V.3 – Photograph Burns – Review

V.3

Photograph Burns (Onion/American)
by Jeff Fritz

“Brain tissue fuming, old movies turning in her head…” with low-fi acid jams staggering back and forth over the lifeline connecting Major Tom to an abandoned space capsule full of ether and amphetamine. Liberal splashes of china white on art metal walls bleeding south into the singed edges of amber waves over fuzzy fields hiding silos and secret laboratories buried deep in the heart of America where they are making sick music like this to conjure up the memory of a photograph of the self-immolated monk who sat in perfect living stillness as the blooming orange singed his eyes like his picture burned itself into the retinas of a million uncomprehending pale pink wig-stand faces propped on frozen carbon trunks, the earless heads of which will never hear the rockets that are bringing them their own self-styled Joan of Arc-ness in the latter half of this century through home theater speakers and the quick-draw five-disc changer. The lucky ones are struck blind by the first flash but those who still see clearly hear the whine of what’s incoming as their ear canals are flooded with the scalding waves of half a dozen melting guitars and the last of their thick brains are lapped up from the floors of their empty skulls behind the collective “American Face.” The light goes out and the photograph burns.