Just Like Dylan's Mr. Jones

Ballad Of A Thin Man

You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked and you say, "Who is that man?"
You try so hard but you don't understand
Just what you will say when you get home
Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

You raise up your head and you ask, "Is this where it is?"
And somebody points to you and says, "It's his"
And you say, "What's mine?" and somebody else says, "Well, what is?"
And you say, "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"
But something is happening and you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

You hand in your ticket and you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you when he hears you speak
And says, "How does it feel to be such a freak?"
And you say, "Impossible!" as he hands you a bone
And something is happening here but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

You have many contacts among the lumberjacks
To get you facts when someone attacks your imagination
But nobody has any respect, anyway they already expect you to all give a check
To tax-deductible charity organizations

Ah, you've been with the professors and they've all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well-read, it's well-known
But something is happening here and you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you and then he kneels
He crosses himself and then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice, he asks you how it feels
And he says, "Here is your throat back, thanks for the loan"
And you know something is happening but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Now, you see this one-eyed midget shouting the word "Now"
And you say, "For what reason?" and he says, "How"
And you say, "What does this mean?" and he screams back, "You're a cow!
Give me some milk or else go home"
And you know something's happening but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Well, you walk into the room like a camel, and then you frown
You put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground
There ought to be a law against you comin' around
You should be made to wear earphones
'Cause something is happening and you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

I've wanted to write a commentary on this song for so long, it's hard for me to even remember. Even when I first heard it, when I was maybe 15 years old and stoned out of my mind on alcohol and hashish, I found it kept pushing me away even as it dragged me into its dark and dysphoric core. Its effect is that magnetic, and that frightening. Maybe it can't even be analyzed, but since it's been haunting me so much lately, I will give it a try.

People have debated endlessly about who Mr. Jones is, whether it's Albert Grossman (the manager who boosted Dylan's fame, then took him for a ride that didn't end until the 1980s, when Dylan found out he'd  been swindling him for years), or the journalists who kept asking him lame questions like "Why don't you write protest songs any more?", or the "over-30s" who were then seen as the enemy (Dylan was, after all, only 24 when he recorded this dire masterpiece) - or - or - 

I've always believed, almost from first listening, that this song is autobiographical. It's an attempt to capture the chaotic nightmare he found himself trapped in, bizarrely self-created by an almost grotesque level of fame, the kind that eats people raw.  Dylan by this time looked terrible, was underweight, pale as a ghost, smelled bad (according to the many bios I've read, he's not much of a bather), had hair like a wild bird's nest, didn't eat, slept even less, and was fuelled mainly by cocaine, LSD and speed. The famed "motorcycle accident" that brought this hell to a screeching halt may well have been a planned exit from a lifestyle that was sucking him down into a hellish vortex. Had he continued, he might not even had made it to age 27, when so many rock legends were cruelly harvested.

I don't need to say that Dylan is one of the great minds of our time, but the fact that he squeaked through this drug-soaked period, dragged down by sycophants and hangers-on, attests to both his inner strength and the stable, happy childhood that launched his confoundingly unique artist's life. Say what else you will about him, Dylan is a family man, and it is this solid foundation that has kept him from flying off the edge of the world, both then and now. 

Of all the songs in this particularly fruitful period, when his creativity was in constant overdrive, this one gets closest to expressing the horrifying dystopia he found himself in: the queasy shifting and lurching of reality, the draining and soul-sucking parasitic "relationships" which he knew were false and phony (and LORD how Bob Dylan hates a phony!), and the dissolving of a real sense of self, a lapsing of identity which must be the most frightening experience there is. It is a hollowing-out, a stealing of one's humanity, and Mr. Jones is enmeshed in it, with no idea who, what or where he is at any given moment. Or how to get out.

You raise up your head and you ask, "Is this where it is?"
And somebody points to you and says, "It's his"
And you say, "What's mine?" and somebody else says, "Where what is?"
And you say, "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"
But something is happening and you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

It isn't just the words, which are harrowing enough, but the delivery, which is so full of pain that it's hard to listen to now that I hear Dylan so differently. I'm noticing aspects of his voice in listening to pristine re-released/cleaned-up recordings on a quality headset in the middle of the night, especially when I've had a wee nip of cannabis oil (purely medicinal, but my how it brings those songs into focus). People would complain he was a lousy singer, but particularly at this time in his career, when he was riding out on the far fringes of existence, his voice is so raw that it grabs you where you don't even know you live.

This isn't just dada or nonsense or surrealism or anything else that can be labelled. This is writing on the level of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, brought up to date for 1965. Dylan lays heavy on the keyboard on this one - I can tell it's him because he's not a very sophisticated pianist, but wrings the guts out of it anyway, each chord reverberating with a sense of  doom. 

I still haven't gotten it, have I? How can you begin to analyze a song that contains the lines, "You put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground"? This is why I kept not writing about it, though I have analyzed the hell out of Desolation Row and a few others. If Ballad of a Thin Man (and Dylan was practically transparent at this point) were a painting, it would be by Hieronymus Bosch, dismembered human body parts crazily rearranged and reality disassembled and shot all to shit.

I still find it hard to listen to, and that moan at the end seems almost like a last gasp. We know it isn't true, that right at this moment he's probably lounging in one of his many mansions (he owns property all over the world, and why shouldn't he? Who has worked harder to attain what he has and who he is?), coming up to his eightieth birthday, maybe hanging out with some of his family (and at this point we know he has at least six kids and multiple grandkids) - the genius has come full circle and is now living comfortably with people who love him. 

But the shadow remains. This man's eyes are haunted, incandescent with knowledge of things we probably were never supposed to know. The realm of genius is lonely, and at such high altitude the air is rarefied and very thin. He came in with this near-freakish gift, I'm convinced, will go out with it, and never chose it. He has no idea where the songs come from, but knows it's his duty to write them down, work them through, refine them and give them back to the world. 

💥BAM! Man’s hair explodes in radio disaster💥

As a kid, I watched the Little Rascals (which was how the Our Gang comedies were re-branded for TV) every damn day, it seemed, and some of them were strange indeed. Even in the early '60s, this technology seemed ancient and creaky, with radio tubes blowing up and a guy's hair standing on end from electric shock. I retained memories of this particular episode because I couldn't quite forget "that guy", the guy with the hair that kept blowing up. What I had to do here was find the episode (on a very poor-quality video shot by a camcorder off an old 16mm print), isolate and make gifs of the parts with "the guy" in them, string the gifs together, make a video of the long gif, then add music that I thought was appropriate. Then upload it to my YouTube channel. So here are all the best bits, with "the guy".This is my VERY low-tech way of making videos, and it works for me so far. 

Baby Rose troll, my pandemic hair, and - don't despair!

My adorable new trollie, and a few observations on what we can do without during the pandemic - such as, trips to the stylist. I haven't tried to grow out my hair for 40 years, and have had it coloured for 30, so I had no idea what it would look like. I would call it "50 shades of grey", except that now I'm getting used to it and I don't think I want to change the colour. My new troll is very sweet, but my God, where does it end? When my office explodes from troll overload. 

BIZARRE Betty Boop Initiation Dance!😍

The Pogo Cartoon Special that Never Was

This is a strange, a VERY strange YouTube video with the cryptic title WHMTEAHIU. Make sense? It didn't to me, until I realized what I had here. To backtrack a bit, Pogo was wildly popular in the 1950s, but by the '60s times had changed and the long-running comic strip began to run out of steam. Warner Brothers somehow got a deal with cartoonist Walt Kelly to make an animated Pogo TV special - without any creative input from the man himself.

Chuck Jones took over, and though his animation could be inspired (think of the Road Runner cartoons and the Grinch), he just did not GET the eccentricities of Kelly's menagerie from Okefenokee Swamp. The result was simply atrocious, a slick, un-Kelly-esque travesty that just misfired on every level. Pogo's voice was dubbed by June Foray, making him sound like a slightly more precious version of Rocky the Flying Squirrel. The whole thing was a disaster and Kelly fumed, vowing to undo the damage.

Walt Kelly was dying of untreated diabetes by then, had had a leg amputated and was half blind, but was still determined to get his own vision of an animated Pogo on the screen. All we have of this project are preliminary sketches which he put together on his own, without the help of any studio - narrating all the voices himself and hiring his son-in-law to do the music. No one took him up on it, which is a tragedy, for this sketchy, several-frames-per-second story is a small masterpiece in which all his characters come alive. It's Pogo through and through, and gives us a taste of what might have been if Kelly had lived past 60.

I don't know how I ever even found this curiosity with its incomprehensible title. I couldn't find much about it at all, and in fact it was thought to have been lost for decades. It's called an "unlisted" video for reasons unknown. But the title stands for something: We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us - probably the most famous Kelly-ism of them all. 

This curiosity is remarkable for yet another reason. Its message is environmental. We are ruining the landscape with our carelessness and our greed. At a time (1969) when the only environmental message was, "Give a hoot! Don't pollute!" - or, even worse, "Don't be a litterbug" - Kelly was way ahead of his time.  

YOO HOO, KILLED COCK ROBIN - ? (According to Pogo)

 

Poor Cock Robin

 

Who killed Cock Robin?

"Who killed Cock Robin?"

 "I," said the Sparrow,

"With my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin."

"Who saw him die?" 

"I," said the Fly,

"With my little eye, I saw him die."

"Who caught his blood?" 

"I," said the Fish,

"With my little dish, I caught his blood."

"Who'll make the shroud?"

 "I," said the Beetle,

"With my thread and needle, I'll make the shroud."

"Who'll dig his grave?"

 "I," said the Owl,

"With my pick and shovel, I'll dig his grave."

"Who'll be the parson?" 

"I," said the Rook,

"With my little book, I'll be the parson."

"Who'll be the clerk?"

 "I," said the Lark,

"If it's not in the dark, I'll be the clerk."

"Who'll carry the link?"

 "I," said the Linnet,

"I'll fetch it in a minute, I'll carry the link."

"Who'll be chief mourner?"

 "I," said the Dove,

"I mourn for my love, I'll be chief mourner."

"Who'll carry the coffin?" 

"I," said the Kite,

"If it's not through the night, I'll carry the coffin."

"Who'll bear the pall?" 

"We," said the Wren,

"Both the cock and the hen, we'll bear the pall."

"Who'll sing a psalm?" 

"I," said the Thrush,

As she sat on a bush, "I'll sing a psalm."

"Who'll toll the bell?" 

"I," said the bull,

"Because I can pull, I'll toll the bell."

All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,

When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin

Poor Cock Robin.

WHO'S THAT BIRD?

It's a spotted towhee, which also featured in my CRAZY BIRD DANCE video in our back yard. I had no idea what species it was because the light was so low, and all I could see was a silhouette. These guys show up a lot in these parts. 

Spotted Towhee: CRAZY BIRD DANCE!

I'm both seeing and hearing these guys a lot lately - the spotted towhee, a very handsome bird that is easier to photograph than most, because it stays in one spot for longer. I also have a video of another towhee in a tree, singing its heart out.  Bird watching has been saving my sanity as things get worse and worse on the COVID front. We don't seem to be making any progress, and are in fact going backwards. My daughter's husband's family ALL tested positive, and some of them are quite sick. SO. . . we are left to commune with nature as a way to lighten and brighten the dark days. Hope you're doing better, dear reader. . . 

April on Burnaby Mountain

After a long, cold, lonely winter in lockdown, these daffodils with their burning throats are proclaiming SPRING to everyone who sees them.  Perfection DOES exist in the world, as does rebirth and renewal.

Dark enchantment: the bridge on the grass

 

I remember the date, May 1, 2005, because my father-in-law had just died and I had just returned from a soul-shredding trip back east for his funeral. I had nothing left in me, but was in that wild, I've-got-to-get-out-of-here state that always makes me slam the door behind me and travel.

On foot. I went off into the woods, and around here that means I went down the street and turned left, but these were public spaces, dog paths, old-lady-jogging places, and I needed far more surcease, more refuge. I needed to get away from the whole damn human race.

I kept walking, and once more turned left.

I was on a bridge. I was aware that a year or so ago, there was no bridge here, never had been. I had a vague memory of someone building one. Why? It led to nowhere.

Or had I tried it once, and found the rough path over the bumpety old tree-roots just too creepy and uncomfortable? I was on that path, and soon borne up by the rushing of streams.

These were hissing, shisshing, fish-and-glitter streams that rushed through my ear canals and rattled the tiny tympani behind them as if gushing through my skull. Suddenly I had the sense of smell of a horse, and, snorting, lifted my head.

The path led ever on. It twisted and wrenched. I was aware of civilization not far away, as if I could even see houses and hear lawnmowers through the cedars. But it couldn't be so, for these woods were primeval, pulling me deeper in. My feet were in a state of hypnosis. I could not refuse.

I went over bridge after bridge. Where had this path been all my life, I wondered  -  inaccessible to the dogwalkers, the granny-runners. Sealed off, yet here. One stream roared like traffic in a tunnel. It was awful, and I sped on.

As if pursued. But look. Here was the place I always turned back. Or not? I had never been on this path, so how could I remember turning back?  My scalp was electric. Beyond this twist lay the place of the faeries.

I can't describe how each tree seemed inhabited, not by a human or a squirrel but by its own fleshwood-spirit. I can't explain how each tree seethed, how burls swelled like pregnancies, wood cancer that somehow popped out of the symmetry of the trunk and made it look hideously deformed.

Then I stopped at the sight of a massive, salmon-coloured stump, the fleshy remains of a huge fallen cedar. It seemed to hum and swarm with life. I wondered where the tree had fallen, and when. And the sound it must have made, and what pushed it over. The tree-flesh seemed vital yet, not grey but livid red, full of ant-tunnels and probably housing one of those termite queens the size of a rat.

I walked beside a huge gully. I have always hated the word gully, it's ugly and hollow and hellish. I remember when I was about two or three, it could be my first memory, falling down into a gully in Delhi where my grandmother lived, and my sister, who was about 15 at the time, bending over me and saying, "Are you wounded?"

My feet slipped in spongy moss and slime. It was a pleasant day, but I was menaced. Something veered and eered. I could not see it. I turned around quickly, and it vanished.

Now strong cords pulled me, whipcords snaking out from under the ground to yank my feet out from under me. I burst into a clearing, and -

I stopped, then stepped, as cautiously as Pocohontas. The ground sank and groaned under me, giving way with each step and leaving a dark depression.  I stopped uncertainly and looked up and all around me.

I stood in an exact circle of tall cedars. I lifted my head and felt a crackling charge of energy whizzing clockwise around and around me. I chanted some sort of prayer that I wish I could remember now, something about my father-in-law. My temporal awareness had burned away like fog.

As I stood in the electrocharged circle I noticed a squirrel violently frisking its tail, jerkily making its way toward me. But it did not stop. It crept and stopped, crept and stopped until it was only a foot away from me. Then another squirrel appeared, and began to creep towards me. They sat up on their hind legs with their tails jerking and their beady eyes glistening in the sun, waiting.

I walked. Huge fallen logs, roots of trees just jutting up in the air: how had they been uprooted? Why were all these trees laughing at me? Then I saw or felt with my foot the weathered slat of an old ladder. Or something like it.

But it wasn't a ladder. It was a bridge. It was a bridge that lay flat on the grass. And it went on and on. I stepped on it and began to walk.

Perhaps the ground wasn't level here. But it was. Perhaps the ground was marshy here. But it wasn't. This thing was, it just was. I wobbled along on the rickety old slats, cursing the fucking little gnome who had put this bizarre useless thing here just to freak me out and make my hair stand on end.

Then. Then I did see something, a minor gully ahead of me where the ground fell away. But the rickety little bridge remained level. Like a horse stepping on a live power line, I jumped back.

Had I walked on it, I surely would have tumbled in.

This was some booby-trap set by a vindictive fairy tale witch, some Tenniel nightmare ink-drawing designed to scare the living shit out of innocent children. I wheeled and ran. And ran and ran, and it was a good thing that no bear ran after me. Everything unspooled and unreeled and unhappened, so that by the time I got home again, I was not even sure any of it had been real.




But I went back a few days later. I had to know. Yes. It was all there. I noticed a humming and a cracking. A subtle sizzling in the air, something that I picked up with the tip of my nose.

This was once a place deep, deep in the black-green uterine core of British Columbia, before the white man came and ripped the hell out of it, as he continues to do. It was a place where you had better not go, not even if you were indigenous and knew the danger. The place of Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood and the Handless Maiden and all those other sweet children who started out innocent, but ended up lost and devoured.

Don't go there. Don't go there, my girl. This is a place of enchantment, but in the archaic sense, the faerie chant seducing you with coils of magic that will never set you free.

All is changed, changed utterly. I go to that place sometimes still, and like a soft drink left out too long in the sun, most of the fizz has gone out of it. But the trees are still murmuring to themselves, nasty little things they don't want me to hear
.

One day I realized the weird wooden bridge on the grass was gone: just gone, and then I wondered if I had imagined it. So I decided to go a little farther, clambered down and up that gully, and kept going.

A few minutes later, I had no idea where I was.

This was a profound disorientation. I couldn't turn in any direction. The view behind me was even more unfamiliar than the view in front of me. Panic crept up my scalp and I started running, desperately running. Like a hunger, like a thirst, like a stab of unbearable desire, I needed something, anything that looked familiar.

I ran until my lungs ached, and then: I burst out. Burst out of the forest, as if the forest had an actual door. I found myself on a road, a main road, paved, travelled, but completely unfamiliar. I had no idea how I would ever get home.

I walked and walked. I didn't have the nerve to flag a car down. Then I saw something. A bus stop. But I had nothing with me. I wriggled my hands into the pockets of my jeans and came up with a frayed yellow bus ticket that had probably gone through the wash.

I waited and waited. A bus came, a bus I had never heard of before, but it had to take me somewhere, somewhere familiar, somewhere in the civilized world! I made myself look normal, or hoped I did, and got on. I had the thought that I should have some sort of passport, to take me from one mode of being to the next.

I went home to recover, then as I was getting ready for bed I discovered a small bulge in my jeans pocket. I took it out and turned it over. It was a small stone in the exact size and shape of a cat's paw: neat toes and pads on one side, smooth elegance on the other. I didn't remember picking it up. For some reason I put several coats of nail polish on it. I have it still in a case with my jewelry, a bizarre trinket that wouldn't mean a thing to anyone else.