Second Thoughts

We got the second half of Scorsese's No Direction Home and watched it immediately. It was frustrating having a two day-gap between both halves (Netflix, while fantastic, does have the problem of turnaround between movies: even with the mail taking one day and Netflix sending something out immediately upon receipt of the movie, you're looking at getting something on the third day after you send the first one). I was left with Dylan's enigmatic persona hanging around in my mind in the interim, and while I thought the second part would allay my Dylan-infused psychological state, I was wrong. In fact, the gift Scorsese has given us is an honest, rare look at both the private and public personas of the singer, and how alike they were, and how infectious they are.

Dylan was always acting, and the footage of how he circumvents the asinine reporter's questions is priceless. When he's backstage with friends, though, you see that it's mostly the same; balancing the limelight with a private self, he was capable of existing in a highly public sphere while, somehow, remaining in complete, disarming control of his self. It's hard to describe, but the point is that he puts on this persona in which nobody can tell him how to act. It's all a sort of coy, shy act. He revels in ambiguity and contradicting himself, and nurtures awkward silences like he's tending to a garden. In it he is able to remain untouched by the stupidity of crowds who booed his electric music, by reporters who ask him how many other singers also "toil" in the musical vineyard of his art. "How many?" he asks. "Yes, how many would you say." "I'd say there are about 136." "136. Now, is that an estimate, or is that exact?" "Well. I think it's either 136, or 142." In his evasiveness he continually exposes those interviewers who don't know his music, and who aren't asking questions, but suggesting pre-conceived answers.

Just recently, a bunch of people got angry that Dylan chose to distribute Live at the Gaslight 1962 only at Starbucks, that corporate American giant who overruns poor coffee farmers around the world (and who really needs to quit overroasting its beans. My God, give us a medium-bodied coffee!) Speculation abounds, much of it that Dylan just wants to clash with peoples' viewpoints of him as a person. The man will do anything to avoid labels.

Allen Ginsberg had a great bit about describing Dylan's persona during that early 1960s time: he called him a Shaman, a man who had channeled his very breath as an output of his entire persona, his entire artistic goal, his whole consciousness--singular. And in the singular, if it is a whole personality, there is contradiction.

The Guardian has especially great articles about the show, as well as some republished stuff from 1966.