Wasted in the wilderness

Only thing that I did wrong
Was staying in the wilderness too long
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on

The great questions in the air — about how much lasting constitutional and foreign-affairs damage Bush-Cheney have done, about the ways and means of turning things around, and the capacity of the american people to be citizens rather than consumers — leave me for the moment speechless.

I do think the turn in the works is a major turn.

A premise there, however, is that the forces behind the Fascist Shift of the new century are not deeply rooted and are exhausted for now — leaving the new administration a horrible mess, yes, but also a durable mandate and some elbow room.

But — if the premise is false, then four years from now we may see Romney on the verge of victory, and the young Obama already a has-been.

This was one reason why, this past winter, I thought Hillary the better candidate for the Donkeys to nominate — to allow her to absorb the worst of the blast, while holding Obama in reserve.

But …  The hour of doom is at hand.  Let the sun shine …

The mandate will not be large.  LBJ in 1964, riding a wave of sympathy re Kennedy’s murder the year before, gathered 486 EC votes and carried 44 states.

Nothing near that is in the cards for Obama.  Rather, somewhere between 289 and 364 votes, with 22 to 27 states, plus D.C.

Clinton got 370 votes and 31 states in ‘92. And 379 and 30 in ‘96. Plus D.C. in each.

Reagan has the all-time high, against hapless Mondale in ‘84, with 525 votes and 49 states.  Then FDR in 1936, against Landon, with 523 and 46 (of 48 total) states. And then Richard Nixon in ‘72, contra hapless McGovern.  520 votes and 49 states.

Then again … Even the greatest EC landslides were, roughly speaking, five people voting chocolate and five vanilla.  Fifty-three Pistachio, forty-seven Rocky Road.

Wasted Years

No matter what happens on Tuesday and across the next four years, there is no escaping or re-writing the fact that the failures to apply Due Process in the 2000 election, and to depose Bush-Cheney in 2004, were costly beyond measure and plain evidence that, on the national level, we are not a functioning democracy.

Only thing that we did right
Was the day we began to fight
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on

It’s an open question — whether WE can fight at all.

But … Team Obama has. They’ve run an amazing campaign — principled and potent.

Can the example revive an increasingly impoverished and brain-dead citizenry?

Too Long in Exile

Seems all my NY friends are holing up Tuesday night. Me, I think it’s the first thing in the public sphere worth celebrating since …  Can’t recall.

Let’s have a General Strike on Wednesday. And then, to the business of rebuilding.

Til We Get the Healing Done

Where’s my blue suede shoes?

Aha — a final pre-election postscript:  Great overview from a waning & weeping Laissez Faire fellow in the London Daily Telegraph.

From the Archive:
Voting from the Outside in 1992

Democrats sixteen years ago were desperate to boot the GOP from the White House.

Rickie Lee Jones: The Sermon
on Exposition Boulevard

Ed Note: After a spirit-deadening summer, Rickie’s latest album, from last year, is bringing me back to life.

Below is my original quick review — which while not lacking for enthusiasm no longer quite does the album justice.

Its depth is … reminiscent of T.S. Eliot. It takes a while to get there … Down the well …

And people who shuffle their Favorite Songs on an Ipod will never get there at all.

Rickie Lee Jones has a new album coming in early February. I posted this capsule review over at Amazon because the glib ne’er-do-tell who did the official thumbnail there couldn’t be bothered to listen or think. Odd they can’t find better help. The dud’s name is McLeese and he concluded by reporting “Some of this music is oddly affecting; much of it is merely odd.”

That’s alright, I know where he lives.

===================

BORN ANEW

Beneficiary of an advance copy of this life-hugging album, let me say (pace Mr McLeese) that THE SERMON is not “merely” anything at all. To begin: two tracks are extemporaneous meditations expounded on the spot — neither composed nor rehearsed (!?!) — and the second of these miracles, “Where I Like it Best”, now reaches me as the richest song in the collection.

(See producer Lee Cantelon’s pennyhead.com for the amazing story of how the record was born.)

It IS a departure from the studied studio perfection of her prior work. Much of the music is by younger collaborators, and the tracks were recorded with a “liveliness” that takes one back to the garage bands and stoop singers of foundational rock. “It was so different from a musical environment I would make,” she said in a recent interview, “and that helped me become something different.”

The mystic religiosity springs from mediations on the life & words of Jesus — another departure — but then again on stage she often refers to the songs of her mystical masterpiece Ghostyheads as “prayers.” Both albums are deep echoing wells, a bit spooky to slide down into (”Watch your elbows — I don’t KNOW how deep, watch you don’t burn your hands”) — but once down it’s heaven. I’ve no faith in the divinity of Jesus but these meditations, born out of the smouldering rubble-strewn spiritscape of America post 2004 elections, have been just what the flamen ordered.

There IS something happenin’ here, after all. And what it is AIN’T exactly clear. In a world gone wrong, post 2004, she found a way to sing. And perhaps it was the only way. Perhaps any other would have been false to the moment and have failed.

Maybe it’s like this (from Deep Space on The Magazine):

This tear will finally fall
Keep your eyes here
When there’s no net at all
Where the Lord’s face is like an all-night cafe
There’s a woman who will wait on
What you have to say

The equestrienne of the Circus of the Falling Star will be found not Born Again here, but born anew. Maybe there’s more to miracles than meets the eye. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad for this troubadour, our companion voice these long years in the wilderness.

Hey! There’s a limited edition DVD on sale (the link above) for pennies more than the regular CD. Has video, a 5:1 surround mix, and high quality mp3 files for downloading. Plus an expanded booklet. Great package, less than $20.

GO ORDER A COPY! The release date is February 6 or similar.

Go see: I’m Not There

The Dylan film is beginning to show across country.

Should/must be seen in a theater — the music and images flow and surround.

Tell me what you think. (My thoughts linked above)

The Dylan Film: I’m Not There

The Dylan film is spectacular. The most exciting american film in years.

Something to see and be thinking about for years.

Must be seen in a theater — the flow of music and people is joyous.

More balanced — as it looks, in its oblique way, into Dylan’s broken relationships with early fans and his first wife — than I’d expected from one or two reviews.

Indeed, one or two reviews had saddled me with worries, going in.

All worries dashed. The energy and courage laid down to make the film have paid off in spades.

Directed by Todd Haynes. Written by same and Oren Moverman. Shot by Edward Lachman. Edited by Jay Rabinowitz.

Interesting reviews online: J Hoberman at the Village Voice. John Anderson at Newsday. By Pete Travers in Rolling Stone. At Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Film Comment. And by writer Robert Sullivan in the NY Times. AO Scott is also in the Times, and applauds, but the Sullivan piece is much richer; he spent six months on it, visiting sets, the editing room, etc.

The reviewers who frowned are in a distinct minority, but include Anthony Lane in The New Yorker — who offers two basic complaints: the film is disjointed and at times confusing, and is insufficiently about the man in his world, and thus allows the “elusive Dylan, once again, to slip away.”

Although I seem to share many of Mr Lane’s thoughts about Dylan, his displeasure with the film seems a bit wooden-headed. To begin, I was never importantly confused. Jonathan Demme (I think it was) seemed right to observe that 30 seconds of confusion in a film are fine but five seconds of boredom intolerable.

What does seem true — to give Lane his due — is that the film is tightly focused on a familiar leitmotif — Dylan’s inability to live in the skin his fame wrapped about him — and thus does not fully treat much else that Dylan fans may be desperately seeking to explore and perhaps grasp.

Beneath this seeking sentiment lies, I suspect, long and commonly held disappointments in the way Dylan piloted himself through stretches of his career. Those of us who suffer with these petty resentments yearn, always, for a triumphant Apologia — a conclusive public Defense — that somehow removes from the hero’s shoe the doo and spent bubblegum he stepped in along the way.

The same desire takes shape with every reading of Hamlet. Yet the promising, brilliant prince’s trajectory always falls and fails to find redemption, or even satisfactory explanation.

Nevertheless, for good reasons, he remains one’s hero.

Mr Haynes clearly set out NOT to make a grand Apology, but rather to present the appearances at play. And this seems the essence of Mr Lane’s complaint — that the filmmaker’s vision fell short for failing to grapple with the heart of the matter.

Two reactions to this complaint:

(i) It’s a question if the grand Apology can, in any form, be mustered. We had a good shot at it a few years ago in No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese’s great documentary. Dylan spoke there at length — interesting, and moving, but confusing as ever — and around the same time had published a collection of scattered remembrances entitled Chronicles. Both doc and book, while gratefully received here, were shot through with contradiction on the familiar ticklish points re desire (to be a poet and a pop star) and responsibility (to other people).

One doubts, then, that Dylan himself has a coherent grasp of the elusive heart of the matter — which leaves Mr Haynes seeming wise, seeming to have taken the best available road, by sticking with the appearances and giving them room to exuberantly play. What Mr Lane desires (on behalf of many, no doubt) may be impossible, in any form, and almost certainly, if embraced as motive of a feature film, would lead to a treacly false artifact. Whereas I’m Not There bleeds truth, such as we have it about Bob, from every frame.

(ii) My sense, reading Mr Lane’s complaint that the history in the film is “paper thin”, is that — in his pique at finding Hamlet again tumbling toward the swordplay — he failed to notice that I’m Not There does indeed deliver the music and its world in their rich mindblowingness, even as the director/writer pursues his relatively narrow interests, and even as he allows his Dylanesque voices free range in declaring they were never a “folksinger” and that “politics” do not exist. The film brings the early music in its time to life, reigniting one’s imagination re same, and this is perhaps its prime raison d’etre, and the reason it will rocket about the world, as Pulp Fiction did a few years back, but with incomparably more staying power. It will stay as long as the Scorcese and Pennebaker documentaries do, and for much the same reasons. As long as people remain curious about Dylan and the interesting times he shared and shaped.

Rickie Lee Jones — Happy Birthday

The celestial one is … can’t quite recall.

Here’s a nice radio show she did this past February in Minnesota while on tour.

She was here in New York in midsummer. A tremendously soulful show.

And check out this video for “Falling Up” from the new album.

Then check out her website — full of great stuff.

See a brief review of the new album here.

Then buy the album! The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard.

Her music has helped keep me alive these decades in the wilderness.