S/D
In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.
Scorsese/Dylan: an open thread (why not?) to discuss the remarkable, troubling, thought-provoking, 200 minute documentary.
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.
Scorsese/Dylan: an open thread (why not?) to discuss the remarkable, troubling, thought-provoking, 200 minute documentary.
posted by awol | 6:40 AM
2 Comments:
I was struck by what I took as the film's awareness of its responsibility to the "historical record" -- not just the extensive, and inadverently poignant footage of Allen Ginsberg (with no indication that he had actually passed away), but more generally a sense that the film was driven to capture these events, put them on film, interview the participants, before they're all gone. And something oddly vampiric about this relationship between all the aging interviewees and the indelibly youthful movement that they and the film was trying to record or preserve.
Then you factor into this Scorsese's own hyperkinetic personality -- in a sense, both Bob and Marty are tricksters or showmen of different kinds (Q: "Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or a poet?" A: "Oh, I think of myself as a song-and-dance man.") and it was troubling, if also interesting, to see these personalities on either side of this documentary that presented itself as so "masterful", precise, truthful.
Scorsese's politics is pretty interesting in its own right, not to mention the crazy knot of Dylan's in the 60's.
When I was 17 I walked into the record shop and sold my Dylan Boxed set....biograph....and my Lomax....Library of Congress Leadbelly...to buy punk albums...
I didn't realize at the time, that Bob Dylan would have done the same thing. The clerk thought I was crazy.
Someday, when I'm an old man, I'll find a copy of the Basement Tapes on vinyl and play them on the world's last turntable...
my favorite Dylan is the haggard State Fair Dylan...chasing it past the point of return. A true punk. An outcast in his own mind.
Funny, my first post college apartment building, the landlord tried to sell me the smaller of two apartments by telling me Bob Dylan lived there.
I took the bigger apartment downstairs. Close enough. Money was tight. I took a roommate who dressed up as Waldo for children's parties. I made linguine with canned clams. The roof fell in in the kitchen. I went for long walks and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes at once. I got kicked out of the apartment.
My ex-girlfriend had sold me her futon. She and her new boyfriend had moved to San Francisco. It didn't work out. When they came back, they asked for the bed back.
I said no. And the left it in the basement when I moved I kept the knives and forks. A couple of them....fifteen years later....are still in my collection.
Bob Dylan used to vacation in the summer with his relatives in St. Paul. I'm sure he hated it.
St. Paul is my home town. Summers I used to go work with my grandparents on the farm. Well....a couple weeks every summer at least.
Nobody on the farm cared who Dylan was...but if I went to town for any reason...
I sure as hell better have combed my hair.
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