Salon.com > Steven Hart

No direction here

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 15:57:00 +0000

"No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" (which airs on PBS Monday and Tuesday) is, like the work of its subject, part fraud, part tease and part revelation, shot through with flashes of genius.

A great deal of time, care and talent went into its making, and yet it seems as sloppily made as the tossed-off albums that all but buried Dylan's reputation in the 1980s. Over the course of two installments and three and a half hours -- relentlessly focused on the first five or so years of Dylan's career -- "No Direction Home" offers little that is new and much that is already grindingly familiar to fans of His Bobness. And yet it is tremendously watchable and occasionally rewarding, even if it's apt to leave most viewers with the feeling that they have been served appetizers and dessert without getting so much as a glimpse of the main course.

Is it necessary, in the four decades since Dylan released his first album, to explain why a rock musician deserves a slot in the "American Masters" pantheon? A friend of mine recently spent a frustrating evening with a young woman who said, "Look, I know Dylan's a legend and all, but what's the big deal? Why's he important?"

The moderate who wasn’t there

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 08:00:00 +0000

You wouldn't know it from the rather whiny title of her new book -- "It's My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America" -- but there was a time not so long ago when Christine Todd Whitman was being called the future of the Republican Party.

The GOP, groggy from the loss of the presidency after 12 years of dominance, certainly needed a face-lift. The ravening beast that had always coiled within the dapper bosom of the Reagan presidency had burst forth during the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. The Reagan-era slogan "It's Morning in America" had given way to "It's Payback Time, Liberal Scum." When she became New Jersey's first woman governor in 1993, Whitman looked like a bellwether back to the sensible middle way -- a moderate Republican who was pro-choice, talked a good game about fiscal discipline, and seemed accepting of gays. Her direct, plain-spoken manner was immensely appealing in person. Pundits talked of "Whitman Republicans" rescuing the GOP from its extreme right contingent; Whitman herself seemed destined for bigger things than the governor's mansion.

Nothing was revealed

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 19:41:00 +0000

As every Bob Dylan fan knows, "Blood on the Tracks" remains the album by which the man's music will be judged. The holy trinity of mid-1960s albums -- "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited," "Blonde on Blonde" -- may hold an unassailable place in history, but their magnesium-flare brilliance offers more light than warmth. "Blood on the Tracks," by contrast, frequently boils over with love, regret and longing. It is often tagged Dylan's "breakup album," and some of the songs do seem to reflect the slow dissolution of his marriage. But it also sports sexy country blues ("Meet Me in the Morning"), a blast of raw vitriol that turns back on itself ("Idiot Wind"), a surrealistic western ("Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts"), and "Tangled Up in Blue," a landmark song that opened up possibilities that Dylan is still exploring onstage.

Who’s Sauron — bin Laden or Bush?

Sat, 28 Feb 2004 20:16:00 +0000

In the years following the mid-1950s publication of "The Lord of the Rings," author J.R.R. Tolkien was often plagued by interpreters who wanted to read his three-volume epic as an allegory of World War II or the Cold War, with the disembodied villain Sauron standing in for Hitler or Stalin, and the fiendishly powerful One Ring representing nuclear weapons or space-age technology or whatever.

Though he detested these interpretations, Tolkien offered a truce by drawing a line between "allegory," which placed responsibility on the author, and "applicability," which left readers free to find parallels of their own without pretending to read the author's mind. However, the worldwide success of Peter Jackson's film version of "The Lord of the Rings" has produced a whole new generation of mind readers claiming to understand Tolkien's motives, and opened up another front in the culture war that has long simmered around Middle-earth's frontiers.

The real fellowship of the ring

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 21:00:00 +0000

On a warm September night in 1931, three men went for an after-dinner walk on the grounds of Magdalen College, part of Oxford University. They took a stroll on Addison's Walk, a beautiful tree-shaded path along the River Cherwell, and got into an argument that lasted into the wee hours of the morning -- and left a lasting mark on world literature.

At the time, only one of the men had any kind of reputation: Henry Victor Dyson, a bon vivant scholar who had shared tables and bandied words with the likes of T.E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell. His two companions were little-known Oxford academics with a shared taste for Icelandic sagas, Anglo-Saxon verse and the austere cultural mystique of "the North." Few people remember Dyson now, while millions celebrate the names of his companions: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Yet the works that made their reputations -- "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" for Tolkien, "The Chronicles of Narnia" for Lewis -- were profoundly shaped by that night-long argument and the bond it cemented. It's possible that Tolkien's Middle-earth would have remained entirely a private obsession, and quite likely that Lewis would never have found the gateway to Narnia.

“Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff”

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 20:00:00 +0000

Bob Dylan must be the first musician in history whose unreleased songs are as well known, and in many cases better, than his officially issued work. Certainly no other artist has been so bedeviled by underground recordings. The 40 or so albums that make up the official Dylan canon are all but lost in a sea of bootlegs so vast that collectors have organized them into subcategories, any one of which contains enough entries for months, even years of study.

After decades of failing to stop the bootleggers with complaints and litigation, Dylan and his record company decided to beat them at their own game by launching "The Bootleg Series" in 1991. The most recent installment, "Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue" (Columbia/Legacy), contains superb music, but it illustrates two uncomfortable facts. First, that for well over half his career, Dylan's art has been better served by the bootleggers than by his own label -- or, indeed, by Dylan himself. And second, that underground releases must get a good share of credit for sustaining interest in Dylan as a continuing creative force. The official Columbia releases are fine for charting the first incandescent phase of Dylan's career. But from the mid-1970s onward -- decades marked by long silences, artistic fumbling and a parade of bungled albums -- the real story of Dylan's artistry comes not from Columbia, but from bootleg labels with names like TMOQ, Swingin' Pig, Dandelion, Q, Crystal Cat, Rattlesnake, Wild Wolf and Scorpio.

Galactic gasbag

Wed, 10 Apr 2002 21:00:00 +0000

Another "Star Wars" movie, "Episode Two: Attack of the Clones," is about to hit the cineplexes. As with all cosmological phenomena, certain strange and even frightening things are likely to happen as the event horizon draws near.

Hardcore fans will prepare for opening night by polishing their toy light sabers and getting their Darth Vader costumes taken out an inch or so. Fast-food joints and toy stores will fill up with merchandise bearing the faces of alien creatures. And some gullible middlebrow -- most likely Bill Moyers -- will once again recite the pseudo-religious doctrine that attributes the phenomenal success of the series to producer-director George Lucas' skill at tapping underground streams of ancient legends, using Joseph Campbell's work in comparative mythology as his dowsing rod.