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| Off The Shelves Reviewed by Bookstaff January 2004 THE ARTS The Times Were Changing, by Theodore Hamm  Mike Marqusee, Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art (New Press, 2003)It makes me angry when I see Dylan taken out of context. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann actually argues that George W. Bush’s "unperturbed confidence that the world can now be remade entirely" shows that Bush, too, is a product of the 1960s, and that W.’s rhetoric about bringing "freedom" to the Middle East is another variation on "The Times They Are A-Changin’" and "Blowin’ in the Wind." The ’60s, however, hold no special claim on the American idea of the world as a blackboard; such providential rhetoric is as old as the "city on a hill" itself. Meanwhile, a more persuasive argument regarding Bush’s relationship to Dylan is that the former, after listening to "Masters of War," decided to become one of them. Unlike most people I know, I make my case against the misuses of Dylan not as a devout fan of the man or his music. Truth is, I’m neither here nor there with him (okay, sometimes really here, sometimes really there). It’s just that as a student of American history, I seek to learn about cultural figures’ relationship to their eras, and to gain a clear understanding of why people gravitated to them. In Chimes of Freedom, Mike Marqusee does precisely this, skillfully rooting Dylan’s music in its proper place and time— i.e. the radical sixties. In the early sixties, Dylan openly identified with the radical left, casting his lot with SNCC and refusing to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show after he was told not to perform his "Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues." But Dylan soured on his identity as a "protest singer" singing "finger-pointin’ songs" pretty quick— in 1964 to be precise, after only three albums and before the age of 25. In Marqusee’s view, Dylan’s ducking out early, just when things started to get hot, meant that he "helped make activism cool, and he helped it make it uncool." Yet if Dylan was confused about, or felt contradictory impulses toward, his political engagement, he was not alone. Though writing from the left, Marqusee candidly admits to identifying with much of the post-protest music, saying that he’s "more than once binged Dylan of this period [’65-’68], and relished his emotive attack on a movement that so rarely lives up to its claims." At the same time, political diehards including the Black Panthers, who listened repeatedly to "Ballad of a Thin Man" while they laid out their formative newspaper, and the Weathermen, who famously took their name from "Subterranean Homesick Blues," obviously found something very powerful in Dylan’s post-protest work as well. Marqusee deftly connects Dylan’s pursuit of "authenticity," in terms of his identities as an individual and as a performer, to the idealism found in the rhetoric of various movements of the day. He conveys the material in a snapshot style, in which he presents brief glimpses of parallel ideas found in key texts such as The Port Huron Statement or Ginsberg’s "Wichita Vortex Sutra." His mini-bios of the pedantic Phil Ochs or the very political, yet very lyrical Curtis Mayfield make for useful comparisons, particularly in terms of the career choices artists must make. At times, the book does contain a bit too much quotation of lyrics, although this is surely the result of Dylan’s music itself having a lot to say. Marqusee’s prior work, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (1999), succeeded in restoring the champ to his rightful place on the radical left of the era. Whether Chimes of Freedom can do the same for Dylan is less certain, precisely because the figure himself is so willfully slippery, and always ready to denounce any attempt to "pigeonhole" him. Yet Dylan’s life and work in many ways encapsulate the existential struggles of a once-radical generation. As Marqusee reminds us, the ’60s were a time of both genuinely utopian dreams as well as collective nightmares, and Dylan’s genius lay in his ability to articulate both impulses in the very same song. THE ARTS Fluxus, by Ellen Pearlman  Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience, (University of California Press, 2003)Hannah Higgins, child of Fluxus progenitors Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, cut her baby teeth on legendary Fluxus events. She grew up and got her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Chicago. She consolidates her experiences into pithy statements like "The event and the Flux kit argue ontologically for the value of primary experience over secondary experiences." This is a far cry from watching mannequin hands crash down on typewriters or a man stick his head in a pot of paint and drag it across an unfurled scroll of paper, as Nam June Paik did in his seminal performance. Fluxus, of course, pretty much changed the art world during the 1950s and early ’60s. Although the inciting event kicked off with an international group of Germans, Korean, Japanese and American artists, it was jumpstarted in a class John Cage taught at The New School from 1957 to 1959. That class birthed George Brecht’s event score where actions were framed as minimalist performances of imaginary events in everyday situations. Those scores spawned happenings, pop art, experimental film, theater and dance with both of the performance series at Yoko Ono’s downtown loft and George Macunia’s AG Gallery. The immediacy of experience changed "the traditional distinction between subject and object on which most of Western philosophy was historically based." Higgins has written the definitive history of Fluxus, explaining what those artists did and why it mattered so much. She has paid high homage to her roots creating an instant classic in the field, using the vast resources at her disposal. |
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The Rail invites you to a reading with Jason Flores-Williams and Brian Carreira, along with musical guest Steve Strunsky of the Lonesome Prairie Dogs. Thurs., Sept. 22, 8:30 p.m. Vox Pop--Flatbush, Brooklyn www.voxpop.net |
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OFF THE RAIL FALL 2005 at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library - Grand Army Plaza |
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The Independent Press Association-NY recently honored The Brooklyn Rail with the following awards: |