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09/21/2005 Archived Entry: "No Direction Home"

No Direction Home
Awaiting the arrival of Dylan's No Direction Home. Somwhere in a Netflix que it sits.

"Everything you knew about Bob Dylan is about to change," the promo promises. Serious hyperbole. The biography-documentary often falls into hyperbole/praise too quickly. Part of the rhetoric of fetish, of course.

Like all things affective, the title lures me in. No direction. Home. We talk about place a lot among our weblogs. I've mixed and remixed homes: Miami, Detroit, Gainesville. Never Lawton, though. It was home, however brief. There are the cities, the banal places, the imaginary places, but how do the birth places affect an ordering of space, especially when they feel like "no direction" places. On the Web, where there is always some sense of direction (Google, a9, deli.cio.us, the weblog, the homepage), how does a specific physical space become no-space (in Auge's terms and then some)?

To imagine this space? Google Images? But which is Lawton?
It is a bit of fetishistic rhetoric as well. I fetishize the imaginary no-place because of one very important connection that always puts that place in front of me: Where were you born?