Bob Dylan (36 page)

Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953, “Formulary for a New Urbanism”: “Given the choice of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people all over the world have chosen the garbage disposal.” Not so fast, says Bill Woodrow, born 1948 in the U.K., in his own room in the Still Life/Object/Real Life sector. For his piece he’s cut the outline of an electric guitar out of the grimy metal casing of a post-war Hotpoint washing machine but not removed it, so the two remain attached like a parasitic twin still part of its host. The curators comment: “The sculpture wittily combines two potent symbols of Western consumerism.” Not so fast: why not art out of functional-ism, or the art hiding in object of utility, desire hiding in need? Woodrow: “The guitar was a pop icon and the washing machine was an everyday, domestic item. So it was bringing the two things together like a slice of life.” Not so fast: why not the urge to create
sneaking out of the wish for comfort, and superseding it? There’s no trouble imagining this as Pete Townshend’s diddley bow, his first guitar.

 

9) Middle-aged man shaking a cardboard coffee cup full of change like maracas (6th Avenue and 13th Street, New York, November 5). He was hammering out a tremendously effective R&B number that sounded halfway between anyone’s “C. C. Rider” and almost anything by Bo Diddley, and it wasn’t until I’d added my change to his and was halfway down the block that the song revealed itself out of its own beat: Elvis Presley’s first record, “That’s All Right.”

 

10) Pere Ubu 25th Anniversary Tour (Knitting Factory, New York, October 14). “The long slide into weirdness and decay,” leader David Thomas announced. When synth player Robert Wheeler moved his hands over two homemade theremins—to play the theremin you can’t look like anything but someone casting spells—the small pieces of metal seemed less like musical instruments than UFOs, and the high-pitched sounds coming from them, drifting through the rest of the music like swamp gas, nothing but the cries of creatures trapped inside. Like any number of people other than myself must feel as I write, the day after the election.

 

 

28 November 2000

 

Special bizarre all-quotation edition!

 

1/3) Alan Berg and Howard Hampton on Election night and after: Berg, November 6. “I am trying to cope with my jitters by listening to the five CDs of Dylan’s Basement Tapes bootlegs and nothing else till it’s over.” November 9: “I didn’t think I’d have time to listen to all
five
CDs. When things got rough, right before Pennsylvania came in, ‘Clothesline Saga’ came on and that took care of
Pennsylvania. Right now it just went to ‘We carried you / In our arms / On Independence Day.’ No question about what this will be resolved on: ‘I’m Not There.’” Hampton, November 18: “Today I played the only appropriate song I could find: ‘I Was in the House When the House Burned Down.’”

 

4) Fran Farrell: “I Want to Be Teenybopped: Teen Star Sex Fantasies” (
Nassau Weekly,
Princeton, N.J., October 19). “Jordan Knight, of the New Kids on the Block, was the first person I ever masturbated about . . . While my friends were playing with Barbie, I was imagining having sex with Jordan, and sometimes a three-some with Joey, on their big tour bus. See, I met Jordan when I was 10; it was downhill from there. Fast forward 10 years, to London, England. I’m walking down the street when I see a sign, the most beautiful sign I’ve ever seen—Jordan Knight, performing at 4 o’clock today. I couldn’t believe my luck. Then I thought, this isn’t luck, it’s fate. We met 10 years ago, but now it’s legal for him to have sex with me!!!! So I wait in line for FOUR HOURS. Yes, four hours for that has-been. The line was full of 15-year-old girls with thick British accents, acne and very bad teeth. I was squished in the middle of a crowd of sweaty, ugly girls screaming for a washed-up ’80s pop star. But when he came onstage . . .”

 

5) Sen. Joseph Lieberman: Fiftieth birthday greeting for Bob Dylan (U.S. Senate, 24 May 1991). “Twenty-five or thirty years ago, I would have had a very difficult time imagining Bob Dylan, whose music was so much a part of my life at the time, being fifty years old, an age he attains today, his birthday. I would have had even greater difficulty imagining me taking note of his achievements in remarks in the Senate of the United States.

“Back in 1963, it is hardly likely any member of Congress would have been talking about Bob Dylan, at least not on the floor or either chamber; at least not in favorable terms. After all, it was he who said of them, ‘Come senators, Congressmen, please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.’ So times have changed, though Dylan’s sentiment still holds true when we
consider how many problems we still have to heed. I am sure he sings those words with the same spirit and intensity today as he did twenty-eight years ago.
¹⁶

“There is a mystery to Bob Dylan, which is surprising, in a way, given how freely he has expressed himself through his music. But the mystery results, I think, from Dylan’s refusal to play roles society might seek to assign him—roles like superstar, rock idol, prophet. ‘I tried my best to be just like I am / But everybody wants you to be just like them.’”

 

6) David Thomson:
The Big Sleep
(BFI Publishing). On Lauren Bacall, director Howard Hawks, and
To Have and Have Not
(1944): “Betty was born in 1924, and grew up looking like nothing else on earth. I mean, how does one describe that young woman who could look like a Jewish teenager, a Eurasian doll, a Slav earth mother and the smoke that gets in your eyes—and all that before Hawks got hold of her? Add to that the allegation that she was only seventeen, and you can see what a wide-open country America was then.”

 

7) Ishmael Reed: on the dance mania “Jes Grew” sweeping the nation after the election of Warren G. Harding, “the first race president,” in 1920, and the conspiracy of the “Antonist Wallflower Order” to stop it, from
Mumbo Jumbo
(Scribner, 1972). “It has been a busy day for reporters following Jes Grew. The morning began with Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the three-element vacuum tube, which helped make big-time radio possible, collapsing before a crowded press room after he pleaded concerning his invention, now
in the grips of Jes Grew: ‘What have you done to my child? You have sent him out on the street in rags of ragtime to collect money from all and sundry. You have made him a laughingstock of intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere.’”

Tycoon Walter Mellon: “Jes Grew tied up the tubes causing Dr. Lee De Forest to cop a plea at the press conference . . . At the rate of radio sales, 600,000,000 dollars’ worth will be sold by 1929, correct?”

Hierophant I of the Wallflower Order: “That is true, Mr. Walter Mellon.”

“Suppose people don’t have the money to buy radios. It will be an interesting precaution against this Jes Grew thing, isn’t that so?”

“I don’t get what you’re driving at, Mr. Mellon.”

“The liquidity of Jes Grew has resulted in a hyperinflated situation, all you hear is more, more, increase growth . . . Suppose we shut down a few temples . . . I mean banks, take money out of circulation, how would people be able to support the appendances of Jes Grew, the cabarets the juke joints and the speaks. Suppose we put a tax on the dance floors and get out of circulation J.G.C.s like musicians, dancers, its doers, its irrepressible fancy. Suppose we take musicians out of circulation, arrest them on trumped-up drug charges and give them unusually long and severe prison sentences. Suppose we subsidize 100s of symphony orchestras across the country, have government-sponsored Waltz-boosting campaigns . . .”

“But wouldn’t these steps result in a depression?”

“Maybe, but it will put an end to Jes Grew’s resiliency and if a panic occurs it will be a controlled panic. It will be our Panic.”

 

8) Hal Foster: Election “Diary,” on a word soon to disappear from our lexicon (
London Review of Books,
November 30). “Chad . . . For some reason I think of Troy Donahue, and imagine him dimpled, pregnant, hanging or punched.”

 

9) Colin B Morton: on Metallica and Napster in “Welsh Psycho: Extracts from the Teenage Diary of Colin B. Morton” (
Clicks and Klaangs
#3, October/November). “William Hague, leader of the UK
Tory Party, has recently come out in defense of a man who shot dead a youth who was trespassing on his private property. Even more recently, the Tory Party has used, without permission, the music of Massive Attack to help promote the idea that we shouldn’t have to pay tax or care about the sick. Hague’s own logic dictates, therefore, that Massive Attack’s Daddy G and 3D should have the right to shoot all members of the Tory Party for trespassing on their Intellectual Property. Either Intellectual Property doesn’t exist, or they can have that right. Hague can’t have it both ways. (Well, he can, but that’s another story entirely.)”

 

10) Special “Forward into the Past” Election Update—Francis Russell,
The Shadow of Blooming Grove: The Centennial of Warren G. Harding
(McGraw-Hill, 1968), quoting Progressive newspaper editor Brand Whitlock on the Republican Party’s nomination of Warren G. Harding as its candidate to replace Woodrow Wilson: “I am more and more under the opinion that for President we need not so much a brilliant man as solid, mediocre men, providing they have good sense, good and careful judgment, and good manners.”

 

 

19 March 2001

 

4/5) Low:
Things We Lost in the Fire
(Kranky) and Peter S. Scholtes, “Hey, We’re in Duluth” (
City Pages,
February 7). “When they found your body / Giant Xs on your eyes / And your half of the ransom,” Alan Sparhawk sings in “Sunflower,” “The weather hadn’t changed”—I made the last line up, but it wouldn’t be out of place. From Duluth, where forty-two years ago Bob Dylan sat in the audience at the National Guard Armory as Buddy Holly played his third-to-last show, this notoriously unhurried trio captures the insignificance of human desire as opposed to the fact of a Minnesota winter even as they suggest they might prefer that the weather never change at all. Or, as Scholtes puts it in his Twin Cities visitor’s piece on “the emerging sense among Duluthians of
an emerging sensibility among Duluthians”—that is, signs of a termite culture going public—“if there is one certainty at the heart of Duluth’s mystique it is Lake Superior. The lake is always there and it is always cold. It will always be there and it will always be cold. Nothing about the physical landscape of the lake’s corner should make a visit this spring more pressing than one the next.”

 

7)
When Brendan Met Trudy,
directed by Kieron J. Walsh, written by Roddy Doyle (Collins Avenue/Deadly Films 2). As culture—the picture it draws of what it means to live happily, almost fully, in a funhouse of representations—the writing in this movie is as sexy as the smile in Flora Montgomery’s eyes. “He makes movies,” Montgomery’s young thief says to her warden, describing her schoolteacher boyfriend, and he does: home movies, as scripted by Godard, Iggy Pop, Kevin Spacey, Jean-Claude Van Damme starring in
Remedial Action.
As when he runs into one of his teenage students, whose name he can never remember. “Dylan,” the boy reminds him, as his parents beam at the one remaining sign of a hipness long since erased by the class system. “Mr.—Tambourine Man,” the teacher says, having already forgotten the student’s name again but translating the reference into a bigger story. The kid has no idea what he’s talking about.

 

2 April 2001

 

5)
The Early Blues Roots of Bob Dylan
(Catfish). The tribute album backward—assembling the originals, the set makes the present-day man pay homage to his forebears, whether he wants to or not. But Bob Dylan is not at issue—right off, with the Mississippi Sheiks’ 1931 “I’ve Got Blood in My Eyes for You,” you hear how completely sixty-two years later he entered the song and changed it from the inside out. The structure remains the same; only the soul is different. Rather, it’s the wide range of the compiler’s ear—picking up Booker T. Sapps’ obscure 1935 “Po’ Laz’rus,” Will Bennett following
the melody of “Railroad Bill” in 1929 like a man going downstream in a canoe, the Rev. J. C. Burnett chanting “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” in a black church in 1928—that makes you realize what an undiscovered country remains to be found. When, just before the end, in the Parchman Farm Penitentiary in Mississippi in 1939, Bukka White begins to hammer the high, ringing chords of “Po’ Boy,” his voice an eternal whine, as if he knows this is the only way to get God’s ear, you reach that country, and you can’t believe you have to leave. You can; he couldn’t.

 

1 May 2001

 

2) No Depression in Heaven—An Exploration of Harry Smith’s
Anthology of American Folk Music,
produced by Hal Willner (Getty Center, Los Angeles). The sixties Cambridge folkie Geoff Muldaur led the assemblage. He looked like the kindly town pharmacist; when he opened his mouth Noah Lewis’ 1928 “Minglewood Blues” came out like a tiger. “You’re going to be killing a lot of people tonight, aren’t you?” fiddler Richard Greene asked Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family, who was one of only four or five people under forty, or maybe fifty, on the stage. “That’s what I do best,” she said sweetly. Sparks writes lyrics about murder and clinical depression for her husband, Brett, to sing; she introduced the Blue Sky Boys’ 1936 “Down on the Banks of the Ohio” as a song in which “a woman is slaughtered to ensure the river remains full.” “This record sounds like it came from Mars,” Greene said, kicking off Floyd Ming and His Pep Steppers’ 1928 “Indian War Whoop” (a new version orchestrates Baby Face Nelson’s arrest in
O Brother, Where Art Thou?).
It sounded just like Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call,” which in
Mars Attacks!
makes all the Martians’ heads explode.