I promised you nice, shallow, fun stuff, so here it is! I actually LOVE videos like this and love to see what kind of work actors had to take to keep bread on the table, and how child actors had no choice but to do what the director said. Jason Alexander is the weirdest, maybe because we are not used to seeing him with hair!
Saturday, October 17, 2020
Thursday, October 15, 2020
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
Dance of the Vegetable Steamer
Having posted MANY long, long (LONG) posts lately, I think I need a rest. But I'll keep up with the fun stuff. . . because, like many of you, I need some fun right now. Hope you enjoy it!
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Meghan's mask is slipping!
Meghan Markle is not my favorite person - in fact, she is currently one of my LEAST favorite, for all her posturing and preaching on "issues" she does not understand, continual virtue-signalling and blatant hypocrisy. She is the most overexposed figure in show biz, and wearing out her welcome. Some say she stole Harry, but Harry's a grown man, for Christ's sake, and made his own decision to dump his family and royal duties and follow her to Hollywood (during the height of a global pandemic - so much for keeping their son safe). I could go on and on, but I won't. Trump wished Harry "lots of luck, because you're going to need it" - the only Trump statement I will ever agree with! He did not even do his usual blustering, but waved them away like the insects they are.
Like Elizabeth Holmes and her embarrassing Mickey Mouse-style explanation of Theranos technology (“A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel"), Meghan gives the most naive and ludicrous explanations for her world-shaking commands. This is my favorite quotation so far:
At any rate: this is a little video made up of gifs taken from a recent interview, in which she became very petulant about someone actually challenging her and saying, "You are NOT the most powerful woman in the world" (an understatement). She then threw a little diva fit which I have immortalized in this video. Enjoy!
Monday, October 12, 2020
Desolation for our times: a Nobel laureate speaks
They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.
Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning,
"You belong to Me I Believe."
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You'd better leave."
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.
Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortune-telling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row.
Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row.
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
NOW, he looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They ARE trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"
They all play on the penny whistle
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row.
Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
They are spoon-feeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get outta here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.
At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.
Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row.
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Or was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.
They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
Here Dylan immediately establishes a macabre atmosphere of heartless exploitation. Human execution has become the subject of postcards, a cheap and superficial means of communicating usually associated with vacations. Passports are similarly associated with travel (being "transported") and escape, a theme running through the entire lyric. That the passports are painted brown means that they are blurred, defaced, shat upon, or otherwise rendered invalid. Might it also be a weird twist on "painting the town red'?
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
The sailors swarming the beauty parlour might be there to ogle women, or to become them, transforming themselves in garish drag. It's our first hint of a sense of dislocation: no one seems to be in the right place. "The circus is in town" is a familiar cliche (and let's not forget he grew up in a small town, in which the circus was a very big deal), which Dylan turns on its head: this motley parade will lead us to a hellish place from which there is no escape.
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
It's worth mentioning that "they" are never identified. I remember hearing someone say, "They've shot John Lennon." Facelessness and blank masks and constantly-shifting identities inflame the lyric's rampant paranoia. The "blind commissioner" is some sort of deposed authority figure reduced to dragging along helplessly behind a circus performer walking a tightrope, while simultaneously masturbating.
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.
The police are out there and looking for trouble, hoping for a good riot. Like juvenile delinquents, they're hanging around waiting for something to happen. Desolation Row seems forever on the point of exploding in apocalyptic violence. "They need somewhere to go" speaks of a lost traveller, one of the many figures in this song who is dislocated and "a stranger everywhere". "Lady and I" adds a sudden incongruous but very Dylanesque romanticism: or is it Our Lady, Mother of God that he speaks of?
Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
Cinderella portrayed as good-time girl is remeniscent of a line from an Auden poem: "And Jill goes down on her back." Bette Davis gives her a touch of old Hollywood glamour, but we can see her posturing as if her body is for sale. And hey, how about that line "it takes one to know one"? Just what is she implying about the songwriter - has he similarly sold himself to the public - or does it have nothing to do with him?
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning,
"You belong to me I believe."
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You'd better leave."
Enter Romeo, stage left. But doesn't he belong with Juliet? Apparently not, but he doesn't belong here either. "Someone", that notorious "they", is telling him to leave. Wrong play, perhaps? And doesn't Romeo end up dead? Whereas Cinderella ends up transformed. In a manner of speaking. And who is the "someone" telling Romeo to get lost? Some stray Prince who's just as much out of place?
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.
"Ambulances" implies twenty-nine harrowing violent movie scenes that we never get to see because we don't have to - it's all condensed down into a couple of lines, a few sirens wailing (and after the fact - they've already gone). "Something" has happened, but we're never told what. Cinderella is like the fairy tale in reverse: she ends up sweeping the street, back to her rags and tatters, and tricks.
Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortune-telling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
Dylan does this, he suddenly and dramatically varies the tone so that the lyric is shot through with beauty. The fortune-telling lady is a magical, almost paranormal figure, her palm-readings and Tarot cards (more about that later) predicting a future that seems, at best, uncertain. But it's so late, so dark, so spooky out that even she has to protect her wares.
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
Impenetrable lines, but they inexplicably work, like all genius does: Biblical references pop up constantly in Dylan's writing, so Cain slew Abel, perhaps raising Cain in the process, and the hunchback is just another grotesque soul seeking "sanctuary". And the next two lines are Dylanisms just as surely as "he not busy being born is busy dying". They seem to say: choose life/Eros, or choose dullness and the conventional life with its boring expectations, where everything is "right as rain". Or is this really about Noah's flood and its inevitable culling of the sinful?
And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row.
Another Biblical reference, but a sardonic one: the figure whose name is synonymous with selfless help and even personal risk is now reduced to just another performer, donning the motley for the "show". And Biblically, the Samaritan was at the bottom of the heap socially, almost an untouchable, which is what gave Jesus' parable such punch.
Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
This is a strange one, but then, the characters on Desolation Row just get stranger. Unlike Cinderella who turns tricks, Ophelia goes crazy while Hamlet seduces his mother. And 'neath the window - is that some sort of weird inversion of Romeo and Juliet? (By the way, what DID happen to Romeo?) This is someone who has apparently died before she even had a chance to live.
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
"Lifelessness is the Great Enemy & always wears a hip guard—he is very hipguard,"Dylan wrote in Tarantula, and if you can figure THAT out, you've nailed these lines. The iron vest sounds like medieval torture, or else kinky. This whole poem/song is about the sin of lifelessness or, perhaps, the deathwardness of the eternal Show. "Her profession's her religion" is a little too opaque for me to fathom, as her profession isn't the same as Cinderella's.
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row.
Ah, Bob! You know more about the Bible than the average monk or Catholic priest. "Expecting rain" may well be a reference to the Great Flood, but here the flood is over and the rainbow has appeared. "Peeking into" means that Ophelia has been cast out and has to "peek in", as in some great existential peep show. Funny that both she and Romeo stand beneath windows, on the outside looking in.
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
You can try to pull this apart or leave it alone, but it pulls apart like a wishbone and spills weirdness like a cornucopia.
Einstein, being the ultimate enigmatic genius, is headed for the carnival dressed up like Robin Hood, some sort of ancient folk hero who fires arrows, robs from the rich and gives to the poor. But he's already gone, folks, he passed this way an hour ago and you missed him. Memories in a trunk - another version of the iron vest, the lifelessness of self-suffocation? And why is his friend so jealous, and of what (and why is he a monk? Maybe it just scanned, we don't know.)
Now, he looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
This implies some sort of hobo in disguise, a fraud, somebody who gets off on sniffing sewer gas or else is a kind of health inspector. Reciting the alphabet implies childishness, or the failure of the greatest mind in human history.
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.
Interesting that Einstein really was a quite gifted violinist. That line "famous long ago", three little words, Bobby, you really can spit them out, became the title of a book, and everybody knew where the title came from, it was just self-explanatory. The author of e=mc2 is now nothing but a musician standing on a street corner in a neighborhood which might be called degraded.
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They are trying to blow it up
This stanza really chills me. It is past grotesque: it's harrowing. Who the fuck is this Dr. Filth, why are his patients (like Ophelia) so sexless? Where is the riot squad when you need them? Is the leather cup sort of like Baudelaire's image of a woman's vagina (so stomach-turning I can't reproduce it here)? For surely the literate Dylan would have read Baudelaire. And it's obvious that sexlessness is next to lifelessness.
Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"
There are those who would say this is Joan Baez, the great unnamed saint of the Row. Even Joan Baez thought it was Joan Baez. Calling her "some local loser" (and what in fuck's name is a "cyanide hole"? That's quite possibly the worst thing I ever heard of) seems harsh, but then come those two impossibly tender lines, which Baez quoted in Daybreak as "I also keep the cards that read have mercy on his soul". She might also be the same person as the fortune-telling lady taking all her things inside (because it might rain?). In the song She Belongs to Me, which as usual might be about Baez or might be about his first wife Sara Lowndes, Dylan portrays a lady full of mystical power ("she can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black").
They all play on the penny whistle
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row.
"Blow" could be taken a couple of ways. Sexual? A drug reference? Or just "blow"? Pennywhistles imply innocence, childhood, and being too poor to afford a real instrument. Pennywhistles are irritating, shrill and unmusical. It's also never clear whether we are ON Desolation Row, looking INTO Desolation Row, or trying to get the hell OUT of Desolation Row. Dylan's camera darts all over the place.
Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
Who is whom here, and whom is who he appears to be? No one. The curtains are already nailed up for this ghastly dumbshow (and remember how in old gangster movies they say "it's curtains for you"?) Nailed-up curtains certainly aren't fancy and won't open and close like normal ones. They're crude, and - nailed in place like so many of the crippled characters. But it is also, as in the Catholic Church, a feast day, a holy celebration. And thus the Phantom, some sort of spiritual kin to the aforementioned Hunchback of Notre Dame, is wrapping himself in priestly raiment. Enough clergy here to start a monastery.
They are spoon-feeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
The cast of this thing grows ever bigger, and each character is somehow laden. Spoon-feeding Casanova might allude to cooking heroin, or it might not. It might allude to feeding a baby, or it might not. He is traditionally a legendary lover and seducer. There's a weird take on sexuality in the song, of exploitation (the blind commissioner whacking off, Cinderella selling herself, Ophelia in her kinky iron maiden) and the uglifying of something that should be beautiful, even sacred. (Dylan is nothing if not a romantic.) And we're back to that amorphous, vaguely disturbing "they". Whoever they are, they are not too damn friendly.
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get outta here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.
If Romeo has been cast out, if he's in the wrong place, my friend, then surely Casanova is going to be out on his ass soon. The skinny girls are - what? Models? The Andy Warhol crowd Dylan hung out with? I wonder if this whole thing isn't about being tossed out of Eden, except that this is nobody's idea of the garden. Or if Casanova really is a heroin addict, perhaps the law has caught up with him?
At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Here we get into the most delicious paranoia, a macabre vision straight out of a sweating, gasping film noir/spy movie. Who ARE these people - part of the unnamed "they"? Agents of WHAT? And I love that line "come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do". Are these people - "everyone" - really smarter? Or do they just carrying a burden of subversive, secret knowledge?
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.
The heart-attack machine is the most sadistic thing I have ever heard of: not a defibrillator, but the opposite, something that GIVES you a heart attack. And then the kerosene. . . This is like "after the ambulances go", a couple of words slamming us against the wall. No mention of a fire or of someone starting a fire, but we don't need that, we already know. Insurance men in their dull facelessness seem to foreshadow the infamous, soulless figure, Mr. Jones, the epitome of the "establishment'. And let's not get into "escaping to", it's just too convoluted.
Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?"
Nero is the one who fiddled while Rome burned. The Titanic is a mite obvious, but like all of this bizarre imagery, it works. "Everybody" is "nobody" and could be anybody, and the question they're shouting, "which side are you on?", is one Dylan heard and had to try to answer or ignore for his whole life. And is no doubt still dealing with. (What do the lyrics mean?)
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
This seems like a blatant contrast of intellectual elitism with simple, life-loving joy, not so much a mockery as a dismissal of violence and hate: so that yes, even in this song there is some sort of breath of hope. I see the fishermen and calypso singers all jumbled in with the mysterious ugly horrific vivid incendiary images of the song as in a Picasso painting, where everything is happening at once. But if you really want to dig (man), the singers do the same thing Bob does, and the fishermen echo Jesus' famous words, "I will make you fishers of men." Holding flowers is either a hippie thing, or a garden thing, take your choice.
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row.
Unlike Ballad of a Thin Man, this song does have unexpected beauty strewn through it. Is Desolation Row a choice, a punishment, a purgatory leading on to greater glory, or to eternal damnation? Is it just the bizarre baffling imagery of a genius on acid who hadn't slept in about 45 days? We know it is compelling, and hard to get away from. But it's not over yet. As with all great works of music, there is a coda.
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
I am virtually certain, though I cannot provide proof, that he chose "broke" to rhyme with "joke". But then, a broken doorknob does imply not being able to get in or out. "Was that some kind of joke?" dismisses all possibility that the asker even cares, or only cares in order to get something. The question has a sardonic Positively Fourth Street feel to it. What's it to you? You got a lotta nerve.
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Thus does the artist casually create and destroy his own universe, so that all the characters come out looking like versions of himself. As for "give them all another name", remember his nickname in high school was Zimbo. The old saw "all the characters are really me" is even more of a stretch than what I'm doing here.
Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters, no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.
It's well-known that Bob really can't read very well, he's always been blind as the proverbial fruit bat, so maybe this is one line we can take literally. Don't forget "here comes the blind commissioner/They've got him in a trance." But "don't send me no more letters, no" means he's cutting himself off from contact with people. And - oh, this is a good one! - what was in the very first line of this thing? POSTCARDS. But typical of Dylan, they aren't sending postcards, but selling them. So the old saw "I'll send you a postcard" becomes, sardonically, "I'll sell you a postcard."
Bob Dylan's masterpiece, if that's what this is, reflects his profound ambivalence about the vertiginous and devouring carnival of fame, his own fame in particular: he lied about working in carnivals as a boy, then found himself IN one, magnetically attracting a horde of sycophants, sociopaths and losers.
But which character IS he, anyway? The most likely contender, in my mind (and this is MY essay, so I can surmise if I want to) is Einstein disguised as Robin Hood: genius in the guise of folk hero. Costumed poseur, lost troubadour shifting from identity to identity, the figure comes closer than any of the others to a self-portrait of the most unlikely Nobel winner in the history of the prize, that enigmatic gift to the world, Bob Dylan.
They're painting the passports brown
Here Dylan immediately establishes a macabre atmosphere of heartless exploitation. Human execution has become the subject of postcards, a cheap and superficial means of communicating usually associated with vacations. Passports are similarly associated with travel (being "transported") and escape, a theme running through the entire lyric. That the passports are painted brown means that they are blurred, defaced, shat upon, or otherwise rendered invalid. Might it also be a weird twist on "painting the town red'?
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
The sailors swarming the beauty parlour might be there to ogle women, or to become them, transforming themselves in garish drag. It's our first hint of a sense of dislocation: no one seems to be in the right place. "The circus is in town" is a familiar cliche (and let's not forget he grew up in a small town, in which the circus was a very big deal), which Dylan turns on its head: this motley parade will lead us to a hellish place from which there is no escape.
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
It's worth mentioning that "they" are never identified. I remember hearing someone say, "They've shot John Lennon." Facelessness and blank masks and constantly-shifting identities inflame the lyric's rampant paranoia. The "blind commissioner" is some sort of deposed authority figure reduced to dragging along helplessly behind a circus performer walking a tightrope, while simultaneously masturbating.
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.
The police are out there and looking for trouble, hoping for a good riot. Like juvenile delinquents, they're hanging around waiting for something to happen. Desolation Row seems forever on the point of exploding in apocalyptic violence. "They need somewhere to go" speaks of a lost traveller, one of the many figures in this song who is dislocated and "a stranger everywhere". "Lady and I" adds a sudden incongruous but very Dylanesque romanticism: or is it Our Lady, Mother of God that he speaks of?
Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
Cinderella portrayed as good-time girl is remeniscent of a line from an Auden poem: "And Jill goes down on her back." Bette Davis gives her a touch of old Hollywood glamour, but we can see her posturing as if her body is for sale. And hey, how about that line "it takes one to know one"? Just what is she implying about the songwriter - has he similarly sold himself to the public - or does it have nothing to do with him?
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning,
"You belong to me I believe."
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You'd better leave."
Enter Romeo, stage left. But doesn't he belong with Juliet? Apparently not, but he doesn't belong here either. "Someone", that notorious "they", is telling him to leave. Wrong play, perhaps? And doesn't Romeo end up dead? Whereas Cinderella ends up transformed. In a manner of speaking. And who is the "someone" telling Romeo to get lost? Some stray Prince who's just as much out of place?
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.
"Ambulances" implies twenty-nine harrowing violent movie scenes that we never get to see because we don't have to - it's all condensed down into a couple of lines, a few sirens wailing (and after the fact - they've already gone). "Something" has happened, but we're never told what. Cinderella is like the fairy tale in reverse: she ends up sweeping the street, back to her rags and tatters, and tricks.
Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortune-telling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
Dylan does this, he suddenly and dramatically varies the tone so that the lyric is shot through with beauty. The fortune-telling lady is a magical, almost paranormal figure, her palm-readings and Tarot cards (more about that later) predicting a future that seems, at best, uncertain. But it's so late, so dark, so spooky out that even she has to protect her wares.
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
Impenetrable lines, but they inexplicably work, like all genius does: Biblical references pop up constantly in Dylan's writing, so Cain slew Abel, perhaps raising Cain in the process, and the hunchback is just another grotesque soul seeking "sanctuary". And the next two lines are Dylanisms just as surely as "he not busy being born is busy dying". They seem to say: choose life/Eros, or choose dullness and the conventional life with its boring expectations, where everything is "right as rain". Or is this really about Noah's flood and its inevitable culling of the sinful?
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row.
Another Biblical reference, but a sardonic one: the figure whose name is synonymous with selfless help and even personal risk is now reduced to just another performer, donning the motley for the "show". And Biblically, the Samaritan was at the bottom of the heap socially, almost an untouchable, which is what gave Jesus' parable such punch.
Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
This is a strange one, but then, the characters on Desolation Row just get stranger. Unlike Cinderella who turns tricks, Ophelia goes crazy while Hamlet seduces his mother. And 'neath the window - is that some sort of weird inversion of Romeo and Juliet? (By the way, what DID happen to Romeo?) This is someone who has apparently died before she even had a chance to live.
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
"Lifelessness is the Great Enemy & always wears a hip guard—he is very hipguard,"Dylan wrote in Tarantula, and if you can figure THAT out, you've nailed these lines. The iron vest sounds like medieval torture, or else kinky. This whole poem/song is about the sin of lifelessness or, perhaps, the deathwardness of the eternal Show. "Her profession's her religion" is a little too opaque for me to fathom, as her profession isn't the same as Cinderella's.
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row.
Ah, Bob! You know more about the Bible than the average monk or Catholic priest. "Expecting rain" may well be a reference to the Great Flood, but here the flood is over and the rainbow has appeared. "Peeking into" means that Ophelia has been cast out and has to "peek in", as in some great existential peep show. Funny that both she and Romeo stand beneath windows, on the outside looking in.
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
You can try to pull this apart or leave it alone, but it pulls apart like a wishbone and spills weirdness like a cornucopia.
Einstein, being the ultimate enigmatic genius, is headed for the carnival dressed up like Robin Hood, some sort of ancient folk hero who fires arrows, robs from the rich and gives to the poor. But he's already gone, folks, he passed this way an hour ago and you missed him. Memories in a trunk - another version of the iron vest, the lifelessness of self-suffocation? And why is his friend so jealous, and of what (and why is he a monk? Maybe it just scanned, we don't know.)
Now, he looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
This implies some sort of hobo in disguise, a fraud, somebody who gets off on sniffing sewer gas or else is a kind of health inspector. Reciting the alphabet implies childishness, or the failure of the greatest mind in human history.
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.
Interesting that Einstein really was a quite gifted violinist. That line "famous long ago", three little words, Bobby, you really can spit them out, became the title of a book, and everybody knew where the title came from, it was just self-explanatory. The author of e=mc2 is now nothing but a musician standing on a street corner in a neighborhood which might be called degraded.
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They are trying to blow it up
This stanza really chills me. It is past grotesque: it's harrowing. Who the fuck is this Dr. Filth, why are his patients (like Ophelia) so sexless? Where is the riot squad when you need them? Is the leather cup sort of like Baudelaire's image of a woman's vagina (so stomach-turning I can't reproduce it here)? For surely the literate Dylan would have read Baudelaire. And it's obvious that sexlessness is next to lifelessness.
Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"
There are those who would say this is Joan Baez, the great unnamed saint of the Row. Even Joan Baez thought it was Joan Baez. Calling her "some local loser" (and what in fuck's name is a "cyanide hole"? That's quite possibly the worst thing I ever heard of) seems harsh, but then come those two impossibly tender lines, which Baez quoted in Daybreak as "I also keep the cards that read have mercy on his soul". She might also be the same person as the fortune-telling lady taking all her things inside (because it might rain?). In the song She Belongs to Me, which as usual might be about Baez or might be about his first wife Sara Lowndes, Dylan portrays a lady full of mystical power ("she can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black").
They all play on the penny whistle
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row.
"Blow" could be taken a couple of ways. Sexual? A drug reference? Or just "blow"? Pennywhistles imply innocence, childhood, and being too poor to afford a real instrument. Pennywhistles are irritating, shrill and unmusical. It's also never clear whether we are ON Desolation Row, looking INTO Desolation Row, or trying to get the hell OUT of Desolation Row. Dylan's camera darts all over the place.
Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
Who is whom here, and whom is who he appears to be? No one. The curtains are already nailed up for this ghastly dumbshow (and remember how in old gangster movies they say "it's curtains for you"?) Nailed-up curtains certainly aren't fancy and won't open and close like normal ones. They're crude, and - nailed in place like so many of the crippled characters. But it is also, as in the Catholic Church, a feast day, a holy celebration. And thus the Phantom, some sort of spiritual kin to the aforementioned Hunchback of Notre Dame, is wrapping himself in priestly raiment. Enough clergy here to start a monastery.
They are spoon-feeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
The cast of this thing grows ever bigger, and each character is somehow laden. Spoon-feeding Casanova might allude to cooking heroin, or it might not. It might allude to feeding a baby, or it might not. He is traditionally a legendary lover and seducer. There's a weird take on sexuality in the song, of exploitation (the blind commissioner whacking off, Cinderella selling herself, Ophelia in her kinky iron maiden) and the uglifying of something that should be beautiful, even sacred. (Dylan is nothing if not a romantic.) And we're back to that amorphous, vaguely disturbing "they". Whoever they are, they are not too damn friendly.
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get outta here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.
If Romeo has been cast out, if he's in the wrong place, my friend, then surely Casanova is going to be out on his ass soon. The skinny girls are - what? Models? The Andy Warhol crowd Dylan hung out with? I wonder if this whole thing isn't about being tossed out of Eden, except that this is nobody's idea of the garden. Or if Casanova really is a heroin addict, perhaps the law has caught up with him?
At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Here we get into the most delicious paranoia, a macabre vision straight out of a sweating, gasping film noir/spy movie. Who ARE these people - part of the unnamed "they"? Agents of WHAT? And I love that line "come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do". Are these people - "everyone" - really smarter? Or do they just carrying a burden of subversive, secret knowledge?
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.
The heart-attack machine is the most sadistic thing I have ever heard of: not a defibrillator, but the opposite, something that GIVES you a heart attack. And then the kerosene. . . This is like "after the ambulances go", a couple of words slamming us against the wall. No mention of a fire or of someone starting a fire, but we don't need that, we already know. Insurance men in their dull facelessness seem to foreshadow the infamous, soulless figure, Mr. Jones, the epitome of the "establishment'. And let's not get into "escaping to", it's just too convoluted.
Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?"
Nero is the one who fiddled while Rome burned. The Titanic is a mite obvious, but like all of this bizarre imagery, it works. "Everybody" is "nobody" and could be anybody, and the question they're shouting, "which side are you on?", is one Dylan heard and had to try to answer or ignore for his whole life. And is no doubt still dealing with. (What do the lyrics mean?)
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
This seems like a blatant contrast of intellectual elitism with simple, life-loving joy, not so much a mockery as a dismissal of violence and hate: so that yes, even in this song there is some sort of breath of hope. I see the fishermen and calypso singers all jumbled in with the mysterious ugly horrific vivid incendiary images of the song as in a Picasso painting, where everything is happening at once. But if you really want to dig (man), the singers do the same thing Bob does, and the fishermen echo Jesus' famous words, "I will make you fishers of men." Holding flowers is either a hippie thing, or a garden thing, take your choice.
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row.
Unlike Ballad of a Thin Man, this song does have unexpected beauty strewn through it. Is Desolation Row a choice, a punishment, a purgatory leading on to greater glory, or to eternal damnation? Is it just the bizarre baffling imagery of a genius on acid who hadn't slept in about 45 days? We know it is compelling, and hard to get away from. But it's not over yet. As with all great works of music, there is a coda.
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
I am virtually certain, though I cannot provide proof, that he chose "broke" to rhyme with "joke". But then, a broken doorknob does imply not being able to get in or out. "Was that some kind of joke?" dismisses all possibility that the asker even cares, or only cares in order to get something. The question has a sardonic Positively Fourth Street feel to it. What's it to you? You got a lotta nerve.
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Thus does the artist casually create and destroy his own universe, so that all the characters come out looking like versions of himself. As for "give them all another name", remember his nickname in high school was Zimbo. The old saw "all the characters are really me" is even more of a stretch than what I'm doing here.
Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters, no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.
It's well-known that Bob really can't read very well, he's always been blind as the proverbial fruit bat, so maybe this is one line we can take literally. Don't forget "here comes the blind commissioner/They've got him in a trance." But "don't send me no more letters, no" means he's cutting himself off from contact with people. And - oh, this is a good one! - what was in the very first line of this thing? POSTCARDS. But typical of Dylan, they aren't sending postcards, but selling them. So the old saw "I'll send you a postcard" becomes, sardonically, "I'll sell you a postcard."
Bob Dylan's masterpiece, if that's what this is, reflects his profound ambivalence about the vertiginous and devouring carnival of fame, his own fame in particular: he lied about working in carnivals as a boy, then found himself IN one, magnetically attracting a horde of sycophants, sociopaths and losers.
But which character IS he, anyway? The most likely contender, in my mind (and this is MY essay, so I can surmise if I want to) is Einstein disguised as Robin Hood: genius in the guise of folk hero. Costumed poseur, lost troubadour shifting from identity to identity, the figure comes closer than any of the others to a self-portrait of the most unlikely Nobel winner in the history of the prize, that enigmatic gift to the world, Bob Dylan.
Sunday, October 11, 2020
The Red Diary - a cycle of poems inspired by the diary of Anne Frank (Part four of four)
The Red Diary
A cycle of narrative poems inspired by the diary of Anne Frank
by Margaret Gunning
Part four of four
To the memory of Anne Frank
Happy
Tears: sometimes
it is too much for you,
you fold up and sob,
trying to keep it quiet,
contained: but your grief will split you
if you don’t give it room,
so you draw up your knees
and convulse silently
in the stale attic room
in the dark.
Yet, you write of being happy;
I believe it.
In the midst of all,
in raw raging hell,
in boredom, in despair, in fury with the adults,
in all this, a shy happiness blooms inside,
delicate as white petals,
protected,
held inside your heart
like a sweet secret:
you are happy as only the doomed can be happy,
this day sufficient,
this moment of precious silence,
this sense of God stealing near. . .
warm against your skin,
tender presence, stirring,
life itself,
insistent,
miraculous,
conquering all
by a single intake of breath:
the act of breathing,
beating,
being.
Not my diary
Then: a break-in, burglars rattling
suspiciously downstairs, police on the trail,
and a frozen night of terror,
eight hearts pounding. . . all of you
lying on the floor, afraid to move,
a wastepaper basket for a toilet,
and whispers: hide the radio!
What’s the use? If they find us,
we’ll have no need for it.
Hide the diary.
No! burn it –
not my diary!
(“If my diary goes,
I go too!”)
What shall we say to the Gestapo?
Impossible conversations.
Rehearsing for doom.
A raw smell of sweat, of feces.
One night spent crammed together
in a stinking airless room,
bodies churning with fright.
When the threat passes,
suddenly you’re older, years older,
forced through another grinder,
and you write, like one who has lived through
a thousand years of torment,
“We’re Jews in chains,
chained to one spot,
without any rights,
but with a thousand obligations.”
But like the psalmist
who howls in loneliness and anguish,
you still say, “God has never
deserted our people.”
In the midst of all,
you stand; you stand.
“If God lets me live,” you declare
with the faith of a thousand generations,
“I’ll make my voice heard.”
Doubt
And yet.
In the next breath, the doubt:
you wonder if anyone will ever want
to look at “this drivel”: your rapt, fascinating
account
turns to dust before your eyes.
Now I know you are a writer,
twisting, impaled on doubt
that never ends,
pressing on in the face of it,
surely the ultimate task.
Peter
They call it knutscherei:
stolen kisses, closeness, body heat
your heart swaying,
Father worrying, yes, worrying
that you could get pregnant,
all that time spent there in the attic, alone together –
and then what would you do;
but fear and shyness
keep you from venturing further
than a chaste kiss, a caress,
yet this glancing touch
makes your legs turn to water,
you want to surrender,
to press for more,
but jump back from the might of it:
forces unknown,
hungers
stirred, but never satisfied,
wild forces
repressed,
mysteries never probed –
Peter, whom you never would have
given the time of day
if your world had been normal,
now becomes your prince,
your heart’s companion,
your only.
Each day (an interlude)
We are given, each day
only enough to get through;
never more.
We may call this
manna
in the wilderness of our own lives,
with nothing left to gather
at the end of the day,
and only trust
to help us open our eyes again,
face the howling uncertainty
once more.
If the world should end today,
if this should be our last, our final day,
we would not know it;
the unknowing
is a blessing of sorts,
the thing that helped me go to school each day,
keep the secret confined
within my small body,
only revealed after decades
of numbness
and oblivion,
a strange, raw flower
blooming like the spread of blood
in water,
a blossom of despair, of damage
swelling purple like a contusion,
a truth,
surging upward like a germinating seed,
mysterious,
inexorable –
but because true, then unstoppable,
even a gift of sorts,
a reanimating of that which had died,
a return to a wholeness I had never known,
a birth into completeness.
I was given back my life;
yours was taken.
The loss is a slap,
or worse, an amputation –
I want you back,
these words are not enough,
this account is not enough,
we need you here –
I know how the story ends
and hate the ending,
hate this waste, this waste
magnified six million times
until it is beyond
what I can even imagine.
Afraid
“I’m afraid of myself,” you write,
afraid of what wells up inside you:
you speak of your period,
red hope spreading
from your place of secrets;
you know there is a connection
between this bright bloom
and your passion in the attic:
Father looks concerned, he wants to protect you,
knowing your loneliness,
your fear: you write,
always in hope,
“I feel liberation drawing near.”
You write: “Why should I despair?”
There are only three months left
There are only three months left
until they take you: but you do not know that,
or you could not live.
Stop
Stop the train: the end of this
I cannot bear;
stop –
The Annex
Twenty-five months;
a protected time,
suffocating,
hard: but nothing to what will come;
the cattle car, the uniform
the shouted orders,
for I cannot bear it –
not my Anne,
not this one, but: yes, they all, all –
Final passage
Sixty years ago, this week. . .
a weariness,
a sense of being overwhelmed,
yet I must read on,
finish it, my heart split
with the effort,
yet how dare I grieve,
how dare I – so far from this,
so safe –
In the midst of all,
not knowing how close you are
to the end of the story,
you study the classics: “Orpheus, Jason
and Hercules
all waiting to be untangled,
since their various deeds are running
crisscross through my mind
like multicoloured threads in a dress.”
You clothe yourself with knowledge,
still and focused
in your attic room,
deadly calm,
your studies a form of sanity,
of steering –
You dream of a book of your own,
The Secret Annex,
perhaps a novel
based on your time of hiding.
The chestnut tree
outside your window
bursts into bloom, it is May,
the world insists on continuing,
your father receives
three eggs for his birthday,
and you write,
“unless you’re a Nazi,
you don’t know what’s going to happen to you
from one day to the next.”
You see the abyss between
daily pleasure
and perpetual terror: “that gap,
that enormous gap,
is always there.”
Sometimes you hope for the end,
no matter how terrible,
just to resolve the grinding anxiety;
you wait,
you wait,
the radio your hope,
D-Day, the invasion,
Churchill’s voice,
and everyone glancing at each other,
wondering how to feel,
what to allow,
heads bent, intent,
everyone sweating
in the airless room: when, when –
and somewhere, in all this
your girlhood has been lost,
stolen by fear
and crowding,
stolen forever: my heart pounds,
I feel sick,
I want to run,
I want to put the book away,
but it insists, it insists,
listen to me, it says across the gap
of sixty years,
listen to how it was with us,
to how it was –
Good at heart
Then comes the statement the world remembers,
“I still believe,
in spite of everything,
that people are truly good at heart.”
And a full stop:
ANNE’S DIARY ENDS HERE.
But not the story; not the story.
One day in August, the door bursts open,
and it is over.
Requiem
Mr. Van Daan: gassed to death in Auschwitz .
Mrs. Van Daan: dead; date and place, unknown.
Peter: died in Mauthausen (Austria ), three days before liberation.
Dussel: died in Neuengamme.
Mother: died from starvation in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
all her bread hoarded for her girls.
The sisters: taken to Bergen-Belsen
where they sickened and died,
their young bodies
dumped in a mass grave.
A few weeks later the troops arrived.
The survivor
Pim lived on,
lived to be immensely old,
lived with his memories,
the diary his legacy, his hope;
he married a woman
who came through Auschwitz ,
and perhaps
they did not need to talk,
perhaps
the number on the forearm
was enough.
Miep
An old, old woman is left,
the keeper of the diary,
the one who snatched it from oblivion
in a moment of prescience.
I realize, with shock
that she is still alive,
though nearing a hundred.
Is it difficult to die
when you hold so many secrets?
When Miep speaks,
the world listens.
What she has waited to say
is just as true,
sixty years on.
“Most of humanity
did not even want to know what was happening.”
She speaks simply.
Slowly.
Choosing her words.
No wasting.
An ordinary woman
in an impossible time,
she did what was necessary,
daily,
daily,
for more than two years.
When she speaks, the connection is completed,
the little girl in the closet,
cowering,
the woman afraid to admit
she has suffered
because so many millions suffered more;
it all comes clear in a single, simple statement:
“Anne stands for the absolute innocence
of all victims.”
To come through
Absolute innocence:
my eyes are opened.
Take away the differences; there are none.
This is what it is to be human: to be held captive
against your will,
to be persecuted,
hunted down,
violated,
vulnerable; this is what it is
to endure,
to hold on
to integrity,
to hope,
to stay human
through atrocity,
to remain merciful when punished without mercy,
to “be”, to carry on,
to remarry,
to have another child,
to tell the story
over and over
in simple words, direct and compelling,
leaving out no detail
for it all counts toward glory,
to open our eyes
each day
in an ultimate act of courage
to the same light,
yes, the same light she knew
through the merest crack
in the blackout curtain,
hope spearing through the shade,
illuminating:
and this is the lesson,
daily,
daily,
pledged beyond reason
to a future that may never be,
for this is all we have,
and all we require:
the need to breathe
in an airless room,
the need to imagine and plan
beyond a suffocating confinement,
the need to see past the day of despair,
to live beyond,
to pick up the bleeding threads
and make a life,
to lift up our hands
in supplication
and praise
and gratitude
for what is left,
for the valour
and the honour
and the stubbornness
and the grace
to come through.
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