Sunday, Sunday

All the leaves are brown
And the sky is grey

John Phillips is a man who has become disentangled from the world. With this, of course, he has freed himself from society's shackles, how else could you write an ode to Monday? However, with this freedom he has become a prisoner. He has disentangled himself from the worldby tangling himself to himself, the only member of the world's largest cult, the paradoxical cult of the self. For all his alienation he may as well be on the moon. That was the name of the musical that he wrote in 1975, Man on the moon.

I'd be safe and warm
If I was in L.A.

He is dreaming all the wrong dreams. Any transcendence he has achieved is merely escapism, a quick fix. You have to dream your way in, not out.

Stopped in to a Church
I passed along the way
You know I got down on my knees
And began to pray

The knees he kneels on are the same knees as the moustached man's knees in Visions Of Johanna who exclaims Jeeze, I can't find my knees. They almost may as well not be there. It is just profanity. One thinks of Slash exiting a church in the middle of the desert and banging out a comically grand meaningless solo. He is taking the easy way out. You don't make up for your sins in church, you make up for them on the streets. The rest is bullshit and you know it. As Jason Molina puts it Real truth about it is no one gets it right. Real truth about it is we're all supposed to try. 

The Natural Bridge

passing an abandoned Drive In
with ivy growing on the screen 
it's like I caught Hollywood sleeping 
sleep without the dream

It's an album which may well be best appreciated on a cinematic level. Cinematic in its imagery and cinematic in the way we are guided through the space and time that it occupies. In a similar way to David Lynch getting in to film because he wanted his paintings to move, David Berman seems to have gotten into making music to make his poetry move. To make it more physical. There are at least 2 explicit references to architecture, the second being

all houses dream in blueprint 
our house, it dreams so hard
outside you can see my footprints
I've been dreaming in your yard

It is in this dreamscape where the album works best. When Bunuel criticised Italian realism he did so on the back of it  not allowing a certain dreamlike element into the films. For him this prevented the films from being truly realistic. Life isn't all it appears to be. It's more or less something else. For kitchen sink realism to be truly realistic it has to let in a certain amount of kitchen sink surrealism. In part, this is the appeal of art, its unclear verisimilitude. Which is the only verisimilitude there is. Clear verisimilitude being a contradiction in terms. All mirrors may look the same, but only to one set of eyes. Berman knows that when he is trying to reach something truly recognisable, approaching on real, he is at his best when he dream(s) all day and write(s) at night. The verisimilitude that he is aiming for is encapsulated in the line

guard my bed
while the rain turns the ditches to mirrors
by evasive carnations from central Ohio
where the looking machine can't hear us

There's a cartoon in The Portable February in which Berman draws the the state of Texas and then replicates the shape drawing a few clouds within it and calls this shape a map of the sky above Texas. This is the America where the album resides, the space between America and the universe (recorded around Louisville). So although the looking out point is a specifically Southern American, the real location is far more universal

in space there is no centre
we're always off to one side
in space there is no centre
we're always off to one side

The themes, too, are universal. Ultimately it is an album about light in its myriad forms, both physical and ephemeral. The light comes from a dark place, a world who's attachment to surface value is too consuming, self deceptively buying into the emperor's new clothes, how do you turn a million steers into buildings made of mirrors? It asks as the make up girls make out with the mannequins etc. However, it ends with the stars shining into our eyes. So, though you cannot stop the night from coming in, there's a twist, maybe you cannot stop the light from coming in either

don't cha know God stays up all night

Berman tells us in Dallas, ending the song

some kind of strange magic happens 
when the city turns on her light

A wise Monk (Thelonious) once said, "it's always night or else we wouldn't need light". I wonder if that's what's going on in the painting on the album's sleeve.