Gates of Eden

Mark Brown, arts correspondent

The Guardian, Tuesday 24 September 2013 16.13 BST





Bob Dylan works on one of his iron gates, which will feature in the Halcyon gallery's Mood Swings exhibition. Photograph: John Shearer/Rebecca Ward/PA

Come writers and critics who prophesise with your pen and keep your eyes wide … because Bob Dylan is welding gates.

The Halcyon gallery in London has announced plans to exhibit ironworks designed and made by the musician as he continues his career reinvention as an exhibiting visual artist.

Seven iron gates Dylan has welded out of vintage iron and objects including a wrench, roller skate, meat grinder and lawn tools, will go on display for the first time, in an exhibition opening in November, alongside his paintings and signed limited editions.

Dylan said: "I've been around iron all my life ever since I was a kid. I was born and raised in iron ore country where you could breathe it and smell it every day. And I've always worked with it in one form or another.

"Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference."

Dylan would say he has been a visual artist most of his life but it is only in the past six years that he has been exhibiting and selling work. His first museum show was staged in Chemnitz, Germany, in 2007.

He has had success and the National Portrait Gallery is at the moment showing 12 pastel portraits of his in a small display which will stay until January.

The Halcyon's forthcoming show, entitled Mood Swings, will "be the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of Bob Dylan's art to date", said the gallery's director, Paul Green.

Green added: "While Dylan has been a committed visual artist for more than four decades, this exhibition will cast new light on one of the world's most important and influential cultural figures of our time. His iron works demonstrate his boundless creativity and talent."

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 lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs ’neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter who’s gone deaf
But still remains
Upon the beach where hound dogs bay
At ships with tattooed sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden

With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Sidesaddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden

Relationships of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden

The motorcycle black madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden

The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what’s real and what is not
It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden

The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Bob Dylan: ace of hearts

So what can I say about Bob Dylan? Flat-out nothing, because there is no one and nothing like him. As if he's the Taj Mahal, or Abraham-fuckin'-Lincoln or something.

No hip has ever been hipster. Who knew what went on in his head. A flying spin of songs, a spin-dry of flying relationships. Sometimes we knew all about him, somehow we knew nothing. Not much of a core except a glowing fire-winged sycamore tree that burned but was not consumed.

You could touch him but you couldn't. He could smile but he wouldn't. Nobody had such cool hair, such hands. He was an e. e. cummings poem except supremer. He was the joujou doll of the universe.

Some say Bob Dylan still arises, still sails. I see a picture now and again as he gets older, and more and more things are hung around his neck. Might as well take them, as his effort has been Olympian, while - all the while - he made it look easy. Some say all them medals is going to get too heavy one o these days and he will tip over, hopefully on stage where I think he will breathe his last breath. I mean this in the most respectest and possiblist way.

'Skinda-a weird, the attitude-ta fame, cuzzadafact that he sought it and bought it, still tours and tours and tours, but never seemed to care two pygmyburgers about it, as if he could take it or leave it alone, as if he'd still write his songs if nobody listened to them, but I don't know whether to believe him. Would Charles Dickens be Charles Dickens if nobody flippin' heard of him? Didn't think so.

I won't get into his lifelong relationship with La Baez, folktresse supersupreme. She's like a peace pizza with everything. Whenever I see an interview with him he talks about her, and whenever I see an interview with her she talks about him. They are beginning to look like each other now with those never-say-die eyes and the peachfuzz skin of youth stretched and seamed like very fine kidskin leather. They were kids together, and wasn't it awfully hard on Suze? Did he really have any morals at all? Did she? They just took. They did. The entitlement of being extraordinary? Or a drug to make it all bearable?

I can say no benediction more than a man, amen, amayhn, amayhhhn, ahmehhhhhhnnnnnn.

She don't look back

(So howcum I'm posting this-all? I got reading Positively 4th Street again, maybe due to taking the guitar out of its dusty case for the first time in a dozen years. Or not? Anyway, these were kind of cool books, reviewed for an internet publication so's I can rerun them any time I want. They do go back a few years, but I heard-tell that Bob Dylan just performed at the 2011 Grammys, so I looked at the clip. It wasn't good news. He sounds like Tom Waits on Draino, a growling monotone that bespeaks shredded vocal chords. Is it finally time to wind up the Never-Ending Tour?)

Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina by David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 328 pages ISBN: 0-374-28199-8

Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan by Howard Sounes
Grove Press 527 pages ISBN: 0-8021-1686-8

During a weekend retreat at a Benedictine monastery earlier this year, I reconnected with one of the idols of my youth in a setting which was both wildly unlikely and oddly appropriate. “I’d like to play you some of the most spiritual music ever written,” Father John told us as he switched on the CD player to the howling bark of the greatest visionary popular music has ever known, Bob Dylan.

Appropriate, because after all, Dylan the master trickster pops up everywhere these days – on TV commercial jingles, in an audience with the Pope (in which he sang “Blowin’ in the Wind”), at the Kennedy Center as an awkward but grateful honoree, and even at this year’s Academy Awards.

He has been nominated for a Nobel Prize for literature and booed off the stage by hostile audiences for the sin of “going electric”. Throughout his monumental career as a troubadour of conscience, Bob Dylan has not reflected the times so much as predicted them, keeping one eerie step ahead of whatever way the wind blows.

It’s not surprising that on the occasion of his 60th birthday, various writers would attempt to capture his enigmatic presence in biography. This is a nearly impossible task, like picking up a blob of mercury that scatters into a million glittering bits. The problem is that Dylan has lived so many lives in one, all of them radically intense: the idealistic young folkie visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital, the jaded rocker crashing his motorbike, the family-oriented country squire, the born-again Christian zealot, the actor (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Dharma and Greg), the grizzled survivor on his famous Never-Ending Tour.

Just when critics were about to write him off as a has-been, he recorded the amazing 1997 Grammy-winner Time Out of Mind, followed up by the ultimate Dylan hurting-love song, Things Have Changed. Receiving his Oscar for best song, he looked frayed around the edges, exhausted by a life at the fringes of normalcy. But he still has those hypnotic, penetrating eyes – eyes that can see for a thousand miles, deep into the heart of life’s most fragile, compelling mysteries.

New York journalist David Hajdu has come as close as any writer to nailing Dylan’s mercurial soul to the page – a curious fact, given that POSITIVELY 4TH STREET does not center on him exclusively (but then, perhaps enigmas are best glimpsed out of the corner of your eye). The book recreates a charmed time, the era of the ‘60s folk boom with its burning idealism and compelling personalities. It was the perfect cultural milieu for a gifted, ambitious artist like Dylan to make his debut.
But as Hajdu points out, he wasn’t the only opportunist in the crowd. Joan Baez comes across as a curious mixture of brash confidence and quaking insecurity, using the ‘60s to her advantage in a way which in retrospect looks quite ruthless. “She just devoured everybody’s things,” a friend recalls of her ability to expropriate song material and make it her own. “I knew I could do what (the folk singers) were doing and a lot better than them,” Baez claimed.

Her Anglo-Mexican background made her a bit of an exotic, and she soon graduated from the coffeehouses of Cambridge to the Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Musician Bob Gibson gave her a push, but it was hardly necessary: “If I hadn’t ‘introduced’ Joan Baez, someone else would have. It was like ‘discovering’ the Grand Canyon.”

Such a force of nature seemed to be on a predestined collision-course with another astral body, a tightly-wound Minnesotan minstrel-boy newly renamed Bob Dylan. The former Bobby Zimmerman, a baby-faced Jewish rock musician from a small town, had remade himself in Woody Guthrie’s image and was busy charming the socks off people (particularly young women) all over New York’s Greenwich Village.

Dylan even mimicked Guthrie’s tics from Huntington’s chorea, causing fellow singer Eric von Schmidt to describe him as “a spastic little gnome”. But with all his charm, Dylan was paradoxically an extreme introvert; as Theodore Bikel reminisced, “He didn’t reach out to touch you. You had to come where he was.”

When these two supernatural beings joined forces, they immediately went supernova. Dylan’s embryonic talent to capture the political zeitgeist was cheered on by an enthralled, deeply infatuated Baez.
Meanwhile her little sister Mimi, still in high school, was developing a quieter but beautifully polished musical gift of her own. Destined to live forever in Joan’s giant shadow, she even ended up with a sort of faux Bob Dylan in the person of Cuban-Irish writer Richard Farina, whom she married at the tender age of seventeen.

The Farina of Hajdu’s account was not so much an original as a badly-smudged photocopy of Dylan’s blazing genius (“I could kind of see the strings,” one friend put it), a hanger-on who would stop at nothing to further his ambitions. While Dylan turned out such searing masterpieces as A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Masters of War and The Times They Are A-Changin’, Farina fiddled with a dulcimer and rehashed traditional folk tunes, winning over a surprising number of people on charm alone.
“He walked and talked as if he had been born wearing a cape,” a friend remembers.

Many believed he went after Mimi just to get to Joan, and the ploy worked. For a time there was a strange sort of romantic formation, not a triangle so much as a rectangle, Bob and Joan on one side, Mimi and Richard on the other, with flirtations flying dangerously in all directions.

Though Hajdu is very good at recreating all the fizz and spark of the folk era, he drops names at such a thick rate that it can make for hard going: “Carolyn and Richard had never met Mimi and Todd, and Mimi and Todd had not met Alex Campbell, a Scottish folk singer whom Carolyn , Richard and John knew.” There must be a less-awkward way to introduce the huge cast of players on the folk scene.

But like the magazine reporter he is, Hajdu just has to tell us who was there and what was said, giving some passages a distinct gossip-column flavor. Still, he does show us a Dylan bristling with paradox: stumblingly inarticulate in person, but a master communicator on stage; a protest-song writer par excellence who had virtually no interest in politics; a man both vicious (as in the slashing Positively 4th Street, a diatribe against all his old Greenwich Village friends: “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes,/You’d know what a drag it is to see you”) and deeply compassionate, as in the Ballad of Hollis Brown and Chimes of Freedom.

And he traces the inevitable falling-out between the King and Queen of folk, as Baez comes to realize that Dylan “criticizes society, and I criticize it, but he ends up saying there is not a goddamned thing you can do about it, so screw it. And I say just the opposite.” Dylan’s scandalously poor treatment of Joan on his tour to London further undermined the romance, which was destined to blaze briefly, then collapse.

A far worse disaster struck Mimi Baez Farina when her husband was killed in a motorcycle crash on her 21st birthday in 1966. Suddenly it was all over. Dylan abandoned folk and went electric; Joan Baez remained glued in the ‘60s, forever associated with that all-too-brief time when anything seemed possible.

For a more blow-by-blow account of the life of Bob Dylan, you couldn’t do much better than British writer Howard Sounes’ DOWN THE HIGHWAY. This book is as detailed and relentless as one of Dylan’s marathon-length songs (say, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands or Desolation Row) and seems to go on as long as the fabled Never-Ending Tour. For Dylan addicts hungry for trivia tidbits, this is fine fare, but there is a certain fineness missing from the writing, a subtlety which would have helped capture the mystery of the man.

Here we learn that Bob’s nickname in high school was Zimbo, and that he piled his hair on top of his head in deliberate imitation of Little Richard. We find out that the last thing his mother said when he left home was, “Don’t keep writing poetry, please don’t.”

Though Sounes does acknowledge the greatness of Dylan’s lyrics (citing such classic lines as “he not busy being born is busy dying” and “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), he tends to focus more on his subject’s messy, convoluted personal life with its dozens of complicated love affairs. Though Dylan made a brave attempt at marriage to Sara Lowndes and has been a loving father to his six children, he is not good husband material, and can’t even seem to hang on to his friends for long.

What emerges in Sounes’ book is a portrait of a desperately lonely man, isolated by his genius and an almost pathological social awkwardness. In some ways Bob Dylan is a bit of an idiot savant, supremely gifted in his words and music but handicapped everywhere else. But as Sounes points out, his strange charisma is so strong that these flaws only add to his mystique. As one record executive put it, “Is he a regular guy? No. Why would you want him to be?”

The baffling way he has always played with the press reflects a deep shyness and a reluctance to share private details. It would be interesting to know what Dylan would make of a book that probes his personal life so deeply, sometimes at the expense of what should be the main focus, his art.

Still, I was intrigued to learn that “Lay, Lady, Lay” was originally written for Midnight Cowboy (typically, Dylan missed the deadline), and that Woodstock legend Wavy Gravy remains a close friend. And yes, the musicians really were stoned on the infamous Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (which, like a lot of Dylan classics, was done in a single take).

But let the master have the last word. In preparing to write this piece, I plunged back into those songs again and was astounded at their freshness and power, even decades later. This is the real reason Dylan is worthy subject matter for books like these. The man still has the capacity to move me to tears, especially in my personal favorite, his ringing anthem of the dispossessed, Chimes of Freedom:

“Tolling for the aching, whose wounds cannot be nursed,
For the countless confused, accused, misused
Strung-out ones, and worse,
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe –
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashin’.”

To that I say – amen, Bob; amen.

JOAN BAEZ "The Greenwood Side"

Bear with me, here. There's method in my madness.

Today I got writing about Songcatcher, a haunting movie about a woman professor's attempts to collect and capture folk music from the Appalachians in the early 20th century. That got me going, of course, on folk music.

I thought of one that my sister used to do (my sister, my sister), a harsh, dissonant thing called Down by the Greenwood Side (i-o). This was the version Ian and Sylvia made popular, sung in fifths I think, harsh and shivery. But today I found another version that shone with wonder and grief, sung by Joan Baez. The essential story is the same, though much more drawn-out. The tune, however, couldn't be more different, and it reminded me of something else.

I puzzled over this. Then I remembered. In the early '60s there was a song by Ewan MacColl called The First Time Ever I Saw your Face, and Gordon Lightfoot recorded a memorable version of it. It's hard to recognize here because the Roberta Flack version that came out a few years later kind of drowned it. Hers was drawled and drawn-out, smokily sexual and completely different from this more compact, folky (but no less heartfelt) version.

But the resemblance between the two, between Lightfoot's version and Baez's Greenwood, was what made my skin prickle. I wonder if MacColl even thought about it as he wrote his paean to erotic love. But the melody, those magic intervals that make up a tune, are so much the same, so full of mystery and ache.

So, listen to these two, and you tell me: do they sound the same?