Yours truly was traveling over the holiday weekend. I thought I’d be posting more from the road, but it didn’t happen, and that’s probably for the best. I have a new theory that it’s all the typing going on which is causing Global Climate Change: all the friction and kinetic energy of billions of fingers hitting trillions of buttons. Think of the text messages alone that get sent every instant of ever day! And all of those furious bloggers and messageboard-posters. The cumulative radiated heat from all of that activity has to be going somewhere and doing something, right? The human animal just leaves a path of destruction from cradle to grave in so many ways. Someone better do something quick.

Oh well — although this is of the most solemn import for the fate of Mother Earth, it’s just a digression right now.

The main point is that, also due to traveling, I haven’t been able yet to see the new Todd Haynes film, the one which we’re told is sort of about Bob Dylan but kind of maybe not, namely, “I’m Not There.”

I’m therefore especially grateful to a couple of readers who have seen it and have shared some impressions and reactions.

Mary at BabyBlueOnline has an extensive commentary on the film at this link. Just a bit from it:

I do not agree with the Haynes view of Dylan, which basically ends almost on the road (or riding the rail) of despair. It misses his humor and replaces it was biting sarcasm (Dylan could be sarcastic, but usually for a reason - as in exposing hypocrisy, even his own). And the spiritual element, the spiritual depth of Dylan’s music is just completely ignored in the narrative (though the music is present in the soundtrack which at times is almost a separate narrative all itself and the selections are terrific). This could be the view of the almost-fan, who knows a lot about the particulars of Dylan but doesn’t quite get it yet - has not yet gone deeper into the soul but is still fascinated by the look, even the feeling - but not the transformation. Dylan is all about transformation. Haynes assembles all the ingredients - and it does it extremely well - but he seem doesn’t seem to know how to mix them together to make the pie.

And Marek Breiger e-mailed with these thoughts:

Sean: I saw the film Friday evening and felt the project a mistake.

No one was more “there” than Dylan in terms of addressing what Whitman called “the time and land we swim in.”

The terrible year of 1968–a year as tragic as 1865–found “John Wesley Harding” (actually released Dec. 27, 1967) as an answer to the extreme members of the counterculture and the twin stupidities of looking to drugs or violence as an answer to the Vietnam War and the murders of King and Robert Kennedy.

In opposition Dylan offered songs of responsibility, remorse, and looking into one’s soul for answers and truth. And in the Woody Guthrie memorial concert, early in 1968, Dylan with the Band sung some of Woody’s “patriotic songs” as well as “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt” in a way that made clear Dylan and The Band’s dedication to both folk and rockabilly and Dylan’s dedication to America and “Uncle Sam” as a symbol not of worldwide oppression but worldwide hope.

Dylan lost that year both his own father and Woody Guthrie and the writing in “Chronicles” shows his love and respect for them both.

As Dylan writes, he was a father himself by the time of his dad’s passing, three times over, and he wanted to share with his father feelings that death had silenced.

“Tears of Rage” is a timeless song from that period and note that it is a song from a father’s point of view, with an awareness of how the daughter has been fooled by the counterculture and also a plea for return from both parents. “We’re so alone/And life is brief.” But it’s done without demonizing the daughter either…who else was writing poetry like that at that time? Who else refused to ride the wave of the youth culture during a time when slogans, Don’t trust anyone over 30, Tune in , turn on, drop out–were so popular? Who else saw the scene with so much compassion and so little anger?

The truth is, at least for me, that there are no six Dylans and that Dylan is a conscious artist…”I’m Not There” is a stunt and it diminishes the real courage of a man who trained himself as a musician and steeped himself in American music out of both an emotional and intellectual need–and whose actions, whether going South during the Civil Rights movement, blending folk with rock n roll, not giving into the simplistic ideas of the counterculture, recognizing the truths of both the Old and New Testament, admitting responsibility in terms of failures in relationships, continuing an American musical tradition–these are things that cannot be expressed by a film that shows little real knowledge of the era Dylan emerged from. It’s not enough to find film footage of Vietnam or JFK … perhaps Haynes should have read Chronicles again or On the Road or Frost or Whitman and Guthrie himself in “Bound for Glory.” That might have been a good start …

So, there you go. I imagine I’ll see the film myself this week. I don’t know if it’ll inspire me to write anything or not, let alone anything as eloquent as the above.

The box office numbers, if those things make sense to you, are at this link. The film opened in 130 theaters (I assume that’s just in the U.S.).

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