The Ginsberg centennial [UPDATED]

 

This is the music film for Bob Dylan's great song, "Subterranean Homesick Blues," from the great Bringing It All Back Home album (the one that has the cover of the young lady in red stretched out on the couch, behind Dylan). 

If you watch the video,  you probably will mostly focus on Dylan holding the cue cards, but the guy on the left, who can be seen gesturing and talking, and who walks across the scene with his cane at the end, is Allen Ginsberg, the famous poet.

As Eric Wagner has pointed out, today is Ginsberg's centennial, i.e. he was born on June 3, 1926.  

In his book Coincidance, Robert Anton Wilson writes about Ginsberg in the piece "The Poet As Defense Early Warning Radar System." RAW refers to Ginsberg as "our major living American poet."

Ginsberg has a long Wikipedia biography.  Here is the Allen Ginsberg Trust website.  You can also see the calendar of Ginsberg centennial events, one is tonight in New York City, but there's stuff all over the world. 

Ginsberg is best known for his poem "Howl," and (in the comments) Van Scott mentioned in yesterday's post reading in April Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. 

UPDATE: Ed Sanders on Howl.  Link via Eric Wagner. 

A visit to the Bob Dylan Center

Bob Dylan holding the placards in the video for 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'

I have often been on board with Robert Anton Wilson's artistic judgments, but his condemnation of Bob Dylan in this interview amuses me. ("Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence -- the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers.") Nobody ever played "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" or "Blowin' in the Wind" for Wilson and suggested he listen to the lyrics?

In any event, as every serous music nerd I know likes Dylan, I thought I would mention my visit to the Bob Dylan Center, a new museum in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, which opened only last year and which houses his archives. 

It's not in a huge space, but I would describe it as information dense, with many documents on display to read, films to watch, songs to listen to, audio narratives to ingest. I spent quite a bit of time there and I feel I would be able to learn more when I get back. 

A Dylan fan from Colorado gave me permission to photograph her as she looked at the exhibits. 

A letter to Bob Dylan from George Harrison. 

Some of my favorite Dylan albums are Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Nashville Skyline, Blood on the Tracks and Before the Flood. My favorite of his live performances is probably at the Concert for Bangla Desh, available on the Internet Archive.  And I really liked the Traveling Wilburys. 

Is Jesse Michels the 'new RAW'?

 

If you are kind of old like me, you probably have run across an article speculating on who the "new Dylan" would turn out to be. Here is an article, for example, on the "Top Ten Best New Dylans." At the end, I usually wound up concluding that the old Dylan was more interesting than any of the new ones.

Jim O'Shaughnessy is a Wall Street finance guy who is a huge fan of Robert Anton Wilson and who often references RAW on his Twitter account. He is involved in various interesting ventures, including producing  movie on the benefits of psychedelics, and also has a podcast called Infinite Loops. 

Describing a recent episode, O'Shaughnessy writes, "I think of my guest @AlchemyAmerican as a modern-day Robert Anton Wilson. He's even more of a rabbit hole diver than me, and his  @YouTube Channel is a blast--listen in as we discuss some wild ideas and fun speculations." 

@AlchemyAmerican is Jesse Michels, you can check out his Twitter account  and his YouTube channel. (lots of episodes about UFOs and psychedelic mushrooms.) The Infinite Loops episode that features Michels is here. and a transcript is available if you don't want to sit through the podcast. 

Michels used to work for Google and now works for Peter Thiel. Apparently the "new RAW" isn't familiar with the old one -- O'Shaughnessy brings up RAW early in the podcast and Michels doesn't recognize the name, although he does know some of O'Shaughnessy's other influences.

I have a couple of suggestions for Infinite Loops: O'Shaughnessy should interview Tyler Cowen, and he should do an episode that features somebody interviewing O'Shaughnessy himself. (I could do a good job with the latter, focusing on his RAW interests, although I suspect O'Shaughnessy would have his own candidate in mind if he wanted to do it). 

The Hilaritas podcast with Oz Fritz

 

Listening to the Oz Fritz episode of the Hilaritas Press podcast made me want to re-read Masks of the Illumnati and the Schroedinger's Cat trilogy once again, as Oz apparently has recently done. There's discussion of Kabbalah, an interestingly topical oddity in the Cat books, a book recommendation, and talk about Oz' interest in Bob Dylan, among other topics. Not too much about Oz' work as a recording engineer and producer, but I had the feeling listening to the podcast that Oz could talk for hours about different topics. I do wish there had been a bit more discussion about Oz' interest in music. 

You can read Oz' blog, The Oz Mix. And here's an Oz piece on Dylan that fits in with the discussion on the podcast. Other related links at the first link in this post. 

Next month's episode is anarchist writer Wayne Price discussing Peter Kropotkin. 

The new Bob Dylan book

Bob Dylan with Allen Ginsberg in 1975. Creative Commons photo by Elsa Dorfman. 

One of the more curious facts about Robert Anton Wilson is that he didn't like Bob Dylan. ("Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence -- the nasal whine of death and masochism.") 

In general, RAW is not who you go to for discussions of popular music, though he's fine when discussing classical music or jazz. The rest of us I guess can just shrug and wonder why RAW never noticed how great the Beatles were or the Rolling Stones (for the first 20 years of the band's existence, anyway). 

Bob Dylan has a new book out about popular songs, and apparently it's quite interesting; see Tyler Cowen's review.  "This is one of the better books on America, and one of the best books on American popular song."

Notes on Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan with Allen Ginsberg during the Rolling Thunder tour. (Creative Commons photo by Elsa Dorfman.)

I finally got to see Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story on Netflix, which mixes fact and fiction in depicting Dylan's 1970s tour,  and enjoyed it very much. I recently noted Oz Fritz' article about the movie, and one of Oz' comments is worth quoting again:

"This misdirection should come as no surprise.  The film begins with old footage of a stage illusionist making a woman disappear then bringing her back.  It seems part of the film's mission to ontologically shake-up assumptions about exactly what is going on.  Editing and using sound and visuals in this way to create new contexts and factual illusions reminds me strongly of Orson Welle's F is for Fake 'documentary' that looked at art forgery through using the techniques of film forgery. Robert Anton Wilson wrote an excellent account of the sleight-of-hand in that film that could give some insight into how Scorsese constructed this Bob Dylan story."

Indeed, the mixture of truth and BS in Rolling Thunder Revue recalls what RAW did in Illuminatus! and I venture to guess that perhaps RAW might have liked the movie, despite his notorious loathing for Dylan as an artist. It's a much better movie that Dylan's own movie about the tour, Renaldo and Clara. 

One other Dylan note: My favorite live performance is the one he turned in for the Concert for Bangladesh organized by his friend, George Harrison. Although the album of the concert does not seem to be commercially available, I noticed this posting on the Internet archive and shared it with a few friends. As I think of the people who read this blog as my friends, I'm sharing it with the rest of y'all, too. (The track listing is a bit wrong, "Hard Rain" and "Love Minus Zero" are Dylan performances.)

Oz Fritz on the new Bob Dylan film

Oz Fritz has a post up on one of my favorite singers (and one of Robert Anton Wilson's least favorite), Bob Dylan. Specifically, the post about the new Martin Scorsese movie on Netflix, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.  I haven't seen it yet; maybe this weekend. I am old enough that I saw the original movie about the tour, Renaldo and Clara.

If you haven't heard, the new movie mixes real documentary facts with fiction.  In other words, it's not a straight documentary of the tour, although it has concert footage and some genuine moments mixed in with the made up incidents and characters. Renaldo and Clara also was pretty weird and not really a conventional documentary; I remember mainly liking the concert sequences.

One paragraph from Oz's piece:

"This misdirection should come as no surprise.  The film begins with old footage of a stage illusionist making a woman disappear then bringing her back.  It seems part of the film's mission to ontologically shake-up assumptions about exactly what is going on.  Editing and using sound and visuals in this way to create new contexts and factual illusions reminds me strongly of Orson Welle's F is for Fake "documentary" that looked at art forgery through using the techniques of film forgery. Robert Anton Wilson wrote an excellent account of the sleight-of-hand in that film that could give some insight into how Scorsese constructed this Bob Dylan story."

When Burroughs met Dylan

Bob Dylan. Wikimedia Commons photo.

Boing Boing has an interesting post, "When William S. Burroughs met Bob Dylan," about a writer who Robert Anton Wilson admired (Burroughs, of course) and a singer-songwriter RAW unfairly dissed. 

The blog post is an excerpt from a new book by Casey Rae, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll.  The book claims that Burroughs' cut-up prose technique influenced Dylan's lyrics, and that the "Brother Bill" mentioned in the Dylan song "Tombstone Blues" is a reference to Burroughs.

Note: Netflix has begun airing a new movie, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a fictionalized account of Dylan's 1970s tour airing on Netflix. Allen Ginsberg, a poet much admired by RAW, apparently is featured in the film.