Sick and medicated, lying in bed preparing to sleep, listening to Springsteen's "Nebraska" album after playing the song "Born to Run" for someone not familiar with it, I explained that the final stanza of the song was the masterpiece. Like many three stanza poems, you have a structure of situation, conflict, and resolution. The resolution in this song is well done, I said, and is the hallmark of Springsteen's career, the tired, desperate fatalism of an America addicted, succored, then betrayed by dreams.
That's what I said, I said.
Then in a near coma, I listened to the songs of the album as I fell asleep, thinking, "This is the photography I must try to make. I must try to capture those dreams and disappointments of Trump America."
A much needed theme!
It will take energy and time. I try to call up the photographs in my head before I make them, mostly black and white and grainy, for if everyone is right, this is a throwback to an older America. I might be able to capture the disappointment of the America of which they speak. . . if I had the money and time. You see, I would have to travel. That America is "out there," not here where I live. Some, maybe, but I live in the new America, or at least am surrounded by it.
I don't know. It would be so very difficult, but what isn't that's worth doing. And, I think, I'm just the fellow to do it. I'm good at listening and taking people's stories. I am a disarming sort.
But. . . I have to work.
Am I not a great example of the theory?
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