Framing Bob Dylan’s empire of the senseless
cedr
AMERICAN STUDIES: Framing Bob Dylan’s empire of the senseless
BY PHILIP MARTIN
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Highwater risin’, risin’ night and day All the gold and silver are
being stolen away Big Joe Turner lookin’ east and west from the dark
room of his mind... Bob Dylan, "High Water (For Charley Patton),"
Bob Dylan’s new movie is in town for a week, maybe two. It’s an odd
thing, not as odd (or as glorious ) as Renaldo and Clara, but not
unwatchable either. In fact, Dylan’s movie can be a pretty compelling
work if you’re willing to suspend whatever expectations you hold for
filmed entertainment.
Masked and Anonymousis not a movie for those uninterested in the
ongoing pop phenomenon known as Bob Dylan. And it may be that only
those intensely interested in the tiny man will be able to sit through
this digital video train wreck without experiencing a kind of
sympathetic embarrassment for the star and the actors he has collected
around him simply to demonstrate that if Bob calls them, they will
come.
But those who have made up their minds that they want — or need —
to see this film are not likely to be bored, and maybe not even
disappointed. There’s plenty of stuff to look at, and plenty of
evidence that at least some of those involved understood the genuinely
subversive spirit of the undertaking.
It’s not clear whether Dylan could have made a coherent, critically
acclaimed independent film or not. But it is clear that Masked and
Anonymous is purposefully strange and silly in a way that Marcel
Duchamp might have winked at. It’s a bad movie that functions as part
of a much larger and complex performance piece: the "career" of Bob
Dylan.
In a sense, Dylan is larger than even Hollywood, and his deigning
to participate in the manufacture of something directed at so broad an
audience as a motion picture can be read as a kind of cultural
slumming. Dylan is more artist than pop star. While he may have
started out wanting to be Bobby Vee, he has wound up as a kind of
American Picasso, a fine artist with highbrow pretensions who employs
his own celebrity in the art-making process.
Dylan would likely deny this. He has, at various times, assured us
that he is nothing more than a "song and dance man," a comment that
echoes Huddie Ledbetter’s protestation that he was but a "songster."
Whether you admire his music or not, it’s hard to agree with this
self-assessment, almost as hard as it is to believe that Dylan himself
believes it.
Watching Masked and Anonymous, a viewer gets the feeling that the
emotionally retarded figure in the middle of the frame, the Dylan
manque who’s called "Jack Fate," understands precisely how American,
how important, he has become. Dylan’s poses of late — especially since
the release of his back-tothe-roots folk-blues album Good as I’ve Been
to Youa full decade ago — have been increasingly humble. Fate is a
cipher, a man of few words who mouths koans in an affectless tone. He
knows nothing of politics; he has given up trying to make sense of a
world gone wrong.
Were Fate not played by Dylan, there’d be no traction to the
character. The whole movie might slip away like so much lightweight
Teflon performance art — mid-list actors indulging their worst
tendencies, Ed Harris in blackface reaching to express some inchoate
American longing, the babble of alert yet undisciplined "creative"
people.
Dylan’s painful performance is the key to the film, though the
acting is so cribbed that we guess the pain is genuine. It is this
pain, this apparent sickness of the soul, that makes Dylan — and Jack
Fate — fascinating to those who have followed the artist’s career and
care about at least the best of his work.
Masked and Anonymous isn’t so much a failure as it is a symptom of
the special madness of celebrity, the disease everybody hopes to
contract. Dylan makes a movie because he can, and we pay attention
because it’s Dylan, and we suspect that something valuable might lie
in even the most banal and chaotic parts. Dylan’s sick, and his
sickness is akin to but not exactly hubris — it is the sickness of the
artist unable to connect with an audience on any level deeper than the
shared shrug. It’s killing Dylan, it’s embalming him before our eyes.
MANIC DEATH AGONIES
Every real artist is a freak. And the more the artist pretends to be
just like everybody else, the more freakish he becomes. A lot of Dylan
fans are fond of saying that we have to let Dylan be Dylan, to accept
the rash and experimental, Tarantula and "Lenny Bruce," that the only
way for an artist to thrive, to get the ore out, is to dig up a lot of
dumb rocks.
They will argue that Masked and Anonymousis a dumb rock, or that it
isn’t. There’s a Princeton professor, Sean Willentz, who has called
the movie "a manic film about the death agonies of one America and a
chilling prophecy about the birth of a new one."
No, Herr Professor, it’s not. It’s something that suggests a film
about an America that’s more busy dyin’ than being born, though it’s
really less about any recognizable America than the state of mind of
the artist — a humble man who has come not to save the world, but to
write its epitaph. Ron Rosenbaum once wrote of Dylan’s late- ’70s
flirtation with Christianity that we were lucky Dylan "only claimed
he’s foundJesus ; it wouldn’t be totally surprising if he claimed he
was Jesus."
But Dylan is too grumpy, too suspicious of human motive to come
back as a redeemer — Jack Fate’s resurrection ends in a whimper of
blood and spite. Stupid humans, what do you expect ? Dylan’s attitude
toward his followers — and you can go all the way back to Don’t Look
Back to see evidence of this — has always been complicated. He doesn’t
like the Kool-Aid drinkers, the Dylan worshippers who accept him as
their intellectual mascot. Those who would call him Christ would turn
around and call him Judas.
Dylan’s attitude is more like George Carlin’s or Elvis Costello’s —
he used to be disgusted, but now he tries to be amused, to keep open
the possibility that connection is possible. He’s a skeptic, not a
cynic, and the best thing you can say about some of the stuff he’s
done is that — as howlingly off-key as some of his work has been —
none of it flatters his audience. Dylan has never been one for
congratulating us for liking him.
HELLO, DALI
Take another tack.
Maybe you have heard of Destino, the animated collaboration between
Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. Until recently unfinished, Destino was
a sixminute surrealistic short set to a Spanish song that was to be
part of an omnibus animation film along the lines of The Three
Caballeros.
Disney abruptly abandoned the project in 1946, probably because it
became clear it wasn’t commercially viable. The short film was revived
earlier this year when Roy Disney realized that technically the studio
didn’t own the Dali artwork the Spaniard had provided for the
production. The terms of the agreement between Dali and Disney
stipulated that the studio wouldn’t own the art — now worth a few
million dollars — until the film was finished.
So the film was completed as an easy way to add value to Disney’s
holdings. Destinomade its festival debut earlier this year, and there
will be a DVD available soon. In connection with the commercial
release, Disney is making the usual promotional gestures, and part of
this is that one of the Disney animators who was assigned to work on
the project with Dali was recently interviewed on National Public
Radio. He said the first thing Dali told him was that Dali "was not
crazy."
Dali knew that if the Disney people understood his work, he’d have
failed. The whole point of surrealism is that there are some truths
inexpressible in any language other than that of dreams; logic and
coherency are but templates we impose on a wild and indifferent
universe.
Like Dali, Dylan is a lot of things, but he’s not mad, so we are
given to understand his apparent madness is really a higher kind of
acting — he’s not acting in the movie, he’s acting in real life.
The 1967 film Don’t Look Back proved that Dylan was a master
thespian. He built a persona based on Chaplin’s tramp and Woody
Guthrie’s folkie leftist (which was itself a retooling of Will Rogers’
folksy political philosopher). He made rock ’n ’ roll a respectable
enthusiasm for adults, he still has it in his power to make chilling,
awesome music. In the last decade, he has reasserted himself as one of
the prime American voices, whether you believe he can sing or not.
(And he can, when he wants to; that man can sing.)
Dylan is prickly and difficult to love, so his albums have never
really sold that well — though Sony keeps coming up with new ways to
market his back pages, the latest involving releasing his Columbia
catalog on newly mastered Super Audio compatible compact discs. He’s
an easy target for those who mean to make a point about the
fecklessness of modernism — it’s easy to listen to Dylan’s nasal,
unspooling vocals and think "my kid could do that."
But the thing is, your kid can’t — or at least he can’t do it the
way Dylan does it. He can’t aspirate the lines, roll out the melodies,
build up a canon of American song, lingering on the periphery of the
collective imagination, an existential runt cleaning his fingernails
with an Arkansas toothpick, something mad and impish about his eyes.
Jack Fate won’t erase the central image of Dylan in the movies,
that of Alias in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. When
you get right down to it, Masked and Anonymous is nothing but a
curious movie. It probably means less to Dylan than it does to those
of us who have found ourselves transfixed — blasted — in his narrow
glare.
Dylan has seen through us, and maybe he does not return our love.
Dylan is a hard prophet, whose vision isn’t what we want to see. He
knows we’ll turn away from him; maybe he imagines that’s the way that
it must be. Masked and Anonymous isn’t what he wants to say, it isn’t
even what he said. Nor is it particularly well said.
It’s just Bob Dylan, "lookin’ east and west from the dark room of
his mind."
Jim (Guitar Centre Records)
As for M&A, we can froth and foam as much as we like about what it might
mean: time will be the judge. Through all of the twists and turns, through
all of the chaos of the years, Bob has continued, quietly and determinedly
to pursue his vision. Sometimes people have hated him for it: misunderstood
his motives and art, but he has continued regardless. Masked and Anonymous
is part of that vision. When all of the pieces of the mosaic of his career
are gathered together at the end we may start to see a glimpse of what it
all meant. Until then all we can do is look on in awe and wonder.....
Jim
"cedr" <t...@in.to.cry> wrote in message
news:3fafc614...@news.dallas.sbcglobal.net...
>
> AMERICAN STUDIES: Framing Bob Dylan's empire of the senseless
>
> BY PHILIP MARTIN
> ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
>
> Highwater risin', risin' night and day All the gold and silver are
> being stolen away Big Joe Turner lookin' east and west from the dark
> room of his mind... Bob Dylan, "High Water (For Charley Patton),"
>
> Bob Dylan's new movie is in town for a week, maybe two. It's an odd
> thing, not as odd (or as glorious ) as Renaldo and Clara, but not
> unwatchable either. In fact, Dylan's movie can be a pretty compelling
> work if you're willing to suspend whatever expectations you hold for
> filmed entertainment.
> Masked and Anonymousis not a movie for those uninterested in the
> ongoing pop phenomenon known as Bob Dylan. And it may be that only
> those intensely interested in the tiny man will be able to sit through
> this digital video train wreck without experiencing a kind of
> sympathetic embarrassment for the star and the actors he has collected
> around him simply to demonstrate that if Bob calls them, they will
> come.
> But those who have made up their minds that they want - or need -
> how important, he has become. Dylan's poses of late - especially since
> the release of his back-tothe-roots folk-blues album Good as I've Been
> to Youa full decade ago - have been increasingly humble. Fate is a
> cipher, a man of few words who mouths koans in an affectless tone. He
> knows nothing of politics; he has given up trying to make sense of a
> world gone wrong.
> Were Fate not played by Dylan, there'd be no traction to the
> character. The whole movie might slip away like so much lightweight
> Teflon performance art - mid-list actors indulging their worst
> tendencies, Ed Harris in blackface reaching to express some inchoate
> American longing, the babble of alert yet undisciplined "creative"
> people.
> Dylan's painful performance is the key to the film, though the
> acting is so cribbed that we guess the pain is genuine. It is this
> pain, this apparent sickness of the soul, that makes Dylan - and Jack
> Fate - fascinating to those who have followed the artist's career and
> care about at least the best of his work.
> Masked and Anonymous isn't so much a failure as it is a symptom of
> the special madness of celebrity, the disease everybody hopes to
> contract. Dylan makes a movie because he can, and we pay attention
> because it's Dylan, and we suspect that something valuable might lie
> in even the most banal and chaotic parts. Dylan's sick, and his
> sickness is akin to but not exactly hubris - it is the sickness of the
> artist unable to connect with an audience on any level deeper than the
> shared shrug. It's killing Dylan, it's embalming him before our eyes.
>
>
> MANIC DEATH AGONIES
>
> Every real artist is a freak. And the more the artist pretends to be
> just like everybody else, the more freakish he becomes. A lot of Dylan
> fans are fond of saying that we have to let Dylan be Dylan, to accept
> the rash and experimental, Tarantula and "Lenny Bruce," that the only
> way for an artist to thrive, to get the ore out, is to dig up a lot of
> dumb rocks.
> They will argue that Masked and Anonymousis a dumb rock, or that it
> isn't. There's a Princeton professor, Sean Willentz, who has called
> the movie "a manic film about the death agonies of one America and a
> chilling prophecy about the birth of a new one."
> No, Herr Professor, it's not. It's something that suggests a film
> about an America that's more busy dyin' than being born, though it's
> really less about any recognizable America than the state of mind of
> the artist - a humble man who has come not to save the world, but to
> write its epitaph. Ron Rosenbaum once wrote of Dylan's late- '70s
> flirtation with Christianity that we were lucky Dylan "only claimed
> he's foundJesus ; it wouldn't be totally surprising if he claimed he
> was Jesus."
> But Dylan is too grumpy, too suspicious of human motive to come
> back as a redeemer - Jack Fate's resurrection ends in a whimper of
> blood and spite. Stupid humans, what do you expect ? Dylan's attitude
> toward his followers - and you can go all the way back to Don't Look
> Back to see evidence of this - has always been complicated. He doesn't
> like the Kool-Aid drinkers, the Dylan worshippers who accept him as
> their intellectual mascot. Those who would call him Christ would turn
> around and call him Judas.
> Dylan's attitude is more like George Carlin's or Elvis Costello's -
> he used to be disgusted, but now he tries to be amused, to keep open
> the possibility that connection is possible. He's a skeptic, not a
> cynic, and the best thing you can say about some of the stuff he's
> done is that - as howlingly off-key as some of his work has been -
> none of it flatters his audience. Dylan has never been one for
> congratulating us for liking him.
>
>
> HELLO, DALI
>
> Take another tack.
> Maybe you have heard of Destino, the animated collaboration between
> Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. Until recently unfinished, Destino was
> a sixminute surrealistic short set to a Spanish song that was to be
> part of an omnibus animation film along the lines of The Three
> Caballeros.
> Disney abruptly abandoned the project in 1946, probably because it
> became clear it wasn't commercially viable. The short film was revived
> earlier this year when Roy Disney realized that technically the studio
> didn't own the Dali artwork the Spaniard had provided for the
> production. The terms of the agreement between Dali and Disney
> stipulated that the studio wouldn't own the art - now worth a few
> million dollars - until the film was finished.
> So the film was completed as an easy way to add value to Disney's
> holdings. Destinomade its festival debut earlier this year, and there
> will be a DVD available soon. In connection with the commercial
> release, Disney is making the usual promotional gestures, and part of
> this is that one of the Disney animators who was assigned to work on
> the project with Dali was recently interviewed on National Public
> Radio. He said the first thing Dali told him was that Dali "was not
> crazy."
> Dali knew that if the Disney people understood his work, he'd have
> failed. The whole point of surrealism is that there are some truths
> inexpressible in any language other than that of dreams; logic and
> coherency are but templates we impose on a wild and indifferent
> universe.
> Like Dali, Dylan is a lot of things, but he's not mad, so we are
> given to understand his apparent madness is really a higher kind of
> acting - he's not acting in the movie, he's acting in real life.
> The 1967 film Don't Look Back proved that Dylan was a master
> thespian. He built a persona based on Chaplin's tramp and Woody
> Guthrie's folkie leftist (which was itself a retooling of Will Rogers'
> folksy political philosopher). He made rock 'n ' roll a respectable
> enthusiasm for adults, he still has it in his power to make chilling,
> awesome music. In the last decade, he has reasserted himself as one of
> the prime American voices, whether you believe he can sing or not.
> (And he can, when he wants to; that man can sing.)
> Dylan is prickly and difficult to love, so his albums have never
> really sold that well - though Sony keeps coming up with new ways to
> market his back pages, the latest involving releasing his Columbia
> catalog on newly mastered Super Audio compatible compact discs. He's
> an easy target for those who mean to make a point about the
> fecklessness of modernism - it's easy to listen to Dylan's nasal,
> unspooling vocals and think "my kid could do that."
> But the thing is, your kid can't - or at least he can't do it the
> way Dylan does it. He can't aspirate the lines, roll out the melodies,
> build up a canon of American song, lingering on the periphery of the
> collective imagination, an existential runt cleaning his fingernails
> with an Arkansas toothpick, something mad and impish about his eyes.
> Jack Fate won't erase the central image of Dylan in the movies,
> that of Alias in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. When
> you get right down to it, Masked and Anonymous is nothing but a
> curious movie. It probably means less to Dylan than it does to those
> of us who have found ourselves transfixed - blasted - in his narrow
Thomas Ward
We can be critical of Dylan and anyone else - M&A was poor...Dylan is
certainly NOT beyond criticism, just because he is some kind of 'great
artist' - Dylan himself would be the first to tell you this.
I love Dylan, but come on...Self Portrait is a load of shit...it ain't
'misunderstood', it's just poor.
Many Dylan concerts have been poor (Oh..look at 8/5/02, for just one
example) - it's not a case of them being 'misunderstood' works of an artist
we can't comprehend.
Tom
"Jim (Guitar Centre Records)" <J...@gcvinylrecords.co.uk> wrote in message
news:booj3s$g9k$1...@sparta.btinternet.com...
Mad Dan
message news:<booj3s$g9k$1...@sparta.btinternet.com>...
> Bob Dylan is bigger than Hollywood because he is real.
>
> As for M&A, we can froth and foam as much as we like about what it might
> mean: time will be the judge. Through all of the twists and turns, through
> all of the chaos of the years, Bob has continued, quietly and determinedly
> to pursue his vision. Sometimes people have hated him for it: misunderstood
> his motives and art, but he has continued regardless. Masked and Anonymous
> is part of that vision. When all of the pieces of the mosaic of his career
> are gathered together at the end we may start to see a glimpse of what it
> all meant. Until then all we can do is look on in awe and wonder.....
>
> Jim
>
Surely that's not *all* we can do?
I mean, we could, for example, suspend all our critical faculties and
post messages to rmd gushing effusively about everything he does,
regardless of whether or not it actually possesses any merit at all,
couldn't we Jim?
Jim (Guitar Centre Records)
merit? Think about this: Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime.
People just like you made snap judgements. They saw no value in his work
and dismissed it. Thank God that history rather than you will judge Dylan.
Jim
Thomas Ward
it's 'senseless' to consider anything that Dylan does to be of some God-like
inspiration and it's somehow OUR fault if we don't understand.
Let's be allowed to criticise, please.
Tom
"Jim (Guitar Centre Records)" <J...@gcvinylrecords.co.uk> wrote in message
news:boqdqu$lkb$1...@titan.btinternet.com...
Jim (Guitar Centre Records)
My problem is not towards constructive criticism of Bob's art, but towards
the mindless, casual dismissal of a film like M&A when it has only just been
released. Some art takes years to understand. Surely any fan of Dylan must
understand that.
Anyway, when people criticise Bob's music perhaps they ought to think about
what they are comparing unfavourably with. Paul Simon? Paul McCartney?
Who? Who?? Eh??? Who exactly is making this incredible music that Bob is
being judged against? I think you'll find that when people criticise a
particular album or song by Bob they are judging it in their minds against
previous work by... Bob. There really is no other adequate yardstick.
For example, people say that Self Portrait was not a good album, but they
are thinking of Highway 61, Blonde On Blonde, John Wesley Harding, Blood On
The Tracks, Time Out Of Mind, Love & Theft, when they say that. These are
works of genius. So suddenly Self Portrait becomes 'rubbish' or 'poor'.
But is it poor really? When the only adequate yardstick is the artist
himself the frame of reference becomes tricky. All you can say is, 'I
prefer this one' 'I prefer that one'.
I think the albums are like colours on an artist's palate. Highway 61 might
be a bright red, Blonde On Blonde a kind of mercury silver and Blood On The
Tracks a deep mauve. Self Portrait, to my mind, is a light shade of garden
green. It is the beautiful sound of a man shaking off his legend and having
some FUN. I happen to think that you need all of the colours at your
disposal to create a painting: to paint your masterpiece, indeed.
So, if you think that this album or that song is crap, fine. You are
entitled to your opinion. But just remember that Bob does not limit himself
to just greys and blues, or even just dazzling reds and yellows. He uses
the full palette and I happen to think he is painting a far bigger picture
than any of us realise. All those colours!!!!! All those colours
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just look at them, my friends. :0)
Jim
"cedr" <t...@in.to.cry> wrote in message
news:3fafc614...@news.dallas.sbcglobal.net...
>
> AMERICAN STUDIES: Framing Bob Dylan's empire of the senseless
>
> BY PHILIP MARTIN
> ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
>
> Highwater risin', risin' night and day All the gold and silver are
> being stolen away Big Joe Turner lookin' east and west from the dark
> room of his mind... Bob Dylan, "High Water (For Charley Patton),"
>
> Bob Dylan's new movie is in town for a week, maybe two. It's an odd
> thing, not as odd (or as glorious ) as Renaldo and Clara, but not
> unwatchable either. In fact, Dylan's movie can be a pretty compelling
> work if you're willing to suspend whatever expectations you hold for
> filmed entertainment.
> Masked and Anonymousis not a movie for those uninterested in the
> ongoing pop phenomenon known as Bob Dylan. And it may be that only
> those intensely interested in the tiny man will be able to sit through
> this digital video train wreck without experiencing a kind of
> sympathetic embarrassment for the star and the actors he has collected
> around him simply to demonstrate that if Bob calls them, they will
> come.
> But those who have made up their minds that they want - or need -
> how important, he has become. Dylan's poses of late - especially since
> the release of his back-tothe-roots folk-blues album Good as I've Been
> to Youa full decade ago - have been increasingly humble. Fate is a
> cipher, a man of few words who mouths koans in an affectless tone. He
> knows nothing of politics; he has given up trying to make sense of a
> world gone wrong.
> Were Fate not played by Dylan, there'd be no traction to the
> character. The whole movie might slip away like so much lightweight
> Teflon performance art - mid-list actors indulging their worst
> tendencies, Ed Harris in blackface reaching to express some inchoate
> American longing, the babble of alert yet undisciplined "creative"
> people.
> Dylan's painful performance is the key to the film, though the
> acting is so cribbed that we guess the pain is genuine. It is this
> pain, this apparent sickness of the soul, that makes Dylan - and Jack
> Fate - fascinating to those who have followed the artist's career and
> care about at least the best of his work.
> Masked and Anonymous isn't so much a failure as it is a symptom of
> the special madness of celebrity, the disease everybody hopes to
> contract. Dylan makes a movie because he can, and we pay attention
> because it's Dylan, and we suspect that something valuable might lie
> in even the most banal and chaotic parts. Dylan's sick, and his
> sickness is akin to but not exactly hubris - it is the sickness of the
> artist unable to connect with an audience on any level deeper than the
> shared shrug. It's killing Dylan, it's embalming him before our eyes.
>
>
> MANIC DEATH AGONIES
>
> Every real artist is a freak. And the more the artist pretends to be
> just like everybody else, the more freakish he becomes. A lot of Dylan
> fans are fond of saying that we have to let Dylan be Dylan, to accept
> the rash and experimental, Tarantula and "Lenny Bruce," that the only
> way for an artist to thrive, to get the ore out, is to dig up a lot of
> dumb rocks.
> They will argue that Masked and Anonymousis a dumb rock, or that it
> isn't. There's a Princeton professor, Sean Willentz, who has called
> the movie "a manic film about the death agonies of one America and a
> chilling prophecy about the birth of a new one."
> No, Herr Professor, it's not. It's something that suggests a film
> about an America that's more busy dyin' than being born, though it's
> really less about any recognizable America than the state of mind of
> the artist - a humble man who has come not to save the world, but to
> write its epitaph. Ron Rosenbaum once wrote of Dylan's late- '70s
> flirtation with Christianity that we were lucky Dylan "only claimed
> he's foundJesus ; it wouldn't be totally surprising if he claimed he
> was Jesus."
> But Dylan is too grumpy, too suspicious of human motive to come
> back as a redeemer - Jack Fate's resurrection ends in a whimper of
> blood and spite. Stupid humans, what do you expect ? Dylan's attitude
> toward his followers - and you can go all the way back to Don't Look
> Back to see evidence of this - has always been complicated. He doesn't
> like the Kool-Aid drinkers, the Dylan worshippers who accept him as
> their intellectual mascot. Those who would call him Christ would turn
> around and call him Judas.
> Dylan's attitude is more like George Carlin's or Elvis Costello's -
> he used to be disgusted, but now he tries to be amused, to keep open
> the possibility that connection is possible. He's a skeptic, not a
> cynic, and the best thing you can say about some of the stuff he's
> done is that - as howlingly off-key as some of his work has been -
> none of it flatters his audience. Dylan has never been one for
> congratulating us for liking him.
>
>
> HELLO, DALI
>
> Take another tack.
> Maybe you have heard of Destino, the animated collaboration between
> Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. Until recently unfinished, Destino was
> a sixminute surrealistic short set to a Spanish song that was to be
> part of an omnibus animation film along the lines of The Three
> Caballeros.
> Disney abruptly abandoned the project in 1946, probably because it
> became clear it wasn't commercially viable. The short film was revived
> earlier this year when Roy Disney realized that technically the studio
> didn't own the Dali artwork the Spaniard had provided for the
> production. The terms of the agreement between Dali and Disney
> stipulated that the studio wouldn't own the art - now worth a few
> million dollars - until the film was finished.
> So the film was completed as an easy way to add value to Disney's
> holdings. Destinomade its festival debut earlier this year, and there
> will be a DVD available soon. In connection with the commercial
> release, Disney is making the usual promotional gestures, and part of
> this is that one of the Disney animators who was assigned to work on
> the project with Dali was recently interviewed on National Public
> Radio. He said the first thing Dali told him was that Dali "was not
> crazy."
> Dali knew that if the Disney people understood his work, he'd have
> failed. The whole point of surrealism is that there are some truths
> inexpressible in any language other than that of dreams; logic and
> coherency are but templates we impose on a wild and indifferent
> universe.
> Like Dali, Dylan is a lot of things, but he's not mad, so we are
> given to understand his apparent madness is really a higher kind of
> acting - he's not acting in the movie, he's acting in real life.
> The 1967 film Don't Look Back proved that Dylan was a master
> thespian. He built a persona based on Chaplin's tramp and Woody
> Guthrie's folkie leftist (which was itself a retooling of Will Rogers'
> folksy political philosopher). He made rock 'n ' roll a respectable
> enthusiasm for adults, he still has it in his power to make chilling,
> awesome music. In the last decade, he has reasserted himself as one of
> the prime American voices, whether you believe he can sing or not.
> (And he can, when he wants to; that man can sing.)
> Dylan is prickly and difficult to love, so his albums have never
> really sold that well - though Sony keeps coming up with new ways to
> market his back pages, the latest involving releasing his Columbia
> catalog on newly mastered Super Audio compatible compact discs. He's
> an easy target for those who mean to make a point about the
> fecklessness of modernism - it's easy to listen to Dylan's nasal,
> unspooling vocals and think "my kid could do that."
> But the thing is, your kid can't - or at least he can't do it the
> way Dylan does it. He can't aspirate the lines, roll out the melodies,
> build up a canon of American song, lingering on the periphery of the
> collective imagination, an existential runt cleaning his fingernails
> with an Arkansas toothpick, something mad and impish about his eyes.
> Jack Fate won't erase the central image of Dylan in the movies,
> that of Alias in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. When
> you get right down to it, Masked and Anonymous is nothing but a
> curious movie. It probably means less to Dylan than it does to those
> of us who have found ourselves transfixed - blasted - in his narrow
Dan Luke
> So suddenly Self Portrait becomes 'rubbish' or 'poor'.
> But is it poor really?
Uh, yes -- really. In fact, "poor" is well short of the mark for that
piece of dreck.
> All you can say is, 'I
> prefer this one' 'I prefer that one'.
I prefer never to hear that one again.
--
Dan
Stuck Inside of Mobile
Mad Dan
>
> (gush, gush, gush, I love Bobby unquestioningly and want to have his babies)
You're the kind of person who gives Bob Dylan fans a bad name.
You're also the kind of fan Bob hates.
Jim (Guitar Centre Records)
about me? Huh? Huh?? Do you know me at all? Do you know him? Who are
you anyway?
Jim
Tumulty
Call me up Jimmy and I'll talk you down.
Jim (Guitar Centre Records)
How very exciting. Being 'talked down' by a fawn.
Jim
"cedr" <t...@in.to.cry> wrote in message
news:3fafc614...@news.dallas.sbcglobal.net...
>
> AMERICAN STUDIES: Framing Bob Dylan's empire of the senseless
>
> BY PHILIP MARTIN
> ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
>
> Highwater risin', risin' night and day All the gold and silver are
> being stolen away Big Joe Turner lookin' east and west from the dark
> room of his mind... Bob Dylan, "High Water (For Charley Patton),"
>
> Bob Dylan's new movie is in town for a week, maybe two. It's an odd
> thing, not as odd (or as glorious ) as Renaldo and Clara, but not
> unwatchable either. In fact, Dylan's movie can be a pretty compelling
> work if you're willing to suspend whatever expectations you hold for
> filmed entertainment.
> Masked and Anonymousis not a movie for those uninterested in the
> ongoing pop phenomenon known as Bob Dylan. And it may be that only
> those intensely interested in the tiny man will be able to sit through
> this digital video train wreck without experiencing a kind of
> sympathetic embarrassment for the star and the actors he has collected
> around him simply to demonstrate that if Bob calls them, they will
> come.
> But those who have made up their minds that they want - or need -
> how important, he has become. Dylan's poses of late - especially since
> the release of his back-tothe-roots folk-blues album Good as I've Been
> to Youa full decade ago - have been increasingly humble. Fate is a
> cipher, a man of few words who mouths koans in an affectless tone. He
> knows nothing of politics; he has given up trying to make sense of a
> world gone wrong.
> Were Fate not played by Dylan, there'd be no traction to the
> character. The whole movie might slip away like so much lightweight
> Teflon performance art - mid-list actors indulging their worst
> tendencies, Ed Harris in blackface reaching to express some inchoate
> American longing, the babble of alert yet undisciplined "creative"
> people.
> Dylan's painful performance is the key to the film, though the
> acting is so cribbed that we guess the pain is genuine. It is this
> pain, this apparent sickness of the soul, that makes Dylan - and Jack
> Fate - fascinating to those who have followed the artist's career and
> care about at least the best of his work.
> Masked and Anonymous isn't so much a failure as it is a symptom of
> the special madness of celebrity, the disease everybody hopes to
> contract. Dylan makes a movie because he can, and we pay attention
> because it's Dylan, and we suspect that something valuable might lie
> in even the most banal and chaotic parts. Dylan's sick, and his
> sickness is akin to but not exactly hubris - it is the sickness of the
> artist unable to connect with an audience on any level deeper than the
> shared shrug. It's killing Dylan, it's embalming him before our eyes.
>
>
> MANIC DEATH AGONIES
>
> Every real artist is a freak. And the more the artist pretends to be
> just like everybody else, the more freakish he becomes. A lot of Dylan
> fans are fond of saying that we have to let Dylan be Dylan, to accept
> the rash and experimental, Tarantula and "Lenny Bruce," that the only
> way for an artist to thrive, to get the ore out, is to dig up a lot of
> dumb rocks.
> They will argue that Masked and Anonymousis a dumb rock, or that it
> isn't. There's a Princeton professor, Sean Willentz, who has called
> the movie "a manic film about the death agonies of one America and a
> chilling prophecy about the birth of a new one."
> No, Herr Professor, it's not. It's something that suggests a film
> about an America that's more busy dyin' than being born, though it's
> really less about any recognizable America than the state of mind of
> the artist - a humble man who has come not to save the world, but to
> write its epitaph. Ron Rosenbaum once wrote of Dylan's late- '70s
> flirtation with Christianity that we were lucky Dylan "only claimed
> he's foundJesus ; it wouldn't be totally surprising if he claimed he
> was Jesus."
> But Dylan is too grumpy, too suspicious of human motive to come
> back as a redeemer - Jack Fate's resurrection ends in a whimper of
> blood and spite. Stupid humans, what do you expect ? Dylan's attitude
> toward his followers - and you can go all the way back to Don't Look
> Back to see evidence of this - has always been complicated. He doesn't
> like the Kool-Aid drinkers, the Dylan worshippers who accept him as
> their intellectual mascot. Those who would call him Christ would turn
> around and call him Judas.
> Dylan's attitude is more like George Carlin's or Elvis Costello's -
> he used to be disgusted, but now he tries to be amused, to keep open
> the possibility that connection is possible. He's a skeptic, not a
> cynic, and the best thing you can say about some of the stuff he's
> done is that - as howlingly off-key as some of his work has been -
> none of it flatters his audience. Dylan has never been one for
> congratulating us for liking him.
>
>
> HELLO, DALI
>
> Take another tack.
> Maybe you have heard of Destino, the animated collaboration between
> Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. Until recently unfinished, Destino was
> a sixminute surrealistic short set to a Spanish song that was to be
> part of an omnibus animation film along the lines of The Three
> Caballeros.
> Disney abruptly abandoned the project in 1946, probably because it
> became clear it wasn't commercially viable. The short film was revived
> earlier this year when Roy Disney realized that technically the studio
> didn't own the Dali artwork the Spaniard had provided for the
> production. The terms of the agreement between Dali and Disney
> stipulated that the studio wouldn't own the art - now worth a few
> million dollars - until the film was finished.
> So the film was completed as an easy way to add value to Disney's
> holdings. Destinomade its festival debut earlier this year, and there
> will be a DVD available soon. In connection with the commercial
> release, Disney is making the usual promotional gestures, and part of
> this is that one of the Disney animators who was assigned to work on
> the project with Dali was recently interviewed on National Public
> Radio. He said the first thing Dali told him was that Dali "was not
> crazy."
> Dali knew that if the Disney people understood his work, he'd have
> failed. The whole point of surrealism is that there are some truths
> inexpressible in any language other than that of dreams; logic and
> coherency are but templates we impose on a wild and indifferent
> universe.
> Like Dali, Dylan is a lot of things, but he's not mad, so we are
> given to understand his apparent madness is really a higher kind of
> acting - he's not acting in the movie, he's acting in real life.
> The 1967 film Don't Look Back proved that Dylan was a master
> thespian. He built a persona based on Chaplin's tramp and Woody
> Guthrie's folkie leftist (which was itself a retooling of Will Rogers'
> folksy political philosopher). He made rock 'n ' roll a respectable
> enthusiasm for adults, he still has it in his power to make chilling,
> awesome music. In the last decade, he has reasserted himself as one of
> the prime American voices, whether you believe he can sing or not.
> (And he can, when he wants to; that man can sing.)
> Dylan is prickly and difficult to love, so his albums have never
> really sold that well - though Sony keeps coming up with new ways to
> market his back pages, the latest involving releasing his Columbia
> catalog on newly mastered Super Audio compatible compact discs. He's
> an easy target for those who mean to make a point about the
> fecklessness of modernism - it's easy to listen to Dylan's nasal,
> unspooling vocals and think "my kid could do that."
> But the thing is, your kid can't - or at least he can't do it the
> way Dylan does it. He can't aspirate the lines, roll out the melodies,
> build up a canon of American song, lingering on the periphery of the
> collective imagination, an existential runt cleaning his fingernails
> with an Arkansas toothpick, something mad and impish about his eyes.
> Jack Fate won't erase the central image of Dylan in the movies,
> that of Alias in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. When
> you get right down to it, Masked and Anonymous is nothing but a
> curious movie. It probably means less to Dylan than it does to those
> of us who have found ourselves transfixed - blasted - in his narrow
Max
dull and amateur script. There may be a vision underneath but the trick is
to get it up on the screen. I don't know what time will reveal about such
an ill advised vanity project; it hasn't revealed much about Renaldo&Clara,
either, although perhaps someone will understand that one in the 22nd
century. I think more likely that the movies will be conveniently
forgotten.
"Jim (Guitar Centre Records)" <J...@gcvinylrecords.co.uk> wrote in message
news:booj3s$g9k$1...@sparta.btinternet.com...
Mad Dan
Jim, I apologise to you for my previous post - and some others
recently. That last one has to be one of the least intelligent
responses I've seen on usenet and I withdraw it. I must remember not
to post when I'm in such a ratty mood in future.
Sorry.
rankflv
times very Alt-Country before the term was coined. I liked how Wes
Anderson used Wigwam in Royal Tenebaums- same corkyness.
Jim (Guitar Centre Records)
Jim
"Mad Dan" <mad...@keepitloud.com> wrote in message
news:badf481.03111...@posting.google.com...
rankflv
> Oooooohh,
>
> How very exciting. Being 'talked down' by a fawn.
>
> Jim
"Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun" - Very good poem by Mallerme, Very
poor piece by Debussy. Eitherway, Self-Portrait is some good stuff.
Art that is. I thinks we's beyond Rock N Roll here, beyond most of
what's stored at Guitar Centre Records. Using the language of Rock N
Roll to describe Self Portrait is like having Howard Cosell play
Hamlet - -Fawn, Fawn, Fawn ...Are we having fun, yet. Rabble Rouser
Jim (Guitar Centre Records)
Debussy could never have written Self Portrait, that's for sure. I'd like to
see him have a crack at All The Tired Horses, though.
You're right: we *are* beyond Rock 'N' Roll... we are in a special place
called RMD where dysfunctional people meet and kid ourselves that there is
more to life than a little guy with a big nose singing songs.
I love it here. :0)
Jim
"rankflv" <ran...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:14a0f657.0311...@posting.google.com...