Thursday, September 29, 2005
All Bob all the time
I Tivo'd the first part of Scorsese's Dylan bio on PBS and ended up watching it the next day just before Part II -- the documentary equivalent, in length if not incoherence, of Dylan's whacked out director's cut of Renaldo & Clara. By the time it was over my hair had gotten kinda curly and my voice had become kind of nasal and I was droppin' my g's and sayin' things like, "I'd like to empty the dishwasher but my hands are on fire."
You ever get the feeling that, at least some of the time, Bob must be a real pain in the ass to be around? I know, I know -- he's Bob Dylan and he could be a major asshole all the time and get away with it if he had just written "Visions of Johanna" or "To Ramona" or "It's Not Dark Yet" or about another hundred songs I could list (if not sing) at the drop of a Stetson hat. (My brother Ethan just sent me some samples from the new Rodney Crowell album, including a song called "Beautiful Despair" that opens with this couplet: "Beautiful despair is hearing Dylan drunk at 3 am/And knowing in a million years you'll never write a song half as good as him." And Rodney's not alone.)
No, Dylan has the right to be as big a jerk as he wants and with the archival material at his disposal, Marty showed us just how much of a jerk he was -- though as Davie Yaffee noted in
his Slate review, this was an authorized biopic which left some of the rougher edges on the floor. The footage of him and the Band touring the UK in 1966 was taken from DA Pennebaker's Eat the Document. It's supposed to be unavailable but you can find a copy at Kim's Video on St. Marks and probably about a hundred other places around the country. In it you will see the same funny scene Scorsese included of Dylan riffing off some sign outside an apothecary's, making nonsense poetry out of the words -- "I need someone to bathe my bird, knit my soul..." What you don't see is Dylan and Richard Manuel, on the same early morning stoned stroll offering some starstruck fan a leather jacket for his girlfriend. Haha. That Bob.
You did see Joan Baez vent, all those years after the fact, about following Bob around on another UK tour, the one documented in Don't Look Back, and never being asked to join him on stage. After all she had done for him! An unseen interviewer asked Dylan about it and for a moment he looked authentically embarrassed, human as all of us. "It's hard to be wise and in love at the same time," he finally says and I say give the man a cigar. Or something stronger. As he demonstrated in the remarkable first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan has been far more self aware all these years than his critics have given him credit for. If he didn't choose to let this film be a Bob bashing session, can you really blame him? And would you want to be on the other side of a pissing contest with Dylan, anyway? The master if the fuck-you song -- "Positively Fourth Street," "Idiot Wind," et al -- Bob has proven he can take it and dish it out. Even at 3 AM.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
The simple life
The cover story in tomorrow's New York Times Magazine is adapted from Joan Didion's forthcoming book, The Year of Magical Thinking. It is about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and Didion's subsequent actions and reactions. Dunne died of a heart attack before his wife's eyes on December 30, 2003, sitting at the dinner table in their New York home. Her description of the event -- the arrival of the parameds, the trip to the hospital -- seems oddly familiar, not because we have heard or witnessed this story before (some of us have) but because the trademark Didion style makes it seem familiar. She witnesses her witnessing with a sense of detachment, as usual in her reporting. As the social worker at the hospital remarks when she beats the doctor to the punch in announcing Dunne's death, "She's a pretty cool customer."
What is more surprising, to reader and writer alike, is the depth of the grief that follows. She explores her grief as if it were a cave, using her intellect and her skills as a writer to illuminate the murk. They were married for almost 40 years and it is his absence as much as his presence that she devotes her narrative to.
Did I mention that their daughter was in a coma at the time of Dunne's death?
Just last week I was reading to my students from her essay "The White Album" (1979) in which she described an ambivalent diagnosis of MS she received from a doctor -- "an exclusionary diagnosis [that] meant nothing. I had at this time a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist's office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become probable, the norm. Things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind. 'Lead a simple life,' the neurologist advised. 'Not that it makes any difference we know about.' In other words it was another story without a narrative."
Different story, different stranger, same knife.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Piece of crap
I like Neil Young in all his guises -- rocker, folker, confused and angry patriot, confused and angry protestor, dad, and just all around Jeremiah railing at the everything -- but now that he's become a media critic as well, I think we all have to start watching our backs. As reported in the
Chicago Tribune this morning, Young lambasted the paper for a story it did on Farm Aid last week that cast aspersions on how funds from the annual benefit were distributed.
"We are not purely raising money for farmers," he fumed at a press conference before the concert, "that's a small part of what we do... The people at the Chicago Tribune should be held responsible for this piece of crap."
Here the protean artist sometimes known as Shakey invoked one of his own Crazy Horse songs:
Saw it on the tube
Bought it on the phone
Now you're home alone
It's a piece of crap
Hey, he's not only describing just about everything you ever bought for yourself or your kids, he's talking about your newspaper too. Neil's ability to be all things to all people includes the role of consumer advocate and small wonder. Seeing him in concert in Pittsburg of all places a few years ago I was struck by the range of the songs he performed -- the sweet, open-hearted "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," the Homeric "I'm the Ocean" -- and the motley crew he performed them for: bankers, bikers, Deadheads, regular dads with their kids. You've got to love a guy who can be caught screaming at the traffic one day and doing fundraisers for his kid's school the next. At least I do.
Friday, September 16, 2005
A simple prop
It was odd seeing Bush standing in front of St. Louis Cathedral in an emptied out Jackson Square last night, delivering his speech to an audience of crickets (the ones that haven't deserted the city) and Secret Servicemen. "I am speaking to you from the city of New Orleans, nearly empty, still partly under water and waiting for life and hope to return," he said to a deafening silence. The church itself, which fronts one end of Jackson Square, looked like a prop; here's the church, here's the steeple, open the door and where are the people?
The president himself chose his outfit from the working-man side of his wardrobe: his sleeves were rolled up, his collar was unbuttoned, he was ready to get the job done! Unfortunately he was a week or two too late, as the ever-rising bloated body count continues to remind us. Photos of Bush disembarking his helicopter earlier showed he was also wearing his work boots. He was ready to get his feet dirty, too.
Such props and costumes are the stuff of politics, of course. Kerry was mocked for wearing hunting clothes (even though he was going hunting at the time) and after Dukakis's tank ride it's safe to say that few presidential candidates will risk putting on a helmet again. But even while Bush has been spared the same ridicule when he goes out to cut some brush on his ranch, here in the city his administration forgot his attire seemed rather grotesque. Was he about to go digging through the mud in search of survivors? Or was it his dying presidency he hoped to revive?
Jackson Square has pleasant associations for almost anyone who has been to NO and I am no exception. I proposed to my wife there; William Faulkner lived a stone's throw from the spot where Bush stood. To see a living locale reduced to backdrop status is sad especially when the man in the foreground so utterly failed the people who once lived there. People will return to New Orleans, of course, just as Bush will return to the White House. Whether he can get anything done there in the years to come remains to be seen. The Katrina disaster has revealed the theatrics for what they are and coast to coast, in states blue and red, a lot of people were left wondering who the hell was in charge. The city is real, it's the man who is a facade.
Monday, September 12, 2005
Flesh for Fantasy
While it may not rival the return of the Palestinians to the Gaza Strip, the news that
John Fogerty was returning to Fantasy Records marks a reconciliation that seemed just as unlikely. It was at Fantasy in the late sixties and early seventies that Fogerty's Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded a string of hits that seems even more remarkable today. "Bad Moon Rising," "Hey Tonight," "Fortunate Son," "Green River" -- most songwriters could have retired having written just one of those but on album after album they just kept on coming. (And really, you can't blame the man for every weak-assed version of "Proud Mary" or "Lodi" you're heard performed by troubadors everywhere from SF to Katmandu.)
Then in the mid-seventies the well seemingly went dry and in an infamous meeting with Fantasy head and CCR father figure Saul Zaentz, Fogerty threw a fit and ceded the rights to all of his songs to Fantasy just to get out of his contract with them. Even in the addled history of rock 'n' roll this seemed to be one of the most bone-headed moves of all time -- up there, perhaps, with
the Kinks similarly stupid sale of all future song rights though not quite in a league with Sam Phillips releasing Elvis to RCA for $35,000. And for the next decade Zaentz used that money to finance one Oscar-winning picture after another (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus) while Fogerty sulked, going into the studio in his home every day and coming out empty-handed.
I interviewed Zaentz for the Berkeley Monthly about twenty years ago. He was gearing up to produce Phillip Kaufman's adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and was most agreeable on every subject -- except that of John Fogerty. The singer's dry spell finally ended with the release of a new album, Centerfield, and he opened local shows with not one but two Fuck You, Saul songs, "Zanz Can't Danz" and "Mr. Greed." Though John wouldn't talk to me his brother, Tom Fogerty, wrote to say that Zaentz had always been great to him and the rest of the band and that John was the one with the problem. (Tom died a few years later of tuberculosis.) I had the sense that whatever went down in that boardroom had more to do with the surrogate father-son relationship the producer and the artist had and little to do with Fogerty's output.
There were numerous lawsuits and counter suits. "Zanz" became "Vanz" as the result of one, and in a a truly bizarre moment, Zaentz and company tried to claim that Fogerty's 1985 hit "The Old Man Down the Road" was a rewrite of the 1970 CCR song "Run Through the Jungle" -- which Fantasy owned, accusing Fogerty in essence of plagiarizing himself. (A jury ultimately disagreed.) Whatever the psychology of the players, this had to be a low point in the art-vs-mammon world of rock business, akin to David Geffen suing Neil Young for making music with no commercial potential.
The stage for Fogerty's return to Fantasy was set earlier this year when Zaentz sold Fantasy to a consortiium of buyers (including Norman Lear) for $80 million. In November the label will release a retrospective with an apt if stultifyingly unoriginal title: The Long Road Home. An album of orginal material is due in 2006 but don't expect to hear any songs from it on Zaentz's next project, a biography of Goya. Now there was an artist who knew something about suffering.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Eleven's ocean
I've been avoiding the television and radio this morning, fearful of the onslaught of words and images that this anniversary will bring. I don't want to see any stars and stripes, or pictures of the rubble, or yellow ribbons, or bullhorns. I don't want to hear the language of the GOP convention repeated thoughtlessly. "On that day," GWB reminded people endlessly in the run up to the last election, "our world changed forever."
Well, at least until it was changed forever again. As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated once again, disasters change peoples lives, sometimes by ending them. The conclusions we draw about the meaning of those disasters and how we react in their aftermath -- how we change -- may be the test of our real selves. I was struck by the opening lines in Nicoloai Ouroussoff's
Critic's Notebook yesterday: "There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at Ground Zero looks bleaker than ever."
He was talking about the planned memorial, and the politicization of the process, and how likely it is that what is finally built will be an ugly, schmaltzy mess, but he could just as well have been speaking of the attacks themselves. Four years later the country has gone to its separate corners and posiitons have hardened more quickly than Ozzy Osbourne's arteries. Those who believe that Iraq had something to do with the attacks --- a position that, on the face of it, seems as laughable as Roman sandal movies I watched as a kid, in which Samson and Hercules teamed up to fight Goliath -- want nothing to do with those who think our new all-war-all-the-time policy is just creating new Bin Ladens, with the speed that it takes to grow Sea Monkeys. The two sides look at each other from across a gulf, separated by flag decals and Bush Lies bumper stickers. Everyone else tunes into the next Paris Hilton news and worries about their abs, proving that Osama might be right after all, that ours is a civilization in decline. Nice tan, though.
This morning at 8:48 I was in Ft. Greene Park watching the dogs run. There was no sense of memorial, even by the trees that were planted to honor Frank De Martini, who died helping others out of the WTC. (You can read his widow's story in "Escaped from New York," on the Articles page.) I recalled walking up Lafayette right across from where the trees are planted that morning. People were already coming across the bridges covered in ash. There in front of me a man broke down on the sidewalk and started to weep and I stood staring at him, mute, unable even to reach out. Another couple did the same thing, all of us frozen in shock.
I've forgiven myself for my inaction in the years since. I still like to believe that I -- all of us, really -- are capable of reacting differently, with less thought and more feeling. Just this morning I got an email from my sister April, who lives in Kingwood, TX, a suburb of Houston. Refugees from New Orleans were everywhere, she said. "The KW United Methodist Church (only Red Cross station in Kingwood) actually acting like a CHURCH should act and providing comfort and a place to stay to those in need," she wrote. "How odd. All the other zillions of churches here standing around with their thumbs up their holy butts."
Kingwood, I should note, is as white as the NO refugees are black. We do not need to identify with people to reach out to them, or ask where the mud or the ash came from, or how it came to fall on them. We'll all get our share in the end.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Mile-high city
Just as the world was mourning the passing of
Gilligan we have received word that Thurston Howell III and his wife Lovey are alive and well and flying somewhere about a mile over the rest of the country.
Speaking to American Public Media's
Marketplace yesterday, former First Lady Barbara Bush opined that the people who had been relocated from New Orleans to the Houston Astrodome were better off now.
"So many of the people here, you know, were underpriveleged anyway," she said, "so this is working very well for them."
Hey, I always dreamed of trading in my crappy apartment for a bigger place -- why not the Astrodome?
Though GWB sent mom and dad out in hopes of putting a friendlier face on his administration's inept handling of the Katrina disaster, their tone-deaf publicity tour is turning into something of a fiasco. Monday night,
speaking to Larry King on CNN, the former President Bush -- known as "Poppy" to those in the family, due to all the opium he smoked at Yale -- said that he had spent plenty of time on the ground in Mississippi with Republican governor (and former GOP chief) Haley Barbour and that the word Iraq hadn't come up once!
"Now where does that story come from?" he asked but refused to name names -- except for one. "I've already said enough. Mr. Sulzberger will be calling in."
So that's who's behind all this negative publicity: the publisher of the New York Times! Should have known. Pinch may not have the Punch that his father did but he can obviously still bend the whole media world to his twisted vision. The elder Bush may be kinder and gentler than his son -- and heaven knows his wife is genteel -- but first and foremost, they are gentiles.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Oil on the water
A friend of mine wrote to ask if anyone was talking about the direct correlation between the money the war in Iraq is costing and the lack of preparedness that left New Orleans so devastated by Hurricane Katrina. I said yes indeed, and pointed her toward a column by
Sidney Blumenthal that made just that point. She said that the man in the photo was swimming in as much oil as water and that the environmental impact of the disaster would be a long time in assessing.
Here's hoping that editorials such as Blumenthal's will be but the first in a drumbeat of criticism for a president who seems so hopelessly out of touch with life as lived by so much of the rest of the country -- the living, dying, suffering that is the lot of those who lost everything in NO, not to mention the parents who lost their sons in Iraq -- as to appear psychotic. Did you see his speech yesterday? Flipping through a hastily prepared reamarks like a senior citizen cruising through the menu at Denny's in search of the dessert page, Bush seemed utterly disconnected from the words he was reading, the implications of loss that the sandbags and soldiers he was promising implied. Small matter that said sandbags and soldiers
have yet to arrive. Bush couldn't wait to get to the part where he gets to smile. Now, back to the ranch.
Bush's insensitivity may yet be his undoing. His can-do response to what is shaping up to be a national crisis on a scale with 9.11 will only look more and more inane as the hellish conditions on the ground -- sorry, water -- in NO reach Hieronymous Bosch proportions. In "Lousiana," his song about that state's last great flood of 1927,
Randy Newman sang
President Coolidge came down on a railroad train
With a little fat man with a notepad in his hand
President Coolidge said, Little fat man, isn't it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker's land?
Coolidge, who oversaw the boom in the economy that fueled the Roaring Twenties, famously decided not to run before the stock market crashed and Hoover (and the rest of the nation) reaped the whirlwind during the Great Depression. Elected to a second term, Bush may not be so lucky. If the negative repercussions of Katrina combine with growing impatience over our involvement in Iraq, 2005 may yet provide the perfect storm that could cripple his foundering presidency.
