I’ve written before that Paul Simon is my favorite lyricist, and when taking this photo I was reminded of a wonderful -but strangely isolated- line in his song “The Obvious Child,” a song which for many years I took to be rather about me and which largely inspired me to take up the drums, first by playing on a homemade and home-painted kit of buckets, unused aquariums recycled from my menagerie, and popcorn tins and later on increasingly expensive sets, until I finally left my equipment, and along with it the interest that had guided much of my life through high school and college, in New York when I left my college there.
The line which came to mind took me years to understand, and was probably explained to me by someone else: I regularly fail to grasp even very simple poetry. Simon says, “The cross is in the ballpark,” referring to the transition of Christianity from the church into the stadium, from the pulpit into the production studio. The song is otherwise personal, and this line stands out as the sole cultural context for the character’s plaintively-expressed anxieties.
There is a connection between the mass-production of faith and the isolation of the individual in his fears, I am sure. In any event, above is the ballpark; the fences seem almost to frame an altar, but there was no cross to be seen.
(From Photophobia).
