it didn't occur to me until I started watching don't look back that I hadn't heard dylan talk before. that lazy, steely, low-pitched whine is so distinctive. the way he leads reporters around in circles was something I anticipated, having read a few. if you ask bob dylan a question, be prepared to have him ask one back. and take note of that exchange with a fan (I don't know who he is?) in the practice room, before a show; dylan sways and rocks with his guitar and throws back all the kid's questions. the picture couldn't be more iconic: some skinny guy with long fingernails and a frizzy head of hair talking to a kid with those fifties glasses and combed back hair. the artist versus the "square", the defining difference here being one's insistent questions against the other's even more insistent, vague answers. some of us go through life constantly trying to pin down ideas and file them away, but people like bob dylan would have none of that. not just regarding ambiguous ideas, either - at one point the kid says he's a science student, and dylan goes, "what does that mean? what does that say about you?" no matter what he says, the kid can't really answer dylan's questions.
other questions dylan will answer flippantly, with a slouching good humor - questions like "what is your religion" will bring yet more questions, and the end result will be that dylan happily mumbles that no one's ever given him worthwhile to believe in, so he's not religious. nor does he really have a "message". but this extreme nihilism is, I kept thinking, deceptive. watch him at the parts when he's grilling a reporter for some major magazine like "time", telling him that no one in the magazines ever tell a story straight, that if they did it would be an interesting collage of life and not just "facts", and that he could sit there and explain why he's not a folk singer, but the reporter would just nod and not really get it. added to these outbursts, there's the obvious hint that his songs have to "mean" something, even if dylan will insist that he believes in nothing. otherwise they'd be completely boring, which they obviously aren't.
this movie is about bohemian culture overtaking the towns in london that we see dylan touring. at the end of the movie some newspapers are giving dylan a new label - "anarchist" - which he chuckles at, amazed. it's possible that he is/was, but I would never accept that he is a nihilist.
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yesterday you could have seen me dance in the streets after al gore & the ipcc won the nobel peace prize. it's all symbolic, I know, and gore still probably won't run, but I was happy that he was recognized.
today I picked up the colbert book but got the most chuckles out of this book, which tells you how to fight global warming in your own home/community. scan the table of contents - one chapter of this well-intentioned book is called, "Make it Creative (And Fun!)"
hot damn! I can't wait!
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