NEW 2008_4 by Paul Kahn

2008

Poetry / poésie Translation / traduction Song / chanson Photography / Photographie Contemporary Art / art contemporain

English / Français

IN THIS ISSUE: François Angot Christophe Lamiot Reuven Amitai Lindsey Adelman Fred Buck Bertie Koller Jaanika Peerna Noah Fischer Tuula Närhinen Ramon Dachs Paul Kahn

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Pop Ark in Brussels

Magazine

Issue 4 2008

Slow Low Tech

François Angot All simultaneous times all places of the imagination all forms of expression are NEW. Editorial address Kahn+Associates 90, rue des Archives, 75003 Paris Editor Paul Kahn Contributing Editors James Koller Florent Fajole Dominique Negel Laurence Bossé Production Editor Julia Moisand Design Consultant Krzysztof Lenk Cover Photo & Design Paul Kahn Subscription 30€ Eu¤ro / $40 USD for 2 issues (two years)

Please visit: www.new-mag.com for further information about and work by new contributors. On the internet we connect you to their publications, audio and video recordings of performances, current exhibitions, and other events that will evolve over time. Dépôt légal : septembre 2008 ISSN : 1776-9353 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any means without written permission from the publisher. © all images: the authors; © all texts: the authors; © all translations: the authors; © 2008 of this publication : Kahn+Associates S.A.R.L.

A l’étale, 8 (extrait) Christophe Lamiot Enos (English translation: Donna Stonecipher)

Néguev 2007 Reuven Amitai

Under the Aegis of World Empire:Rashid al-Din al-Hamadani, the First Historian of Humankind Lindsey Adelman

Hair Drawings Fred Buck

Book Report Bertie Koller

Seven Songs Jaanika Peerna

Particles in Motion Noah Fischer (in collaboration with Prem Makeig, Grégoire Paultre and Ronnie Bass; in conversation with Lars Kwakkenbos)

Pop Ark

Tuula Närhinen 74

Plastic Ocean Paul Kahn

Detritus Art and Plastic Science Ramon Dachs

(en collaboration avec Anne-Hélène Suárez Girard, English translation: Karel Clapshaw) 88 ENVOL palimpseste Paul Kahn 100

Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare: Looking Back on Bob Dylan

IN THIS ISSUE:

Slow Low Tech When I began new four years ago, my intention was to create a publication that aggressively ignored the conventional boundaries of visual and verbal expression, drawing contributions from the work I discover through the opportunities that present themselves. Paris is a marvelous hub of artistic activities, but I have always tried to find work where I am as I move around. This fourth issue of new began to form around the work of several artists. We had shown the video of Noah Fischer's two-room installation Rhetoric Machine at several of our events last year. When he brought this to Brussels along with the enormous Pop Ark, collaborating with Grégoire Paultre and Prem Makeig, we decided to devote a part of this issue to documenting the event. Global warming has become a part of our common vocabulary and Fischer's dramatic use of media informs us about how and why we think the way we do. Tuula Närhinen was showing her new installation, Plastic Ocean when I was teaching in Helsinki. As I learned more from Närhinen about the scientific research that inspired her work, I was able to gain further insight from conversations with the marine biologist Richard Thompson into interactions between science, language and visual art. A journey in the fall of 2007 to

New York led to Brooklyn, as all things do now, opportunities to reconnect with old friends and meet new ones. Perhaps no other part of America today attracts such a diverse and vibrant collection of young talent as this part of the New York megalopolis. During that trip I met Lindsey Adelman in the cafeteria of P.S.1 (officially in Queens) the day she was taking down her show of hair drawings at Platform in Chelsea. The slow and methodical technique she has chosen for these evocative works resonates in many ways with the work of the other artists we've published. Her work on paper and video also demonstrates the continuity between her art and design. A short drive up the Hudson River led to our meeting with Jaanika Peerna and a viewing of her works on paper, spread across the floor of her studio in Cold Spring. In addition to these works on paper, Peerna has produced remarkable video works (available in small format on the web). I was introduced to the work of Ramon Dachs by our contributing editor Florent Fajole. Dachs performed his “minimal poems” at Librairie Tschann in Montparnasse this year, using a recording of Bill Evans' piano, a computer screen, space and form to resonate meaning in several languages simultaneously: Catalan, Spanish and French. The place and time of the poems are as various as the languages. Christophe Lamiot Enos sent us a series of poems drawn

from a recent visit to the Negev desert in Israel. Photographs by the poet from the same journey are to be found on our website. The essay about the great historian Rashid al-Din by Reuven Amitai was a long time coming. It was first suggested in 2006 when Amitai was in Paris to lecture on the MalmukMongol war at the Sorbonne. In the end we are fortunate to have illustrations from a manuscript produced in Rashid's own lifetime from the Nassar D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art to demonstrate this broad treatment of world history from the early 1300s. Fred Buck, musician, poet and the subject of a song published in the first new, pointed me at the books of Gregory Gibson. His essay informs the reader in a way few dust jackets or book blogs have ever done. Somewhere behind a bushy beard, Bertie Koller produces remarkable songs that resonate and jive with a world gone by and a world being born. His guitar and banjo playing as well as his remarkable voice were among the highlights of our event in Providence, Rhode Island. François Angot originally composed A l’étale, a 550 page poem, in six months. The work was then refined for twenty years before the final version was completed. The title can be translated as At slack tide. This extract presents seven pages selected from the eighth section of this previously unpublished work. —PK

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A l’étale, 8 (extrait)

François Angot

en grand silence selon la clarté semée suivant le souffle chaud de ton haleine

suivant la nuit tournée et les nuques qui cèdent sous la neige tombée

rupture d'équilibre encore elle se dénude pour rétablir à proportion le nocturne céleste de ses épaules saillantes absorbé par frissons dehors il gèle pénètre en elle tranquille est son règne

enlacé dans ses bras l'air libre s'élève tenu d'accentuer l'enthousiasme ses formes

si gracile soudaine elle se faufile par la fenêtre hermétique fermée trouvant naturel le passage de sa main immédiate touchant au cœur pleine félicité maintenant c'est son corps entier reposant sur nos lèvres comme un sourire d'ange

sur le sol heureux parfaitement épousé neigeux à sa chaleur amadoué d'un geste la sentant partout subtile en son étreinte extrême déployé secret élan de sa captivité mise en transe intime continuité verse et renverse elle nous oblige sans s'interrompre illimitée tiède et mouillée seins appuyés dans le silence lourd de virginité elle nous est désignée

fondant en nous le temps d'amour l'espace d'un blanc inanimé ne pouvant que jaillir en ce lilial vibrer

chaleur irrésistible elle se forme à nous encourager tous nos corps enserrés dans ses bras vivifiés elle excelle à nous posséder tout l'excitant à nous quitter relâchés épuisés sentant la puissance de l'abandon confié recommencer à vivre humainement échapper

et à mourir recommencer tous les corps alignés d'emblée attentifs immobiles disposés à s'envoler bien décidés ordonnance unique comme la vie est son mouvement de traversée

tous les corps de part en part transpercés comme le regard a ce pouvoir venir de loin continuer

inhumaine égale au comble de l'éblouissement comme si passagèrement tu étais vraiment seulement toute féminine

radieuse telle que tu es changeante en nous-mêmes constamment partagée en tendresse scintillante en mouvement échangeant et la nôtre et la tienne demeurant sublime telle que tu es périlleuse entière

blanche

pas davantage féline même si tu aimes

vierge au soleil changeant comme lui de sexe suivant l'heure et le lieu brûlant le ciel exemplaire ne tenant qu'à la vue

l'aimant à corps perdu

depuis qu'elle se dĂŠcide en chair et en os Ă se prendre au dessin se montrant brĂ¨ve avec une impudeur crue insoutenable tant elle est nue

sous sa chaleur porté au cœur simplement comme on est heureux conduit vers sa très grande proximité sentant venir son approche

maintenant à l'étale le présent comme il s'offre en elle maintenant toujours sérielle venant nous déborder ravie de son outrance

elle se fait plus aiguë

longtemps elle nous saisit dans un état de stupeur totale et en souplesse soudain bondit au beau milieu de la beauté subite la sienne visible à ce point immense nous traverse d'effroi

ménageant ce passage elle se désaltère en nous résolue

nous mangeant elle veut se faire manger portée au comble sa jouissance elle nous tient

juste comme elle aime prendre vie

une fois satisfaite éclatant orageuse exaltée elle se plie tranquille se muant sous nos yeux amoureux foudroyés de vie comme opère l'esthésie s'alimentant de la vue qu'elle nous a provisoirement rendue

maintenant touchant au cœur tout nous devient sensible

commençant à respirer en elle la liberté voulue elle enfante

une parallèle inouïe taisant lointaine notre lieu de rencontre si gracieuse en retour au point de voir le jour

exaltée de disparaître extrême suspendue à la grâce même juste comme elle aime

d'un demi-tour se délivrant auprès de nous assouplissant tout sur son passage l'horizon

vibrante au soleil visible comme un rail infini luisant sensible s'éclipsant comme la vie elle laisse soin

si leste évanouie plus que vive

laissée telle quelle

Christophe Lamiot Enos

Néguev 2007

Sur le sol, plusieurs cailloux se voient— roues de pluies, du vent, tournez, roulant qui y renvoyez, en évidence ; la possibilité, se bougeant d’une mosaïque, cette danse le sol a, le sol près Oboda ; des insectes, cherchant leur pitance cette abeille fredonne, voilà une touffe de thym, droit devant. À l’oreille, le long de la voie de l’abeille, le caramel en croustillant plissé du corps cuit, lance et lance l’à demi transparent des ailes aussi ; dans le silence les cailloux parmi, la seule voix. * Un homme passe ; un âne le suit un autre aussi, l’homme sur un âne marchant à pas petits ; puis, à pied, l’homme ; crie au troisième boitant ; troupeau de chèvres conduit et un chien, sans l’aide d’une canne ; barbe noire de jais, cri et poing s’élèvent là, de même : se voit passant, orée de la nuit à l’arrière de la caravane la mort de l’âne, prochaine, blancheur ses poils de sel gemme. * 10

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On the ground, several stones can be seenâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; wheels of rain, of wind, turn, rolling that refer to them, obviously;

English translation by Donna Stonecipher

the possibility, moving, of a mosaic, this dance the ground has, the ground near Oboda; insects, looking for their pittance this bee hums, and coming up, a tuft of thyme, straight ahead. To the ear, the length of the advance of the bee, the caramel in crunching folds of its body burns, spears and spears the half-transparent wings, too; in the silence, the stones among, the sole voice. * A man passes; an ass follows then another, the man upon an ass that minces its steps; then, on foot, the man; cries to the third ass, that limps; goats he herds by and a dog, without the use of a cane; jet-black beard, cry and fist rise up, similarly: and at the nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s threshold at the rear of the caravan, the death of the ass, next, whiteness its rock salt fur. * | 4_ 2008

Il y a, non loin d’ici une, deux, trois qui font piles de pont, des constructions dans la brique. Venez, venez, venez-y disent-elles, trois fois, cils battants. Battant, des maisons s’appliquent il y a longtemps, ceci à battre, ainsi, en des villes qui des cailloux dans les champs repiquent. * Dans des sacs de jute, dans la main les résines l’une, couleur de miel et de lait maints et maints cristaux, denrées rares qu’acheminent des reflets plus précieux que vin, raisin s’examinent matières à parfum, s’il vous plaît. * Troglodytes, les habitations ne se voient pas, dedans la colline ; un oiseau s’en échappe, soudain—un pigeon ; terriblement, ses ailes les minent d’indigo sur le ton verdi, que l’enfilade avoisine des pièces taillées dans de la chaux. *

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There are, not far from here, one, two, three building bridge piers, constructions in brick. Come, come, come over here they say, three times, lashes fluttering. Flustering, houses apply themselves this, a long time ago to beat so, in cities, planting out the stones in the fields. * In jute sacks, in hands, resins—one the color of milk and honey handfuls and handfuls of crystals, rare qualities, spun by reflections more precious than wine, grapes seen in the sun— the makings of perfume, if you please. * Troglodytes: the dwellings, inside the hill, can’t be seen; then a bird flies out from one, sudden—a pigeon; terribly, mined by the wings of indigo turning green, the row now neighboring the rooms carved into the lime. *

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Sous le mur, qui les domine la paroi rocheuse, le chemin montant, sous le soleil : mines peu à peu ; sous cassures de rien les cavités s’avoisinent ; nous avons passé, ici, oh, bien des jours, des nuits ; s’y dessine fraîcheur dans la craie, le soin pour le repos de ceux qui cheminent. * Troglodyte, voici Oboda cette cavité dans la colline comment, à retourner sur ses pas voir bleu, voir vert dans de la craie mine passage, passage d’ici à là, l’espace—je m’y achemine d’une aiguille, debout, se voient craie, des activités en sourdine dans de l’espace, encore, là-bas.

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Under the wall that dominates them the rock face, the rising path, under the sun: mines little by little; the cavities neighboring each other under faults of nothing; we have spent here—oh, all kinds of days, nights; coolness draws into the chalk, a caring gesture for the repose of those making the climb. * Troglodyte, here’s Oboda in the hill, this cavity how to retrace one’s steps—walk back; to see blue, to see green in the chalk carves a passage, from the air of here to there, and space—I make the climb myself from a peak, upright, the chalk can be seen, and all the activities once more muted, in the space down there.

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Reuven Amitai

Under the Aegis of World Empire: Rashid al-Din al-Hamadani, the First Historian of Humankind

One today still encounters popular descriptions of the Mongol empire stating that this was mainly a time of destruction and decline; there is even occasionally academic writing in the same vein. Yet, increasingly, investigators from different specializations and fields are bringing to the attention of academics and a wider public that Mongol control had its positive side in a number of areas, not withstanding the devastation of the conquests by the Mongols and some of the darker areas of their rule. Among the brighter aspects of Mongol rule in the Middle East and perhaps in general is the great historical work of the Persian physician, bureaucrat and scholar, Rashid al-Din Abu al-Khayr al-Hamadani, born a Jew around 1247, died a Muslim in 1318. The Mongols entered the world historical stage around 1200 when the Mongolian and Turkish speaking tribes in the steppe region to the north of China were united by Chinggis (Genghis) Khan into a nascent state. In subsequent years, a number of innovations were introduced to begin the process of state institutionalization: adoption of an alphabet for the Mongolian language; establishing a bureaucracy based on steppe peoples who had already sedentarized and established political administration; the breaking up of tribes and the distribution of the tribesman into decimal units up to 10,000 men; laying the basis for a judicial system; and, the gradual crystallization of an imperial ideology that justified conquest. The Mongols were thus more than just a flash in the pan phenomenon, something that usually characterized the empires of the Eurasian Steppe. Already around 1210, raids in northern China commenced that soon turned into campaigns of conquest. Concurrently, Mongol troops expanded westwards into the Steppe, incorporating tribes into the Mongol state. By about 1218, the Mongols shared a border with a Muslim state, that of the Khwarazm-Shah who ruled the area today controlled by Uzbekistan, northern Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and northeastern Iran. A year later, Chinggis Khan commenced a four year campaign in this large area, which led â&#x20AC;&#x201C; after a particular cruel and destructive campaign â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to the eradication of the Khwarazm-Shah and his state. The Mongol rule in the Middle East had commenced.

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In subsequent years the Mongols continued to advance on several fronts, even after Chinggis Khan died in 1227: in China, into Russia (and subsequently Eastern Europe) and the Middle East. In the last mentioned, Mongol control expanded over the next three decades into all of Iran, the Caucasus, and most of Anatolia. Three things can be said already at this early stage, both regarding the Mongol state as a whole and the widening territory under their rule in the Islamic countries. Firstly, numerous Muslims, generally Persian speaking bureaucrats, joined up to serve the Mongols, who appeared at this time to be unbeatable. Baha’ al-Din Juwayni, father of the famous brothers Shams al-Din, future senior minister (wazir) to the Mongols, and `Ala’ alDin, a governor of Baghdad and their first great historian, are good examples of this phenomenon. Secondly, the Mongols displayed from the beginning a remarkable religious tolerance, both among themselves and to their ever growing subjects (although some scholars have referred to this as

religious indifference). Thus, `Ala’ al-Din Juwayni writes: “Moreover, [the Mongols] oppose no faith or religion – how can one speak of oppression? Rather they encourage them…” Thirdly, early on, the Mongols sought out, encouraged and patronized men of learning, perhaps hoping to gain advantage from their knowledge. Thus, Chinggis Khan, while campaigning in Iran, had brought from across Asia a Taoist sage to provide him with information on, and perhaps an elixir for, longevity.

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Shakyamuni (Buddha) offering fruit to the devil from the Jami' al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) of Rashid al-Din, folio 34a, courtesy of The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art.

This interest in intellectual matters continued under the successors of Chinggis Khan. His grandson Möngke, who served as Great Khan from 1251-59, held a council of religious scholars who debated the merits of their respective religions while carefully denigrating the values of their interlocutors. His brother Hülegü, who had been sent to the Middle East to consolidate and expand Mongol power in the region, also surrounded himself with learned men from various religious traditions, although Rashid al-Din – the subject of this short article - thought that many of these were quacks and magicians who took advantage of the Khan’s credulity. In any event, one of the savants found in Hülegü’s peripatetic court was the great Nasir al-Din Tusi, Shi`i theologian, philosopher, administrator and astronomer. It was for Tusi in this last mentioned capacity that Hülegü had erected a state of the arts observatory in Maragha in Azerbaijan (today northwestern Iran). Without a doubt the Mongol rulers in Iran and the surrounding countries (now including Iraq and the entire western bank of the Euphrates) saw themselves early on as patrons of learning and art, a tradition followed until the end of Mongol rule in the region in the mid-fourteenth century. In this wide area, a virtually independent Mongol state was established by Hülegü and it was ruled until 1335 by his successors, known as Ilkhans, a title often translated as “subject khans” (to the Great Khan in the east). We are now in a good position to examine the rise to prominence of Rashid al-Din (1247-1318) and his political and intellectual career. Stemming from a Jewish family involved in medicine (his father was an apothecary), we find him first as a physician at the court of Arghun Ilkhan in the 1280s. There is some question when he converted to Islam: although most studies say he was in his thirties, recently it has been suggested that perhaps this transition only took place towards the end of the thirteenth century. In any case, it is early in the 1290s that we can trace Rashid al-Din’s rise: during the reign of Geikhatü Ilkhan (1291-5), he is noted as a cook at court, a position of some importance among the Mongols. Later, under Ghazan (1295-1304), his role as preparer and supervisor of the Ilkhan’s food is also mentioned. In circumstances that are not completely clear, he was appointed first as Ghazan’s chief minister (wazir) in 1298, after serving briefly as the deputy of his predecessor. Actually, throughout most of the next two decades, he was the co-chief minister. His relations with his fellow co-chief minister were so bad at times that the administration of the kingdom was divided between them, with Rashid al-Din responsible for the southern and central part of Iran.

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In any case, according to his own words, he was much of the inspiration for the widespread administrative reforms enacted by Ghazan, who had converted to Islam just before his accession to the throne. This event was symptomatic to the growing Islamization among the Mongol elite and tribesmen in Iran and the surrounding countries, and strengthened this process. Rashid al-Din is actually our main source for information on Ghazan’s reforms, which may have been partially inspired – or at least justified – by this ruler’s new found religion. As he was both the self-proclaimed instigator and executor of these reforms, we are perhaps justified in doubting the full extent of his stark description of the bad situation these reforms were supposed to ameliorate and their actual execution. Yet, there is no reason to be skeptical about Rashid al-Din’s important role in the affairs of state under Ghazan, and his brother and successor Öljeitü (1304-1318). The Arabic sources composed in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, then the unequivocal enemies of the Ilkhanid Mongols, confirm Rashid al-Din’s vaunted position with Ghazan, and his influence on political and intellectual matters. With all due respect to Rashid al-Din’s political authority and activities, he is most famous, among historians of Iran, the Mongols and the Middle East in general, art historians and other scholars, for his historical writings. Sometime early in his long career as wazir, Rashid al-Din was commissioned by Ghazan to compose a history of the Mongols. He was then ordered by Öljeitü to expand this work into a universal history of humankind. Writing in Persian, but giving it the Arabic title of Jami` al-tawarikh (“The Assembly of Histories”), Rashid al-Din completed what can be considered the first work to encompass the story of the various states and peoples across Eurasia. With regard to his own lifetime in the Ilkhanate, Rashid al-Din is in probably his own main source, while for the post-Chinggis Khan period he relies heavily on Juwayni’s work, Ta’rikh-i Juhanshusha (“History of the World Conqueror”). For the biography of the great man himself, he is heavily dependent on a now lost work in Mongolian, the Altan Debter (“The Golden book”) and thus provides an alternative to the standard Mongolian Secret History of the Mongols. Besides these literary works, Rashid al-Din used extensively oral sources, most importantly Bolad Chingsang, a high Mongol official who was the commissioner of the Great Khan in the Ilkhan’s court in Azerbaijan. Thus, he was provided with an insider’s insight into the workings of the Mongol empire and its history, something unmatched by other pro-Mongol historians (who wrote in Persian, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian and Arabic) active

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1. I am grateful to my colleague Rachel Milstein for bringing the matter of Rashid al-Din’s portrayal of the biblical stories to my attention. See her book: La bible dans l’art islamique (Paris, 2005).

in the Ilkhanate at this time, no matter how intimate their personal encounter with the Mongols. Without a doubt, Rashid al-Din’s work is the single most important source for the history of the united Mongol empire in general, and the Ilkhanate in particular. Its value for earlier Muslim history and the countries beyond the borders of the Mongol history is more derivative and of uneven quality. For instance, the parts devoted to pre-Mongol Iran are not without value, but those devoted to the Franks or early China shed little new light on these subjects, although they are of interest for seeing what a learned Iranian ca. 1300 might know about them. Rashid al-Din certainly deserves much credit for even attempting to deal with these areas and cultures, the most comprehensive hitherto of a Muslim author, and unrivalled for a long time afterwards. One non-Mongol section of special interest is that devoted to the ancient Jews (more specifically, from the time of the Patriarchs and afterwards). Here we have a unique and fascinating case of two separate reports dealing more-or-less with the same topic. On one hand, we have the traditionally Islamic portrayal of Banu Isra’il (=Bnei Yisra’el) as found in the Isra’iliyyat literature, while on the other hand we have a synopsis of the rendition of the same topic as presented in the Hebrew Bible. This parallel approach to early Jewish history is unmatched in Muslim writing, and reflects both Rashid al-Din’s particular background and his wide horizons and perspective1. Being justifiably proud of his achievement, and possessing riches and power, it should not come as a surprise that Rashid al-Din wanted his great historical project to be “published” and distributed properly. He established a scriptorium in Tabriz, the main city of Azerbaijan, which was to produce two illustrated manuscripts every year of Jami` al-tawarikh, one in Persian and one in Arabic. The illustrations, which represent a fusion of earlier Islamic and East Asian styles, are a milestone in the development of Persian miniatures, greatly influencing later work. The descriptions of the Mongols in these paintings are both evocative and important sources of information on Mongol dress, military activities and lifestyle. The portrayals of earlier scenes are also both appealing and worthy of further study. Personally, I find particularly engaging the pictures showing characters from the Old Testament. The ones wearing Mongol hats are especially endearing. While many illustrated manuscripts of this work have come down to us, as far as I am aware only two, neither complete, from Rashid al-Din’s own lifetime have survived. One is in the University of Edinburgh Library and the second, earlier known as the Royal Asiatic Society

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manuscript, is now in the Nasser Khalili collection. The illustrations of both have been published and all can derive pleasure and profit from examining these beautiful surviving examples2. In November 2007, a conference was held at the Warburg Institute in London devoted to Rashid al-Din, whose multi-faceted activities were discussed: administrator, patron of culture, historian, writer in other topics, and the focus of much of the intellectual activity in the Ilkhanate. At the same time, it became even clearer than previously understood how Rashid al-Din had deliberately manipulated his information about his patron Ghazan, more generally the dynasty of Hülegü, and furthermore the father of the lastmentioned, Tolui, and by extension, his descendents among the Chinggisids (including Qubilai and the Yuan emperors in China) to portray them all in a positive way. Yet, even with this clear tendentiousness, Rashid al-Din’s great historical achievement should be recognized. We can ask what was the background to this feat? We can note that Asia was open from one end to another under the Mongols (even at times of inter-Mongolian war, such as after 1260), and this was indeed a time of wide horizons in general. To this we should add that everywhere under the Mongols and particularly in Iran there was a certain intellectual openness, and no dogma was necessarily the official one. To a certain extent, this is even the case after the conversion of the Ilkhanate Mongols to Islam ca. 1300. This most probably contributed to the atmosphere of wide horizons just described. To all of this we can attach Rashid al-Din’s own personality, industry and genius. I would suggest that his liminal position, on the meeting ground between different worlds and traditions, also placed him in just the right place to explore in depth different

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2. David Talbot Rice, The Illustrations to the World History of Rashid al-Din (Edinburgh, 1976); Sheila Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles: Rashid al-Din's Illustrated History of the World (The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, Vol. XXVII) (London, 1995).

Joseph with his brothers from the Jami' al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) of Rashid al-Din, folio 49a, courtesy of The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. Note the Mongol-style hats worn by some of the brothers.

cultures and peoples. He was located at the meeting place between Islamic Iran, the Mongol empire and his own Jewish background (not emphasized, but evidently never forgotten). There are two aspects of this personal multi-culturalism. Firstly, he was exposed to different worlds, and thus aware of various traditions and histories. Secondly, not being apparently fully in any world, he had become sensitive to different cultures and outlooks and was well positioned to examine them. Rashid al-Din, in spite of all of his power, was a kind of cosmopolitan intellectual of his time: well poised to look at his own, neighboring and distant cultures, assisted by the particularly open circumstances of his era. Not unlike some secular Jewish intellectuals of the modern era, in Europe and elsewhere, Rashid al-Din, no longer at home in his own tradition, became a great scholar of all others.

Muhammad exhorting his family before the battle of Badr from the Jami' al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) of Rashid al-Din, folio 5a, courtesy of The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. The Prophet is in the center (third from right).

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Rashid al-Din in English Amitai, Reuven. “New Material from the Mamluk Sources for the Biography of Rashid al-Din.” In J. Rabi and T. Fitzherbert, editors. The Court of the Il-khans (Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, vol. XII). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Now reprinted in R. Amitai, The Mongols in the Islamic Lands: Studies in the History of the Ilkhanate (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007). Blair, Sheila S. A Compendium of Chronicles: Rashid al-Din’s Illustrated History of the World. “Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art,” vol. 27. London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1995. Boyle, John A. “Rashid al-Din and the Franks.” Central Asiatic Journal. 14 (1970), 62-67. Boyle, John A. (translator). The Successors of Genghis Khan by Rashid al-Din. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Hoffmann Birgitt. “The Gates of Piety and Charity. Rašidaddin Fadlallah as Founder of Pious Endowments.” In Denise Aigle, editor. L’Iran face à la domination mongole. Teheran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1997. 189201. Jahn, Karl. “The Still Missing Works of Rashid al-Din.” Central Asiatic Journal. 9 (1964), 113-122. Morgan, David, “Rashid al-Din Tabib.” Encyclopaedia of Islam. Leiden, 1960-2002. Morgan, David. “Rašid al-Din and Gazan Khan.” In Denis Aigle, editor. L’Iran face à la domination mongole. Teheran: Institute Français de Recherche en Iran, 1997. 179-88. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. “The Status of Rashid al-Din Fadlallah in the History of Islamic Philosophy and Science.” In idem. The Islamic Intellectual Tradition in Persia, ed. Mehdi Amin Razavi. London: Curzon Press, 1996. 228-236. Originally published in Islamic Culture, 68/1 (Jan. 1994), 1-10. Petrushevsky, I.P. “Rashid al-Din’s conception of the State.” Central Asiatic Journal. 14 (1970), 148-62. Thackston, Wheeler M. Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s Jami`u’ttawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles. A History of the Mongols. “Sources of Oriental Languages and Literature,” vol. 45. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1998-9. Togan, A.Z. V. “The Compostion of the History of the Mongols.” Central Asiatic Journal. 7 (1962), 60-72.

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Lindsey Adelman

Hair Drawings

The artist's website: lindseyadelman.blogspot.com

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Hair Drawings, 2007-2008: Collect, 6.25 x 9.25 in., p.24 Fill, 6.25 x 9.25 in., p.25 Fish Eggs, 6.25 x 9.25 in., p.26 Sea Growth, 6.25 x 9.25 in., p.27 Knot 1, 6.25 x 9.25 in., p.28 Knot 2, 6.25 x 9.25 in., p.29 Stitchery detail, 6.25 x 9.25 in., p.30-31 Fill In 1, 6.25 x 9.25 in., p.32

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Fred Buck

Books by Gregory Gibson Hubert's Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus (Harcourt 2008) Demon of the Waters: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe (Little Brown 2002, Back Bay Books 2003) Gone Boy: A Walkabout: A Father's Search for the Truth in His Son's Murder (Kodansha America 1999, Anchor 2000)

Websites http://www.tenpound.com http://www.hubertsfreaks.com

Book Report

I don't remember meeting Greg Gibson, but our paths have crossed in significant ways for a near lifetime. He's a couple years older than I, would have been unapproachable when I was in the third grade, one of those super sophisticates of the fifth or sixth grades whom teachers treated as equals. One would think such inequity would level off as we limp into our 60s. My revelation is that the big kid is always bigger, smarter, tougher, finds the treasure, gets the girl, blah blah. I made some babies before he did, but then he went out and got some boy babies, leaving me in a little kid ponder about whether there was some mysterious advantage being levered over my beautiful girl babies. He sent me some of his writing when I was putting out a mimeo poetry magazine with my friends Paul and Thorpe and our babies were still in shitpants mode. There was a fair bit of writing coming in at that time, some of it interesting, some not very, but almost all of it literary. Gregor has always been a book man, even insulated his attic with spares from the store, so I expected something literate from him, and probably literary. Damn if he didn't go right to the head of the class, well beyond both categories, with the simple lyric of truth. Will I ever figure this guy out? Of course I had to reject some of the offering so I could still wear the engineer's cap and toot the whistle at crossings. In the fullness of time our kids grew larger, smarter, and more beautiful. Paul & Thorpe & I decided to stop doing the mimeo thing, and I sold my A. B. Dick and its supplies to Greg for 50 bucks. He had opened a storefront book business in what was the M. B. Wright stationary store on the corner of Main and Center, original home of the mother of all Gloucester bookstores and printing establishments - Procter Brothers' â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Old Cornerâ&#x20AC;?. He kept the Dick rotating with periodic book lists that he mailed to dealers and other addicts. My stepfather, a famous poet, and the mother of all big kids, came through town on a reading tour, and stayed with us the night of his Gloucester reading. After the show a few people came back to our apartment, including Greg, for some of that heavyweight conversation poets do so well. Sure as hell, Greg not only knew the books they talked about,

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but had actually read them and had real things to say about same. I kept the glasses full and my mouth shut. The store windows at Ten Pound Island Books brought that corner back to its glory days of the last half of the 1800s, with art and artifact displays that made even late night footsoldiers on their wobbling way home from the Busy Bee Tavern think seriously about reading a good book one of these days. My mother was one of the underutilized species (fishing industry metaphor) of Gloucester artists whose work found new light in Gregor's windows. Though she would never admit it, I think she liked him better than me. Inevitably, this genial and productive abrasion between us wandered into our progeny. Greg's #1 son and my #2 daughter had several classes in common at the high school, and they engaged in intellectual jousting which at times brought my bright, lively and beautiful daughter home in tears. “He thinks he's so smart...” Big hug from dad followed by, “Get over it. He is.” In a patternless way, my daughter soon became a mother at 17, Greg's son a murder victim not long after. The beautiful girl and I sat at the back of the beautiful church next to our home and wept as Greg wept and spoke of his beautiful gone son. There is no 'better' in such desolation, but there is smarter, and Greg took his grief on the road and wrestled and wrote until he made a book of it. He called it Gone Boy. This is a book review of another book he wrote, which he called Hubert's Freaks. Between his first and Hubert he wrote a book about a young mass murderer aboard a whaling vessel in the early 1800s which he called Demon of the Waters. Each informs the other, read 'em all.

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Bertie Koller

Seven Songs

Man With Many Names (by James & Bert Koller) She says that he’ll be home tonight But I won’t leave on the light Yeah I know he’ll be here But I don’t know when he’ll appear She keeps her ear to the wind Tries to hear what lies he’ll spin She says he moves in a time all his own I know he don’t answer his phone He’s the man with many names Got no ticket but he rides the trains What is it he’s trying to find Is it something he left behind Bouncing the baby on his knee Who you gonna be Laughing & singing all the while The man with the winning smile She hears the dog bark in the night Turns on the bedroom light Hears him coming up the stair Brushes back her hair He’s the man with many names Got no ticket but he rides the trains What is it he’s trying to find Is it something he left behind

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The Sky Is Falling Oh the sky is falling heard it on the evening news Yeah the sky is falling heard it on the evening news & for your own safety people don’t look up, but keep looking down at your shoes Oh I hear the sky is falling to me it just looks like rain Yeah I hear the sky is falling to me it just looks like rain But I suppose a man gets blood on his hands he’s gonna find somebody to blame Oh this whole thing got me thinking what does hold the sky up there Yeah the whole thing got me thinking just what does hold that sky up there It didn’t take me too long to figure out it’s just a whole lot of air So the sky is falling least that’s what I heard Yeah the sky is falling least that’s what I heard But before I believe that evening news I think I’ll go & ask the birds

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Wandering Woman #1 Girl where you goin’ to this time Come on & tell me girl where you goin’ to this time Well you know me honey I’m just headed on down the line Girl what do you think about them wedding bells Come & tell me girl what do you think about them wedding bells Well you know me honey I think they might ring for me on a cold day in hell Well girl where you gonna spend tonight Come on & tell me girl I can take it where you gonna spend tonight Well I thought I’d stay in town with my friend, you know if he said it was alright Well girl just one more question why you tryin’ to break my heart Well girl come on & tell me why you tryin’ to break my heart Well honey you know the truth is I just love to watch a man fall apart

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Wandering Woman #2 Nobody moves like that woman does No, nobody moves like she does She’s always movin’ somewhere on that Greyhound bus Nobody talks like that woman do No, nobody talks like she do She’s got a million ways to say honey, we’re through But you know I love her love her just the same Yeah I love that woman love her just the same Whether she’s leavin’ on a bus or a train

Emptiness I went to sleep last night with emptiness all around Yeah I went to sleep last night with emptiness all around I didn’t get myself up ‘till that blue sky came down I heard the church bells ringing ringing through the trees Yeah I heard the church bells ringing ringing through the trees But not one of those church bells was ringing for me You know it’s whiskey in the evening morning’s when I have my tea Yeah it’s whiskey in the evening morning’s when I have my tea & I know my darlin’ you’re gonna do just what you please

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Morning Came Morning came like Frank & Jesse James Searching hard for some kind of change But mornings never last too long & outlaws never outlive their songs Make no appologies for the things you do For sometimes itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a hard road Just getting through & morning came like Frank & Jesse James working hard for some kind of change but mornings never last too long & outlaws never outlive their songs As long as youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re moving & that moving is true & you ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t holding down what your holding on to Morning came like Frank & Jesse James working hard for some kind of change but mornings never last too long & outlaws never outlive their songs

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Billy The Kid Billy the Kid he sat on his hat Looked up at the sheriff & said well how do you like that The sheriff he said nothing just grimaced in pain & then Billy the Kid he shot him again Well Billy the Kid he straightened out his hat Picked up his rifle & headed out the back He rode his horse all night long Laid down with his woman by the light of dawn Billy the Kid he woke from a dream His belly mad for bacon & beans & after he ate he laid down in the sun Cleaned & reloaded all of his guns Well Billy the Kid he pulled a pistol on the moon Laughed & he said I’ll be seein’ you soon He watered his horse & kissed his woman goodbye Then he headed south no sayin’ why You know Billy the Kid he died one night Shot with a bullet in a warm lantern light Well Billy the Kid he fell down on his hat Looked up at Pat Garrett & said well how do you like that How do you like that

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Jaanika Peerna

The artist's website: www.jaanikapeerna.net

Particles in Motion

There is information out there. It consists of tiny units that can be boiled down to little particles. Particles of dust, crystals, digital bits, dots, points of energy, moments of presence. The particles are in constant motion-swirling, jumping, bumping into each other, speeding up and slowing down, in flux between order and chaos. Pattern emerges and spreads all over the field. In slow motion the pattern transforms into something indescribable so you lose system from sight. A space with randomly moving particles remains until a new pattern emerges out of nowhere. Worlds consist of fractures of time which add up to the flow, but only for a fragment of time before it all disappears into a place without measure, where all is always connected, where every particle has purpose and flow, where everything depends on each tiny point of energy. The scale of action is

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Traces of: engulfing wonder, graphite on paper, 50 x 38 in., 2008 (below) Traces of: engulfing wonder, detail (opposite)

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at the same time microscopic and macroscopic. All of a sudden, everything seems to make sense, but it soon disappears into nonsense, in silence. There is breath, rhythm, tone underlying and overlooking all. Â Something to hold onto, something to hum along with, something to get lost within, in order to come clear again and again. Â This is the vision which inspires my artwork. Â It is an all-encompassing sense of life, deeply felt and closely studied. My artwork stems from this perspective, using drawing, photography, video, digital imaging and also sound. Sometimes it is hard to get it down to the surface. The creative process is not a coded plan that begins with a picture of the work inside your head and ends with the realization of your vision on the wall. No, it is a haphazard path of starts and stops, movements left and to the right, dances back and forth along a path where each step only remembers the last. You try things out and listen and learn. Each step bumps up against other steps and in the end something emerges that shows intelligence within itself, but doesn't require that a clear thought was there to set it in motion and guide it along. Art does not progress over time the way technology does. Rather, the significance of an artwork depends more on whether or not it changes the way we see. I hope mine does as well.

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Traces of: a passing touch, graphite on paper, 50 x 38 in., 2008 (opposite) Traces of: a passing touch, detail (above)

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Traces of: an urgent laughter, graphite on paper, 50 x 38 in., 2008 (opposite) Traces of: an urgent laughter, detail (above) | 4_ 2008

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Traces of: a sweet connect #2, graphite on paper, 50 x 38 in., 2008, p.48

Return #1, graphite and color pencil on paper, 48 x 34 in., 2007 (opposite)

Return #4, graphite and color pencil on paper, 48 x 34 in., 2007, p.49

Return #1, detail (above)

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Noah Fischer

Pop Ark

with the collaborative support of Prem Makeig, Grégoire Paultre and Ronnie Bass

An introduction by Paul Kahn

Photo & Image Credits Noah Fischer, drawings, pp. 53, 54 Prem Makeig, preparation models, pp. 54 (left), 61 (above) Catherine Antoine, photos in Brussels, pp. 63 (bottom), 66 Grégoire Paultre, photos in Brooklyn, pp. 56, 57, 60, 65, 68 Paul Kahn, photos in Brussels, pp. 54 (upper right), 58, 59, 61 (below), 62, 63 (top middle), 64, 67, 69-73

Noah Fischer's sculpture and image-making involves manipulating fire and light. He has an artist's talent for drawing and a mechanic's talent for making materials perform. At various points he has crossed the lines that isolate sculptures and photographers, photographers and painters, painters and set designers, designers and video film makers. In early 2007, he created Rhetoric Machine, a dramatic sculptural installation for two small rooms. In room one speeches by US presidents— Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton — present the language and sounds of American warfare and pop music. In the second room, the great communicator and television host, Ronald Reagan, invokes godless Communism, the Christian bible and C.S. Lewis. In these small spaces, the audience is confronted with combinations of sound, motion and light. The result is an anti-media that pulls us behind the mesmerizing surface of the rhetoric. The project that followed, Pop Ark, proved to be much larger and longer. Fischer is still playing with the material of verbal and visual rhetoric, and the subject is global warming. For the sound track, he mixes audio excerpts from Albert Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, a comedy routine by a very young Bill Cosby, and testimonies of environmental angst taken from less renowned contributions to YouTube (one identified as Murf). Whereas the smaller Rhetoic Machine was a solo effort, Pop Ark is a collaboration with Prem Makeig, Grégoire Paultre and Ronnie Bass. The images reproduced here include sketches by Fischer, computer models by Makeig for the entire installation, photos by Paultre of the work being produced at Fischer's studio in Brooklyn, New York, and my own photos of the installation as it was presented to the public May 9, 2008 at Kunst enfestivaldesarts, Brussels. At this venue, Pop Ark filled the enormous hall of Centrale électrique, while the enormous mask containing the timing drum that controlled all motion and light, known as the Gore-bot, sat in a storefront facing the street, attached to the ark by braided cables.

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Pop Ark, Scene 1: Bill Cosby from Complete Noah Act: There’s a fellow by the name of Noah... built an ark. Everyone knows he built an ark said what did Noah do, well he built an ark but very few (cough) people know about the conversation that went on between the Lord and Noah. You see Noah was in his rec room sawing away, making a few things for the home there, he’s a good carpenter. Voopa Voopa Voopa (bell) Noah Somebody call? Voopa Voopa Voopa (bell) Noah Who is that? It’s the Lord, Noah Right! Where are ya? Whaddya want. I’ve been good. I want you to build an ark Right! What’s an ark? Well don’t worry about that Noah, when you get that done go out in the world and collect all of the animals in the world by twos and put them in the ark. Right! Who is this really? What’s going on? How come you want me to do all of these weird things? I’m going to destroy the world. Right! Am I on candid camera? | 4_ 2008

That’s Me on the LCD That’s Me…On the LCD (x2) Blue Pixels all around, no Polar Bear to be found That’s Me…On the LCD (x2) Melting Ice and Snow, as I upload video Who is that? That’s Me…On the LCD (x2) (guitar solo) Baby Sunshine’s bright, she wipes away the night That’s Me…On the LCD (x2)

Al Gore, from Inconvenient Truth: You see that Pale Blue dot? That’s us. Everything that has ever happened in human history has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs, all the tragedies, all the wars, all the famines, all the major advances. It’s our only home. And that…. Murf: is what is at stake. Gore: is what is at stake. M: I mean Our ability… G: Our ability… M: to live… G: to live… M: on planet earth. G: on planet earth To have a future as a civilization. I believe this is a moral issue, it is your time to seize this issue, it is our time to rise again to secure our future. (gong)

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Pop Ark, Scene 2: Right! Don’t turn back into a caveman people. (gong) It’s like chasing your tail talking about this subject. Talking about… It’s like chasing your tail talking about this subject. Whenever I talk about these individual concepts, each individual concept, they need their own individual arguments, and then even when I’ve broken down to conclusions…. It’s like chasing your tail talking about this subject. And I don’t mean to infer that you’re brainwashed…well… Everyone is. They create, they find this individual problem, this catastrophe thing…and they point out the way out of this problem that we’re causing on ourselves. This danger threatens the world or America or all people or something. The media and the press are more than happy to exaggerate that image of danger. Because the conclusions will always sound absurd to people who are brainwashed…

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And I don’t mean to infer that you’re brainwashed…well The environment is, the environment is what it is, it does not try to aspire to be something. You know… The world lies to you…Yeah everyone’s gotta stop watching TV ‘Cause the conclusions will always sound absurd… The world lies to you Don’t turn back into a caveman people. (gong) Duh! And it like totally eradicates Global Warming bullshit. Our World is crumbling right before our eyes and we’re not doing anything about it and I want to be able to get proof of all we had before everything came crashing down like picture of… The everyone’s…

Angry Song Angry at the blue pixel Angry at the world Angry at Polar Bears: I’m so angry, angry, angry So don’t you burn the sunshine before it burns you down (x2)

And everyone’s angry And everyone honks at me you know…saying that I’m giving them a bad day by driving too weird and it’s like everyone’s so angry nowadays and then the world is getting this angry vibe and it’s like everyone just stop and breath! (gong) Do some yoga Sit by yourself under a tree and think This world is going too fast and no-one takes the time to think anymore.

Panorama by Daniel Lanoise, performed on Pedal Steel

Al Gore, from Inconvenient Truth: And there was inevitably some suspense, then when they came back in radio contact, they looked up and they snapped this picture and it became known as “earthrise” and that one picture

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exploded in the consciousness of humankind. It led to dramatic changes. Within eighteen months of this picture, the modern environmental movement had begun. The next picture was taken on the last of the Apollo missions, Apollo 17. This one was taken on December 11, 1972 and it is the most commonly published photograph in all of history. And it’s the only picture of the earth from space that we have where the sun was directly behind the spacecraft (ha ha) so that the earth is fully lit up … and not partly in darkness. The next image I’m gonna show ya has almost never been seen. It was taken by a space craft called the Galileo that went out to explore the solar system and as it was leaving earth’s gravity it turned its cameras around and took a time lapse picture of one day’s worth of rotation here compressed into twenty-four seconds. Isn’t that beautiful

Earth Picture Earth Picture, earth picture, Earth polar bear Baby photograph, baby photograph take a photograph of Polar Bear See me sunshine, sunshine shine so brightly Baby Sunshine, sunshine, earth picture Polar Bear, polar bear polar bear (gong)

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Lord (Bill Cosby): Noah? What? Whaddya want? (Gong) It makes me sad to think of all the animals that we really don’t care about, that we let die, like the polar bears and… They said that most polar bears…don’t hunt What we’ve noticed is that in Antarctica there’s ice shelves melting, cracking off, going away, saying bye bye Um, polar bears are dying because of it, because well, the ice shelves are their homes and that’s sad to think because I like polar bears.

Polar Bear And Polar bears are standing…. Because the ice shelves are melting, and the glaciers are melting On ice that’s turning warm And Polar bears are dying but kleiner Icebear’s born…

Do you see that pale blue pixel? Isn’t that beautiful? Global Warning first off…The thought of it is this Greenhouse Effect, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this but the Greenhouse Effect is then sun pretty much… I’m doing weird hand gestures.

Greenhouse Come into my house my house, my green green house baby sunshine. Murf: But the routine is, you know the UV rays Come into my house my house, my green green house baby sunshine. Ok bye bye see you later, ok bye bye see you later You know you’re hot baby, and I need you to warm up this house The sun is our baby, like he’s a baby sun right now It’s a green, green, green house. (x3)

And I don’t think I’ve lied at all, I would never lie. This is my open diary like I said but I feel like I’ve gained a lot of respect and it’s made me feel better about myself ‘cause I know maybe there aren’t people in my school or nearby…. 60

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Anthem In the distance there’s a shimmering light It shines upon us, and breaks the night We stir the sky this brings the light As we continue our course in life Beyond the stars is pale blue dot It’s what we have an all we got We watch the triumph, we watch it grow We see the rain, we see the snow And it’s our time to rise again Against the sun, against the wind And it’s our time to fight the truth For ourselves and for our youth

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Don’t turn back into a caveman people I wanna be a wildlife photographer or a Zoologist. So I basically love animals. And I wanna do that because…. I want to be able to get proof of all we had before everything came crashing down like pictures of…. Bengal Tigers Polar Bears…or… Pandas Voopa Voopa Voopa Lord (Bill Cosby): Noah Voopa Voopa Voopa Noah Who is that? The sun Right! The sun is our baby. Right!

Polar Bear The Sun is Our Baby It cries and we are warm We wrap it in a blanket Of smoke and toxic storm Polar Bears are standing On Ice that’s turning warm And Polar bears are dying But kleiner Icebears born Do you see that pale blue pixel? It’s our only home Will you watch me please on Youtube? ‘Cause I feel so all alone.

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I don’t believe in Global Warming It’s just a crown of thorns But I do believe in suntans So I lay here all the dawn Polar Bears are standing On ice that’s turning warm And Polar bears are dying But kleiner Icebears born

Song Credits That’s Me on the LCD Guitar and vocals: Grégoire Paultre; Vocals: Ronnie Bass, Noah Fischer Angry Song Guitar and vocals: Grégoire Paultre Earth Picture Guitar: Grégoire Paultre; Arrangement: Ronnie Bass; Vocals: Noah Fischer Polar Bear Guitar and vocals: Grégoire Paultre Greenhouse Arrangement and vocals: Noah Fischer Anthem Arrangement and vocals: Ronnie Bass; Guitar: Grégoire Paultre | 4_ 2008

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Between 10 and 19 March 2008, Lars Kwakkenbos of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts held a discussion with Noah Fischer via e-mail. The following text is an excerpt from that e-mail exchange. Both Rhetoric Machine and Pop Ark are discussed in it. In the first few days the e-mails centered on the types of rhetoric Fischer used and arranged in Rhetoric Machine and Pop Ark. The following excerpt opens with Noah’s reflection on the question of how far the manner in which one talks about freedom, for instance, can in itself be free. Fischer then goes further into the meaning of electricity in his work, before finally reflecting on the performative character of the machines he builds.

Saturday 15 March 2008, on 7:41, Noah Fischer Dear Lars, Yes, freedom is a good theme and I hope that the Ark will take us there, although I can’t promise a smooth ride.... I agree with you on the freedom paradox in political rhetoric. Of course, here in the US freedom is our favorite word and it has been totally twisted around. In the research for Rhetoric Machine I listened to many many presidential speeches and found a hard-wired pattern where a picture is painted of a road to freedom and to the utopian destiny of Americans (and people in general). Unfortunately, that road always had an obstacle on it – someone standing in the way of freedom. One last war and everyone will finally be free... I know working with this content sounds hard and heavy. It’s not in the same spirit as the live chats or interviews in Little Red for example which as you say point a way toward a new use language – maybe a new rhetoric–that is not as weighed down by political history–that feels fresh. But given what it has felt like to see our government and legacy of the United States and global situation in general implode in the last 8 years–a truly strange nightmare like experience – a dark tunnel actually – I felt that this work needed to be done. Sometimes you just have to head right into the shit. That’s why I love reading Kafka – some sort of hall of mirror mausoleum for human stupidity. These things have to be built and that is Rhetoric Machine. But then again Rhetoric Machine was in the end a (troubled) love story and I think if you can see that you really get the piece. Pop Ark is not really in the same direction. There is a strong link between the two with mass culture and persuasive language but as I said in a previous email, after Rhetoric Machine I wanted to get away from a pure critique of “the man” or the big institutional symbols. Al Gore as you say is another well practiced head mover, but he works kind of like a foil in this piece against a new freer feeling, rambling, mimicking, media savvy yet highly personal rhetoric. I was inspired by the kids who grew up with the internet as a fact of life and on their video blogs where they get to speak, edit, add sound, and network with their viewers, seem to have found a freedom (that word again) in the eye of the storm of commercial , superficial media. One thing about my background is that I grew up in California on a Buddhist monastery. It was modeled on a traditional Japanese one, and very beautiful and peaceful near the Pacific Ocean. People were meditating and healing themselves, very nice people but there was one problem maybe.

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Anything outside of the monastery was referred to as “the real world.” So at the bottom of my practice is dealing with the shit of this real world– actually as a celebration/duty of living in it. When I say “dealing” I mean making art about it: remixing a very visible electricity which is the basic but invisible thing in society with elements of painting (signifiers of art) sound, narrative structures, etc. to craft an experience that is completely of the reality (shit) world but reorganizes it into art somehow. It is very hard work which means I have to be in my studio a lot – not hitch hiking on a Western highway – but I find a simple joy in things and time and in the state of the world as it is – in doing this, and I can share it. Rhetoric Machine was really that– a Rhetoric Machine and you could say that this machine was showing something it was kind of like a multi media essay. With Pop Ark, I cannot say what I am showing pointing out – it’s more simple than that – it’s a big vessel, an Ark. The exciting thing about the Ark is that it’s on a voyage.

(from left to right) Prem Makeig, Grégoire Paultre and Noah Fischer, at the opening of Pop Ark/ Rhetoric Machine, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, May 2008.

Noah

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Saturday 15 March 2008, 19:59, Lars Kwakkenbos: Hi Noah, Thanks a lot for your answer. Can you tell me more about that electricity youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re talking about, and link it to the way you use it in your work, if possible? You talk about a very visible electricity in society, while your work seems to be characterized by a same sort of basic thing called electricity, that might link everything together. How does this work in Rhetoric Machine, and how does it work in Pop Ark? How does electricity help to reorganize reality (by making art with it)? Lars

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Saturday 17 March 2008, 7:23, Noah Fischer: Hi Lars, Here are some thoughts on electricity in my work. One of the privileges of making art I think is to highlight ordinary things. This happens without doing anything– when we bring them into art context which can be a place of heightened sensory/ intellectual/historical awareness and debate. But I prefer to take a more active stance. I would very much like to highlight electricity. It’s light, warmth, power, and politics in a pure form. It’s the energy that we live off. Yet for generations people have been taught to be scared of it, leave it to specialists, or just find it boring even though it’s consumed at increasing levels. Like a traffic signal, or the glowing screen of the computer that you have to sit in front of all day, electricity exerts a certain amount of control over our lives but we can no longer really see it. I make work about power so I use power. Really, I have no choice. Even if I were painting with oil on canvas, or making ephemeral sand sculptures, a power grid looms somewhere in the background. That’s western society. I choose to use this power in my work actively and, as we were saying before, to develop my thinking inside of this electrical work toward creating new forms. What about these forms? Well, electricity has rules that determine them. You touch certain wires and you will get shocked– a powerful sensation that I have experienced many times. Electricity tend to be either totally on or totally off– not wishy-washy. It’s reality! Then when I started to work more with lights and motors, I found a freedom in it– avoiding being a “good electrician” and taming this force into a grid, but instead keeping alive an aspect of the raw power that initially fascinated me. My work is lo-tec but more and more it’s addressing the computer. The computer is either an electric brain or mirror. Laptops (which are featured in Pop Ark) and ipods and iphones and the like are getting smaller and smaller and we are encouraged to think less and less about electric power and more about experience, networks, emotions, connectivity, options. But don’t be fooled – there is always something raw and dangerous and beautiful in electricity that maybe mirrors the same in the human mind. Behind the laptop there is a primitive thing and I would like to reveal this in my art. In Pop Ark I have built switch boxes that look like laptops where all the power for the installation is routed. There will be a tall power pole with power lines up in the space. Controlling the installation – as with Rhetoric Machine – is

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a large motorized timing drum covered with electrical wires called the “Gore-Bot” which works like a music box. I could use a small computer chip to do the exact same thing, but I want to bring the electricity out of the closet. This machine may seem antiquated, but in New York there is a metal box on every traffic light which is basically the same thing. Noah

Monday 17 March 2008, 18:31, Lars Kwakkenbos: Hi Noah, What fascinates me in your answer is firstly: your awareness of the physical presence of electricity – it can be warm and it provides power, but it can also be harmful – and therefore its relation to our senses and our human body. Can you further explain that? Second thing that fascinates me: the rawness, danger and beauty that is to be found in electricity might mirror rawness, danger and beauty in the human mind. Can you also further explain that? Do you turn your machines into metaphors for ways of thinking or feeling? Lars

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Tuesday 18 March 2008, 3:54, Noah Fischer: Dear Lars, Electricity is a physical experience and like I said, it becomes clear when you get a strong shock. I don’t see them as bad things – It’s a very foreign but interesting moment to interact with pure energy. In New York we have Times Square

which is as you know an area of highly concentrated electric lights and communications. When I get near it I have a strong reaction to the electric fields I usually start humming pop songs to myself – silence isn’t possible there or maybe I have to start humming to reach silence– the mind making up for a negative charge. To your second question – I was making the link between the brain and the computer and showing that there was actually a rawness to both although they seem like well organized working systems. It’s a question of seeing the forest for the trees I guess. The way that we use electricity in human social life from big coal or water or nuclear generators through transformers and stepped down to street voltages, to the 110 or 220 in our apartments, finally into our laptops in low voltages where information floats around – is very much like a human anatomical system: the nervous system or blood circulation. We seem to have created a massive hungry electric

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monster but mostly we just see the small side– the screensaver or something. I like to focus on the big picture which is dangerous (not iPod-like). Also, this is what the Global Warming conversation is about or should be about it learning to step back. But it’s not just an intellectual exercise it has to be hands on, so I advocate taking apart electric appliances to see how they work. You might even get shocked. Perceiving the rawness danger and beauty in humans work roughly the same way. You can read the newspaper, talk in depth with smart friends, drink tea and eat a nice meal and think everything’s alright and civilization is ultimately winning out. But the answer is not really so clear. There is ongoing violence and injustice in the world that just defies logic. We’re lucky not to be a part of it for the time being. So you have to step back on that too – there is more work to be done with understanding the human experience on this level.

This text was published as a gallery booklet for the exhibition of Pop Ark/ Rhetoric Machine at La Centrale électrique / De Elektriciteitcentrale in Bruxelles / Brussel / Brussels as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, 9-31 May 2008. The editor wishes to thank Lars Kwakkenbos and the directors of Kunstenfestivaldesarts for permission to reprint this text.

Noah Electricity seems to be closely linked to humankind because we have learned to harness it. And human civilization just exploded after that.

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Tuula NĂ¤rhinen

Plastic Ocean

Mermaid Tears (2007) Installation 400 x 90 cm. Materials: A necklace made of plastic waste from the seashore, 4 sieves, 5 shelves, 1 c-print on aluminium. Among clumps of seaweed or flotsam washed up on the shore it is common to find â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;mermaid tears,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; small plastic particles, some resembling fish eggs. Some particles are plastic resin pellets, the raw materials of the plastics industry spilled in transit to processing plants. Some are domestic waste that has fragmented over the years. Both sources have spread widely across the world's

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seas. These mermaid tears remain everywhere and are almost impossible to clean up. Whether plastics present a toxic challenge to marine life and subsequently to humans is one of the biggest challenges facing marine scientists today. Plastic is ingested by seabirds and various marine organisms, and its adverse effects on the food chain are a concern.

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Plastic Ocean: mermaid tears (2007), details

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Frutti di mare (2008) The installation consists of 36 c-prints on aluminium (70x50 cm each) and 36 floating sculptures in plastic boxes partly filled with water (49x25x2 cm, each box). Boxes containing the floating sculptures are placed on metal shelves on the floor and illuminated with fluorescent tubes. The c-prints on aluminium hang in long rows on a wall in the vicinity of the metal shelves. The sculptures are made of plastic waste washed up on the seashore in Helsinki. They represent new kind of marine species from a previously unknown sea called Plastic Ocean.

Plastic Ocean: frutti di mare (2008), details

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Plastic Ocean: frutti di mare (2008), details

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Plastic Ocean (2007-2008), installation at Forum Box, Helsinki, January 2008

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Paul Kahn

Imaginary extinct bird, Wunderkammer, 2006

Photographic image taken by Ladybirdcam from The Landscape Seen Through Animal Eyes, 2000-2003

Detritus Art and Plastic Science

Tuula Närhinen sent me images of Wunderkammer, a large project she had done in Oulu in northern Finland in 2006. She had sculpted dozens of imaginary birds, mounted in cases along the stairwells and hallways of the school. Many of the imaginary creature were classified with Latin names, as one might expect to find in a natural history museum. But the collection of complete creatures, skeletons, sets of beaks, nests, feathers, embryos and eggs carefully mounted and displayed in glass cases and jars were made largely from materials found around her island studio or in local flea markets and hobby shops. The owl-like creature is composed of birchbark, driftwood and fragments of a mole’s skull. On close examination, the mounted skeletons are a collage of animal, bird and fish bones, held together with silver wires. Images derived from scientific investigation are the core of Närhinen’s art, along with a dry sense of humor. She has built cameras that produce images of how she imagines the world looks to a fly or a bear, developed methods for letting trees trace the shape of wind on their branches, and found techniques for using cold winter air to create patterns on paper and glass. She is an investigative artist, inventive and methodical. My first view of Plastic Ocean was a set of two composite photographs, prepared for a group exhibition at Forum Box, an artist cooperative in Helsinki. She had decided to investigate the problem of plastic in the ocean. Mermaid Tears was an elaborate necklace fashioned from plastic particles she had separated from the flotsam around her island studio. The series of sieves, similar to tools used by archeologists, as well as a photo and samples of the debris were also part of the work. Frutti di mare was thirty-six sculptures set in aquarium-like containers along with colorful photos of each creature. Her brief text states that the creatures were “made of plastic waste washed up on the seashore in Helsinki. They represent a new kind of marine species from a previously unknown sea called Plastic Ocean.” The photos of the halfsubmerged creatures made them look colorful and charming, not unlike the wonders we see floating by behind the glass of

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the local aquarium. But viewed in their white plastic cases on metal shelves, they looked more like organized trash. The work is visually impressive and makes you think. The point was somewhere between the artist’s response to her environment and the viewer’s response to the art. And I asked myself, in the spirit of an investigative writer looking at the work of an investigative artist, what made her notice the plastic? And how did little bits of plastic trash come to be known as “mermaid tears”? A little searching on the Internet produced an answer: the BBC. In December 2006, a science program in a series called “Costing the Earth” was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published as an article on the BBC website. The title of the program was “Mermaids’ Tears”. The report begins: Microscopic particles of plastic could be poisoning the oceans, according to a British team of researchers. They report that small plastic pellets called “mermaids’ tears”, which are the result of industry and domestic waste, have spread across the world’s seas. This report summarized the research of marine ecologist Dr. Richard Thompson at the University of Plymouth. His research had slowly filtered into news after his group published a one-page article with the provocative title “Lost at Sea: Where Is All the Plastic?” in Science. This was the first scientific report of “the abundance of microplastics” in the marine environment around England. But there are no mermaids or tears to be found in the language of his report. I quote a bit of the methodology section: To quantify the abundance of microplastics, we collected sediment from beaches and from estuarine and subtidal sediments around Plymouth, UK (Fig. 1B). Less dense particles were separated by flotation. Those that differed in appearance to natural particulate material (Fig. 1A) were removed and identified with Fourier Transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy . Some were of natural origin and others could not be identified, but about one third were synthetic polymers (Fig. 1C). These polymers were present in most samples (23 out of 30), but were significantly more abundant in subtidal sediment (Fig. 1D). Nine polymers were conclusively identified: acrylic, alkyd, poly (ethylene:propylene), polyamide (nylon), polyester, polyethylene, polymethylacrylate, polypropylene, and polyvinyl-alcohol. These have a wide range of uses, including clothing, packaging, and rope, suggesting that the fragments resulted from the breakdown of larger items. Science, Vol. 304. no. 5672, p. 838, 2004.

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Costing the Earth: Mermaids' Tears http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi / science/nature/6218698.stm

Lost at Sea: Where Is All the Plastic? http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi / content/full /sci;304/5672/838 DOI: 10.1126/science.1094559

Marine Conservation Society http://www.mcsuk.org

The accompanying figure is a small masterpiece of scientific illustration collage, a form motivated by the paucity of space permitted in scientific journals for visual explanation. We see the familiar outline of the British Isles with some ominous dots along the coast, lines connecting it to Iceland and the Shetlands, a microphoto, and some bars and lines. I wrote to Thompson, attaching some images of Närhinen’s Plastic Ocean. He thought her work was “fantastic” and made the time to answer our questions and talk at some length about his own work. As to where the name “mermaids’ tears” came from, he was quite certain it “is a US phrase”, and in any case only appears in news stories. The genesis of his research comes from supervising Marine Conservation Society beach cleanups as a graduate student. As he led groups of 170 volunteers to clean dozens of beaches around the UK, he noticed that the volunteers, particularly the young men, were attracted to large debis such as tires, but people generally ignored the small fragments strewn about in the seaweed and sand. He became interested in the fact that these small fragments were not being fully recorded in the surveys that, along with bags of trash sent to landfills, were the results of these cleanup efforts. Once he became a marine biologist, he set off with a graduate student of his own to gather up and analyze “the small stuff”. They found strange-looking fragments, but it took several years before he was able to team up with Andrea Russell in the chemistry department of the University of Southampton. Russell had the technique for identifying what they found, the Fourier Transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscope, an instrument that can analyze the composition of the smallest particles. The lab methodology that Thompson and his team developed to analyze the samples was time consuming and labor intensive. The grains of sand were first sorted, then grains that appeared to be plastic were visually selected. These grains were run through the FT-IR analysis. The technique depends on a known library of wave patterns given off by compounds. A plastic, such as nylon, has a predictable wave pattern, metaphorically called a “fingerprint” (the wavy line in Figure 1C). When Thompson ran a fragment through the process, he could “see” that it was plastic. The materials that Närhinen found in the Helsinki by sifting through beach flotsam are much larger than the plastic fragments Thompson calls “the small stuff”. Looking at the uniform size of the beads in the photo, he guessed that most of what she found are the plastic resin pellet shipped between plastic producers and factories where plastic products are extruded or molded. These pellets are called

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Figure 1. (A) Fragment of microscopic plastic from shoreline. (B) Sampling locations in North-East Atlantic, showing Routes (CPR 1 and 2) sampled by Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) since 1960 and used to assess changes in the abundance of microplastics in the water column (see Fig. 1E). Shores around the UK where similar fragments were found () and the location of sites near Plymouth () used to compare the abundance of microscopic plastic among habitats (see Fig. 1D). (C) Example showing how FT-IR spectroscopy was used to identify fragments from the shoreline and the water column. Here an unknown fragment is identified as nylon. (D) There were significant differences in abundance of microplastics between sandy

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beaches and subtidal habitats (ANOVA on log10(x + 1) transformed data, F 2,3 = 13.26, P < 0.05, * = P < 0.01), but abundance was consistent among sites within habitat type. (E) Accumulation of microscopic plastic in CPR samples revealed a significant increase in abundance when comparing the 1960’s and 1970’s to the 1980’s and 1990’s (ANOVA on log10(x + 1) transformed data, F 3,3 = 14.42, P < 0.05, * = P < 0.05). Approximate figures for global production of synthetic fibres overlain for comparison. Microplastics were also less abundant along the oceanic route CPR 2 than CPR 1 (F 1, 24 = 5.18, P < 0.5). Reproduced from Thompson et al. (2004), with permission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki / Nurdle

Resilience http://www.resalliance.org http://resilience2008.org http://www.mejanlabs.se

The world's rubbish dump http://www.independent.co.uk/ environment/the-worldsrubbish-dump-a-garbage-tipthat-stretches-from-hawaii-tojapan-778016.html 86

nurdles, a word that must have a British origin, as it comes from the sports jargon of cricket. To close the loop, a recent “nurdle” entry in Wikipedia, the virally evolving Internet encyclopedia, states that a nurdle “may be called a mermaid’s tear, a term which may also refer to pollution in the form of degraded plastic.” Thompson’s research has also raised nurdle consciousness in the environmental movement and the popular press. Nurdles were first found in the Bristol channel in the 1970s, and there was a freighter spill of several containers of the material off the English coast. An awareness of the problems that result from improper handling of nurdles during transport is a recent phenomenon, he said, a polite way of saying that for decades no one paid attention to spills and shrinkage from pallets and containers during shipment. Like dandelion seeds on the wind, nurdles blew into the river estuaries and marine environments of the world. Thompson is now one of the leading experts on the touchy subject of measuring how much of the sand beneath our feet on every seashore and riverbank is plastic. A 1987 study he cites in a recent conference presentation states that 70% of all marine debris is plastic. But plastic is not DDT or plutonium. It is your mobile phone (used for one year), your shampoo bottle (used for one month) and your grocery bag (used for one hour). The plastic in each of these items will probably maintain its structural properties for hundreds of years. But we don’t know. Plastics have been mass produced only since the 1950s. We now have studies indicating that plastic materials are distributed throughout the oceans, but no one has developed models of what will happen over hundreds of years as the production and dispersal of plastic continues to increase. In his writing, Thompson advocates a decrease in the use of disposable packaging and an increase in the development of closed-loop recycling “so a bottle can become a bottle once again”. In April 2008, Plastic Ocean was part of Changing Matters – The Resilience Art Exhibition at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. Närhinen's plastic sea creatures were featured in Svenska Dagbladet. General interest in the topic of plastics in the ocean has been growing in the press, in part due to the work of another man, Charles Moore. A sailor and not a Ph.D., Captain Moore was lead author of a 2001 article in the Marine Pollution Bulletin that first described a dense concentration of floating plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean. In February 2008, The Independent in London ran a story with the title “The world’s rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan” with a graphic showing two enormous grey-filled

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areas labeled Eastern Garbage Patch off the coast of Japan and Western Garbage Patch swirling between California and Hawaii. Research papers from Moore’s own Algalita Marine Research Foundation refer to the areas as gyres, the metaflows that carry particles throughout the oceans. In June, the New York Times published “Sea of Trash” in which Donovan Hohn describes accompanying members of the Gulf of Alaska Keepers (GoAK) on their mission to gather and remove thirty tons of plastic debris from Gore Point, a stretch of uninhabited coastal wilderness south of Homer, Alaska. Articles about plastic debris on Midway atoll appeared in the L.A. Times. An Alaskan collecting plastics on a beach and a wildlife biologist measuring plastics in the bellies of dead birds now know where it is coming from. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer quoted in The Independent, personifies it: “It moves around like a big animal without a leash. The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic.” “In Sweden I was almost accused of speaking FOR plastic because some of my creatures look beautiful or funny and thus I made the waste (the bad thing) look positive”, Närhinen wrote on her return. “In this work I wanted to speak about the seashore as a place for imagination and fantasy where you can find surprising things and fantasize about foreign countries and strange animals. Plastic is there among other things. I guess a scientist wants to know what actually is going on but does not necessarily judge it? Would a scientist think in this way? Could there possibly be a marine biologist who would like to participate in the work and give scientific names to these creatures?” So far, she hasn’t found one.

Algalita Marine Research Foundation http://www.algalita.org Sea of Trash http://www.nytimes.com /2008/ 06/22/magazine/22Plastics-t. html Plague of plastic chokes the seas http://www.latimes.com / news/local /oceans/la-meocean2aug02,1,7826699,full. story

Sopfynd blir flytande konst http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/ konst/artikel_1118881.svd

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Ramon Dachs en collaboration avec Anne-Hélène Suárez Girard

ENVOL palimpseste

en consomption

consumption

ardeur de glace froideur de feu douleur vitrée

burning ice freezing flame crystal pain

canon

cadence des ondes brisant

rhythmical breaking of waves

clarté céleste mer flottante pureté

celestial light ocean of pure weightlessness

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English translation by Karel Clapshaw

delta alluvial prisme liminaire seuil abyssal

alluvial delta prism of mud threshold of the abyss

moineau

sparrow

de pierre en tuile

from pebble to tile en branche

to twig vol

des étoiles répandant des lucioles

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flitting

glow-worms meekly gleaming beneath the stars

des icebergs en dérive fendent les flux sublunaires fondant parmi le plancton

sublunary icebergs adrift forging furrows in the ocean dissolving amid plankton

désistement crépusculaire du firmament

crepuscular yielding of the heavens

des lèvres boivent des lèvres

lips sip lips

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des pas qui veillent cachettent la nuit déserte

sleepless pacing sealing empty shadows

des vagues délayent le jour

the waves dissolve the setting sun

fleurissent les prés de la nuit

meadows of night come into flower

du bas brouillard s’élancent de hauts sommets

out of the mist emerge towering crests

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en un temps sans limite comme une mer sans rivage sous un ciel sans nuages

in a limitless time like a boundless sea with a cloudless sky

février

February

frêle pressentiment de fruit des amandiers en fleur

fragile foretaste of fruit on flowering almonds

freux en vol concentrique

steadily circling crows

becs cernant la charogne

carrion ringed by beaks

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horreur d’être en vie scrutant d’un regard perplexe l’horizon

appalled to be living scanning the horizon with bewildered eyes

immense nuit la mort de loin en loin éteint de minuscules lucioles

death with its vast night ever and anon extinguishes tiny fireflies

joyeuse excitation de la poussière infime dansant dans la lumière

jubilant jig of small specks of dust whirling round in the light

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la terre allèche le ciel tressant ses cheveux d’eau les mamelons glacés

the earth enchants the sky weaving wisps of water around icy nipples

l’autre rive pointe verte et fraîche vierge

the far shore emerges fresh and green virgin

le chant du coq se lève au ras du jour

cresting the dawn cockcrow rings out irrefutable

en crête

and red

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les ruines des moulins hĂŠrissent la colline contre lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;assaut du vent

battered windmills still bristling on the weather-beaten ridge

ondes dunes nues

waves dunes clouds

vont

flowing

parmi les herbages vacillent lĂŠgers les papillons blancs

white butterflies gracefully wavering in the green meadow

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péremptoire illusion la mémoire s’éteignant dans l’oubli

peremptory mirage a memory vanishing into the void

pesante paupière céleste

heavy eyelid of the sky

du soir

at dusk

août

August

plénitude d’or au soleil

fullness of gold beneath the sun

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poème minime cristal irréductible

minimal poem irreducible crystal

rang de cyprès sombre regard cils de la mort

rows of cypresses fixed on eternity eyelashes of death

ruines ravagées rongées de lichen s’écroulant vaincues

ravaged ruins gnawed by lichen conquered crumble

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littoral

shore

symphonie minérale infinie

infinite mineral symphony

tendre renouveau d’âpres terres

tender renewal of harsh lands

tombe le soir évanoui

evening faints and falls

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vagues de blé irisées marées d’épis

vierge exempt tout sans

waves of wheat iridescent ripened seas

untouched uncharted exquisite world

fraîcheur sur l’herbe envol hereux

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Paul Kahn

Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare: Looking Back on Bob Dylan

1. In The Year(s) of Bob Dylan … All song lyrics by Bob Dylan are copied from the texts available on the Bob Dylan website: http://www.bobdylan.com

Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964 - Concert at Philharmonic Hall, notes by Sean Wilentz, Columbia Legacy (CD), 2004

100

Early one morning the sun was shining I was laying in bed

I woke up one morning, maybe it was back in 2005, and with no special announcement, no special occasion, and no clear evidence of planning it seemed to be the Year of Bob Dylan. It was not even clear when it began. The calendar now reads 2008 and it is not clear when it will end. Like a movie already in progress, I came in to find the theater dark and images flashing on the wall. At this point in time, I don’t even remember the order in which the images appeared. The order matters less than the sudden glut of availability. What was not there for so many decades is now on the market. As a result, the past is present in ways it had not been for decades. A collective Old Man was re-playing his past, talking to his collective Self. Do you remember? these pieces of evidence seem to ask. Do you want to try to understand, do you want to see what it looked like and hear what it sounded like? And for those of you who couldn’t possibly remember a time before you were born, do you want to know where this collective Self came from? I was 15 years old, standing in the music store after a trumpet lesson, waiting for a ride home, staring at the poster pinned to the wall advertising new releases from Columbia Records. There’s a picture of a skinny young man standing on a stage with his harmonica rack and guitar under the title Bob Dylan In Concert. The announced recording was never released. And then the piece of evidence disappeared. Then one morning, there it was. The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall, a full concert recording from a period that previously existed only in the memory of the audience that saw Dylan in those three short years when he was the Wunderkind folk singer of Greenwich Village. Who was waiting to hear this evening? Who wanted to read Sean Wilentz, now a Professor of History (slash American Studies) at Princeton University, whose family ran the Eighth Street Bookstore a few blocks north of

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Washington Square, describing the event? Sean Wilentz’s father and uncle ran the store, co-published a series of poetry books with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) under the name Totem/Corinth, books that in retrospect seem like gems of early work by great American poets – Philip Whalen, Paul Blackburn, Gary Snyder, Edward Dorn – who all led or still live long and complicated lives. I am thinking about The War on a spring afternoon in 1969 during a weekend foray into the Village from the Westchester suburbs. I walk past the NYU houses of Henry James’ Washington Square to the Eighth Street Bookstore to find Planet News from Allen Ginsberg. I walk into Village Voice, the English-language bookstore in Paris, and there is an enormous book titled Dylan’s Vision of Sin. Many books proposing to tell the story of Dylan’s life or the meaning hidden in his songs had appeared before, but this one seemed to be different. The biographical note about the author, Christopher Ricks, informs the reader that “in 2004, he was elected the Oxford Professor of Poetry”. Christopher Ricks is a man who has edited the work of Alfred Lord Tennyson, A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot and written books on John Keats and Samuel Beckett. His attention span had previously covered the Romantics to the Early PostModern. Now he was extending himself into the Contemporary. If this man was writing about Bob Dylan’s songs – and that was the sole subject of his book – then these songs must be English literature. All this confluence of back-filling the past and literary analysis might have been sheer coincidence if, on what seems like the very same morning, Chronicles, Volume One had not also appeared. Dylan himself was writing about his past, creating a memoir about how he became the character that wrote and performed the songs for which he is now well known. The writing makes it clear that in his seventh decade he has very clear memories. He maintains tremendous authority and control over these memories, in much the same way he maintains control over his recordings, films, paintings, and private affairs, and uses them to some purpose. The chronology of the narrative is both precise and fragmented, leaping across decades to describe both an origin and a process. The weather visible out the window of an apartment on a particular evening is quite clear. Exactly what preceded or followed that meteorological event is not. The books pulled by an autodidact from a friend’s library, a blend of Classical Greek history and German military technique, are described in some detail. The subject of the narrative is the creation of a persona, an account of the influences he wove to create a body of work that continues to tour the world in the form of

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Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Vision of Sin, Ecco/ Harper Collins, 2005

Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One, Simon & Schuster, 2004

101

Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, Faber & Faber, 2005

Martin Scorsese, Bob Dylan - No Direction Home, Paramount, 2005

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a performance artist and inhabit the minds inside a million heads. The momentum continued as a decade-nostalgia for the hopeful revolutionary 1960s began to spread (it is interesting to note how we like to remember revolutionary times as hopeful rather than desperate). With a sense of timing that could only have been organized by an adroit book editor, Greil Marcus’ extended essay, Like A Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, appeared to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Dylan’s anomalous popular single. Marcus does his best to recreate this summer of 1965 event – the recording, release, and ascent to the top of the American pop music charts of “Like A Rolling Stone” where it still resides, firmly lodged in the granite edifice of Classic 60s Rock playlists. Marcus paints a portrait of a long poem, a text neither he nor anyone else has ever seen (another piece of evidence withheld), confronting a recording session with ambitious young musicians trying to discover what they should sound like, a play managed by those invisible directors of creation, the session producer and artist’s manager who, like the publisher-editor or the gallerist and art critic, illuminate and insinuate their presence into what we see as the final work. The foundations of this past were more firmly established when No Direction Home was broadcast in the US and England and quickly published on DVD. The documentary tells the story of Bob Dylan’s life from childhood in Minnesota to his time in New York’s Greenwich Village music scene to his electric band tours that ended in 1966. So once again we are presented with a wrap-up that ends with a year an even number of decades (four) in the past. Dylan appears in interviews, looking like he does in the 21st century, describing this carefully circumscribed part of his past. He is forcefully supported by footage of performances, press conferences, and the brilliantly captured moments in parties, hotel rooms, and limousines filmed by D.A. Pennebacker. His current reflections on the past are remarkably cogent and clear. The same can be said of all the people who participated in this conventional exercise in oral history, from Dave Van Ronk to Susie Rotollo to Paul Nelson to Tony Glover to Joan Baez to Allen Ginsberg to Izzy Young to John Cohen to Bob Neuwirth. Everyone was there and, unlike certain Presidents of the United States, all have a clear memory. Everyone knows what part of the drama they witnessed. No Direction Home, made in 2005 and broadcast in 2006, is the past framed by the future. Allen Ginsberg had died in 1997, Dave Van Ronk in 2002. The interview footage must have been carefully gathered for over a decade by Bob Dylan’s organization. Martin Scorsese is credited as director

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and David Tedeschi as the editor. No one is given credit for writing the script. On the money side, the film’s release is prominently sponsored by the iPod creationists of Apple Computer, eagerly seeking to become the earphone conduit to everyone’s musical consumption. The executive producer lineup includes Paul G. Allen, the other person who made an enormous fortune from Microsoft Corporation. Allen’s personal interests include enshrining Jimi Hendrix, creating the Experience Music Project – the museum in Seattle that displays his collection of famous guitars – and most recently bankrolling private space travel while morphing the extra space in his Frank Gehry building into The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. This frame does not intrude into the picture itself. The documentary sucks you in again and again with wonderful leaps from historical footage to concerts, surprising monologues confronting television broadcasts. Scorsese’s direction resulted in a documentary with a wonderful momentum and edgy style. It’s success has spawned the appearance of more video evidence. In 2007, Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 2007 appeared, to fill in the pieces that did not make the Scorcese cut of Dylan performing in Newport in the early 1960s. A second DVD release of Pennebacker’s Don’t Look Back now includes concert footage omitted from the original film. Recordings and films of Bob Dylan’s performance in the 1960s is more available now than it was forty years ago.

Murray Lerner, The Other Side of the Mirror: Live at Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965, Sony, 2007 D.A. Pennebaker, Bob Dylan - Don’t Look Back (1965 Tour Deluxe Edition), New Video Group, 2007

2. …Sifting The Evidence… Christopher Rick’s Dylan’s Vision of Sin is made up primarily of long discursive essays about individual songs. He tends to focus on the way Dylan uses words – rhyme, rhythm, allusion – with frequent descents into the enormous etymological well of the Oxford English Dictionary, and often enough this is informative. He goes on for several pages about the phrase “Times change”. Times change The times change The times are changin’ The times are a-changin’ The times they are a-changin’ For the times they are a-changin’

To which he adds, “The acorn has grown into a royal oak” (260). When the song was popular I can’t recall anyone asking why Dylan used this odd archaic sounding language. Why does the clipped ending of changin’

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James Ellison, Younger Than That Now: The Collected Interviews with Bob Dylan, Da Capo Press, 2004. Jonathan Cott , Bob Dylan the Essential Interviews, Wenner 2006.

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seem more authoritative than the full pronunciation of the word? Why add another vowel before it? Why add this pronoun? If you think about it too long, it sounds like some immigrant who thinks in his mother tongue and puts the thought into English – “For the dinner, she’s a-ready”. The major value of Ricks’ book lies not in his erudite thesis of medieval sins and virtues. This thesis is used primarily to structure his own language play built upon Dylan’s lyrics. The great value is in his second chapter, “Songs, Poems, Rhymes”. He does an illuminating job of covering the value of rhyme – a topic all but absent in most discussions of American poetry – and he does it from a completely Brit Lit point of view. So the continuum of John Milton, John Keats, Robert Burns, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins with the writing of Dylan is something he can acknowledge rather than construct. He simply finds it in the language. He does not have to provide a trail of influence, though he does his best to cull what he can from Dylan’s interviews. The interview published in newspapers and magazines, transcribed from radio or television, had been the only text to refer to outside the song lyrics before the Year of Bob Dylan began in earnest. Professor Ricks must have had to rely on his own collection of copies and clippings. The bound collections followed his work, if not his thesis – Younger Than That Now: The Collected Interviews with Bob Dylan edited by James Ellison in the same year (but too late to be cited by Ricks), followed by Bob Dylan the Essential Interviews edited by Jonathan Cott in 2006. The only thing I remember about the interviews when they were happening early in Dylan’s career was his answer to the question “can you tell me what the song ‘Desolation Row’ is about?” To which Dylan replied “About fifteen minutes.” I am quoting that from memory and might have it wrong. The evasion seemed masterful at the time, and belongs to another subject, his ability to play with people’s expectations. I don’t recall anyone asking him about rhyme. Ricks manages to point out that Dylan mastered the art of writing songs and songs are made from words organized into patterns held together by rhythm and rhymes. Rhymed poetry had disappeared from serious American verse by the beginning of the Modern. Whitman had left it, Dickinson had dispersed it, and both were appreciated as precursors, prophets of what was to come. Ezra Pound dismissed Amy Lowell for using it. Modern masters from W.C. Williams to Charles Olson and Robert Creeley had explored a different way of making verse – tuned to an irregular music, one part rhetoric and one part speech. Pound found music in Provencal, Williams in American speech, Olson in

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Hesiod and Creeley in pure tension. Allen Ginsberg began with the same retro-rhyme his father, Louis Ginsberg, had used and then fused biblical and jazz rhythms into a music of emotional thought rhetoric, an imitation of spontaneous language, what you thought your thoughts might sound like if you could hear them. All these techniques were different from the music of songs. Ricks largely ignores the possibility that Dylan learned how to master song writing from the not-at-all literary oral traditions of America. Because of this, his book is not particularly accurate but he is refreshing. His readings provide a means to appreciate the subtlety of how Dylan uses internal rhyme, the surprising juxtaposition of end rhymes, in combination with bursts of syllables to stretch or shrink a line within a repeating form. His essay on “Love Minus Zero / No Limit” (1964) displays most of his own virtues and vices. This song-poem he classifies under the virtue of Temperance. He tells us that W.H. Auden once said there were two kinds of poems: the ones whose titles you could guess and the ones whose title was a surprise. This is one of those songs whose title could not be guessed by reciting the lyrics. My love she speaks like silence, Without ideals or violence, She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful, Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire. People carry roses, Make promises by the hours, My love she laughs like the flowers, Valentines can’t buy her.

The opening rhyme is a strong one, and the listener starts off with a quiet shock of contradictions. While silence and violence are a complete rhyme, their meaning offers a remarkable juxtaposition. Ricks finds echoes in a gently rocking verse by William Blake (Silently, invisibly) and a couplet in Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine’s Phèdre. In the dime stores and bus stations, People talk of situations, Read books, repeat quotations, Draw conclusions on the wall. Some speak of the future, My love she speaks softly, She knows there’s no success like failure And that failure’s no success at all.

He notes an important part of Dylan’s technique, visible in the way clear end-rhymes are marked in bold above, along with an irregular use of front alliteration rhyme marked in italic. We have one case (future, failure) which combines

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both techniques. An unrhymed end word (softly) stands out in the patterns woven by the verse. He notes the way the poet carefully defines “my love” in negative terms, by what she does not do or is not, and he finds echoes in the drama of Cordelia unable to speak about the love she has for her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear. He quotes from the Book of Daniel to recount the narrative which is source to the common phrase “the writing on the wall” and points out this Biblical allusion in the uncommon “draw conclusions on the wall”. The cloak and dagger dangles, Madams light the candles. In ceremonies of the horsemen, Even the pawn must hold a grudge. Statues made of match sticks, Crumble into one another, My love winks, she does not bother, She knows too much to argue or to judge. The bridge at midnight trembles, The country doctor rambles, Bankers’ nieces seek perfection, Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring. The wind howls like a hammer, The night blows cold and rainy, My love she’s like some raven At my window with a broken wing.

The puzzling and seductive logic of the verses seem to rapidly move from one frame of reference to another. But Ricks stays fixed on the Book of Daniel and uses it to add a conjectured double meaning to the “wise men” allusion. The gifts that wise men bring would first bring to mind the Three Magi. So wealthy children (banker’s nieces) expecting to be treated like the baby Jesus carries a certain feeling of profane materialism. But in Daniel the wise men are the false prophets of the Babylonian king, unable to read the Hebrew letters on the wall. Yet when it comes to resolving the powerful unrhymed “hammer” and the closing image of the raven, his certainty dissolves. This is another of the occasions in my experience of Dylan […] when I don’t know what to think, or what to feel, or quite how to argue and to judge. For there is at the end of the song what feels like a curious rounding on the woman. She has been evoked throughout the song in a way that is on the face of it incompatible with her being like a raven with a broken wing. Why is she like some raven with a broken wing? Because she has now been hit by a hammer? (300)

At which point Ricks slips from wings of a raven to Henry James and Wings of the Dove. Now, when I think about the

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wind howling like a hammer, I can hear hammering rain and raining blows and echoes of Pete Seeger’s “If I Had A Hammer” hammering out justice. And for any American who had to read Edgar Allan Poe through years of English classes, there is only one raven at a window. Dylan lived in Poe’s old neighborhood, literally if not figuratively. And literally, if not metaphorically, the raven is a very impressive North American bird, a dark giant you might encounter in the woods or on a deserted highway, the trickster of the Pacific Northwest. A raven is black, as in raven hair. But no matter what you hear or think, you are always left with a raven – not an eagle or an angel – with a broken wing. It also happens to be the only time Dylan ever used the word raven in a song. And that’s how the movie ends. There is no real value in trying to correct Ricks’ selection of associations. There is real value in letting his technique open up your mind and see how the machinery of a Dylan song works. I can describe one verse of one song – “Tangled Up In Blue” (1973) – the one that came to mind when I began this essay, using this Ricksian appreciation of rhythm and rhyme. Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’, I was layin’ in bed Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all If her hair was still red. Her folks they said our lives together Sure was gonna be rough They never did like Mama’s homemade dress Papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough. And I was standin’ on the side of the road Rain fallin’ on my shoes Heading out for the East Coast Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through, Tangled up in blue

Without understanding who is speaking, where the speaker is, or what he is doing, the rhymes communicate a metastructure, a high-level shape offered to memory and apprehension. Mornin’ is shinin’, something is red. Its rough and something’s not enough. These shoes have paid dues to get through in blue. The listener (or the memorist or singer trying to re-create the song) hears the internal and end rhymes first. Then, the rhymes are pushed and pulled by the elastic rhythms. The third lines have the same four-stress rhythm packed into or pulled from a range of syllables. The first of the third-line structures is compressed by reducing three syllables (won-der-ing) to two (won-drin) and by slurring

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two words into a single stress (if-she). The second is elongated by stressing a two syllable word (Ma-ma’s) followed by a two syllable unstressed word (home-made). The third is tightened even further with single syllables for each stress and nothing between East and Coast. This technique had been mastered ten years before. Look how the tuneless rhythms of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1964) are intricately pieced together: Johnny’s in the basement Mixing up the medicine I’m on the pavement Thinking about the government The man in the trench coat Badge out, laid off Says he’s got a bad cough Wants to get it paid off

This is LANGUAGE poetry. Basement=pavement=government; laid off=bad cough=paid off. The words are the thing itself. They take up the space, they bounce, they grow from some mysterious activity. At the same time, it is a syncopated 4-4 waltz rhythm: 1-3-4, 2-3-4. Then, without a breath of warning, in comes a refrain you haven’t even heard yet: Look out kid It’s somethin’ you did

And the 4-4 LANGUAGE waltz continues, this time with a new rhythm of end rhymes: 1-2-4, 2-4. God knows when But you’re doin’ it again You better duck down the alley way Lookin’ for a new friend The man in the coon-skin cap In the big pen Wants eleven dollar bills You only got ten

Where Ricks excels at riffing on the literary dimensions of verse, Griel Marcus has a true gift for describing music with words. He does his best to generate flashes of insight by mixing the waters of American history and the oils of popular culture. He reminds us that before the success of “Like A Rolling Stone” no one in show business would have imagined an audience listening to a pop song that went on for more than six minutes. I had the pleasure to listen to Marcus read a selection from the book, his description of Michael Bloomfield’s guitar playing. Marcus’ prose conveys the sharp, speeding energy Bloomfield brought to the moment captured

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in the recording. But ultimately he is not able to reveal any new dimension of the song/recording itself. It was a turning point in a never-ending series of turning points, neither the high point nor the low point of a literary and musical career that has insinuated itself into so many corners of so many rooms that events in this particular recording studio do not stand out against the sky for very long. Perhaps it is a testimony to Dylan’s own sense of taste that the longer piece of writing the song lyrics were drawn from has not been published in a manner similar to Eliot’s pre-edited “Waste Land”, Ginsberg’s typescript of “Howl”, or Rimbaud’s unaltered notebooks. But Marcus had already made the greatest contribution to the Year of Bob Dylan almost ten years before it began. Dylan’s withdrawal from performance in 1966 generated a curious form of intellectual larceny, the bootleg recordings. His audience began to publish and circulate unauthorized copies of anything they could get their hands on. If he wouldn’t sell it to the love-hate audience, they knew how to steal it. His desire and ability to repel and attract his audience was another dimension of his art. The most compelling of these unauthorized recordings was known as The Basement Tapes. In 1997, Marcus published Invisible Republic, Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (later retitled The Old Weird America), a remarkable blend of music criticism and social history. The subject was the time (then thirty years before) when Dylan had recorded a group of songs in a basement studio, away from the commercial music business, for purposes that must have included recreation, therapy, and selling them to other groups to record. The book was about the secret history of the musical sources Dylan built on, the recording of various styles of popular ethnic music in the 1930s, and the transmission of that music to a new generation. The vehicle of that transmission had been a set of LP recordings, published in New York in the 1950s, themselves culled from discarded commercial 78 recordings found in second-hand record stores. The year Invisible Republic appeared, Smithsonian Folkways re-released, now as a set of six CDs, The Anthology of American Folk Music edited by Harry Smith containing this major source for Dylan and the musicians he had come of age with in New York. Harry Smith’s role as a counter-folklorist was handsomely and profoundly revealed, further enhanced by thoughtful essays published with the new Smithsonian package. Marcus’ book created an audience for the music, and the music helped explain the book. A few years before this (1992-93), Dylan produced two excellent collections of folk songs, ending what

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Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic, Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Owl Books/ Henry Holt & Co., 1997

Various Artists, Anthology of American Folk Music (Edited by Harry Smith), Smithsonian Folkways, 1997

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I will judgmentally call the weakest period of his musical career. He demonstrated that he was really good at singing songs from the late 19th and early 20th century. He could convincingly sing the songs of Stephen Foster, Mississippi John Hurt, and Blind Willie McTell. Perhaps that re-emergence of Bob Dylan in the persona of a folk singer, inspired Marcus to investigate. I have no special knowledge of why these things happened. Don’t let my sentences fool you into thinking that any one of these events caused the other. 3. … Seen From Where We Are Now … What Dylan did in the 1960s was to use American folk music – which includes story ballads, talking monologues, country music, rhythm & blues, popular songs transmitted on vinyl and radio – as a vehicle for profound poetry. That seems obvious enough now, but what is not so obvious is why this was so radical, and why we should continue to think it was profound then or is profound today. At the time he began his work, songs were thought of as culture only by folklorists, musicologists, and anthropologists – and anthropologists who sought the meaning of human interaction did not study Euro-American culture. Franz Boas and his disciples, who did such a remarkable job recording Native American language, story and song, did not study the people who were displacing them. There was nobody to study as there was nothing to be lost. Nobody wrote folk music. Folk music was created by Anonymous Tradition. Poetry was made by individual poets. At the height of his 1960s career, at a time when one did not need a magnifying glass to read the text used to package recordings, Bob Dylan published poetry and prose on his album covers, but this form of writing did not have a great impact. What had enormous impact was his ability to channel the language and rhythms and narrative strategies of all forms of American music into poetic psychodramas. Like any dramatic form, these songs happened in the space between the performer and the audience. The achievement was made of many parts: what the performer said, how he said it, how he charmed and challenged the audience’s ability to understand what he was saying. The audience he played to began as college students in the Midwest and evolved into tourists and urban voyeurs in New York’s Greenwich Village. What Dylan was singing was remote and mysterious to all of them, yet he rapidly seduced them into feeling they were listening to a hidden part of themselves, their own hopes, conscience and fears. The connection between the song subjects and the audience was illusive. Why would anyone who had grown up in urban post-war America care about a

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lonesome train whistle (did trains make people lonesome)? A lover sailing across the sea (sounded romantic)? The sound of a workman’s hammer (sounded biblical)? A boxer from Cuba (sounded frightening)? A woman who took out the garbage (had we seen her)? The illusive romance of these images was inextricable woven into an image of the performer, a boyman, representing the present incarnation of the unexperienced – and so unremembered and mysterious – past. That might have been enough, but for reasons of his own, reasons Bob Dylan doesn’t feel shy about describing today, he felt compelled to shock this same audience out of their reverie. As the success of the illusion closed around him, he quickly added another dimension to his art – the ability to change his image each time the audience developed an image of who he was. In a few short years, his audience convinced itself that he was many things: a folk singer from the Midwest, a poet of the Civil Rights movement, a prophet of the American generation born after the Second World War. In retrospect, it is not clear who convinced who – we can now see that he was capable of playing all of these roles when it suited his temperament and art form. Bob Dylan was and is a song writer, an art form that is poorly understood. We think we understand what a playwright does: write plays that groups of people can perform for groups of people who suspend their disbelief to enjoy the play. There is a passage at the end of Chronicles where Dylan describes watching the audience during the performance of Brecht/Weill songs at the Theater de Lys in the West Village. He was at the theater to meet his girlfriend, not to see the play, but nonetheless he was seeing how Lottie Lenya’s performance of Marc Blitzstein’s English translation of Brecht’s Pirate Jenny drew everyone in and then left them squirming in their seats. [Brecht’s songs] were like folk songs in nature, but unlike folk songs, too, because they were sophisticated. […] Later, I found myself taking the song apart, trying to find out what made it tick, why it was so effective. I could see that everything in it was apparent and visible but you didn’t notice it too much. (273, 275)

It is a wonderful moment of revelation. Brecht wrote plays, but it was the songs that survived the plays being performed. Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong could entertain audiences with Mack The Knife and no one had to see the Three Penny Opera or ponder the political implications of the lyrics. And while they were entertaining, the songs were disturbing. The Bob Dylan who had learned how to make people listen to songs but not yet learned how to write them saw this. He knew that he wanted to do that.

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You could almost say he wanted to learn how to make his audience feel uncomfortable, but that would focus on the means rather than the end. He wanted to make his audience notice that they were wrong, that they didn’t know what to think, that a song could entirely undermine their pre-conceptions about who they were, how they felt, and what they wanted to do next. These people in the audience didn’t know who he was, and he was going to show them that they didn’t even know what that meant. When Bob Dylan rose to fame, his audience didn’t have to know why railroad men drink up your blood like wine to feel what his song wanted them to feel. They were happy to think that whatever railroad men were, they must be a metaphor for something dangerous, just as a mojo was a metaphor for something sexy. In the Folk Scene at the time there were hundreds of people who were singing these songs with coded messages created by working-class English-speaking people in America during various periods, and no one knew where they came from or what they really meant. We had collectively forgotten all our history in part because it wasn’t actually ours. A majority of the US population in the 1950s came from families that had not been in America before the Civil War. No one was teaching the social history of the last 100 years. We learned the story of the American Revolution in school, saw an idealized Wild West on TV every night, and all the movies were about World War II. I learned Jump Down, Turn Around, Pick A Bale of Cotton in Roosevelt Elementary School in New Rochelle, New York. No one in the school had ever seen a cotton plant or knew what a bale was or had the slightest idea what it felt like to pick one up. And a few years later, Jimi Hendrix could perform All Along The Watchtower (1968) and no one had to know the Book of Isaiah or hear the formal structure of an Appalachian ballad or have read Allen Ginsberg to be impressed. Isaiah, 21:6-10, Masoretic Text: For thus hath the Lord said unto me: Go, set a watchman; Let him declare what he seeth! And when he seeth a troop, horsemen by pairs, A troop of asses, a troop of camels, He shall hearken diligently with much heed. And he cried as a lion: ‘Upon the watch-tower, O Lord, I stand continually in the day-time, And I am set in my ward all the nights.’ And, behold, there came a troop of men, horsemen by pairs. And he spoke and said: ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon;

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And all the graven images of her gods are broken unto the ground.’ O thou my threshing, and the winnowing of my floor, That which I have heard from the Lord of hosts, The God of Israel, have I declared unto you.

Allen Ginsberg, “Holy Ghost On The Nod Over The Body Of Bliss”, Planet News, 1968: Is this the God of Gods, the one I heard about in memorized language Universities murmur? Dollar bills can buy it! the great substance exchanges itself freely through all the world’s poetry money, past and future currencies issued & redeemed by the identical bank, electric monopoly after monopoly owl-eyed on every one of 90 billion dollarbills vibrating to the pyramid-top in the United State of Heaven –

Dylan, 1968: “There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief, “There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief. Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth, None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.” “No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke, “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate, So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” All along the watchtower, princes kept the view While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too. Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl, Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

By the time the same audience was presented with symbolic characters whose names echoed numerous folk lyrics – “you say that I’m an outlaw and you say that I’m a thief” (Woody Guthrie) – they were accustomed to not knowing with their conscious mind what was going on in this or any other story.

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Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers, Columbia Records (LP), 1961

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Everyone in urban-suburban and many parts of rural America was experiencing the fact that an enormous infrastructure had been built for diffusing popular music. This same engine was not pushing out poetry. Record companies, radio stations, television programs, cinema – all these businesses were pushing out music. The music store had instruments lining the walls, bins of LPs with listening booths for playing them, racks of current 45s, and piles of Top 40 hit lists distributed each week by the local radio station. There was a radio in every car. There was a television in every house – and in the prosperous households of 1960s suburbia a television in every room – movie theaters in every town, and concerts at every college campus. This was where we received our culture, mediated by the weekly magazines that fell through the front door mail slot, the images we emulated and imagined from. This infrastructure was run by Disney and CBS and NBC and RCA and Columbia Records and Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox and Time Magazine. It may have been 1961 when Dylan arrived in New York, but it was still the conformist 1950s – decades always last about five years into the next one. So after “studying” folk music in Minneapolis and Greenwich Village for two years, Bob Dylan figured out how to write songs made from this mysterious language that everyone was singing. He channeled Robert Johnson (who had channeled Son House) and Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams and Dave Van Ronk (who with a dry and sophisticated wit was already channeling a dozen other singers) and Charlie Chaplin. He read the rhyme and music of Edgar Allen Poe and Enid Starkie’s translations of Arthur Rimbaud. He started changing the words, writing different words with similar phrases to similar tunes, changing the stories to relate to things that were happening at the time, a technique Woodrow Wilson Guthrie had already refined into a popular art. In the same stream of consciousness that fingers Brecht’s dramatic art, the memorist of Chronicles describes the impact of receiving a vinyl pre-release of Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers during a visit with John Hammond at Columbia Records. Dylan describes playing it for Van Ronk, whose musically educated ear heard the imitation of the earlier blues singers – Johnson’s recordings were made in 1936-37, late in the period that defined Delta Blues. But Dylan, a young man without a sense of linear time, an ear attuned more to intensity than originality, hears something quite different and feels “like I’d been hit by a tranquilizer bullet.” He hears a synthesis, a mastery of language and delivery, a driving force.

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I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction – themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I didn’t have any of these dreams or thoughts, but I was going to acquire them. I thought about Johnson a lot, wondered who his audience could have been. It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. (285)

These songs didn’t seem to be aimed at another culture, the farm-hand children and grandchildren of slaves. They seemed to be aimed at him. The lyrics were apocalyptic, cryptic, fluid. Robert Johnson: If I had possession over judgment day If I had possession over judgment day Lord, the little woman I’m lovin’ wouldn’t have no right to pray … I have a bird to whistle I have a bird to sing Have a bird to whistle and I have a bird to sing I have a woman that I’m lovin boy, but she don’t mean a thing

Dylan: I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings. I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings. But I ain’ a-got Corrina, Life don’t mean a thing.

Child Ballad #12 (Lord Randall): “O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son? And where ha you been, my handsome young man?” “I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon, For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.” “An wha met ye there, Lord Randal, my son? And wha met ye there, my handsome young man?” “O I met wi my true-love; mother, mak my bed soon, For I’m wearied wi huntin, and fain wad lie down.” “And what did she give you, Lord Randal, My son? And wha did she give you, my handsome young man?” “Eels fried in a pan; mother, mak my bed soon, For I’m wearied wi huntin, and fein wad lie down.”

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Dylan: Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Oh, where have you been, my darling young one? I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains, I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways, I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests, I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans, I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard, And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

In this little Greenwich Village world, maybe 100 people who all knew one another, Dylan pulled off an original leap of literary form. In a culture steeped in nostalgia for a world that was gone before most of the performers were born, he began to produce new material that sounded old (=authentic, since everything new was false and commercial), was about a psychological now (when everyone was singing about remote mining disasters, ancient murders, blues complaining about a place no one had ever been), and everyone could listen to and relate to it. More importantly, most of the audience could sing it, memorize it, internalize it. He was shy at first, slipping only one of his own songs onto his first recording, but he sensed he was producing songs that everyone wanted to sing. Bob Dylan, the memorist, gives a long account of why he did this. The way he remembers it, he wasn’t inspired or elected – he was driven to it, forced to change his plan to be a folk singer by an evening of listening to Mike Seeger play at a private party. Mike was skin-stinging. He was tense, poker-faced and radiated telepathy, wore a snowy white shirt and silver sleeve bands. He played on all the various planes, the full index of the old-time styles, played in all the genres and had the idioms mastered – Delta blues, ragtime, minstrel songs, buck-and-wing, dance reels, play party, hymns and gospel – being there and seeing him up close, something hit me. It’s not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them. … The thought occurred to me that maybe I’d have to write my own folk songs, ones that Mike didn’t know. That was a startling thought. Up ‘til then, I’d gone some places and thought I knew my way around. And then it struck me that I’d never been there before. You open a door to a dark room and you think you know what’s there, where everything is arranged, but you really don’t know until you step inside. (70-72)

This kid who had evaded his family place and business, pretended to be an orphan, escaped from college, eluded any recognizable form of the heritage others might construct around

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him, opened a door into a house of mirrors where no one could tell where anything was coming from. Dylan was not alone in what he was doing, but in retrospect he seems to have been alone in his sense of purpose. He set out to harness the mystery of an art form that others were imitating. He was so much better at writing these songs once he started that he was quickly in a class by himself. In one year he went from singing for free to recording for Columbia Records, promoted by television appearances, concerts and the echo of others singing his songs. In a few more years, he was the sought-after performer and favorite song writer of an enormous audience. In No Direction Home, Allen Ginsberg recalls going with Dylan to a concert date in Chicago in 1964 and witnessing the intensity and control of his performance. If Ginsberg had not recorded this beautiful description, it would be one of those “you had to be there” things. In a short time, the audience he drew had gotten over the shock of his style and delivery. John Cohen, who is consistently generous and insightful in everything he says in No Direction Home, describes a producer at Vanguard Records rejecting Dylan for being “too visceral”. He was not smooth or melodic at a time when popular folk singers (Joan Baez, Peter-Paul-and-Mary, Judy Collins, Josh White) were both. This voice he created with its harsh twang was less a lack of vocal talent than a reminder of a sound and sensation that we were supposed to forget. His syncopated way of delivering the words was to become an original technique for driving meaning into syllables and bending the language of the songs. The language he had learned to deliver this way combined archaic English phrasing and refrains, Biblical references, blues couplets, surrounded by spontaneous bop prosody emanating from Beat poetry. The combination was disarming in its surrealism. Dylan (circa 1962): I can’t see my reflection in the waters, I can’t speak the sounds that show no pain, I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps, Or can’t remember the sound of my own name. Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin’, Yes, and if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin’, Only if she was lyin’ by me, Then I’d lie in my bed once again.

My own true love coexists with the sounds that show no pain. The same voice that can sing about her heart a-softly poundin’ can shift to the mental state where he can’t remember the sound of my own name. Dylan (circa 1965): You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last. But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.

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Yonder stands your orphan with his gun, Crying like a fire in the sun. Look out the saints are comin’ through And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

The saints are comin’ through the audience’s head without the slightest understanding of what saints are or why they should be marching or why a marching band in New Orleans – that most exotic mix of European, African, Caribbean and American cultures – might play such a song at a funeral. But the snare-drum rim-shots of syllables make the internal and end-rhymes of the previous couplet unforgettable, not only for the imagery but for the way the imagery both hangs from and creates the music. YONder stands your ORphan with his GUN CRYing like a FIre in the SUN

And then you have internalized it yourself, long before you can even think about the image. What kind of intensity is communicated by this cry? He was a folk singer who was singing only his own material, which was being written so fast, as Wilentz points out, that if you were familiar with his concerts and recordings, each new performance was always made up of things you had heard before and things you had never heard. In his notes for Bob Dylan Live 1964, Wilentz describe that strange sensation the audience felt when they first heard these verses. The call and response happened not at the Amen Bench of the concert church but in the dim spaces of the individual’s mind as he or she wandered back to sleep in their private bedroom. Dylan (“Gates of Eden” introduced as “A lullaby in D minor”, 1964): Of war and peace the truth just twists Its curfew gull just glides Upon four-legged forest clouds The cowboy angel rides With his candle lit into the sun Though its glow is waxed in black All except when ‘neath the trees of Eden

The Audience (Wilentz): Two hours later, we would leave the premises and head back underground to the IRT, exhilarated, entertained, and ratified, but also confused about the snatches of lines we’d gleaned from the strange new songs. What was that weird lullaby in D minor? What in God’s name is a perfumed gull (or did he sing “curfewed gal”)?

Dylan had become, as Ginsberg puts it, one column of breath, his whole body delivering these words that were mesmerizing to listen to coming from this strange foreign voice. This performance art was completely authentic to the audience.

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Few people knew what he was imitating, had even heard the music he was translating and transforming into songs unlike anything they had heard coming from that infrastructure, relentlessly flipping channels on the television, pushing buttons on the car radio, seeping from elevators. Returning now to the concert that Wilentz describes hearing at age 13, we can hear the performance artist, who is as he reassures his audience “wearing my Bob Dylan mask”, carefully modulate and interweave the familiar with the unnerving, simultaneously basking in his popularity. Then there is the moment of rupture when his performance crossed a line. John Cohen, again in No Direction Home, gives his own marvelous reaction to that first shocking moment when Dylan, perhaps naively, threw his blossoming rhythm and blues synthesis in the face of the Newport Folk Festival audience in 1965. As Dylan and the electrified band launch into “Maggie’s Farm”, Cohen recognizes the echo of a song on the Harry Smith anthology, “Down on Penny’s Farm”. He remembers thinking that Dylan had brought it “up to date”. The Bently Boys (1929): Go into the fields And you work all day Deep into the night But you get no pay Promise you some meat Or a little bucket of lard It’s hard to make a living On Penny’s farm It’s a hard time in the country Down on Penny’s farm

Dylan (1965): I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. Well, I wake in the morning, Fold my hands and pray for rain. I got a head full of ideas That are drivin’ me insane. It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor. I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

That little transformation, from ancient fiddle and stomp to Michael Bloomfield’s electric guitar slashing across tender ears and vibrating the bones above their hearts, turned out to be the most disturbing performance many people in the audience had ever seen. The audience didn’t get upset because Dylan had taken a sharecropper’s protest against a landlord and turned it into a metaphysical protest against being expected to follow other people’s goals. They were

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upset because he wasn’t acting the way they, the audience, expected him to act. The Newport Folk Festival audience, people focused enough on folk music to get themselves to a Rhode Island resort town from wherever else they were spending their summer, was there to hear Dylan because their minds and ears had been opened by two important keys. They had heard his songs sweetly interpreted by Peter Paul and Mary (the apparently authentic folk trio created by the man who was also Dylan’s manager), so the cornerstone songs that promised prophecy and appealed to conscience – “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “The Times They Are a-Changin’” – were already familiar. This whining singer had been introduced to unsuspecting thousands by Joan Baez, a woman who’s melodic powers had charmed everyone. These two acts – and they were both major actors, molding the expectations of their considerable audiences with their appearance, their choice of songs, their choice of political causes – opened the door for Dylan’s art, willingly, with great conviction, and with their own high expectations. In the summer of 1962 at the YMCA auditorium in Pittsfield, Massachusetts I heard this voice coming from a scruffy kid dressed in farm-hand overalls at what I thought was a Joan Baez concert – that was the experience the audience had paid for – and I thought he sounded horrible. I was one month shy of my own thirteenth birthday, two years before Professor Wilentz experienced his. When I recognized that this kid was singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in that whiny voice – a song that was played on Top 10 radio that summer by Peter Paul and Mary – I distinctly remember leaning over to the person sitting next to me and saying “If the person who wrote that song hears him singing it like that, he’ll kill him.” But before Baez returned to save the evening, I also remember being drawn in and intrigued by a song that seemed to be about the murder of Black Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, yet it seemed to say something sympathetic about the White people who killed him. That was a complex thought for an almost thirteen-year-old mind to catch, but Dylan communicated it. You didn’t have to understand him or like him to find him intriguing. Today it is wonderfully ironic to see Peter Yarrow (whose family also arrived in America from the same faraway Ukraine as Dylan’s grandmother) nervously introduce Dylan’s line-crossing performance in Newport in No Direction Home. The wonder boy who gave his contemporaries such good material had certainly succeeded in putting them in an uncomfortable situation.

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Dylan’s audience was very big by then, and for all the people who hated what he was doing because it crossed their evil-commercialism line, there were also many who learned to love hearing this synthesis coming through the broad channel of popular music and didn’t know or care about the line at all. The animosity is captured on a recording that was circulating in the early 1970s as a bootleg album and in 1998 had become The Bootleg Series Vol. 4, Bob Dylan Live 1966. Here we have the audio record of the love-hate tug of war that went on between the artist and the audience, as he delivered musical messages in Manchester England to people who thought they knew the difference between folk music and pop music. In No Direction Home we see more of this fight between transmitters and receptors in footage that Pennebaker shot for a film Dylan decided not to release. The Complainers are easier to capture on film, and louder, than the Bewildered and Content. And the artist who set out to make his audience uncomfortable seems engaged in a dialog with that part of the audience trying to make him uncomfortable back. “Play it fucking loud” Dylan famously instructs his group before starting into “Like A Rolling Stone”, as if the intensity of the sound and the blinking of his eyes would hold back the conflict he’d created. And, in a way, he was right. Not that playing it louder would resolve the conflict but that blinking his eyes, he could make it change direction. No Direction Home makes another contribution to this vision of a man in love with his own word power. We watch a sequence of Bob Dylan gazing at the signs on a pet shop somewhere in England. He reads the language on the signs:

Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall Concert”, notes by Tony Glover, Columbia Legacy (CD), 1998

We will collect clip bath & return your dog KN1 7727 cigarettes and tobacco Animals & birds bought – or – sold on commission

Then he begins to re-arrange it into rhythmic and increasingly surreal assertions. He is blasting the cameraman,

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faster and funnier each time the film starts rolling. I’m lookin’ for a place that’s gonna animal my soul knit my return bathe my foot and collect my dog [cut] commission me to sell my animals to bird my clip and buy my bath and return me back to the cigarettes

Then the scene cuts to a London concert in 1966 during the final months of his year of touring. By 1966, he could make songs out of anything. This level of formal sophistication had been achieved in about four years of study, analysis, and performance. There were chord changes, tunes, and musical arrangements behind it all. But like the larger theatricality they established, the music survives only in memory, if you’ve heard it, and most certainly when you’ve heard it over and over and over again – this repetition is the very nature of popular music – and only portions of it survive when it is all reduced to the words on the page. But if it had not been written, banged out on a typewriter, carefully prepared and memorized, it would not have been performed. 4. …In the Hall of Mirrors Chronicles is the memoir of an elusive man. Its author directs a great deal of wit and bile towards the people who criticized him for not being the public persona they wanted him to be. Then he devotes just as much care to guarding what he’s defined as his private life from view. The entire narrative is very precise in the way the memorist does not describe his family or his religious background or beliefs. He recalls the names and appearance of many people he knew in Minnesota and New York in the years leading up to 1965, and he has a way of sketching each one with an emotional aura and physical details. But all the members of his own family are unmentioned or, if mentioned, invisible. A daughter-in-law is cooking something good for dinner, but only the scent of her cooking is described. A wife accompanies him on a motorcycle ride into the Louisiana countryside, and the only glimpse we catch of her in the prose is when she puts down her John Le Carré novel to apply some eye shadow, signaling that it is time to leave the country store where they stopped. His reminiscences of childhood includes advice from a one-legged

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pipe-smoking grandmother who had “come to America from Odessa”, and this is the only suggestion of an ethnic background beyond the recollection of growing up in the Iron Range region of northern Minnesota. We have an entire chapter devoted to how our hero set out to destroy his audience’s fixation with the image that brought him fame. Like the description of how he was forced to become a songwriter, the purpose of this campaign is clear: “Liberty for myself and my loved ones had to be secured.” I went to Jerusalem, got myself photographed at the Western Wall wearing a skullcap. The image was transmitted worldwide instantly and quickly all the great rags changed me overnight into a Zionist. (122)

This is the only reference to Judaism in the entire book. The only other subject that approaches religious belief is a description of not eating pork, inspired by a sermon he heard on the radio where Malcom X pointed out that pigs are related to rats. Just where that places him on the JudeoChristian-Islamic spectrum seems intentionally ambiguous, as if to say why should there be anyplace to stand. The question everyone wants to ask him is “what do you believe in?” The answer, repeated in the songs many times, appears in a-chronological observations that employ a distinctly Protestant biblical language to cast judgment on a present nostalgic for a past. Dylan’s summation of mankind in the final verse of “Blind Willie McTell” (1983) is my personal favorite. Well, God is in his heaven And we all want what’s his But power and greed and corruptible seed Seem to be all that there is I’m gazing out the window Of the St. James Hotel And I know no one can sing the blues Like Blind Willie McTell

Supreme beings and the need for justice are one with a reflection of human imperfection (I almost used the unChristian term hopelessness) coupled with the need to resist and draw strength from the past. This free society, or society of free men, is not an open-minded world. Power is in the hands of The Authorities, and no one seems too interested or capable of changing it. That situation continues to the present day, set in the flood plain of the Mississippi delta. “High Water (for Charley Patton)” (2001): Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew “You can’t open your mind, boys To every conceivable point of view.”

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They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five Judge says to the High Sheriff, “I want him dead or alive Either one, I don’t care.” High Water everywhere

Various Artists, Gotta Serve Somebody, The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan, Columbia (CD), 2003.

Dylan’s persona began as a boy-prophet preaching to the Protestants. Over forty years he has evolved into a passing stranger quoting Old Testament to the Black Baptists. There is no mention in Chronicles of the period in late 1970s when he outraged and alienated much of his audience by professing evangelical Christianity and performing an entirely new repertoire of original Gospel songs. An interesting preface to The Year of Bob Dylan was the release in 2003 of Gotta Serve Somebody, The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan. This anthology collects ten of the songs from that period, performed by gospel singers and ensembles. With Dylan’s persona removed, you can hear just how well he also mastered this particular form of American songwriting. Compared to the ballad, blues or love song, the gospel song presents the songwriter with more limited set of problems to express and resolve. For every problem encountered – fear, insecurity, pride, unworthiness, despair – there is only one Answer. When the subject of material vanity was set as a blues, Memphis Slim described it this way in “Mother Earth” (1950): You may own half a city Even diamonds and pearls You may buy that plane, baby And fly all over this world Don’t care how great you are Don’t care what you worth When it all ends up You gotta go back to Mother Earth

Dylan shifts the argument from material vanity to spirituality, and doubles the line, magnifying the comparisons in each couplet in “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1979): You may be a construction worker working on a home, You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome, You might own guns and you might even own tanks, You might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed You’re gonna have to serve somebody, Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Who else could rhyme tanks and banks? It sounds even more impressive coming out of Shirley Caesar’s mouth. To make it clear that his own involvement in the project is unambigu-

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ous, he finishes the collection of gushing devotional songs with an un-smooth and to my ears very un-gospel-sounding duet with Mavis Staples. For the package he is presented as a photo of the current pencil-thin moustache lonesome gambler. Jean Genet demonstrated in his novels and plays that crime is a conspiracy involving both criminals and police. Each needs the other to prove their existence. Bob Dylan’s art is a similar conspiracy between himself and his audience. He created himself in an image he sensed all around him, yet his audience often felt that only he was able to imagine what this image should be. Few individuals have ever gotten to shape and control their own history this way even once. Dylan has managed to do it repeatedly. That he succeeded at creating a kind of art that did not exist before him is self-evident. Yet as much as his art reaches into the hearts and minds of an audience that dwarfs the readership of most contemporary writers, the meaning of his work remains mysterious. Perhaps what people respond to most is being challenged and surprised by what they think they hear. We could make the same observation about any great art. On November 26, 1965, when Dylan was performing his electric psychodramas at concert halls across America, sometimes to the hushed and awed and sometimes to the hostile, all of them straining to find their own personal meaning in his lyrics, Joseph Beuys was performing a solo action at an art gallery in Dusseldorf, West Germany. The year Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, Beuys was a bomber pilot on the Russian front serving the Masters of War. Twenty-four years later, he was launching a career of art actions and monumental sculptures. For the moment, there were no crowds to cheer or jeer at him. The gallery was closed to the public and Beuys’ actions were witnessed only by the photographer Ute Klophus and a television crew. The title of the piece was “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare” Beuys sat on a chair in one corner of the gallery, next to the entrance. He had poured honey over his head, to which he had then affixed fifty dollars worth of gold leaf. In his arms he cradled a dead hare, which he looked at steadfastly. Then he stood up, walked around the room holding the dead hare in his arms, and held it up close to the pictures on the walls; he seemed to be talking to it. Sometimes he broke off his tour and, still holding the dead creature, stepped over a withered fir tree that lay in the middle of the gallery. All this was done with indescribable tenderness and great concentration. (135)

Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, Abbeyville Press, 1987.

He seemed to be talking to a dead animal. I carry this picture

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in my head today, thanks to Klophus’ collaborative art, imagining the language coming from his lips. Like Dylan, Beuys was often confronted by interviewers, both sympathetic and hostile, wanting him to explain the meaning of his work. Unlike Dylan, he was a teacher and an advocate of social action. He was not shy about discussing meaning. Beuys: Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, Thames & Hudson, 1979

This seems to have been the action that most captured people’s imaginations. On one level this must be because everyone consciously or unconsciously recognizes the problem of explaining things particularly where art and creative work are concerned, or anything that involves a certain mystery or questioning. The idea of explaining to an animal conveys a sense of the secrecy of the world and of existence that appeals to the imagination. Then, as I said, even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality. (105)

Perhaps Dylan continues to perform a similar kind of action, dressed in various disguises at State Fairs, Minor League Baseball stadiums, and concert halls around America, performing songs that seem to explain some of the world’s mystery. His popularity and impact continues now into a third generation, even as he continues to perform what has become a blend of forty years of material. This fame gives him plenty of space to publish and release more old and new materials. But beneath the current fame, which will disappear as it did before and will again, is the nature and extent of his achievement. Perhaps because he chose songwriting and performance as his primary art form, a medium well below the radar of most intellectual discourse, we have not been able to see how his work is among the great literary achievements of American culture.

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Six artists from

magazine

showing together for the first time in Paris.

north east west Marie-Noëlle Fontan

Lindsey Adelman

Jaanika Peerna Tuula Närhinen Noah Fischer Miska Knapek

14 oct. — 16 nov. 2008 galerie Lavignes Bastille 27 rue de Charonne 75011 Paris Tues. - Fri. 2-7 pm, Sat. 11-7 pm tel : 01 47 00 88 18 http://www.lavignesbastille.com

email:

northeastwest@new-mag.com web: