Tissot loved the Thames and its waterfronts — which offered him
endless opportunities for the sort of spatial drama that he reveled
in. The example above is especially dynamic, with its small boat
moving forward into a space in front of the picture plane as the
taller ships lead our eye backward into the space of the painting, reinforcing the sense of
movement. The result is a highly cinematic image.
Well, the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame,
Preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain.
— Bob Dylan, Jokerman
To call Bob Dylan the greatest Christian poet of the 20th Century (and the 21st Century so far) is probably to damn him with faint praise. There just weren’t that many great Christian poets in the 20th Century. His Christian poetry, however, is more alive and vital than the work of other poets with greater reputations, like Auden and Eliot, who were nominally Christian but whose poetry is less concerned with expressing passionate faith than with charting the ennui of a faithless age.
And Dylan is not quite a poet in the modern literary sense — his words don’t live on the page, only in conjunction with the music that is inseparable, expressively, from those words, and mostly only in his own voice. Very little of his poetry survives in cover versions of his songs — although it can. (Hendrix knew how to sing Dylan, and Dylan’s Gospel songs come gloriously alive in the versions of them by black Gospel singers collected on the recent CD Gotta Serve Somebody — most other versions fail because the artists who attempt them don’t realize how deeply Dylan’s work is steeped in the blues, or have no great feel for the blues themselves.)
Dylan wrote two types of Christian songs, one type that fits more or
less directly in the Gospel tradition, however quirky his take on that
tradition might be, and one type that follows the image-collage strategy of
another American tradition, what might be thought of as Whitman by way
of the Beats.
Jokerman is of the second type. It’s a powerful evocation of the image of Jesus, or rather the images of Jesus, but it’s hardly a catalogue of familiar icons. It’s more like a passionate torrent of Dylan’s own various imaginings of Jesus, his own various attempts to comprehend him. The momentum of the work seems to be deeply personal — not an intellectual or aesthetic meditation but a desperate attempt to record a racing stream of thought in which one image of Jesus is instantly rejected as insufficient, replaced with a corollary or opposing image. The ultimate effect is a kind of lyrical portrait in the round — but a portrait in which the subject just won’t sit still.
Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing.
Distant ships sailing into the mist,
You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing.
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?
The first quatrain presents us with the image of an almost pagan figure — a terrible Jesus who stands in conflict with the ancient false gods, the iron gods. Dylan, too, was born with a snake in both of his fists and did not reject the terror of the predicament. (Just try to imagine Auden or Eliot with their hands full of venomous reptiles — they would certainly faint dead away, once they realized that the snakes weren’t metaphors.)
But the last couplet jolts us back to a different kind of complexity. Jesus, the lord of nature, the destroyer of false idols, is not free like the gods of old. His power is useless in the absence of truth within the hearts of men. This is the difference between Jesus and the other, older gods. His power and his freedom count for nothing if they can’t be shared, communicated, translated into the language of simple men. This fact defines his mission, his incarnation.
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,
Bird fly high by the light of the moon,
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman.
Why “Jokerman”? Because the paradox of Jesus’s mission is like the paradox of a good joke — too surreal to be taken seriously by a slow-witted humanity. Many of the climaxes, the final unexpected twists, of Jesus’s parables are like the punchlines of jokes. Laughter is not an inappropriate response to them.
In Dylan’s recording of the song, listen to the yearning, the hopelessness in Dylan’s voice as he sings the last line of the chorus above. He is bemoaning the limits of language and music and human thought.
Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy,
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers.
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed,
Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features.
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space,
Half asleep ‘neath the stars with a small dog licking your face.
In the first couplet above, the paradoxes are almost resolved. Jesus has come to fulfill the law and the scriptures, to reconcile them with the laws of nature. The message of Grace will find unsentimental expression in light of a harsh view of this world and its inexorable destructiveness. The issues, the stakes, won’t be fudged. (See the couplet at the beginning of this post.) In the next couplet above, Jesus is exalted, aestheticized — worshiped as he’s worshiped in art:
But Dylan can’t leave Jesus here — a figure carved in marble.
The last couplet above startles like a bolt of lightning — because
suddenly Dylan is back imagining Jesus as he walked the earth, sleeping
rough, on the road between two villages, as he must have done on so many
nights, getting just a little rest, and alone, probably grateful for
the affection of the little dog who undoubtedly showed up at the
disciples’ campfire looking for a handout. This is a good man,
the dog senses — he won’t kick me.
All the allegories and all the art fade away. The image of Jesus
won’t be fixed by any convention. It always returns to the dust
of the earth and to mystery. There are no “answers” in Jokerman —
just a question . . . who is this guy, who is this joker? It’s
the question Dylan is asking himself, and it’s unanswerable.
Lyrics copyright © 1983 Special Rider Music
My
friend Jae and I supplemented our modest cooking skills with large
doses of improvisation and luck to concoct a truly splendid
Thanksgiving meal.
Jae, in an impulse of reckless ambition, decided he would make mashed
potatoes. “I'm going French with them,” he said, but would not
explain what he meant by this.
In the end he made stupendously
good mashed potatoes and only after they'd been tasted would he reveal
his ingredients. Half-and-half for creaminess, a large but not
overpowering amount of finely chopped garlic, one single, large
shallot, a small amount of freshly grated Romano cheese and a pinch of
cayenne pepper. I can't say
what's French about any of this but I can say that the results were
delicious.
Jae made stuffing but added to it at my request some oysters and, on
his own initiative, as likely to complement the taste of the oysters
well, some crumbled fried bacon. Again . . . delicious.
Our large turkey for some reason did not produce much in the way of fat
drippings, so that late in the cooking of it we despaired of having
enough liquid in the pan to make gravy. On another inspired
impulse, Jae poured some pumpkin ale into the pan, which made for a
very fine gravy in the end — an improvisation that could well become a
Thanksgiving tradition.
I confess I couldn't savor the meal as slowly and carefully as I might
have, because I started drinking too early in the day, and too many
different things. A rosé wine, then some of the pumpkin ale,
which had a cheerful, festive taste to it, then some Chimay ale and finally a
Merlot with the dinner. I was past consciousness even before I
got to the pumpkin pie, which served as a fine breakfast the next day.
Friday was a bit of a blur, sharply focused only by a turkey sandwich and by a viewing of Vertigo, which still yields up treasures after countless viewings in the past.
And so the time of leftovers begins. From the look of things this should last quite a while.
. . . the pang of affection & gratitude is the Gift of God for good. I am
thankful that I feel it; it draws the soul towards Eternal life &
conjunction with Spirits of just men made perfect by love &
gratitude—the two angels who stand at heaven’s gate ever open, ever
inviting guests to the marriage. O foolish Philosophy! Gratitude is
Heaven itself; there could be no heaven without Gratitude. I feel it
& I know it. I thank God & Man for it . . .
We can make good movies or we can make bad movies. The bad movies
cost a bit more, but if they give us enough money, we can make them
just as bad as they want them to be.
Jae
and I headed back to Death Valley Junction from our dinner at the
Longstreet Casino coffee shop with plenty of time to spare before the
performance by Marta Becket (above) at her Amargosa Opera House.
We were amazed at all the people who'd showed up — the little theater
could hold about a hundred people and it ended up nearly full.
The place is a hoot — all its walls and ceiling painted by Marta
herself to resemble the inside of a Baroque opera house. It took
her four years to complete the job.
Today she is frail and birdlike, but still carries herself as a
dancer. She walks out onstage, sits in a chair and talks and
sings for about an hour. She has great presence, partly
diva-like, partly girlish. You come away from the show, from the
whole phenomenon of the Amargosa Opera House, with a swirl of questions.
Is it silly or sublime to be the biggest star in Death Valley, where there
are no other stars? Is it heroic or preposterous to create your
own world out in the middle of nowhere and dare the rest of the world
to ignore you?
All of the above, I guess. Marta's world is part David Lynch,
part Fellini, part senior high school play, part good old-fashioned
show-biz, utterly disciplined and professional. Once she
bought a ghost town and brought it back to life — now she's a bit of a
ghost herself, but right at home in the spotlight.
What's profound about it all, I think, is the reminder that all theater
deals in the presentation of spirits, not quite flesh and blood, not
quite illusion. She painted an audience for herself on the walls
of her theater, and every Saturday night at 8 o'clock between November
and May she conjures a real audience out of thin air, there on the edge
of Death Valley — she conjures us out of thin air, and we become part
of the ghostly goings-on. We lose some of our solidity in the process and feel
that we know what it's like to dance on air.
[Photos © 2007 Jae Song]
On
our visit to Death Valley my friend Jae and I decided to attend a
performance at the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction, just
outside the boundaries of the national park. The opera house sits
at one end of a large u-shaped arcade built in 1923 by the Pacific
Coast Borax Company as a kind of company town. It incorporated
living quarters, offices, a hotel, a dining room and a community
center, which is what the opera house started out as.
When New York City dancer Marta Becket and her husband chanced upon the
complex in 1967 it was a deserted ruin, but Marta imagined the
community center as a theater in which she could exercise her
art. She and her husband leased it, renovated it and gradually
bought up the rest of the complex, reopening the hotel and presenting
shows in the “opera house” every year from November to May, all
starring Marta.
She's still at it, though at 84 she can no longer dance. She
gives a seated performance these days, in which she reminisces and
sings songs of her own composition.
While waiting for curtain time we drove seven miles north to the
Longstreet Casino, Hotel and RV Park. Like everything else in
these parts, it's in the middle of nowhere. As I learned from a
bartender there, the casino's fortunes rise and fall with the numbers
of RV campers who stop in on tours of Death Valley and the American
West.
There only seemed to be locals on hand when we visited. “Why do
people live out in places like this?” I asked myself. The answer
came to me after a while — “There are no yuppies here.” It
was refreshing.
Jae and I had some decent burgers at the casino's coffee shop, and I won 57 cents at a slot machine.
Then we headed back to Death Valley Junction for the show.
My friend Jae is in town, visiting from New York, and yesterday for
some reason we decided to drive to Death Valley, which is about three
hours away. It was like a journey to another country.
We headed straight for Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the Western
Hemisphere — 282 feet below sea level. It was amazing to think
we'd sunk so low.
There was a broad pathway from the parking area whose surface was
packed salt. As you walked out into the valley on this pathway
you could see other figures walking far in the distance. It made
you feel like a pilgrim on some supernatural highway leading to the end
of the world.
The good news was that the only way we could go from Badwater Basin was up.
Ken Burns says this photograph is his favorite among all the still images used in his documentary The War.
It really is beautiful — the composition, emphasizing the deep space,
reminds one of Victorian academic paintings. Tissot and
Alma-Tadema reveled in compositions like this:
Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
Like Renoir, Anders Zorn seemed to be intoxicated by female flesh — the sensual surface of his canvases seems to be a sexual response to the female nude, whose aura radiates outward to affect her surroundings, which take on her sensual properties, as in the painting above. The whole world seems made of flesh. Renoir said, “I paint with my penis,” and the same can almost be said of Zorn.
Renoir’s world sometimes seems about to melt in the sexual delirium but Zorn kept a stricter control over his draftsmanship and his sense of modeling, of space — he was more academic in that sense. The tension between the sensual surface and the precise rendering of forms makes Zorn’s work more interesting to me than the late Renoir nudes, which always seem to threaten to dissolve into goo (see above.) They become more and more about Renoir’s mood and process, less and less about real women.
The
influence that went on, back and forth, between the cinema and other
visual arts has often been noticed but rarely studied in detail.
Writers on cinema have produced tome after tome about the influence of the
stage and literature on movies, but the visual side of things has
rarely been subjected to rigorous investigation.
Partly this is because the two principal visual influences on movies,
comic strips and Victorian academic painting, have had little prestige
in the scholarly culture, and partly it's because these two forms have
been hard to study themselves. First-rate reproductions of even
the most important comic strips have been difficult to come by, and
Victorian academic painting tends to languish in storage in museums, to
make room in the galleries for the junk creations of “modern art”.
With respect to comic strips, things are changing. Splendid reproductions of seminal strips like Popeye, Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates
are becoming available in ongoing series, and Winsor McCay is getting
spectacular treatment in large over-sized volumes which do full justice
to his amazing visions. (See here and here.)
New revelations about the connection between comic strips and movies should
follow. Here's a brief slideshow (via Boing Boing) created by a critic at the Boston Globe
which surveys some of the most obvious ways Winsor McCay's work has
influenced the iconography of movies. It's based on observations in a new collection of McCay's strip Dream Of the Rarebit Fiend. More complex issues of
narrative technique and composition will surely come to the fore in the
future. [McCay created some of the earliest animated cartoons, so
his influence on film animation has long been appreciated, but his
influence on movies in general was far more comprehensive, as the
slideshow suggests.]
If you want to contemplate the connection between cinema and Victorian
academic painting you will just have to settle at present for my
passing observations in the essays collected here.
This picture has an aura and authority that may become harder and harder to
appreciate. It was taken by Robert Capa, who went into Omaha Beach
with the first wave on D-Day, 6 June 1944. Omaha Beach was, as it turned
out, the most hellish sector of the invasion, where the most casualties
occurred. Even before that became known, Capa would certainly
have been aware that he was risking his life to record the moment on
film, that there was a good chance he’d never return from France, even
if he managed to get ashore there. But he knew how important the
invasion was — what a visual record of it would mean to everyone
praying for its success, and to future generations.
In modern warfare, there would probably be video cameras attached to
the landing craft, capable of transmitting live images to a command
center somewhere, but in Capa’s time a real live human being needed to
be there with a camera to bring back pictures of the assault. A
life had to be put on the line for it.
Capa could assume, too, that his pictures would have a built-in
authority as proof of his witness. Today, in the era of
Photoshop, when photographs can be faked almost beyond detection, the
photographic medium has lost some of this authority. We have to
think retrospectively to summon up what the image above and the one below meant to Capa and his contemporaries.
There was a tragic but somehow fitting end to Capa’s experiences at
Omaha Beach. He survived but most of the photographs he took did
not. A nervous lab assistant back in England tried to dry Capa’s
rolls of 35mm film too quickly — and all but eleven of the images were
destroyed. But this just served to make those eleven images more
precious — to remind us of all that was lost on D-Day, all the lives
of young American soldiers that ended on the invasion beaches.
The eleven images that do survive are miraculous things. It’s
like having photographs of the last day at Thermopylae, of the battle
on Bunker Hill, of the furthest advance of Pickett’s charge. The visual
records of future wars will be more extensive and more useful to
military planners, but they won’t have quite the human dimension, the
spiritual dimension, of Capa’s pictures. They may make us shudder but they won’t make us cry — as Capa’s do, or should.
Here's a poem in French by Henri Michaux, Ma Vie:
Tu t'en vas sans moi, ma vie.
Tu roules.
Et moi j'attends encore de faire un pas.
Tu portes ailleurs la bataille.
Tu me désertes ainsi.
Je ne t'ai jamais suivie.
Je ne vois pas clair dans tes offres.
Le petit peu que je veux, jamais tu ne l'apportes.
A cause de ce manque, j'aspire à tant.
A tant de choses, à presque l'infini…
A cause de ce peu qui manque, que jamais tu n'apportes.
Here's a rough translation:
You're going away without me, my life.
You're rolling on.
And I'm still waiting to make my first move.
You've taken the battle elsewhere.
You've deserted me.
I never followed you.
I've never seen anything in what you offer.
The little I want you never bring me.
Because of this I want so much —
So many things, almost everything . . .
Just because of this pittance I lack, that you never bring me.
This new painting, Deja Vu Waltz,
by Amy Crehore was just completed for a show at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa
Monica, California, opening on 17 November. If I were in the Los Angeles area I'd rush
right out to see it. It's awesome.
The devil would like to turn all this gossamer sensuality into
something else, but he can't — he's under severe restraint. The
naughty dream will just go on and on.