Nihilism: The No That Says Yes

Well, all the cool people interviewed on the AV Club do it...Why shouldn't I when insomnia and I are getting hot and heavy on the brown couch?


The Vines, "In The Jungle"

I'm not very much into The Vines. My Australian friend Mark put a few tracks of theirs on a mix CD of Australian bands that he made for me, along with stuff by The Cruel Sea, Butterfingers, and the incomparable Machine Gun Fellatio...Meh, it's not bad. The other ones, "Mary Jane" and "Gone", are squealier. This must have been recorded for a radio session because at the end of the track, an announcer says "You're listening to The Vines live on Triple J."


Joy Division, "Colony (Peel Session, 11/26/79)

More radio sessions! The "Live At The BBC" CD was my first real exposure to Joy Division. I had known about them and their inopportune end for quite a few years, as I had been into New Order for a while, but God knows why, I had never consciously heard any of Joy Division's music.

It was a Friday afternoon in early April of 2003 and I was living in Karasu-cho, Mie Prefecture, Japan. I had the afternoon off work, and I was sitting at home reading Cut, my favorite Japanese film magazine. The issue was all about great music movies and there was a big blurb about Michael Winterbottom's new film "24 Hour Party People" with a photo of the actors that played Joy Division in the film. Something about how these scruffy English kids looked with their raincoats and fags hanging from their mouths appealed to me. I had no further plans for the day; I hopped on the bus to Tsu (30 min.), got on the next Kintetsu express train for Nagoya (1 hr.), went straight to the 9th floor of Nagoya Station to Tower Records, bought this CD, and then got back on the train. I would have gone straight home and listened to it (I didn't have my CD player with me), but I seem to recall that my friend Lisa called me and I wound up getting trashed with her and some other friends and crashing at her place in Matsusaka. I got home the next day, made myself a cup of tea to combat the hangover, and put this on the stereo. I just sat there drinking my tea at the kitchen table listening. When it was over, I played it through again. I was shocked that I'd been alive for 24 years and I hadn't heard this stuff before. Are Joy Division over-rated? Of course. Is it really just a nihilist moaning over a bass solo? Well, yeah. But I've been hooked ever since.

This is an early version of "Colony" with different and slightly inferior lyrics to what appears on Closer. The guitar break in the middle is much more satisfyingly raw on this one, though.


Saint Etienne, "Dream Lover"

This is off 2006's Tales From Turnpike House, a concept album about people living in an East London tower block. It's one of St. Etienne's better albums...Up there with Finisterre and Tiger Bay. Sarah Cracknell's voice is like gourmet Italian vanilla gelato with just a touch of syrupy, aged balsalmic vinegar drizzled on the top. Trust me.


Echo And The Bunnymen, "Angels & Devils"

This is my absolutely favorite Echo & The Bunnymen song. It was released as a single in '85 (I think) and languished in obscurity until it got tacked on as a bonus track on the reissue of Ocean Rain. Will Sergeant's Fender Jaguar never sounded better, in my opinion.


Seamus Creagh, Hammy Hamilton & Con Ó Drisceoil, "Nicholas McAuliffe's/Barrack Hill"

From an album called It's No Secret by the above musicians on fiddle, flute, and button accordion. They all live in Cork, and these tunes are slides (i.e. jigs in 12/8 time), which are especially popular in the area. I used to play both these tunes at sessions when I spent a summer in adjacent Co. Kerry, which is also serious slide and polka territory...


Iggy Pop, "The Passenger"

Oh, Iggy...If any popular music performer ever deserved to get fellated by a crazed fan on stage, it was definitely Iggy...


Eno Moebius Rodelius Plank, "Mr. Livingstone"

From an album of late-70s German electronic music called Begegnungen which was produced by Brian Eno. I don't know much else about it and rarely listen to it. I got it from my friend, Gobshite Quarterly editor R.V. Branham, who boasts a probably unhealthy 48 hours of Brian Eno music on his iTunes...


Pablo Casals, Bach: "Cello Suite #2 in D Minor, BWV 1008--2. Allemande"

My dad loves this recording of Casals rocking the Cello Suites. Casals took great pains to re-train himself to eschew well-tempered tuning and played every note in just tuning--leading many unknowing music students to think that he was playing out of tune, poor bastards. He gets major points for the effort in my book. This is passion in a wooden box.


The Go-Betweens, "Streets Of Your Town

Possibly the best single from 1988 that you never heard. Andrew made a rather embarrassing recording of me singing this song at one of the ill-fated Schizoprestige practice sessions. God willing, it will not see the light of day. This song was done when the Go-Betweens were making one last effort to break into the charts before they called it a day. Even in its Steve Lillywhite-produced '80s pop glossiness, its lyrics are slightly outré, all about a man pondering the direction of his life as he saunters for the upteenth time through the worn-down streets of his girlfriend's town "full of battered brides." The cheesy video of the band running around Sydney on a warm, sunny day is even more incongruous and at the same time fits perfectly. I think I'll watch it now and then go to bed.

World War I ended ninety years ago yesterday...Took bloody long enough...

I haven't written anything on here in a long while, so I figured I'd write something.

Life's interesting right now for a number of reasons, but I'm not going to write about them. I'll write about my day instead.

I woke up late in the morning to the sound of Mara crying upstairs. Mara is my friends'/landlords' 1-month-old daughter, and judging from the noise she was making this morning, she's inherited her father's bagpiper lungs...She's actually pretty quiet most of the time, though. We'll see how long that lasts...

Checking my e-mail, I noticed that my horoscope for the day reads "The outside world does not have much to offer you right now--hunker down at home." Looking out the window, I judge this to be an accurate assessment, so I settle in on the couch after making myself an atypical Japanese-style breakfast of miso soup, rice, and natto.

Mmmm...Natto...

The next few hours are spent mostly online getting my political junk craving satiated for the day...I loved the Palin prank call by The Masked Avengers of Montreal, and my dad and I had a nice little chat about this later. I then blasted Luna's "Penthouse" album from my speakers while doing the dishes and tidying up a bit. I bought the album last week on a whim, based on an e-mail conversation with someone who considered it one of her favorite albums. I was embarrassed to admit that though I was well acquainted with lead singer Dean Wareham's previous band, Galaxie 500, I had never heard any of his work with Luna. It's pretty enjoyable stuff. In a subsequent conversation, the someone opined that Wareham's voice had a certain "aural umami" to it...I'm not entirely sure I'd agree (some of his warbling on the old Galaxie 500 records was seriously annoying), but most of his songs on "Penthouse" are great with lovely guitar hooks that linger in the brain. The dishwashing and other assorted household tasks go quickly.

"Aural umami." I love it...

It's now getting on into the evening, the sun is setting, and I'm feeling awful for not having set foot outside all day. I hop in the car and drive down to Powell's. While driving, I pop in "The Evangelist" by Robert Forster, one of the other CDs that I bought on that whim last week, but am only now getting around to listening to. On the lavender-colored inside of the CD jewel case for the Go-Betweens' 2005 album "Oceans Apart", there is a faintly discernible "9" to signify that it was their ninth album. "The Evangelist" should and would have been their tenth, but Forster's songwriting partner Grant McLennan died of a heart attack in May of 2006. He had been planning to propose to his girlfriend at a housewarming party in his new home on the night that he died.

"The Evangelist" feels like a Go-Betweens album in places, which makes sense: Forster's still got fellow ex-GBs Adele Pickvance and Glenn Thompson in his band, and he also includes three Forster-McLennan compositions on this, one of which he has transformed into a tribute to McLennan: "There was melody, there was harmony, there was sweet Sherrie, but it was melody he loved most of all", in reference to a man who turned out more than a few short, sweet, tuneful guitar solos. And later: "I write these words to his tune that he wrote on a full moon/ And a river ran, and a train ran, and a dream ran through everything that he did." It's hard to sum up the life of someone that was raised by his mother on a desolate farm in Queensland before running away to the city and becoming a rock star in one sentence, but that comes pretty close.

I finally find parking in the midst of the Pearl and idle my way through the streets, catching a whiff of diesel exhaust, and thinking of how it reminds me of the traffic in Glasgow, and how, awful though it may be, I like the smell of diesel exhaust fumes because there's something so evocative of the harsh, vibrant, lived-in city about it to me for some reason...

I walk around Powell's for a while. I pick up the latest issue of Kyoto Journal. I really should just break down and subscribe to it, but I like the ritual of going down to Powell's, unexpectedly finding a new issue, and greedily snatching it from the rack. This one profiles residents of Kyoto in interviews, memoirs, and essays. Those profiled include a zen priest, a young thatcher, several visual artists, a(n ethnically Japanese) woman from Hokkaido who has become one of the few young exponents of Ainu traditional singing, a homeless couple, and a chocolatier. There's a picture on one of the middle pages taken from a bridge over the Kamo River of the city framed by grey clouds. I know this view well; I've even taken a similar picture myself. But the quality of the light in this photo is beautifully sublime. I think of myself standing on that bridge, and I ache to see that view again.

Leaving Powell's, I realize that I need to figure out what I'm going to have for dinner. I have some pita and hummus in the fridge at home that I need to get rid of, so I head over to Whole Foods and pick up some tabbouli, felafel, tzatziki, and dolmas. They will go well with the Pilsner Urquell in my fridge that's left over from the party I went to last night...The girl that rings me up is very cute. She says "Have a great night." "You too", I reply. And I mean it.

I stop off at Impulse Video on the way home to pick up another "Prime Suspect" DVD to watch. There's a middle-aged woman standing there hassling the nice girl behind the counter by trying to describe some movie that she wants to see, but she can't remember who's in it or what it's called. Just something about a shootout on a boat. The woman then very nearly ruins my day when without warning she launches into an anti-Obama diatribe: "He's a total Marxist. And his wife, too, oh my goodness! I just can't believe anyone in this country would seriously want to vote for him." I notice the woman is wearing a NObama button. For a minute, I think of going over and trying to crush this shrew in an argument, but I decide to just ignore her and hope that she'll leave the poor video girl alone and fuck off. She eventually does. I pay for my DVD, go home, pull a beer from the fridge, and look at the tantalizing brown couch.

'S tu caraid iongantach. Tha gaol agad orm, agus tha gaol agam ort.

Bha do phòg milis. Tha mi 'gad iarraidh.

Tha mi ag iarraidh am blàs do craiceann a-rithist.

Ach tha thu 'nad fèinealachd. Mhilleadh do gluasad-inntinn ar càirdeas.
Cha tèid agam air thoir an rud a iarr thu thugad.

Chan eil a-nis. Chan eil idir.

Ach tha mi 'gad iarraidh fhathast...

Had a pretty good day today. I was down @ PSU in the late afternoon dropping off a phonology problem set at my professor's office when I noticed a flyer up for a lecture sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies about marketing manga in America by Carl Horn, manga editor at Dark Horse Comics. I had no plans that evening, so I decided to check it out. I remembered reading a few articles by Horn in anime fanzines like Animag and Protoculture Addicts back in the early '90s and was curious about what he had to say and what he was up to now.

For those of you that haven't known me for a very long time, a bit of disclosure: there was a time in my past when my obsession with anime and manga bordered on otaku status. When I was about five or so years old, I first saw Star Blazers on TV and became totally fascinated with it. When I was eight, Robotech came on the air and I was hooked. For a very brief period, there were a bunch of anime on American TV: Star Blazers, Robotech, Speed Racer, Tranzor Z, Battle of the Planets, Captain Harlock, etc. The boom didn't last long, though, and by around 1987, anime had pretty much completely disappeared from American airwaves, but I was already beyond the point of no return...I'd save my pennies all year long and blow it all on imported Japanese toy robots at an anime-themed toy shop called The Iron Horse while visiting my grandparents in Berkeley; I'd scour comic shops looking for any imported manga. When I'd found a few, I decided I wanted to know what they said, so I taught myself to read hiragana and katakana when I was 10. In middle school, I began going to meetings of the Japanese Animation Society at the University of Puget Sound. We'd meet two Saturdays a month and sit in a dark lecture hall watching anime (most of it w/o subtitles) for six hours. The obsession nearly killed my grades in AP math and science...By the age of 15, I had made up my mind that I wanted to travel to Japan and train to be an animator over there. I was really into that idea for a while; I even got some of my artwork published in an American anime magazine...Then I started to do a little more research and heard about the not-so-glamorous life of a Japanese animator: the lousy pay, the occasional 100+ hour work weeks, living on a diet of instant ramen...Not fun. Around the same time, I went to a couple of anime conventions in the Bay Area and was a bit horrified at the level of fanaticism on display by the fat, balding 30-something anime fans squealing as they tried to get Megumi Hayashibara's autograph...I needed to get out before this stuff completely wrecked any future chance of a conventional social life.

And that was it. Just as anime and manga began to creep into the American mainstream, I tuned out. I never completely swore off it, though; ask me about just about any anime made between 1977 and 1993 and even if I haven't seen it, I could probably tell you something about it or one of the artists that created it. In college, I'd justify reading manga as a Japanese study aid. More recently, I've been impressed by the creativity and vitality in recent anime like FLCL, Tekkon Kinkreet, and Paparika. I still take an interest in odd/esoteric manga like Naniwa Kinyudo (a seriously bent story all about financiers in Osaka), and as I approach 30, childhood nostalgia has taken hold of me: there are a few classic '80s anime DVDs in my collection and my rare 1982 Takatoku Toys 1/55-scale Battroid Valkyrie still has a place of pride on my shelf.

Anyway, back to Carl's lecture. Turns out manga is seriously big business in the US these days. The market's gone from around $60 million in 2002 to $210 million in 2007 and sales continue to grow. The market is even a bit bigger in Europe (readers in Hungary and the Czech Republic are particularly interested in war stories and historical period pieces). Horn puts this down to the physicality of manga: as youths become more and more bombarded with electronic media, manga is something that you can hold in your hand, pass around, and collect. I was impressed with the range of titles Dark Horse is currently publishing--everything from the most brainless sex and violence junk and flowery love stories to some very serious, challenging stuff. Back in 2006, Dark Horse began publishing an English translation of Hiroshi Hirata's Satsuma Gishiden, a bloody samurai epic set in the Azuchi-Muromachi period (1580s-90s). Hirata was (and still is) an extremely unconventional artist: he piled his stories full of historical detail and left hardly any room for a moment of levity. He's also an extremely talented calligrapher and rather than printed script, all of the dialogue is done in his florid handwritten script. Where room permits, the English translation has preserved this, with tiny boxes containing the English translation next to the Japanese. Nine months before his spectacular disembowelment/militaristic publicity stunt, the novelist Yukio Mishima wrote a few articles on manga in Sunday Mainichi magazine in which he praised Hirata's work and compared it to the sensibility found in warrior prints from the Edo period. It's not the kind of thing you'd expect to really sell here, and Carl lamented that they had to pull it after releasing three of its five volumes due to poor sales. I bought volume 1 and am thoroughly enjoying it.

Carl also offhandedly mentioned that Warner Bros. are currently developing a live action film of Akira to be released in 2009. Intriguing...

That Portland State University's Center for Japanese Studies was sponsoring such an event says a lot about the current state of Japanese language education and American interest in things Japanese, a fact that was not lost on Carl Horn: "Back in the '80s when I was studying Japanese, Japan was at the cutting edge of geopolitics and economic growth. Everyone was reading Japan As Number One and wanting to get in on Japan's global success. I felt like I was the only person in the world that was taking it so that I could understand anime...When I applied for the JET program, I was told not to mention anything about anime or manga on pain of death. Now the Japanese government offers special scholarships to foreign manga artists."

To an extent, I could relate. Back when I was studying Japanese in college in the late '90s, mention of anime and manga in class was pretty rare. Now, here's Dr. Larry Kominz from PSU's Japanese department making announcements about a cosplay competition at an upcoming anime convention...When I took an advanced Japanese reading and writing class at PSU a couple of years ago, about half the class were anime fanatics that couldn't fucking stop talking about Inu-Yasha...All the serious business and poli sci playaz-to-be are taking Mandarin now and Japanese departments all over the country are getting filled up with fanboys and fangirls...Maybe there really is such a thing as karma.

A very interesting evening, and one that filled me with nostalgia. One thing hasn't changed about anime and manga fans since the days of my youth, though: a lot of the guys still have unbelievably bad body odor...

PS--あれ？！このブログに日本語で書けるのか？すごおおおおい！これから日本語でよく書かなきゃだな。

PPS--Carl Horn also told a funny story about how Hiroyuki Yamaga and Hideaki Anno (the founders of Gainax, most famous for Neon Genesis Evangelion) met at Osaka College of Art in 1980. Anno marched right up to Yamaga and without even telling him his name, announced "I've got all the episodes of Space Cruiser Yamato on tape except the first one. I would have taped the first one too, but I wasn't sure if it was going to be any good or not."

Kinda reminds me of the similarly obsessive behavior of people I encounter now who have boxes full of grainy recordings of dead Irish musicians or carefully catalogued bootlegs of live performances of their favorite rock bands...Am I doomed to walk the earth surrounded by obsessive nuts? Am I an obsessive nut?!

Um, you don't have to answer that...

For the past couple of months, I have been diligently heading over to my friends Lisa and Andrew's basement almost every weekend to rehearse with Schizoprestige, a shitty punk band we decided to put together with our friend Woods. Actually, we've been steadily improving and have taken an interesting German goth detour lately...A YouTube documentary about the band and our dizzy ascent towards fame and glory is in the works.

Part of the reason why I actually wanted to be in the band was because Lisa and Andrew actually have some pretty serious chops as musicians. Having both played in numerous bands in Chicago for years, they hooked up with expert knob twiddlers Todd Jackson and Jeremy Camp when they moved to Portland and put together an electro-pop outfit called "The Unlikely Event." They've been glacially creeping towards putting an album together for several years, but have recently put up some demos for public consumption.

So how do I figure into all this? The other day at Schizo band practice, Lisa mentioned she was doing some work on a new TUE demo called "I Should Have Known." Andrew had already recorded a great bass part for it, but Lisa said she kind of had something high-pitched and New Order-y in mind for it...Not exactly Andrew's bag. I had a listen to it, twiddled my fingers a bit and said I'd try to cook up something. The next evening, with the aid of a few neato digital effects, I laid down a track and much to my surprise, Lisa & Co. liked it. You can judge for yourselves and hear several other fantastic tracks on the band's webpages:

http://www.virb.com/tue
http://www.myspace.com/theunlikelyevent

So, my horror-scope for today reads as follows:

"In order to get more romance in your life, you must go back in time."

Who do they think I am? Doctor Who?

I'm not much of a consummate blogging aficionado (bloggist? bloggiste? bloggista?); I don't blog all that often, nor do I read many other people's blogs on a regular basis. I did, however, recently discover a couple of blogs that I think I'll be checking in on pretty regularly:

First off is David Byrne's journal at http://journal.davidbyrne.com. My favorite entry so far is his one about going to Ikea to find new kitchen cabinets for his parents. As you might expect from somebody that made a hit record out of a Hugo Ball Dadaist nonsense song, he was really intrigued by the names that Ikea give to all of their merchandise and decided to find out where they come from. Apparently, most of them are Scandinavian placenames; bathroom articles are named after Sweedish rivers, lakes, & bays, and children's items are named after birds.

Awww...

The other cool blog I've recently found is John Birmingham's "Cheeseburger Gothic" (http://birmo.journalspace.com). Birmingham, as you may or may not recall, is the man that spent most of the 1980s dropping in and out of school and living in 89 different shared houses all over the east coast of Australia, keeping meticulous notes on his flatmates which he later turned into the sidesplitting, horrific book, "He Died With A Felafel In His Hand." The success of this book turned him from a struggling, down-and-out writer trying to flog his stuff to Penthouse into Australia's biggest literary sensation since...Um, damn, I know there have been some tremendous authors from Australia, I'm just blanking on their names...It was kind of fun reading his reaction to the big story in the news over there about a 16 year-old kid in Melbourne who threw a party while his parents were away, several hundred guests showed up and got into a pitched battle with the police, and in the end, the house was left with $20,000 in damages...

Ahh, Australia...Reading Birmo's blog really got me caught up in nostalgia for the place. I'd really love to go back there for a while. Maybe even live there if I possibly could...Perhaps I should head down to the nearest British consulate and beg them to make me a member of the Commonwealth, like what France tried to secretly do in the 1950s...Prime Minister Anthony Eden told 'em where to stick it...Worked for Mozambique, though...Anyway, kinda wound up on a bit of an Australian kick. I went out and got the film version of "Felafel" directed by Richard Lowenstein (who's perhaps most famous outside of Australia for making commercials for the Sandanistas). The film compresses a lot of the story and amalgamates many of the characters, but is nonetheless highly entertaining. Much reference is made to a technique that Birmingham claims causes women to go "barking mad, speaking in tongues, ga-ga." This technique is never explained in the film, but I know what it is and...Yes, it works.

Also recently picked up an album by an Australian band called The Triffids entitled "In The Pines." Apparently, they recorded it in a woolshed in Western Australia for a little over $1,000 (including booze & food) back in 1986. Not the most polished record of all time, but it has a lovely spontaneity to it and you can feel their excitement of just having the freedom to play what they want to play. That's something that I can relate to a bit more now that I've been playing with the Schizoprestige gang...Not that we've got big aspirations or anything.

One thing I really enjoy about The Triffids' songs is that some of them really do exude "Australianness." Yes. I mean that in a good way. They sing about Perth on a lazy summer afternoon or driving out in the desert, and you can really visualize that imagery in their lyrics. It strikes me that there aren't really any bands from Portland that I'm aware of that are really exuding much "Portlandness" in their music.* You know, you hear a song and can see the November rain, the pretty girl passing by you on Hawthorne, stuff like that. You hear a song and it conjures up clear images of familiar places in your head. Elliott Smith briefly tapped that vein, but he's long gone now.

So here's my question for y'all, kids: What would you like to hear about Portland in a song? The good, the bad, the painfully obtuse. Sock it to me.



*I know, I know...How dare I slag the Portland scene? Especially when there is such a hyped "Portland sound" alluded to in articles about The Decemberists, The Shins, etc., etc. Granted, I haven't been out to see any local music in a while, but I just can't get up any excitement over much of what I've heard lately. I was sitting in the Albina Press earlier today, and some of the local music they played was SO toe-curlingly, ass-clenchingly twee...Like the man says, "It says nothing to me about my life."

It gives me great pleasure to announce that "Curse & Berate It in 69+ Languages", a book that I have worked on for quite a long time with RV Branham, has just been published.

Did you know that curses in Swahili are commonly intensified with the addition of a suffix meaning "in triplicate"? Have you ever wondered what you would say if you were surrounded by a hoard of rowdy transsexual Afrikaners? What about proper heroin use etiquette in Hungarian? Fancy chatting with shoe fetishists in Mexico? If you were at a Scottish Gaelic punk show in Stornoway, would you know what to say? What if you had to deal with a shitty Croatian wedding band? Have you ever wanted to use a 17th century Icelandic rune to put a death curse on someone or get the girl of your dreams?* Helpful information on all of these topics and many, many others can be found in "Curse & Berate It in 69+ Languages" a dictionary and phrasebook of insults, sarcasms, snits, cris de coeur, merde du jour, bigotries, Dutch courage, thought crimes, anti-benedictions, German sense of humor, Tijuana bibles, and other sit-next-to-mezes in Croatian, Danish, Zapotec, Cantonese, Spanish, Turkish, Scottish Gaelic, Japanese, Ukrainian, French (incl. Québecois), Mandarin,Tamil, Greek, Portuguese, Quechua, Catalan, Maltese, and many other languages.

The book is 202 pages in length, published by New York-based Soft Skull Press, and is available at fine bookshops across the US and Canada or online from Amazon.com for the ludicrously low price of $13.95. A British edition, tentatively titled "Gobshite Wisdom", will be available in the UK and Ireland later in the year.

Be fruitful & multiply.

Regards,

Channing Dodson
Assistant Editor


*The editors and Soft Skull Press are not responsible for any damages or injuries incurred resulting from the use of this book.

anywhere.

I'm back in Santa Cruz for the holidays. Today, I went to see "I'm Not There", Todd Haynes' anti-biopic about Bob Dylan. I hadn't been sure whether I wanted to see it: The San Francisco Chronicle's film critic Mick LaSalle, normally someone whose reviews I agree with, absolutely shithammered the movie when it came out. As curious as I was, the thought of Richard Gere attempting to play Bob Dylan (or Billy the Kid...) filled me with stomach-turning dread. Now I'm trying to decide whether it's the best movie I've seen all year.

"I'm Not There" doesn't attempt to move according to any chronology; like human memory, it falls in and out of time in smooth contours and sharp bursts. It also doesn't attempt to adhere to any accurate portrayal of a life that nobody (including maybe even the man himself) seems to know all that much about, instead peppering the film with hilariously exaggerated famous comments and incidents from his career. When Dylan goes electric at Newport, he and his band walk onstage with their Fender cases, pull out machine guns and fire on the audience.

It says a lot about a biopic that the two people that come closest to expressing Dylan's frustratingly complex persona are an 11 year-old black kid and a middle-aged Australian woman. Much of the press on "I'm Not There" has focused on Cate Blanchett as Dylan in his "Don't Look Back" phase, and every bit of it is deserved. Blanchett is amazing in this film: no one else manages to capture Dylan better as she virtuosically mimics his sputtering nonsensical proclaimations ("Good and evil are ideas for people trapped in scenes."), nervous ticks, physicality, and rage at the whirlwind of fame (s)he finds himself caught up in. Perhaps my favorite scene in the film (aside from Dylan stoned with the Beatles running, jumping and talking like chipmunks) is when Dylan stands below a statue of Christ on the cross screaming "How does it feel?" and "Do your early stuff!"

The film is visually stunning, going from rich and sometimes over-saturated color to sharp-yet-grainy black and white that at times really makes you feel like you're watching TV circa 1965. As an extension of the Dylan myth factory, he never appears under his own name, and neither do many of the other characters...I'm still trying to figure out if the blonde in the Blanchett sequences is supposed to be Edie Sedgewick. Allen Ginsberg is Allen Ginsberg, however, and David Cross redeems his existence as an actor playing him. The only part of the movie that doesn't work is (surprise!) the segments with Richard Gere playing Dylan/Billy the Kid...Thanks for bringing up Tibet every now and then Richard, but you really are a horrible, horrible actor...

Even these bits of the film that don't work remain a compelling effort, though, with their fever-dream visions of a town under threat in Missouri. Gere's interesting failure continued after the movie in liquid form when my parents and I went to Malabar, a new Indian restaurant run by the old owners of Asian Rose, previously the premier slingers of cheap brown rice and dhal in Santa Cruz...Apparently, the place doesn't have a liquor license, so they offer a bizarre selection of teas and health drinks instead. My dad ordered a rosemary and lime martini, a pulpy green concoction that was one of the strangest things I've ever tasted. It's hard to describe, but it was a combination of strident citrus, grainy rosemary and a hint of wheatgrass...It tasted terrible, but in a complex and surprising way. Now, whenever I think of Richard Gere, I'll have a seductively revolting taste in my mouth...Hoo-boy.