I’m Not There

I don’t know who you are, but if you care about ‘Life’ or ‘Art’ then you got to at least be interested in Todd Haynes’s new one, the biopic about Dylan called I’m Not There.  According to IMDB, it won’t be out until much later this year, but I’m already excited.  Stumbled across some pics today from the film  (you have to click the link on the right-hand side of the page).  While they don’t give us much to go on, they at least suggest that Haynes hasn’t lost it on the project.  Blanchett as early-electric era Dylan seems like a sound choice.  A lot of great minds behind this one.  Hope it’s better than Masked & Anonymous, which I actually liked, but was still confused by.  Back to work now . . .

1000 hits/Greatest artists

My blog just reached 1000 hits. Kudos for me. I think that’s pretty miniscule in the internet scheme of things, but it’s quite an attractive number, so I’m happy . . .

Today when I was eating brunch at the Blue Moon Diner here in Charlottesville, I sat next to two guys who I overheard talking about the following things: their incapability to see the Big Dipper in Washington, D.C. last weekend; the fact that when the Nazis made the yellow star mandatory for all Jews in Norway, the king of Norway commanded that everyone wear the yellow star (unconfirmed); some obscure references to habeus corpus law; extended discourse on Roman musical notation and its contemporary legibility; brief reference to the musicological accomplishments of Pythagoras. And the best thing about all these comments was that they were disconnected by long periods of silence before another comment would suddenly bubble to the surface, and there seemed to be no overarching logic holding the conversation together. It was like overhearing a Beckett play.

But my real point in writing . . . In my review of the new Bright Eyes EP this past week, I mentioned my view that Dylan was “the second or third greatest American artist in the 20th-century,” and ferdogg took me ever so lightly to task in a comment. Well, first of all, I think I misspoke. I would have preferred to have written “at least the second or third greatest American artist of the 20th-century” so as to leave things slightly more ambiguous. I didn’t want to overspeak and cause just such a protest on the part of my readership by leaving myself some wiggle room. I’m totally confident that I could argue successfully for Dylan’s top-three status, but arguing that he was somehow “the best” I think would be hard (but maybe worthwhile nonetheless).

Still, the basic logic behind what I wrote was that, for me, the “best American artist of the 20th-century” would probably have to be a popular musician or filmmaker because those are two forms with the greatest cultural impact and highest level of aesthetic development during that century. Yet I think it would be hard to argue for an individual filmmaker. Kubrick, Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, and others created amazingly varied, complex, and aesthetically adventurous bodies of work over long periods of time. Welles, Chaplin, Peckinpah, Keaton, and others made startling accomplishments in a limited range of films. But it would be hard to argue that any of these filmmakers defined the form or stood out from the pack in the way that someone like Joyce or Beckett or DaVinci or Melville or Newton stood head and shoulders over their peers in terms of quality, accomplishment, or originality. If I did include a filmmaker in my top three it would probably actually be an avant-garde filmmaker like Stan Brakhage or Hollis Frampton. In other words, if I could figure out the best American avant-garde filmmaker of the 20th-century, I might put him or her in the top three, but more so for aesthetic/theoretical reasons than preference. Arguing from my own preferences, I actually think I could make a strong argument that David Lynch is the greatest filmmaker of the 20th-century, but here I would get hung up on the fact that he’s still working and may still create even better work in the future (thus becoming more thoroughly associated with the 21st-century). I think that the mainstream, canonical filmmaker that you could make the best argument for would be Hitchcock, but he is really only ‘American’ by default since 1) he was British by birth, and 2) his films don’t reflect on classical American themes in the way that some of these other filmmakers do. These two latter examples prove the basic futility in exercises such as this as well.

In the popular music realm, the strongest candidates, for me, would be Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, John Coltrane, or Duke Ellington. The reason I would give Dylan a slight edge over the last two artists is that his accomplishment was slightly less singular than theirs, i.e. it fit into an American tradition that was already well established and that still continues today. If the American idiom has a Shakespeare, it is no doubt Dylan, and even though Coltrane and Ellington both achieved aesthetic brilliance on par with Shakespeare, their brilliance is nearly impossible to imitate without sounding like empty ventriloquism. In the case of Dylan, a performer can create a fair to middling effort in the Dylanesque, American folk tradition and still be saying something somewhat worthwhile and lasting. Every American songwriter, poet, or literary artist toot court must respond in some way, in their art, to Dylan’s accomplishments and innovations.

Robert Johnson, on the other hand, is just without peer. To my mind, the brilliance in his music is nearly incommunicable, although not unintelligible. Listening to him is much like studying quantum physics. At this level of artistic accomplishment different rules of possibility reign. In some way, Johnson cannot even be discussed as a sort of best artist, because he is more like a god-man or something. We need to discuss, rather, his position in the pantheon or in the heavens. St. Robert.

And a similar argument goes for the King. When the archaelogists excavate the ruins of Las Vegas and see the temples built to this figure Elvis, he will appear to them in much the same way that figures like Zeus, Athena, and Apollo appear to us today — real but unreal figures of a hallowed yet unapproachable past. In the same way that we read of the Greek pantheon and don’t quite understand how these figures were gods, the archaeologists of the future will not quite understand how we considered Elvis a ’star’ — what that meant, how that happened, etc.

OK, there is a lot more that I could write on this, but I need to do schoolwork so I’m stopping. Next post I’ll address the literary and plastic arts.

Finishing Up w/ Dylan

So I’ve been doing pretty well with this daily posting thing, at least up until this weekend. Attended a friend’s wedding outside Philadelphia. All went well. Very happy to see so many great, old friends and unwind, get my mind off of work, however briefly. I’m fairly crushed right now by the Eagles loss, but at least I didn’t have to watch the thing on TV, as I was on the road between Springfield and C-Ville. I don’t know how it looked or felt, but it sounded brutal and I wonder whether the Birds’ll be able to recover. Who do they have next week?

Unfortunately, I’m getting a bit bored of this track-by-track Dylan thing. And I’m afraid that if I keep it up, the pace of my posts will begin dwindling again. All that I have to say has basically been said. According to my original plan, today would have been the day when I’d review “Beyond the Horizon,” but instead I’m going to tackle the last four songs on the album and call it a day. Tomorrow, I will probably start a series of post titled “Suburban Flanerie,” and along the way, mix in reviews of some new albums I’ve been listening to. How’s that sound?

The last four songs are “Beyond the Horizon,” “Nettie Moore,” “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” and “Ain’t Talkin.’” Of the four, “Nettie Moore” is my favorite. As I mentioned last post, it was locked in a tie with “WB2″ for my favorite song on the album and it remains there. It’s definitely the most balanced song on the album. Musically, it’s gorgeous, driven by a pulsating bass and piano line. Are there pizzicato strings in there too? I’m not sure. I hear breath blowing through the song, an old man wheezing in a rocking chair. The whole thing is grey and wheezy, but it’s not nostalgic and it’s not retro. To me, it actually sounds forwardthinking in spite of the antiquity of the words, the music. I thought so immediately upon hearing the song. Unlike anything on the last three Dylan albums, this song immediately suggested to me a way forward for his music at the dusk of his career. It doesn’t sound like he’s struggling anymore for self-resolution, absolution from without. There’s a confidence in “Nettie Moore,” even though it’s a song about loneliness, detachment, death, distance.

“Nettie Moore” stands out from the rest of the album as it stands out from the last four songs on the album. “Beyond the Horizon” is a straightforward tune pitched as an old, white jazz standard. It’s parlor music, easy listening, and for all that, it’s still fine. Again, it reminds me of those pre-Blood on the Tracks, post-Blonde on Blonde Dylan albums that I’ve always liked – New Morning, John Wesley Harding. Not Dylan’s best work, I’ve come to realize, because of it’s straightforwardness, but still pleasant. A cut like “Beyond the Horizon” on Modern Times is a good chance to compose your thoughts in between “WB2″ and “Nettie Moore,” the most challenging song on the album (arguably), and the most cathartic, engaging one (inarguably).

The album closes strangely, to my mind, with “Levee” and “Ain’t Talkin.’” For all its timeliness and its fine lyric, “Levee” smacks of throwaway to me, which is a shame, especially since it then leads me to hear ‘milking it,’ the disaster I mean, all within the track. A far better Dylan track about Katrina was “High Water,” which appeared on his last album, on September, 11, 2001. That’s right, I’m saying he predicted it, which wasn’t too hard considering that the Katrina disaster was a systemic failure and a tragic case of history repeating itself. Or was it farce? I’m still not sure. Tragic farce, maybe. I think that makes sense.

And “Ain’t Talkin’” ends things. I don’t think this song belongs at the end of Modern Times. “Nettie Moore” would have been my pick. And it’s not just for how “AT” sounds. It sounds like it should have started the album! It’s the lyrics, too. The song sounds orphaned at the end of Modern Times, since the rest of the album, to me, evokes statis, fear, sadness, and then courageous and incorrigible prodding of the present. “Ain’t Talkin’” is about walking away or, at least, walking through (the cities of the plain) and that, to me, doesn’t seem to fit well with what the rest of Modern Times was about. Of course, maybe that was the point. Maybe Dylan is trying to move on at the end of this new album, or maybe he is trying to take the wholly negative stance that I perceive him to be taking.

It’s not a bad ending to Modern Times, it’s an unsettling one. In fact, it’s a good song, one that I’m sure I will return to even after I stop spinning the whole album.

And a final word on the album . . . It’s Dylan’s first billboard number one since the sixties (I’ve heard), and it deserves to be (although I wonder how Blood on the Tracks and Desire never made it . . . ). It’s a great album and, as I think I’ve already mentioned on here, I believe that when Dylan’s career ends, it will be listened to with a level of reverence approaching Dylan’s greatest work. While I’ve been writing these reviews, I’ve had the chance to return to Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft,“ and I can say, unequivocally, that this album is generally as good as them, and in certain respects, better. For instance, I still find many songs on Time Out of Mind lyrically weak if not downright cringeworthy. As I mentioned before, I prefer the stripped down production on this one to that heard on “Love and Theft”, and when I listen to the earlier album I can’t help but feel that some of its intensity is feigned. Some of the songs on Modern Times are, I believe, the most poetically and intellectually focused and concise Dylan has produced in years, maybe ever. The album, in many ways, for me, lends support to what many of us Dylan fans, young and old, late and new, have worried about for years: that he has lacked for viable material, for things to write about. Dylan has something to write about here on Modern Times, the same thing he was writing about in 1963, the same thing he was writing about in 1966, but he’s a different man writing it, which is makes it timely and potent and worth struggling with.