Sunday, June 26, 2011

thoughts on the news of the day: robyn ludwick

hmmm…..
            Heard of Robyn Ludwick?  She is a singer song writer from the Texas Hill Country and I went to a mini-concert where she sang this weekend.  Well… it wasn’t exactly a concert … it was Robyn singing a couple of songs with two crazy girls (my daughter and her friend Cathy) singing backup from a Karaoke machine on the patio of a store front in Wimberley, TX.  Her songs are brilliant and one of my favorites is “Can’t Go Back No More.”  It tells the story of her childhood and a mother who was the “casualty of beauty and sin” – if you get her drift ….
            Of course, she is taking her cue from Thomas Wolfe who long ago wrote:
            "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
            You know, we want to go back, but it’s never the same; and probably, truth be told, we wouldn’t want it to be the same anyway.  We want it to be different this time.  We want things to be kinder, gentler, stronger, prettier and safer.  But they generally are not. 
            Robyn sings, “there’s a new way of  dancin’ ‘cross the hard wood floor” and she’s right.  Things change … “You Can’t Go Back No More.”
            hmmm…..

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