slacker mandarin

No Direction Home

I've never had much use for Dylan's music and horrible cawing nasal voice and baby-boomer-icon status, but watching this just now, two things in particular blew me the fuck away:

1. "Ballad of a Thin Man," UK 1966: with an angry folk-purist audience shouting things like "Turn it off! Go back to Vietnam [?!]!", Dylan and band bounce back with a furious and inspired performance, horrible cawing nasal voice in maximum hostile effect. Beautiful.

2. Press conference, San Francisco, 1965: a frighteningly bizarre scene w/clearly pathologically obsessed fans and dronelike reporters behaving as though Dylan were Jesus Christ in person and/or a zoo animal; Dylan's grace in the midst of it is extraordinary.

I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan

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"So you're saying i can quit my job now and start a hedonistic lifestyle til the end of the world in October?" - not-goodwin

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"Other than that it was exactly the same as the night before, and the night before that..." - Ste