Jesus' Son
I just finished up reading this book, Immediatly after I watched the film. I want to say I enjoyed it and I feel like I did but there is a lot that I didn't understand. I mean I understood all the stories and stuff like that but the book and the film are both filled with so many symbols and metaphors I was not able to understand what it all meant. Anyone else read the book for see the film? If so, could you help me out a bit. The book is just so poetic sometimes and it was hard to understand the meaning. I liked it though 
"The Warmth of Blood" 30 min Short Film
"There is a price to be paid for dreaming"
"I knew every raindrop by it's name"
"all these weirdos, and me getting better right in the midst of em"
And I am guessing that the guy in the jacket was satin, but what was with the glowing heart. Also what is the book supposed to mean.
"The Warmth of Blood" 30 min Short Film
I..I don't know how to explain some of it, it's sort of self explanatory.
Knowing every raindrop by name is a beautiful line that just means he relates to the rain, and the feelings that it brings.
The book, it's title based off a lou reed song, is about well..what you read and saw? It's about a guy battling addictions and such. I know thats the short shallow answer but I'm not really sure what..you want to know? I don't know man.
Sorry.
Yeah I mean I understand the whole story but I just thought there was more behind it like it was trying to say something. The poetic writing of the book was really intresting though. I am gonna look more into it.... I just feel like somethings went over my head.
"The Warmth of Blood" 30 min Short Film
I don't think lines like those quoted are meant to be read literally so much as they're poetic expressions that adhere to the book's overall hallucinogenic, dreamlike vision, an "otherworld" quality without falling into overt surrealism, Lynchian indecipherability or something. It manages to toe the line of a dirty realism (see Carver, Wolff et al.) whereby narrative and character is rendered intact.
A lot of, well, most of the characters are junkies or recovering addicts (or marginal figures or "outsiders"), and part of the book wallows in the skewed, largely indefinable space between reality and unreality -- that altered state of preceiving the world through pure sensation without burden of full self-conscious awareness distinguishing between self and world, the objective and from the subjective, etc. -- that constitutes the drug experience on the one hand, while also sharing with it aspects of the spiritual or religious (or supernatural, whatever).
That doesn't really explain it well but you shouldn't be all frustrated and confused if you feel like you're not "getting it" or the "meaning isn't clear" -- just like enjoy the trip, man.
Johnson does this kind of writing really well (especially the earlier stuff, fucking aces most if not all of it, i.m.o.) and so does Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient , which also has some beautiful druggy imagery popping up here and there (administering his injections and so on), and shares a similar, though granted more nonlinear, narrative approach. Both are poets-writing-novels-to-pay-the-bills so that accounts for so of it, I think. Check out some of Johnson's poetry if you're really into it. Great stuff.
Never seen the film.
If you throw some metaphors or quotes at me I can try to help you decipher?
It's a beautifully written book though.
I've yet to come across any of Johnsons work that I do not enjoy.