[Previous entry: "No Direction Home II"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "WHAT?"]

09/28/2005 Archived Entry: "No Direction Home III"

No Direction Home III
Like Chuck, I caught the second part of No Direction Home last night. And despite the cheesy editing Scorsese falls back upon over and over again (ok! We get it! "Mr. Tambourine Man!" How about something from Blonde on Blonde? How about "Rainy Day Women?"), I still came away with ideas and motivation for a new essay.
What intrigues me is:

  • The moment of technological confusion: Aural? Electric? Visual? How to negotiate all three?
  • The visual confusion is in the final part of the now canonical filming of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" from Don't Look Back. At the end of the cue-card flashings Dylan holds up, the final one reads: "WHAT?"
  • What? is the moment of confusion and digital allusiveness (Dylan's persona plays into that as well). What the hell does that mean? has become the trademark of most 20th and 21st century art and rhetorical production. The first moment of innovation always meets rejection.
  • The booing. But the booing is not important because audiences rejected Dylan. Quite the opposite. Dylan and Robbie Robertson are in the hired car taking them away from the gig, and Dylan remarks that "They can't buy the tickets fast enough." We hate it! But we use it/enjoy it anyway. Fetish as repulsion/attraction. What better way to explain Luddite attitudes in a culture where one not only has no choice but to engage with technology, one often enjoys it as well (even if the pleasure is not owned up to). Neil Postman uses Microsoft Word to complain about digital culture. You get the picture.
  • The moment of celebritacy. Jenny says I have a Dylan fetish. Sure. But the fetish is the basis of digital rhetorical production (the icon!). That so many people constructed meaning first out of the "folk" image and then out of the reclusive rocker image (Dylan highlights this second point through his 1966 motorcycle crash after the electric tour ended! Talk about extending a trope – motorcycle/fatalism/cliché image of cool) says something about the power of celebritacy.
  • As I say that, I also note the poster of Dylan from the 1965 Highway 61 Revisited recording session that I have over my TV. The folk meets the electric, but it does so as well through me: folksono(me). Whew. Things are starting to click here....

    Replies: 6 comments

    I like whacking uppity bloggers in the head.

    Posted by cbd @ 09/29/2005 08:00 PM EST

    I like your reading of "technological confusion" here (I'm tempted to call it "media confusion"), and you're right to distingusih between a rejection of Dylan (the booing) and a rejection of something else (they're still buying tickets, possibly in order to boo).

    Interesting that the technological confusion gets displaced onto political confusion: Dylan's no longer a "topical" singer? Really? What do you call "Like a Rolling Stone?"

    Posted by Chuck @ 09/29/2005 12:33 PM EST

    I like whacking folks in the head

    Posted by jeff @ 09/29/2005 11:49 AM EST

    I'm hip to the concept. But IMO the pun works better if you don't whack folks over the head with it.

    Posted by cbd @ 09/29/2005 10:10 AM EST

    Don't you read this blog
    :)
    I wrote about this earlier this year: Folksonomy + ME (via Barthes' work)

    Folksono(me)

    Get used to it. It's my new thing I'm working on.

    Posted by jeff @ 09/29/2005 06:57 AM EST

    folksono(me)

    Please, no cute(sy) (paren)thesis!

    Posted by cbd @ 09/28/2005 10:24 PM EST

    Powered By Greymatter