Persistence Of The American Pastime

Tonight, feeling in the spirit of spring and at a loss for something to watch over dinner I decided to revisit the Ken Burns’s Baseball. I evaluated my mood and chose my favorite “inning,” the one covering the 1960s.In a world of upheaval, the game finds itself evolving quickly, transforming in a few short years from the black-and-white clips of game 7 of the World Series in Pittsburgh, to a game of color and closeups that resembles what we see on television today. The old urban ballparks are demolished and replaced by concrete stadiums with expansive parking lots. The Player’s Union is born as players, in a struggle for emancipation from the Reserve Clause mirror the efforts of the Civil Rights movement in the quest for freedom.

As the war in Vietnam escalates and violence breaks out in cities across the country, football rises in popularity. In 1967 the first Super Bowl delivers short spurts of simulated warfare to living rooms across the country. It is viewed by more people than any game of that year’s World Series. Burns presents us with and era in which refuge from everyday turmoil cannot be found even in a pastoral, summer game. The National Pastime seems threatened and its traditionalists wonder whether it is possible for Americans to escape from the explosive, fast-paced world to the serenity of ballpark.

These traditionalists—represented here by Baseball’s usual talking heads of Doris Kearns-Goodwin, George Will, Roger Angell, Bob Costas. Gerald Early, Studs Terkel, et al—are even more magnificent in extolling the beauty and virtue of the game in the context of 60s then they are in the series’ other installments. We are told of the absence of time in baseball, how the other team can never kill the clock and has no option but to keep giving the other guys a chance, and even if you’re dying, you know you can live forever as long as you keep hitting. We hear an African American writer describe his emotional response to the ritual of the Star Spangled Banner before a game and how baseball was the only thing that made him feel connected to his country. Later, he describes the empowered feeling that drove him to march and to fight for civil rights. His rationale was that they had to prove that they would do whatever it took to achieve justice.

There is a part that describes the drama of inaction during a game. The excitement of baseball is rooted in the mind of the viewer; it happens in the endless seconds between pitches where a player digs in the dirt with his cleat, adjusts his cap, waggles the bat. While these things are happening, endless possibilities run through your mind as you watch. You play out every possible scenario before it happens so that when something finally does actually happen, it’s like a dream fulfilled. Sometimes, during these moments a hush can fall over the entire ballpark for just a few moments and you know that everyone there is going through this deeply intellectual process. It is this sequence that draws the viewer to the game in a way that nothing else can. The results can be explosive.

This is how I understand the sixties. Endless anticipation of huge things to come, revolution and the personification of tremendous sacrifices and powerful wills exacted on a collective target. People always say there was something in the air, the vibrations of the time—those vibrations are the same as the anticipation you find in any baseball game coupled with the payoff or the devastation everyone knew would come. It was a time of people proving they’d do anything to get what they wanted.

That baseball is still alive and well only proves that there is a place for ideas to be born in America. It is proof that we still believe big things can happen if we can only imagine them.

Preparing For Departure

What of the world after?

In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2010 film, Biutiful, modern Barcelona is anything but the romantic city Americans envision or visit as tourists. The city decays as the dying Uxbal (Javier Bardem), a small-time hustler with the power to speak to the dead, tries to glean an existence for himself and his family. Iñárritu has chosen to show us little in the way of commerce: no grocery stores or no gas stations and certainly no office parks or shopping strips. Uxbal’s world is one of cracked concrete and concentrated people all scraping to survive.

Uxbal serves as a liason between two Chinese businessmen who run a sweatshop that produces knockoff designer goods and the Senegalese street vendors who sell them. He is also responsible for paying off a local police officer. Despite the bribes, the street vendors, including Uxbal’s friend Ekweme, who also sell drugs to supplement their income, are raided by police, beaten and deported. Uxbal brokers a deal to get some of the Chinese laborers to work for a construction company where Uxbal’s brother is a foreman. When he buys faulty heaters for the basement where the laborers sleep, they are poisoned by the gas and die in the night.

Given a diagnosis of terminal prostate cancer, Uxbal is forced to reconcile with his alcoholic wife for the sake of his two young children. But though there is a hint of a reconnection, she is mired in prostitution and drink; neglecting and abusing the children as soon as Uxbal relinquishes some of the parental responsibility.

The American audience understands the failure of the European economy in terms of how it will effect our own. Americans are accustomed to despair and anger after the monthly unemployment rate rises from 7.1 to 7.6 but 20% unemployment is truly shocking when translated from statistics to actual people. Economic stagnation is nothing new to Spaniards. Iñárritu does not aim to educate an ignorant audience.

Bleak is the word, so bleak in fact that Uxbal’s diagnosis of terminal prostate cancer seems only fitting. He is broken man, trying to fix broken people in a broken city. Biutiful is the story of arranging for life after.

On the surface, Uxbal is making preparations for his family. He does his best to secure income and to steer his hopeless wife in the direction of responsible parenthood. But Uxbal is interested in perpetuating life in a Barcelona that seems on the brink of utter collapse. Like Uxbal, Ekweme leaves behind his wife, Ige, and baby, Samuel who cannot afford to return to Africa. Uxbal gives his wife money and employs her as a nanny for his own children. For these people as well, Uxbal tries to create an existence. But why? Uxbal’s actions may be strictly benevolent, but as a medium, he knows that the dead are condemned to continue living in the world. Uxbal can find no comfort even in the thought that he won’t be around to see things get worse.

Just as Uxbal understands that there is an endless perception following death that dwarfs the understanding of the living, Biutiful uses poverty only as a backdrop for a story of magical realism. In a magnificently understated way, Uxbal has the power to communicate with the dead. Given this power, Uxbal must understand his imminent death in a uniquely knowing way. He hears the voices of the dead in their suffering, in their longing to touch the ones they’ve left behind. If Uxbal is afraid for himself, it is because he knows he will be condemned to the same fate. He will not be leaving his children behind, but from the prison of death, will be forced to surrender his ability to protect or comfort them while he watches them suffer.

Ige establishes herself in Uxbal’s home, but it isn’t until she decides to stay in Barcelona that he dies, content the world without him, though far from perfect will be sustainable even after he dies.

Wall Street’s Moral Downfall

How much can I take from this land of plenty?

Terrance Malick’s 1978 masterpiece, Days Of Heaven was famously shot in the “magic hour” between dusk and darkness. The tiniest things seemed most highlighted in the bewitching twilight; each individual seed at the end of a shock of wheat, streaks of grime across the faces of anonymous field hands and the subtlest expressions and movement seethed with jealousy, contempt, desire. The story comprises a relatively convoluted scheme explained through the heavily colloquial and vague voice-over of fifteen-year-old Linda Manz whose character is removed from the primary action of the film. The result is an intensely visual form of storytelling. The surreal details captured by the lens blend seamlessly with the actors’ faces. The dimness of the Texas plains at nightfall highlights their features in ways that work beyond the performers’ raw skills.

It is not mastery of craft that enables seventeen-year-old Richard Gere, starring for the first time, to create such a memorable performance, but rather the way his flawless, youthful prettiness absorbs and reflects moonlight and distant ambiance. Only the tip of sinister intention peeks out at us through the shadows like a pair of alligator eyes tracking its prey.

Gere, sixty-three at the release of last year’s Arbitrage (directed by Nicholas Jarecki), has retained more than his fair share of youthfulness, but without masterful cinematography he is left only with his ability; alas, we can see very little beyond the furious condescension peculiar to the super-stressed elite and the self-satisfied smugness of a short-term victory—this is a guy who loves to close the deal.

[The following passage contains plot-spoiling details]

The film tells the story of Robert Miller (Gere), a wealthy hedge-fund manager on the cusp of selling his business. After a rushed birthday dinner with his wife (an underutilized Susan Sarandon) and family, he hurries off to the real party with his mistress, Julie (Laetitia Casta). We soon learn that there is more to the sale than we thought. The IRS has come sniffing around and he’s been forced to borrow $400 million in order to plug a hole he created in the company books to finance a shady investment that went bust.

One night, Miller and Julie are in his car when he falls asleep and crashes, killing her. Fearing public and familial shame along with the potential destruction of the deal, he decides to cover it up. He calls an acquaintance named Jimmy (Nate Parker), a young black man from Harlem to take him home. Things unravel for Miller from there. A slovenly detective (Tim Roth summoning his best Columbo impression) is on to him, and attempts to force Miller’s hand by going after the innocent Jimmy. His daughter, an financial executive in his company finds out about the accounting discrepancy and when she confronts him about it, he is remorseless.

I believe it is Gere’s challenge to find some inkling of sympathy in this character. No easy task, to be sure. I think there are two distinct strategies employed in an effort to achieve this. The first is identification with a man who risks losing his family, his money and the company he spent a lifetime building. There are some good moments to this effect. The scene where he’s begging the keeper of his $400 million loan to wait just a little longer was well-played. Though we should see this as contrary to intention—isn’t it great watching the rich guy squirm?—Gere is touchingly pathetic, begging, leaving frustrated. No one wants to see a grown man cry, but then as someone references, he’s sure to have plenty of jack stashed in off-shore accounts, he’ll survive. Then, there is his later desire and (limited) effort to exonerate Jimmy. But he’s unwilling to give himself up to do it.

In the end, Gere beats the charges, Jimmy gets off on an implausible bit of evidence tampering, but it’s his wife gives him his comeuppance, delivering divorce papers and as his alibi for the night of the accident, blackmailing him into signing over everything he has to her non-profit organization. After getting away with treachery of the highest order it’s the family he neglected that brought him down in the end.

Is this really supposed the be a story the moral conflict of a middle-aged one-percenter who ironically thinks he is motivated by benevolence? By the end, the film has resorted to cliché. “Everything I do is for this family!” shouts an exasperated Gere to his wife. If Arbitrage were a success, the viewer might actually wonder whether or not that statement is true. As it is, it seems ridiculous. Gere’s Miller is obviously motivated by selfishness. So Wall Street is all about greed and selfishness? How profound.

How compelling the story might have been as told by Sarandon or Parker. Malick got away with using Gere as an amoral protagonist in a film where story was in the background and the victim of his evil was himself an whip-cracking wheat baron. Here, are set up to hate Gere from the beginning, not only because he’s the guy who has it all, but because he is precisely the guy who prospered at the expense of ordinary Americans.

Helplessness and clawing for survival is far more interesting that clinging to millions. Aren’t we supposed to like underdogs? This is, after all a new day and perspective is exactly what empowers the female and the minority in the face of the white-male whose grip on control is ever-loosening.

As it is they are both paid to keep their mouths shut. If we could see things through their eyes instead, we’d see them taking it away.

Doors, Death and Betrayal

“What does it all MEAN?”

Thoughts on the first three episodes of Mad Men season 6

It takes a shoeshine kit to finally bring Roger Sterling to tears. This after his mother’s funeral which is punctuated by the presence of an ex-wife’s new husband, Don’s drunken vomiting and a big ask from his daughter—a loan for a business venture. The shot is framed with only Sterling’s cotton white head visible as his face is buried in his hands. His body is positioned, not in a centered close-up, but to the side of the frame while in the center of he shot is the closed door to his sun-drenched office.

Doors, as Sterling frames them earlier in therapy, seem like opportunity. They appear throughout life waiting to be entered but when you walk through them, you find they only lead to more doors. In fact, Sterling is a character who chases his desires to a fault only to be disappointed but we must ask ourselves if this might have something to do with the fact that his doorways are far larger and more easily accessible than the doorways of everyone else. His existential dilemma may likely stem from a scene in an earlier season in which he references his tendency to point out the fact that it’s his name on the side of the building. “But I didn’t put it there,” he says, “I inherited it.”

Of course, Sterling is only now joining Don in the world of self-validation. As Matthew Weiner has said in the season preview, Don seems drawn to death for the potential of rebirth. In fact, Don has proven a character constantly looking for rebirth, but what makes the current portrayal different is the obsession with death itself. This is reflected in his work for the Hawaii resort, but, I think, more significantly in his drunken curiosity regarding the near-death of the doorman and later in the conversation he has with his surgeon neighbor. Again, doors play a crucial role. It’s as the elevator doors are closing that he asks the doorman what it was like. It’s at the back door where he and the neighbor have their somber conversation about what it’s like to hold another man’s life in your hands; all the while, Don studying the door frame as if to step out into the snow would be to step into another world. Though obsessed, he’s scared.

This leaves the business of Don’s affair with the surgeon’s wife, which at first glance seems an act of suicide considering they are only a few floors from Megan. But I think we can understand this relationship as an attempt to inhabit the closeness to death about which he is so curious (we also saw him reading his lover’s copy of Dante’s Inferno); but is sex as far as he’s willing to venture? Laying in bed with her, he says something like “this only happens here,” and points to his head. Later when he and the surgeon’s wife find themselves alone at dinner there is an overload. He has seen her and Megan together, and she’s told him that she likes Megan; little does he know, Megan has shared the intimate secret of her miscarriage with her before even telling Don. All this leads to what appears to be an establishment that the relationship can only exist on the surface. When it gets real, it only distracts from the fantasy.

Faithfulness also comes into play with Campbell who, unlike Don has been definitively busted and must contend with a far more determined wife. He is a character who we can expect to turn his failure in marriage into open hostility to all those unlucky enough to encounter him. Meanwhile, we can only hope to see more of Trudy. The show needs a wife with some conviction.

Far outside the betrayal of marriage, we have Peggy who we see facing difficulty with her staff as she summons the demanding perfectionism she learned from Don. The difference between them is her compassion for those working beneath her. Though she is disappointed with their work, she is equally distressed as the messenger of their failure and immediately identifies with them (“I had your job once, I know what it’s like). This later transforms into a subconscious sort of guilt. How could she make such a huge mistake as to share confidential information from her old firm with her boss? I think this is plea and symptom of Peggy’s deep need for approval. I predict we will see just how far this need goes when this slip up forces her into an inevitable confrontation with Don and the old gang.

Win From Within

In a recent Gatorade commercialKevin Durant is taking the ball down the court against the Miami Heat. He penetrates the defense, drives hard in paint, goes up for the slam and is met mid-flight by Dwayne Wade; just as Durantula is about to jam it home, Wade reaches up and blocks it.

Cut to Durant, snapping upright in bed, covered in sweat, a look of terror on his face. It was just a bad dream. (Think Tupac in the video for “California Love” or any other character waking up from a nightmare in anything ever.)

Durant then eats a Gatorade power gel thing and sets about training harder than ever in the dank, Rocky IV solitude of most training sequences you see in commercials.

Soon, we’re back on the court. Thunder-Heat again, Durant drives, Wade meets him mid-flight but this time…BOOM Durant slams it right in D-Wade’s grimacing face. Now it’s Wade waking up from a terrible nightmare.

“Win from within” says the tag line.

Aside from the metaphysical implications of two people sharing the exact same dream, this phrase is somewhat peculiar. After all, success must always come from within. Motivation at the highest levels of any field is essential and where else can motivation come from?

The suggestion is that we are motivated not by the will to succeed or the desire to reach our goals or dreams; it isn’t from a ravenous craving for the nectar of victory that we blast through the pain barrier.

We win for fear of failure.

Yikes.

Lets face it. Competition is about ego. We like to think of mano y mano, toe to toe, trash talk and posterizing a lesser player to fuel our own glory but high level performance is about competing with yourself. Professional athletes talk about swagger and confidence all the time. Every one of them grows up being (and being told repeatedly) that they are the best anyone’s ever seen and THAT is their motivation. In their mind they always know that if they bring it, they can’t be stopped. If they were afraid of failing, they’d have never made to the big time it in the first place.

So how about this for a commercial. Durant steps onto the court. He looks at the women in the crowd and knows they want him. He looks at the men, some of them a foot and a half shorter than he is as knows they envy him. He looks at the kids in the stands and every one of them is wearing an OKC jersey with his name on the back.

He thinks of his beautiful home, his cars, his mother who wants for nothing and how it feels as good to stroke a three against Miami as it did to stroke a three against a rival middle school team when he was 13.

Getting blocked by Dwayne Wade? The thought never crossed his mind.

Kevin Durant doesn’t have nightmares.

Thoughts On Django

Blood erupts from bludgeoned bodies like the murky water of a pond disturbed by tossed stones. It coats the virgin white flowers of a spring meadow when a man on horseback is shot. It is smeared, by a sleezy Leonardo DiCaprio across Kerry Washington’s beautiful and terrified face. One loses track of the body count somewhere in the neighborhood of the second act as one by one, slave owners drop in montage and quick cuts just as fast and Jamie Foxx can pull the trigger.

It would be naïve to react with shock at the overwhelming brutality of a Quentin Tarantino picture, after all without the appropriate amount sadism, murder and racism, viewers would feel somewhat betrayed.  Kill Bill: Volume 1 probably had a body count higher than Django, and its most violent scenes took on a (sometimes literally) cartoonish quality. In the same way as Tarantino’s first four films, it existed in a world that was fabricated, representing no particular time-period in a hyper-stylized version of a place (Kurasawa’s Tokyo, Ford’s Texas desert, etc.). With Django and Inglorious Basterds before it, Tarantino has placed the revenge theme in historical context in a way designed to strike a tender chord easily accessible in the American psyche. He has one purpose: to make the viewer feel comfortable with all that blood.

With the exception of a few unfortunate innocents—some “mandingo fighters” and of course, Cristoph Waltz’s smooth talking vigilante—the overwhelming majority of slaughtered souls have one thing in common. They are all ugly, remorseless caricatures who exist in a dimension as emotionally distant as Tarantino’s gorgeous and classic panoramic shots. These guys had it coming, and in this frontier justice, we are meant to delight. But there is tragic miscalculation: The Holocaust and American Slavery remain the two titans of American shame and emotional suffering and continue to affect us all on a personal and visceral level. We don’t want to see these things downgraded to vehicles for style. These topics must be handled with care.

If we are to simply address the ideas of good and evil as stock entities and polarized opposites, it becomes very easy to identify with the dashing, gun-slinger who clearly represents good. Tarantino, the film historian, asks us to consider the Western, the Blaxploitation film and the Revenge Plot as vehicles for this purpose. Of course the characters have limited emotional depth or psychological motivation or fear—they are not meant to represent actual people like you and me, just idealized form. The film explicitly references Seigfried and Broomhilda, but unlike the epic tale, Jamie Foxx’s hero has no tragic flaw. The minute he jumps on a horse, he is unstoppable, unflappable and unrelatable. There is nothing about American slavery as emotionally simple as that.

There is a moment early in the second act where Django is reluctant to kill a target because the man’s son is with him. Convinced by Schultz that this is the job, he finally pulls the trigger, dutiful but reluctant. When later, he poses as a Black slave-trader, he treats the slaves with coldness and brutality. As Schultz questions his behavior, he defiantly references the earlier incident. Is there a moral dilemma here? Maybe Django has actually become the sinister character he is portraying. Maybe there is a deeper, institutionalized self-loathing that is manifest in his treatment of his black brothers who remind him of what he really is. Maybe he is so consumed with personal revenge that it transcends the hatred he feels for the system that brutalized him.

We never find out.

There is no suggestion that any of these potentially meaty themes are resolved or considered as Django systematically liberates Broomhilda and destroys Candieland and virtually everyone in it before riding off to moonlit freedom.

Django is not really engaged with the world that makes up the plot. He is inadequately hurt, enthralled, joyous or reluctant. If you seek to feel some sense of remorse or self-doubt or the sort we all feel every day, than you won’t find it here or in anything this talented auteur has done in fifteen years. Maybe some day.

Champslayers

When Giants come to play these nights
It could be that the air is light or thin.
Dawkins on all fours through the tunnel lights
Showed new Eagles the time was now to win.

Worries were strong of mistakes we survived;
The debt of turnovers came due last week.
We wondered if our offense was revived,
But for a rivalry our team did peak.

A slugfest fitting of the hardnosed east—
Triumph unto the side that can endure.
On New York’s defensive fatigue we’d feast,
While Michael ran and kept the ball secure.

Though times we felt the game would slip away
Round one of this battle was ours today.

The Season You Save May Be Your Own

I. Prologue
Without a loss after two ugly games
In which our boys did not deserve to win
Because of turnovers and other sin,
Heroics brought us victory the same.

Fourth quarter magic seemed to be the rule
After first halves of heartbreak and of pain,
Face-down on grass our quarterback seemed slain;
After each hit we waited for the blood to pool.

Perhaps for fear of pain, poor throws they come;
And into waiting hands of cornerbacks.
Still, Mike Vick’s decisions seemed dazed and lax;
We knew if it continued, we’d be done.

Typical sun in Phoenix produced hope
That we could build an early lead to keep;
Back in the game, the Cards would never creep;
Grime of stats cleansed by winning’s joyous soap.

Hitting commenced, Vick fumbled early,
While Kolb was great, a point to prove.
Fitzgerald free and always on the move;
The Arizona defense staunch and surly.

We’ve seen men fumble in this brutal game,
Teammates and fans do soon forgive;
“But in the red zone, you have to find a way to score!”
So coaches always said.

II. The Action

The play at first half’s end:
Designed for quick release, yet for eternity,
Vick held the ball.
He never saw the blind side blitz…
(No blocker there, he wasn’t supposed to need the time.)

III. The Poem

It is the reasoned crisis of the leader:
Against the will to take the game into his own hands,
Against the game plan, well-rehearsed but bland;
Fighting always, the will to run,
Acting as the pocket-passer, better than the run?
The coach, he says to trust his team—
A patchwork line, receivers small and lean;
Immobile Vick: for sack-hungry Ds, a feeder.

IV. Epilogue

As the Cardinal defender scampered 93 yards, twenty pursued,
All but Vick, who could not rise;
Defeat would come as no surprise.

Love Had Lost Its Fires, All Things Had Run Their Course

Bob Dylan’s thirty-fifth album, “Tempest,” has been out for over a week which has given critics ample opportunity to engage in the periodic and tiresome exercise of acceptance. Acceptance that The Minstrel’s instrument is shot after half a century of inspiring students, workers, civil rights activists, misanthropes, mothers, garbage men and attorneys.  Acceptance that the songs are too long. Acceptance that as critics, they have no choice but to judge every new record against his legendary back catalog and to group each track into further categories, (belonged on previous album; belonged on future Bootleg Session box set; vaguely reminiscent of “John Wesley Harding;” a gem that can stand among the cream of his late career). Acceptance that the album may well be the coda of Dylan’s life’s work. Acceptance of the album itself, because even though it isn’t “Blonde On Blonde,” it isn’t “Down In The Groove” either. Acceptance of the curmudgeonly, withered old bluesman persona that Dylan has cultivated over the past ten or fifteen years; but then again, maybe that persona isn’t cultivated at all, maybe it’s just Dylan accepting what he always saw himself to be.

Among the criticisms of “Tempest” has been the fact that the shuffling blues numbers that seemed classic, yet vibrant and fresh on “Love And Theft,” still cool on “Modern Times,” and boring and silly by “Together Through Life” are not getting any better and it doesn’t help that “Tempest’s” opener is a leftover from that Robert Hunter co-written effort. Clearly, Dylan has no interest in participating in any sort of new sound. There will be no Dylan album produced by Danger Mouse. Thank God for that.

And so what remains is the peculiar image of late Dylan, a sort of Americana, a la forgotten scoundrel with a constant Victrola soundtrack in his mind and on his lips. That, and the themes and images we have always loved: religion, travel, vitality, love, loss, death.

It’s violence that stands out on this album, the sort of violence that is a side-effect of living. We heard this idea last spring on Jack White’s “Blunderbuss.” White sings of love that will “roll over me slowly,” “slam my fingers in the doorway,” “make me murder my own mother.” The only way to be truly moved by love is for it to hurt and leave damage and mutilation behind. “Tempest” sees the world the same way, and yet the difference is that for White, the narrator is the subject of the violence, whereas for Dylan the narrator is detached from the suffering he observes in the way of the omniscient narrators of 19^th Century novels or Civil War soldiers around a campfire.

In the video for “Duquesne Whistle,” a young man finds himself brutally beaten following an unfortunate series of events stemming from his efforts to impress a girl. All the while, Dylan and his crew are walking the streets and finally happen upon the guy in a bloody heap. They simply step over him, completely indifferent. Here, brutality is not only a part of love, but so intertwined with it that even its literal manifestation comes as no surprise. The old bluesman, having survived plenty doesn’t sympathize. Maybe that part of him is dead; itself a casualty of violent love. He knows what he is; he is just as aware of his limited capacity to empathize as he, like any bluesman is aware of, say his sexual prowess. As he says in “Narrow Way,” “If I can’t work up to you, you’ll surely have to work down to me.”

“Long And Wasted Years,” a spoken word narrative over a simple repeated blues line is “Tempest’s” fulcrum. The track harkens the mercurial “Brownsville Girl” or “Highlands” for its epic quality, and like those tracks there seems to be a personal subtext, but “Long And Wasted Years” lays the groundwork for the age-old tales to come. The narrator has loved, he’s lost, he’s regretted, and all that remains is memory. This is precisely the predicament that allows him to occupy the role of storyteller, static in time and space, objective and reliable even if narrating in the first-person. The song may or may not be autobiographical but somehow we can all relate to the idea that so much happens beyond our control, our reach or even our awareness. As the narrator laments, “I think my back was turned / And the world behind me burned.”

On the second or third listen, it’s “Tin Angel” that stands out. The ominous banjo sends us straight to the heavy, sinister mood we heard ten years ago with “High Water” and the scene is set for a tale of 19^th century American betrayal, lost-faith and murder. We feel something strong listening to a song like this, cathartic to be sure, but it’s the time warp that really gets you. The listener finds himself swept into the lawless spirit of frontier justice and it’s as exhilarating as it is sombre. This is, after all, a world we can only imagine and piece together from what we’ve read and seen depicted in movies, and of course, heard in the old songs that inspired this one.

In the eponymous track we are even further removed from the actual experience of suffering. Dylan, in writing a sprawling account of the Titanic is recalling an instance of suffering to which the Twenty-First Century listener must attach an element of sentimentality and romance. It’s no accident that he summons the image of Leo and his sketchbook—pure Hollywood fiction. This is not a song about the actual sinking of the Titanic, but as with that movie starring Gregory Peck in “Brownsville Girl,” the romanticized, Hollywood lens through which we understand the idea of the Titanic is the madeleine that unlocks the memory of the much greater story of Human Pain.

How odd, then, to end the album with a tribute to John Lennon. Again, Lennon’s death is something that we have had ample time to deal with. “Roll On, John” probably hits closer to home for boomers who were moved by Lennon’s work when it was new, but for those of us born after 1980, Lennon’s tragic death is just another part of the entire legacy of The Beatles. For Millennials, the great music coexists with the stories of Hamburg, Ed Sullivan, Yoko, India, The Breakup and Lennon’s death. The giant idea of “The Beatles” is something which we have made our own, not something that defines our generation. “Come Together” is just another song on my iPod. “Roll On John,” recalling so many of Lennon’s lyrics and influences remains a part of his greater mythology. It connects for me, not on the level of a friend lost, but of a cultural tragedy, move violent evidence of the vicious irony of life— Lennon represented peace and yet he died a brutal, premature death.

Dylan has always been a translator. He absorbs the same information you and I absorb, information about the world he lives in, the people he meets, the places he goes. Then he articulates it in his own language which is itself, constructed by a musical history which we also have access to; you can listen to every one of Dylan’s influences. Listen to every recording of American music and beyond. This is the material behind what Dylan does; we can identify it, we can track it, we can listen to him talk about it. Still that is only a small part of the equation. What has always interested listeners about Dylan is the man behind the music. Critics and fans grasp for connections between symbolic imagery and Dylan’s life at the time. Would we see “Blood On The Tracks” the same way without seeing it as his chronicle of the unraveling of Dylan’s marriage to Sarah Lowndes? Would we listen to “Slow Train Coming” without being able to imagine a crucifix around his neck? Dylan has tried in various ways to run away from these analyses. While he can’t help but put himself into his music and his various adopted personae, he seems now, in the twilight of his life, intent of divorcing himself from it inasmuch as possible. Maybe this separation is what sequesters him to the refuge of the American standards. Maybe he’s keeping himself safe, or maybe he’s just enjoying one last, loving scoff to get the hippies off his lawn and the A.J. Weberman’s out of his garbage once and for all.

Or maybe he just wants to tell a story.

Irresponsible Family Planning