Bob Dylan at 80

What can you say about Bob Dylan on his birthday that hasn’t already been said? The only perspective I have that no one else does is my own personal experience. Even then, if I say that he’s always seemed to be singing my story, even while telling his, I can just as easily imagine you saying the same. Perhaps that’s a measure of his gift. Still, on his 80th, I cast my memory back over a handful of scenes from my life that will always be evoked by his songs—moments his songs created, in a sense. Going to a debate on the issue of mandatory drug testing on the OU campus while I was still in high school, in ’87 or ’88 (Timothy Leary vs. a former head of the DEA), where they played “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” over the PA system pre-debate, to riotous audience reaction. This was certainly the first time I ever heard a whole auditorium full of people sing along jubilantly to that joyous chorus. (The audience clearly didn’t understand it’s obviously a religious allegory. Ahem.) A plane lifting off in ‘88 as "Like a Rolling Stone” kicked in on my Walkman, and the possibilities of life and travel and adventure seeming to open up endlessly in front of me. Bob gazing down at me from the poster of the cover of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” on the wall of my OU dorm room, freshman year ’89-‘90. Road trips where I’d pop “The Basement Tapes” into the tape deck just as soon as I got the motor turning (it’s still my favorite road-trip album). Moving to Chicago in ‘93 and seeing my first Dylan concert in April of ’94, four days after my birthday. What I remember most is being lifted away by a stirring “Jokerman,” Bob’s poker-face hovering in the spotlight. Seeing a friend who’s still the only cat I’ve ever known who could sing all the words to “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” do just that at a memorable open mic. An evening in the mid-‘90s: I’m in my mid-twenties. It’s late at night and “Desolation Row” is playing softly. I’m sitting up with a fellow I don’t know too well, an African-American gent 20 years my senior, a friend of a friend‘s mother. Everyone else has turned in and we just sit there and sing along with the song, both of us tickled the other knows every word, down to the phrasing. Nothing more really needed to be said. I never did see him too much after that, but it was a bonding moment I won’t forget. And then in some of my darkest times, finding tremendous consolation and strength and courage and acceptance in songs like “Most of the Time” and “Shelter from the Storm.” I think of all the shows I’ve seen down the years: the way a local audience always erupts after that line about “the winds in Chicago” in “Cold Irons Bound.” Dylan grinning from ear to ear from behind the keyboards at the edge of the stage, as a woman in the side balcony above him dances with utter joyous abandon, acting as though she might just obey the lyrical injunction to “throw your panties overboard” in “High Water (for Charley Patton).” That was at the Vic, I think. Going to concerts with Karolyn: hearing him play “Desolation Row” at United Center while huddled up next to her. I was probably singing along softly. Going to the big Americanarama all-day concert, where Karolyn introduced me to my first “tailgating” experience—Dylan headlined a show also featuring Richard Thompson, Wilco, and My Morning Jacket. Watching him seemingly baffle the crowd that night rather like he must’ve in the ‘60s: “Ballad of a Thin Man” took on an especial resonance. Dancing with Karolyn to “Soon After Midnight” at our wedding. (A dark choice, perhaps, but we liked the sound of it.) These are just a few scenes from a life; I could have chosen a hundred more. We have been extraordinarily lucky to live at the same time as Bob Dylan. Assuming there are still people around 500 years from now, our descendants will understand that we lived in a historical period like few others. Happy 80th, Bob. Thank you for the music. I can’t imagine my life without it.

Sheltering and streaming in place with a few Great Movies

Thinking about good things to read and stream in these days of COVID-19, I pulled those four Great Movies books by Roger Ebert down off the shelf. It’s always good to hear his voice again. Poking around at the Open Culture and Internet Archive sites, I then found 10 free films Ebert anointed—a lot of them silent, all undeniably “great” (though, really, that's for you to say—you may disagree.) Alongside links to the films themselves (and the sites’ own capsule descriptions), I’ve linked to Ebert’s essays. I’ve only written about one of these films myself, Beat the Devil, in which case I’ve linked to my own essay, as well. It’s not easy saying something refreshing about the most celebrated films, which is part of why I like to study how Ebert gets to the heart of the matter. For dedicated cinephiles, to curl up with these films, with the accompanying essays as companions, is to renew your vows—and, perhaps, the debate. For first-timers, it's a fine way to build a strong foundation for your own personal temple of cinephilia.

Detour - "Edgar Ulmer's cult classic noir film shot in 6 days." (1945) Great Movies essay. 

My Man Godfrey - "Gregory La Cava’s screwball romantic comedy. Ditzy socialite with a heart of gold, Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard) finds 'forgotten man' Godfrey Smith (William Powell) in a scavenger hunt. Eventually Godfrey is taken in as the family butler for the Bullocks and screwball antics and romance ensue." (1936) Great Movies essay. (This lustrous film really demands the Criterion Blu-Ray: the version I offer here is only a shadow).

The General - "Orson Welles said that Buster Keaton's The General is 'the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made.'" Alternate version here (1926)  Great Movies essay.  

Beat the Devil – "Directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, the film is something of a comic and dramatic spoof of the film noir tradition." (1953) Great Movies essay. Read my essay, here. It's unclear to me whether that 4K restoration is streaming anywhere: I know Twilight Time put it out on a Blu-Ray, worth looking for.

Broken Blossoms - "Silent film directed by D.W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish." (1919) Great Movies essay. 

Greed - "Erich von Stroheim’s silent drama originally ran 10 hours, but was eventually hacked down to two. It follows a dentist whose wife wins a lottery ticket, only to become obsessed with money." (1924) Great Movies essay. The version at the Internet Archive is so murky as to be almost unwatchable, and it has Italian title-cards. There’s an interesting and crisp-looking alternate version here, with a live score and a “live edit” performed at the Marigny Opera House in New Orleans. (The gilded bits are tinted gold, a not ineffective treatment.) I’m usually apprehensive when other “artists,” or even artists sans air quotes, tamper with the original vision. In this case maybe it’s perhaps not so egregious, in that no original version can be said to exist.

Metropolis - "Fritz Lang’s fable of good and evil fighting it out in a futuristic urban dystopia. An important classic." An alternate version can be found here. (1927) Great Movies essay. 

Battleship Potemkin - "Directed by the great Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein. One of the most influential propaganda films of all time." Alternative version here. (1925) Great Movies essay. 

M - "Classic film directed by Fritz Lang, with Peter Lorre. About the search for a child murderer in Berlin." (1931) Great Movies essay. 

Safety Last - "Starring Harold Lloyd, the film features one of the most iconic scenes from the silent film era: Lloyd 'clutching the hands of a large clock as he dangles from the outside of a skyscraper above moving traffic.'" (1923)  Great Movies essay. 

THE LAST WALTZ and Thanksgiving in Troubled Times

[I wrote this essay three years ago, after that awful day in November, with America on the precipice of the Trump regime. It feels right to publish it here, now.]

I watch THE LAST WALTZ every year around Thanksgiving. It's about capping an era, and it always feels right to cap the year by returning to the Band's big farewell concert/party. However, with a Ku Klux Klan-endorsed president-elect headed for the White House, it seems to me that, here on the 40th anniversary of that Thanksgiving night in 1976 at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom, the film contains a vision of America more badly needed in today's America than ever. After all, one of the Band's best songs was called "Across the Great Divide." 

We might start by noting that, in the Age of Trump, the Band's tough, funky ensemble rock remains a vision of the melting pot, that most American of ideas, and one which Trump's campaign tried to give a bad name. In THE LAST WALTZ, each ingredient is embodied by one of the Band's old friends—the Staples for gospel; the Chicago blues by Paul Butterfield and Muddy Waters (and his great pianist Pinetop Perkins: if only they'd gotten him on film!); country by Emmylou Harris; New Orleans jazz and R&B by Dr. John, as well as a horn section playing Allen Toussaint's charts. Motown is here in the rhythms and songs (Marvin Gaye's "Don't Do It"); the immigrant experience in the bracing "yargh" of Van Morrison. 

In contrast to the homogenous vision of America imagined by Donald Trump, in THE LAST WALTZ what's vital in American culture—rock & roll itself—comes from the sparks that fly when "opposites" rub together: rural and urban, North and South, men and women, black and white, tradition and revolution. As Levon Helm explains, "Memphis is kind of the middle of the country": "bluegrass or country music, if it comes down to that area, and if it mixes there with rhythm, and if it dances, then you've got a combination of all these different kinds of music—country, bluegrass, blues music, show music." "What's it called, then?" asks director Martin Scorsese. Breaking out in a big grin, Levon answers, with a glint in his eye: "rock & roll." 

As Greil Marcus wrote in Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, the "secret theme" of the Band's music is obligation: "What do men and women owe to each other? How do they keep faith? How far can that faith be pushed before it breaks? Those are problems communities and friendships share." The answer coming back from the Trump election might be: Nothing. We owe each other nothing. Every man for himself, and God against all. "The Weight," as performed in THE LAST WALTZ by the Band with the Staples, offers an alternate answer, positing a universal American burden, some combination of "love, debt, fear, and guilt," in Marcus' words. It's a version of the social contract: if we all share the weight, that's just another way of saying we get to carry each other. 

On an associative level, the movie resonates with the antiwar and Civil Right Movements, due to the presence of the Staples and Bob Dylan (his fiery electric music with the one-time Hawks—a public scandal a decade earlier—now cheered). It's about the counterculture, but also about traditions the 60s swept away, like Tin Pan Alley, represented by Neil Diamond. The Band plays as if they imagine that if they could just make music powerful enough, they could make whole the divides of the 1860s and the 1960s. We've heard the phrase "there's strength in diversity." This movie shows us what that looks like.

While it feels especially elegiac at the end of the Obama era, Scorsese's fantasia about the changing of the guard would be no ordinary rockumentary in any year, not with seven 35mm cameras, operated by the likes of Michael Chapman, Vilmos Zsigmond, and László Kovács, pulling off Scorsese's elegant compositions, and storied Hollywood production designer Boris Leven lighting the set he borrowed from Verdi’s La Traviata, replete with crystal chandeliers, his lights glinting off Robbie Robertson's gilded guitar. How deep is the red of that backdrop! (As Robertson recalls in his new memoir, when asked by the crew, "is there a movie we should watch to inspire us?” he thought of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES, before naming Jean Cocteau’s THE BLOOD OF A POET.) Robertson's quip that the concert is a celebration of the "beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning" evokes the way Scorsese cut the picture, scrambling up the chronology so the last song they played that night is the first song in the movie. When Scorsese is in personal mode, there are few more exhilarating filmmakers, and he loves this music, feels it in his bones, in his camera moves and the rhythm of his cutting. The interviews are funny. In a playful Brechtian move, he occasionally leaves in bits of the process, revealing how filmmakers tweak reality—flubbed takes, spoken directions to the cameraman, views back on the crew. 

The backdrops to the interviews signify the Band's geographical and emotional landscapes: New York City, the Canadian Maple Leaf, a sign proclaiming "Dixie" (the beer), and...the Confederate battle flag. The fact of the latter in the movie is fascinatingly paradoxical, redolent as it is of the Ku Klux Klan but also an unfortunate icon to this day of the Southern white working class, many of whom voted Trump. The movie dares to listen to their stories, too, to gather them into the fold. Trump voters, too, were asserting some vision of community, albeit a homogeneous one, and, perhaps just as importantly, expressing a sense of loss. It makes me think of the man in "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," a character imagined by a Canadian (Robertson) and brought to life by an Arkansan (Helm). He is, in Marcus' words, "a poor white farmer from the Confederate side of Tennessee": "He wants us to understand that the war has cost him almost everything he has...It is hard for me to comprehend how any Northerner raised on a very different war than Virgil Kane's, could listen to this song without finding himself changed. You can't get out from under the singer's truth—not the whole truth, simply his truth—and the little autobiography closes the gap between us. The performance leaves behind a feeling that for all our oppositions, every American still shares this old event; because to this day none of us has escaped its impact, what we share is an ability to respond to a story like this one." Marcus was speaking of the recorded version, but all of this comes through even more powerfully in the movie, with Robertson punching the air into the song and Helm, fierce and soulful behind the drums, putting you squarely in this character's shoes. We'll need to listen to voices like this, too, and, if necessary, be changed by them.

Finally, the movie is full of the life force and community, in the face of Trump's nihilism and social atomization. How many times have I seen it with friends, singing along communally with gusto? Think of the camaraderie in Neil Young's "Helpless," the glances tossed between Young and the musicians as together they are left utterly disarmed in the face of beauty. Or the way Rick Danko regards Joni Mitchell with such little-boy joy. Or Danko singing "It Makes No Difference" into the dark, and Garth Hudson stepping into the frame with his alto sax to light up the night with magic and warmth. America under Trump might be a mean place, but its other face is the vision of friendship here. It can get us through some cold days to come. As Hudson asserts, refuting the "jazz is evil" or "devil music" theory, the truth is, music is actually a healing force. There is room for all in the America of THE LAST WALTZ, a stage on which a glorious dance of contradictions sets off sparks in which we glimpse, if just for a moment, an America we can be proud of.

Elvis Costello's take on "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" at 40

On his version of Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," my main man faces up to the world, faces it down, ventures out to remake it, to set it to rights, at least in the space of the few minutes of this song. Riding in on wave after wave of slashing guitar, Steve Nieve's keys are grand and stately as they announce the song in the wake of Pete Thomas's machine-gun snare barrage, then garage-y as they swirl around those waves of guitar—oil atop the water. Bruce's muscular, melodic bass and Pete's propulsive drums are a sodden, relentless undertow threatening to pull the singer back under. Yet he beats on, fights his way as the waves crash against him. His voice embodying wounded swagger, he surveys the landscape of the blasted shore, looks for hope and love and peace amidst the ruins, stands his ground as the tide rushes back beneath him, suctioning back around his legs. By the bridge he's surging, and as Pete moves to the ride cymbal the power of the music surges through him (and you): it's the life force, and he's got his second wind, and as the wave builds he's now at its crest; as it breaks he's exulting. Pete's drums are exploding all around him in the sky as he makes it to the beach. Bloodied but unbowed, he emerges gasping on the shore. He's ready for whatever comes next, to greet it defiantly with love and peace and not add to the hatred and violence and ugliness in the world (and so will you be after hearing this). He lunges snapping at that last line of the chorus, bites it off: "WHAT's so funny 'bout peace love and understanding?" Every time I draw this jam while doing the iPod shuffle, I have to replay it over and over.

LOVE ACTUALLY podcast starring Karolyn Steele-Pfeiffer, Michael G. Smith, and yours truly

Karolyn Steele-Pfeiffer makes her podcast debut on Michael G. Smith's revenant White City Cinema Radio Hour. Risking cineaste opprobrium (or at least snickers), Michael and I explain how we learned to stop worrying and love Richard Curtis's LOVE ACTUALLY, that ne plus ultra of modern rom-com. Meanwhile, the wise Karolyn explains why the movie was always great in the first place. 

Head here to give the podcast a listen.

In my 2016 writeup for Cine-File, I tried to convey a bit of this story. To get you warmed up for the podcast, I've reprinted it below.

Richard Curtis' LOVE ACTUALLY 
Of the world of modern romantic comedies, so shaped by Richard Curtis' pen (BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY, NOTTING HILL, FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL), I once knew naught. This, despite my great affection for the rom-coms of the 30s and 40s. It took a connoisseur like my wife to clue me in. Upon first viewing LOVE ACTUALLY, Curtis' maiden attempt at wielding the camera, I was scandalized. "Curtis, you have no shame!" I cried. It took repeated administerings over several holiday seasons. Slowly, my amazement grew to fascination, and pretty soon I was clamoring for it as soon as December rolled around. Today, I believe it to be one of the age's great entertainments, a milestone in the canon of UK-US Christmas pop culture. It dawned on me that it was Curtis' utter lack of shame that constituted his greatness. He is completely sincere; he cannot be embarrassed. He achieves moments of real dramatic and psychological verisimilitude, then happily chucks them in favor of fantasy. I began to see the film as a modern, cheerily explicit, sexy equivalent of my cherished P.G. Wodehouse novels. Like Wodehouse, Curtis breezily choreographs a complex farandole of plot and subplot, stacking and spinning ten storylines at once. Even after umpteen viewings, one spots new connections, marvels at Curtis' conducting of the relationships and destinies of a bevy of Londoners, embodied by pleasing players like Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightly, Laura Linney and Bill Nighy. LOVE ACTUALLY is a film that even the vinegary David Thomson, in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls "a triumph." It will restore your faith in humanity. It's very funny, and it gets you in the mood. My wife reckons that the transcendent detail is the way the "enigmatic" Carl (Rodrigo Santoro) plays with Linney's hair as they dance. In response, I can only muse happily over how much I still have to learn.