Weird Al Yankovich does... Bob
Set in the 1930s during the Great Depression era, the film's main concerns (and those of the oppressed Tramp) echo those of millions of people at the time — unemployment, poverty, and hunger. It has a number of wonderfully inventive and memorable routines and scenes that proclaim the frustrating struggle by proletarian man against the dehumanizing effects of the machine in the Industrial Age (at the time of Henry Ford's assembly line), and various social institutions.
The Greatest Films | Modern Times
Enjoying the Chaplinesque Dylan's upfront allusion to the great movie referenced above, I found Working Man's Blues #2 the song most readily — and pleasantly — echoing the album's (and Chaplin's) grim message. The melody of this song which so easily sticks to the mind conveys lyrics that are, to mine, extraordinarily difficult to analyze.
Seemingly disconnected — much like our globalized selves, the words have a surreal, dreamlike quality. Each line evades categorization, genre, or subject as it approaches one, leaving an evocation of lives lived through the centuries resonating in each line following. Yet the chorus is an anchor. Engaging and strong, Dylan's richly textured voice is vibrant. As the verses form the threads of our lives, the chorus gives us the tapestry and élan vital needed to appreciate the song's immense passion and depth.
It's a great song — perhaps one of Dylan's best — and the album revolves around it, the darker but similarly potent Nettie Moore, and the tongue-in-cheek but haunting, doomsday finale, Ain't Talkin'.
Paradoxically, and elusively, while damning us to our nature, Dylan celebrates our inimitable greatness. Chaplin is but one of us, a life lived in extraordinary times. He serves too as a decoy. Roman poet and author Ovid is the intentional driving force of this album, and his work gives it both its timelessness and its immediacy. Ovid lived and worked in an era much like ours; a time in which free speech and arbitrary banishment were the imperial order of the day. After the introduction of Ovid's most famed work — and that which probably indirectly led to his death — in the album's first song, Thunder on the Mountain ("I've bin' sitting down an' studying the art of love..."), Dylan focuses — especially in Working Man's Blues #2, on Tristia, the first of three works Ovid completed during his ultimately fatal exile by Caesar Augustus to Scythian shores, where he lived out his life among the warlike Getae and Sarmatians.
To read Ovid while listening to this album gives it the immense weight and startling clarity of 2,000 years. Living in the world of Bush, we are all exiles. Cut from our crowd, we wander an increasingly frightening and incomprehensible world. Surrounded by intellectual Getae, in their sheepskins and with their long hair covering their chests, our politico-corporate Caesars laugh at us, as did their forerunners at Chaplin and Ovid. Powerless, we are left only that which Dylan evinces; our voices, our anger, our passion, and our courage...
Yeah, this post is just a heads up. I could write reams. To those of you who know me, it'll come as no surprise that I'm pleased with Dylan's latest work. But I'm more than pleased. Since Dylan survived his brush with Christian fundamentalism and, he used Infidels and Empire Burlesque to move from overt language to engaging the subtext of our humanity. In short, he began to try to make this album. He failed with Knocked Out Loaded. He touched a nerve with Oh Mercy. He failed with Under the Red Sky. He failed with Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong. He has failed many times. Ten years ago, he started getting it right with Time Out Of Mind and Love and Theft. Now, six years after his last studio album was released, on September 11, 2001, he has crafted the work of his life.
As for Weird Al Yankovich and his wonderful use of the palindrome in BOB, "Great." By the same sleight of lip, Ovid anagrammatically becomes the Void — filled with the voices of the ages and their sages.
Finally, this post is for Jon Husband whose words of a week or two ago struck me dumb. Thank you, Jon. I guess, in the circles in which we blog, an appreciation that our language is merely a pointer to that which we are, goes without saying. But you said what you did and I'm humbled and grateful for your words. And as I've commented before, "Backatcha!"
This social protest film is Charlie Chaplin's final stand against the synchronized sound film — and it is also his last full-length "silent film" — although it must be noted that it is a quasi-silent film. There is no traditional, synchronized voice dialogue in the film — but voices and sounds do emanate from machines (e.g., the feeding machine), television screens (i.e., the Big Brother screen — pre-dating George Orwell's book 1984, written/published in 1949), and Chaplin's actual voice is heard singing an imaginary, nonsense song of gibberish. Special sound effects and an original musical score (by composer Chaplin, including various musical themes from "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," "Prisoner's Song," "How Dry I Am," and "In the Evening By the Moonlight") enhance the pantomime.
The Greatest Films | Modern Times
As for old Bob — and like Chaplin in his first soundtracked movie, he ain't talkin'. "Here," as Ovid says in the fifth book of Tristia, "I'm the barbarian no one comprehends."
Ain't talkin', just walkin' | Up the road, around the bend. | Heart burnin', still yearnin' | In the last outback at the world's end.
Bob Dylan | Ain't Talkin'
Backward glance...
Attempting to portray Iran as a nuclear menace to Israel and the world, in that order, even though it has no nuclear weapons and Israel has hundreds, is not merely a sign of dementia. It is indication of near idiocy in a society that can be repeatedly manipulated into believing such totally crackpot notions that have no foundation in the material world but exist only in a world of superstitious psycho-fantasy.
Frank Scott | Iran, Israel, The Big Lie and The Real Threat
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
Hannah Arendt | The Origins Of Totalitarianism
Mark Woods Burning
Kokerboom
When the primacy of objects — the authority of things — is destabilized, what changes in our daily reality? Is there a renewed sense of agency — that we triumph despite a constant flux — or is there a deeper dread, that survival is contingent on an ever-shifting utilization of material accident? Seventy odd years ago, when the code became prophetic and the forest burned, was it fear of the body terrorized that made Char want to claim the primacy of words, alone? I imagine that objects — shrapnel, corpses, shelters, and bodies — are so psychologically freighted in battle — that it feels necessary to sublimate one's attachment to these soft vulnerable carapaces — to deny all objects and laud the word. This way in which Char — in a kind of projected grief — created a beautiful and false pillar of abstraction to cling to reminds me of the obverse — twin and twisting tree houses built of driftwood on the coast of California. A father built the tree houses when his son died at sea. They towered up fragile — a careening and rickety wood helix — but they did not protect and could not preserve anything that had been lost, flesh or word. The world still existed beyond the tree house and the coast — furious and charged, shaking.
M.W. Blackburn | The Library is on Fire — Wood as Cultural Signifier
I couldn't read the above article without crackling... sorry, cackling. I'd imagine Mark doing so too. What would be the keywords of such a piece? Wood, burn, black, char, library, fire, tree? Does it lead us to one of blogging's favourite sons's views on logging... erm, blogging? Or, for that matter, i.e. wood (naturally), does it reflect his views on a possible nukular conflagration?
Umm, yes. I know. Well, no really, I don't. But I couldn't resist cracking — damn, crackling up. Whatever.
Anyway, I took this photograph of a tree upside down. A kokerboom endemic to the Northern Cape, it reminded of our baobab, or upside-down tree. And, yes, because it grows where no tree (in its right mind) should, of our world gone wrong. Neither the tree nor I were inverted when I took the picture (nor, indeed, was the camera), but the effect is intentional. Lending new perspective, it now brings to mind one of my many close-as-damnit-to-favourite bloggers and a cultural signifier second to none, Mark Woods.
(As indeed I have done and shall continue to do.)
Why slip this beneath the entry on Bob? Mark's is a language as austere as Dylan's, but the music that emanates from his over-the-garage gluation and scissorology scriptorium is as deep and compelling. In short, and without effort, he don't miss a beat.
