Looking for America
This [Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”] may very well be the truest song ever written.
“Kathy, I'm lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike
They've all gone to look for America
Well. A better picture of our culture never existed.
Short history recap: as the United States formed, we discovered that we had two things no other civilization had ever had in conjunction: massive amounts of free land (if you ignore the Indians) and an energetic population (Russians and Canadians never were as rowdy a people - perhaps it’s the cold). So we kept rolling west - and eventually the plains were settled, and towns sprang up across the wilderness, and the interstates connected everywhere to somewhere else; thus, America, land of the itinerant bourgeois, the urban nomad. We still have to move, but we no longer know where.
Nothing new, I know. The frontier as an element in the American mind has been thoroughly explored and exploited (why else use “final frontier” in connection with the space program?) - but it’s just a part of the why and how of America, not the what.
So. What’s America? Hitchcock’s Vertigo - a great myth of desire and obsession (the detective story is at most a frame for the myth): the hero is a lone man, unattached, a bit of a drifter - the American everyman. Vintage San Francisco, the Southwest sun, the cheap hotel where the hero seeks to recreate his lost love, the blue neon sign out the window at night: that’s America. Jim Morrison’s lyrics are about equal parts America and nightmare - the interstates at night, the wide suburban emptinesses - lines like “Indians lie bleeding on dawn’s highway” are pure America. (I really like “Peace Frog” at the moment - here.) Jazz is America - incomprehensible but undeniably alive, in motion, without the neat resolutions of other music.
That’s nowhere near a satisfactory definition - it’s weighted toward the Midwest even without my bringing up Chicago (so much more American than NYC or LA - not divorced from the surrounding plains, but rather an extension of them) -
(odd that America is to me the Midwest. I’ve lived in Arkansas my whole life, and my family’s from Texas, but the South is as foreign to me as New England.)
So. I have here a part of America. Others will have other parts. I refuse to bring up the blind men and the elephant - it’s sophist and cliché - but if you want to think of America in those terms, I can’t stop you. All I will say is that America is a big place to fit in one mind.
Oh, and bonus: here's Yes covering America.
“Kathy, I'm lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike
They've all gone to look for America
Well. A better picture of our culture never existed.
Short history recap: as the United States formed, we discovered that we had two things no other civilization had ever had in conjunction: massive amounts of free land (if you ignore the Indians) and an energetic population (Russians and Canadians never were as rowdy a people - perhaps it’s the cold). So we kept rolling west - and eventually the plains were settled, and towns sprang up across the wilderness, and the interstates connected everywhere to somewhere else; thus, America, land of the itinerant bourgeois, the urban nomad. We still have to move, but we no longer know where.
Nothing new, I know. The frontier as an element in the American mind has been thoroughly explored and exploited (why else use “final frontier” in connection with the space program?) - but it’s just a part of the why and how of America, not the what.
So. What’s America? Hitchcock’s Vertigo - a great myth of desire and obsession (the detective story is at most a frame for the myth): the hero is a lone man, unattached, a bit of a drifter - the American everyman. Vintage San Francisco, the Southwest sun, the cheap hotel where the hero seeks to recreate his lost love, the blue neon sign out the window at night: that’s America. Jim Morrison’s lyrics are about equal parts America and nightmare - the interstates at night, the wide suburban emptinesses - lines like “Indians lie bleeding on dawn’s highway” are pure America. (I really like “Peace Frog” at the moment - here.) Jazz is America - incomprehensible but undeniably alive, in motion, without the neat resolutions of other music.
That’s nowhere near a satisfactory definition - it’s weighted toward the Midwest even without my bringing up Chicago (so much more American than NYC or LA - not divorced from the surrounding plains, but rather an extension of them) -
(odd that America is to me the Midwest. I’ve lived in Arkansas my whole life, and my family’s from Texas, but the South is as foreign to me as New England.)
So. I have here a part of America. Others will have other parts. I refuse to bring up the blind men and the elephant - it’s sophist and cliché - but if you want to think of America in those terms, I can’t stop you. All I will say is that America is a big place to fit in one mind.
Oh, and bonus: here's Yes covering America.