…Leada came up from L.A. to escape the fires. She talked about electromagnetic fields, the ex-Mormon guy who gave her chlamydia, pyros and tweakers, the Rothschilds, the imminent Earthquake that would destroy everything, the entire state of California. She picked Leila up in her car that smelled of old Taco Bell and vape smoke and perfume and just drove, blasting different cloud rappers she’d fucked or tried to fuck or who’d tried to fuck her, who were too ugly to fuck, etc. Talia was in the front passenger seat. They crossed the bridge, weaving manically in and out of traffic, drove through the TL, ended up at Fisherman’s Wharf on a cold, desolate night.
Culturewatch
Sohrab Hura: “Mother” (At MoMA PS 1 Through February 17)
Click on Read More for a bigger screen.
Perception
The first-floor windows of the Life Sciences building sit one step above sidewalk level, flush to the floor. They are recessed far enough in from the outside edge of the building to allow an elderly woman in a heavy, hooded blue coat, a black “I (Heart) SF” sweatshirt, and a patterned dress over jeans to sleep there.
The woman sleeps surrounded by her possessions, which, so far as Goshkin can catalog from his seat in the café across the street, consist of a shopping cart, several stuffed large plastic bags, a yellow blanket, a rug depicting a horse on hind legs, an umbrella, two tubes of glittering steel pipe, and a crooked, leafless tree branch as tall as she is. Once she has awakened, the woman begins to move her belongings to the sidewalk.
She arranges them as if assembling a train. What connects the cars of the train is unclear. So is how it will move forward. She takes her time, sometimes removing an item from a shopping bag and adding it to the exterior, sometimes shifting items she has placed in one position to another.
Bob Dylan and the unfairness of genius
Bob Dylan puts on a song like a suit of clothes. He does it when he plays concerts, sings his old hits as if for the first time, frequently confounding his back up band with his changes. Through the magic of YouTube, we can listen to him in the studio, recording “Positively 4th Street” through 12 takes, each different from the other. You’re relieved when he hits the take that’s used on the record, but changing his approach, his tone, the attitude of his singing, doesn’t reveal any more about him than changing from a cashmere sweater into a plaid lumberjack shirt.
You can hear the deliberateness of the different takes. He is, and was, a professional musician, after all. He appeared to be trying to find himself inside the songs he wrote and sang, but maybe that was a put-on, like so much else he said for public consumption. In an interview for Newsweek done in February of 1968, Dylan said, “I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that anymore. There’s myself and there’s my song.”
How to Mourn a Famous Friend
Recoil from the headline’s slap.
Scroll through all the phases of her face.
Dig up your own photographs. Decide the auspicious number means she died without pain.
Place your favorite – arms around each other, grinning like fools – on your body where it aches the most.
Hold her pet name for you under your tongue.
First Pomegranate
Which part of this crimson
honeycomb to eat? And how? Sun
highlights the knife’s blade, stripes the room
like prison bars.
I watch you scoop seeds, then copy;
savor sweet-tart bursts
as red pearls open.
Your food soothes me, your kind,
scratched-by-smoke-and-whiskey voice.
You must meditate, Sweet Pea.
Learn to let go. You’re just like me
at that age – beautiful and charming,
far too stubborn.
Not with you.
All Gone: Garth Hudson R.I.P.
A homiletic organ part from Garth opens “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,” frames the song right away with weight, seriousness, the melody hinting at mortality with funerary allusions, surely, though Garth’s playing here takes me somewhere else, back to mass as kid, to those brief, well, I don’t have the technical terms for them, but those brief intros and outros to the segments of mass, intros and outros played on the organ, the pieces serving, I recall, as signals of transitions, this organ with just utterly massive pipes in rows that fascinated me as a kid, dozens of pipes in various sizes, many running all the way up to the high vaulted ceiling (maybe 75 feet), an entire wall of pipes behind the altar and sanctuary, so much bigger and, as I picture it now, seemingly out of proportion with the celebrant down there, to whom my brother and I were supposed to be paying attention, my own memory though being really specific now: warm and slow organ chords that somehow combined light and darkness in one, the overwhelming wall of pipes with no pattern or symmetry that I could ever discern, the organist not, I recall, ever visible from the pews, though you’d maybe catch a glimpse of her, stage left, depending on which line you were in for communion, so small-seeming, almost hiding there within the mountains of sound.
“Bob on Bob”…
is a brilliant collection of essays, short pieces, reminiscences, Rabelaisian lists, and so much more.[1] All devoted to (“The”) Bob Levin’s love for, and obsession with, Bob Dylan. I was struck by the book’s design. It reminded me of the early releases of Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books. Levin’s style is a smorgasbord of pithy observations and freewheeling narrative that makes reading him a pleasure. Every page is tasty.
Levin has attended more than a dozen live performances of Dylan’s, beginning in 1963 at Brandeis University, which in Levin’s telling was close to the center of one version of high American culture—a culture that Dylan would transform. It helped that Dylan was an outlier, hailing from Minnesota and born on the less than urbane side of the tracks—“Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac/ Like Louis and Jimmy and Buddy and all the rest…” He belonged among the un-jocked and un-classical—the artful strivers not the upwardly mobile conformists. Levin credits Dylan with making rock ‘n’ roll respectable to the culture’s next generation of cool rulers when he chose to go electric.
Per Levin, Dylan beats Hemingway (and every other artist of the last century) as a creator and character-shaper. It was Dylan’s shape-shifting that instantiated the counterculture’s previously unimaginable range of possible selves/worlds.
Homegoing: Watching “The Burial” & Assessing the Value of Attorney Halbert Dockins’ Mentorship
n+1‘s editors sent out an end-of-the-year appeal, noting that 2024 was their journal’s 20th year. They trumpeted “a viral essay (‘Casual Viewing,’ by Will Tavlin) in our new issue that’s on track to become one of our top-five most read pieces of all time.” I don’t keep up with n+1. The editors’ little magazine (say what?) notion of what they’ve called “The Intellectual Situation” has always seemed narrow and inorganic — a tweak on the insular thing the original New York Intellectuals termed “Mind in America.” Still, what the hey, I gave “Casual Viewing” a shot.
Afterlife
…Leila, do you believe in an afterlife?, Heidi asked. Leila was on mushrooms, lying in a bed of roses. The way Heidi asked the question made her think of a spring day on a planet where it snows all the time (after the last snow on Earth). She closed her eyes. Everything passed too much like a dream. I don’t know anymore, she said, truthfully. There had been a time when she had seen certain things, known them, well after the atheism of her adolescence. But seeing, knowing, passes away too, into the void. What about you?, she asked.
Imperfection
a capsule review by Bob and Adele Levin
Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days follows a middle-aged cleaner of public toilets in Tokyo from waking, through sleep, to waking again. About two-thirds of the way in, the film introduces issues of family. “While,” Goshkin suggested, “they make the movie more audience friendly, it might be better off without distracting from someone simply going about tasks like a Zen monk.”
American X-mas Party
Shane and I used to finger each other. Don’t worry mom, this isn’t me coming out. Fingering is a bit dramatic. It was just pre-pubescent exploring. I remember one time when we had our pants off, figuring out each other’s, in Shane’s room—my mom and Shane’s mom knocked on the door. We hadn’t heard them make their way from the living room. Shane and I rushed to button up. My mom didn’t notice the way my pants hung loosely from my hips.
I went to see Shane for the first time in ten years. His mom, an ex-police detective who had moved out to California, was hosting a Christmas party on her return to New York. I could discern which retro-fitted Harlem apartment building was Shane’s.
Kafka’s Blues
Mark Christian Thompson, a professor of English at Johns Hopkins, is a scholar to reckon with: he is the author of Kafka’s Blues, a work on Kafka and racial blackness, or as the book’s subtitle puts it, “Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic.”[i] You might not think this field of inquiry the most urgent domain for reflection right now, but Thompson’s scholarly energy and originality are exemplary.
The Pete Seeger Story
Thanks to the script and Edward Norton—a real actor with a larger palette than Timothée el blanco—Pete Seeger is a central player in the new Dylan movie. Part of being a so-phisticated 9-year-old in 1965 (rather than a winsome seven-year-old sing-a-longer con hammer) was to lean away from Pete Seeger. Down the line, when I got all clear about the history of America’s Fellow Travelers, my aversion to him went beyond his/my square past. Every time some Oliver Stoney/Nationist upholds some update of Stalinist/Putinist nonsense, I want to curse all the fuckers who polluted the American radical imagination with agitprop about humanism of totalitarians. Seeger was tuned to their channel for way too long. Unlike so many of his comrades, though, he got free (if not loose)…
Let’s ‘ave a Larf (“In which I introduce the Beatles to both Bob Dylan and the evil weed…”)
Before (the late) Al Aronowitz brought Dylan and pot to the Beatles, he introduced Billie Holiday to the Beats. You can read his sweet tale about that encounter here. I’m reminded just now that I met Aronowitz one evening in the aughts at Amiri Baraka’s house where a tiny group had turned out for a poetry reading by an ex-member of The Last Poets. The odd few included the current mayor of Newark, who chowed down with me in the kitchen as someone’s (Amina’s?) beans moved his dad to get rhapsodic. Wish I’d taken Baraka’s words down. His offhand ode to beans was as tasty as Seven Guitars‘ melody of greens. Thankfully, though, I recall what happened after the reading when the Last Poet let on he’d become a Muslim. Baraka’s response was to pour the Courvoisier and ask: “Is God a tease? How come this is so mellow if He doesn’t want us to have a taste?”
On to Aronowitz’s (conflicted) case for natural highs…
It’s my experience that to smoke marijuana for the first time is to explore the limits of hilarity only to find that there are no limits. You laugh so hard that you get addicted to it. You want to laugh that hard again, so you smoke marijuana again. And again and again and again and again. I’m told that few ever really succeed in laughing that hard a second time, but I did. The two biggest laughs of my life were the first time I smoked marijuana and the first time the Beatles smoked it.
The latter occasion was at the Hotel Delmonico on Manhattan’s Park Avenue on August 28, 1964. The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein, had just finished eating their room service dinner when Bob Dylan and I pulled up in Bob’s blue Ford station wagon driven by Victor Maymudes, Dylan’s tall, slender-and wiry Sephardic-looking roadie. Victor carried the stash in his pocket as we made our way through the mob of teenyboppers on the sidewalk and into the hotel.
Bob Dylan: On A Couch & Fifty Cents A Day
Peter McKenzie’s parents welcomed Bob Dylan into their life and New York City apartment where he slept on the couch for a couple seasons in 1961. Mac and Eve McKenzie helped introduce Dylan to Greenwich Village’s politics of culture. Peter was in high school (on his way to Harvard) when Dylan came to stay for a stretch. He hero-worshipped Dylan who acted big brotherly toward him.
Bob Dylan: the Man; the Moment; the Italian Meats Sandwich[1]
Chickie Pomerantz was lit.
Opening night of the 1963 Brandeis Folk Festival had been lame. All those green bookbags and black turtlenecks. All those skanks and pears. Then this skinny guy with this scratchy voice came on singing about some farmer starving to death in South Dakota. Chickie and Kevin Cahill and Frannie St. Exupery and a couple other jocks tossed beer cans at the stage.[2] “You shoulda seen the assholes run,” he said, coming back to the dorm.
I went the second night.
A Feminist Dylanist Remembers
It always seemed to me — and I could be wrong but this is my memory — that in the 1960s, boys sat around, stoned or not, like rabbis doing talmudic interpretations of Dylan lyrics. Not girls. My intro to him came in 1966 in 10th grade “AP” (advanced placement) English, where this kind of hidden-bohemian woman teacher (this was a time in my totally and still de jure segregated public HS when the boys where still being kicked out for a day and sent home, if they wore sandals to school with no socks, or if their sideburns got too long, or their hair past their ears, and girls still had to do the spaghetti-strap bend-over test for the old lady assistant principal, to see if their breasts were even slightly visible and if so also remove to home and change). So this bohemian teacher, Ann Sherill, played us The Times They are A’Changing. I remember it was a hot day and the big fan was on, and we girls were stuck on the backs of our thighs (we had to wear dresses then) to our desk seats. I remember being absolutely electrified, probably not just by the title song but also by Hattie Carroll.
The museum as important as the Parthenon (What you lose when you break up a collection)
Another visit by another Greek premier to London, another bout of speculation about the future of the Parthenon marbles, another poll showing that the British people are happy to see them shipped off to Athens, another slew of liberal commentators expressing with characteristic superficiality the view that the marbles “belong” in Greece, another failure by almost everyone to ask what might be lost if that were to happen.
Not that it constitutes much of an argument, but in fact the level of public support for the restitution of the marbles seems to have dropped by over 20% in the last decade, from 77% to 53%. It may be that this has something to do with the issue becoming yet another front in the culture wars, with Reform and its media boosters coupling the metopes in the British Museum with the fate of the Chagos islands. One result is a double irony in which the Right wants to charge people to see the marbles and the Left advocates free entry not to see them.
Whither Disillusion: I Wanna Watch College Ball (“to be sung to the tune of “I Wanna Be Bobby’s Girl”)
I. Dislocation
Too Jewish for Christmas, not Jewish enough for Chanukah: I long ago began cultivating the practice of obsessively watching the NBA cavort on December 25, on which date both sectarian holidays occurred simultaneously this year.
An icy night of snow and blues
It was bitterly cold on a late December night, and snow was starting to blow when I went out to listen to Slim Harpo at Steve Paul’s Scene, a club on West 46th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City that was one of the hippest rock and roll joints the city has ever seen. Hendrix played there in ’67, it was the first place the Doors ever played in New York, and it was a home-away-from-home for touring British acts like Traffic and Jeff Beck. Most of all, it was the premier blues venue in the city.
On this night, with the wind howling and the temperature hovering somewhere in single digits and Slim Harpo playing, I went early. He was supposed to go on at 10:00, and me, I’m thinking it’s fucking Slim Harpo and the place is going to be packed, so I arrived around 8:00. Steve sat me down right in front of the stage at this little table about the size of a dinner plate. There was a one-drink minimum, and I figured I could afford one beer. That was it. I was determined to nurse it through the entire show.
Well, I waited and waited, and I was nursing my beer and checking the door for the crowds I thought would show up any minute, but nobody did. Around 9:30, Steve opened the door and stepped outside, checking up and down the street. Snow was blowing through the open door, and finally Steve came back inside and sat down across from me at the table and introduced himself. Other than the bartender and a couple of waitresses, we were the only two people in the place.
“I guess the blizzard kept everyone at home,” Steve said. “You’re my only customer. I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’re going to have a show tonight. Let me get you another beer. I’m going to go and talk to Slim.”
He came back about five minutes later, followed by Slim and a guy who played a snare drum and a guy who played an old Fender Telecaster. Steve sat down next to me and said, “Slim told me if there’s a paying customer out there, we’re putting on a show.”
Did they ever! They played all of his hits, like “I’m a King Bee,” “Baby Scratch My Back,” “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and “I Got Love If You Want it,” plus covering half the blues canon of the time. All three of them were sitting on stools. They were in their 40s, but to me they looked like Moses coming down from the Mount. Slim wasn’t well, health-wise — he would die two years later — but he wailed on that harmonica and barked out his songs, and between songs, they chatted with Steve and me from the bandstand, which was about a foot high and two feet away. An hour or so later they were still playing when Steve said, “Let’s call it a night.”
We stood there talking while Slim and his guys packed up their instruments — no roadies needed for one electric guitar case, the smallest Fender amp you ever saw, and one snare drum case and a stand. Slim stuck his harmonicas in his pockets and we all headed out the door. Outside, more than a foot of snow had fallen. Steve said good night and tromped off into the blowing snow. Slim turned to me and asked, “You got any plans?” I said no. “Why don’t you come on along with us?” Why not?