{"id":14974,"date":"2012-08-15T01:25:45","date_gmt":"2012-08-15T05:25:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=14974"},"modified":"2012-08-15T09:07:53","modified_gmt":"2012-08-15T13:07:53","slug":"an-open-private-letter-to-epg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/an-open-private-letter-to-epg\/","title":{"rendered":"An Open, Private Letter to My Friend E. Pluribus Gergely Regarding That Dylan Movie, <em>I\u2019m Not There<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_14975\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-14975\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-14975\" title=\"im-not-there\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/im-not-there-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/im-not-there-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/im-not-there.jpeg 450w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-14975\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">I&#39;m Not You.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>My friend,<\/p>\n<p>How&#8217;s it going? I know we spoke on the phone last night and I know we discussed plans to get together and hash out some serious stuff, but I miss the private, personal communications we used to have here, in public. I&#8217;ve got something I&#8217;d like to discuss. Man to man.<\/p>\n<p>I just tried watching a half hour of a movie I&#8217;ve put off watching for the last couple of years, a movie I&#8217;ve\u00a0repeatedly\u00a0been tempted to watch, <em>I&#8217;m Not Here<\/em>, the Dylan movie by\u00a0<strong>Todd Haynes<\/strong>, who&#8217;s directed a couple of films I like a lot, especially <em>Safe<\/em>,\u00a0that one with <strong>Julianne Moore<\/strong>, before she broke through by dropping trou in that <strong>Robert Altman flick<\/strong>. Have you seen it? (The Dylan movie, that is.)<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/R9oi9hnNmKs?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>Earlier this week I saw the last 15 minutes. Combined with the 30 minutes in the middle of the film I just watched, I guess I&#8217;ve seen half of the movie. I&#8217;m not digging it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;<strong>Cate Blanchett<\/strong>&#8216;s performance is amazing!&#8221; I can hear a friend or two itching to tell me.<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, she does a good impersonation of Dylan at his most iconic, the Dylan from <em>Don&#8217;t Look Back<\/em>, a movie I thought was about the coolest rock-doc on earth when I was in my early 20s but have found less &#8220;cool&#8221; and more damming as years go by. Sure, Cate gets bonus points by being a woman playing a guy. I&#8217;m sick of that Dylan, or more to the point, I&#8217;m sick of thinking of myself in my early 20s, thinking that Dylan was the bee&#8217;s knees while I was surrounded by a roomful of aspiring hipsters also wanting so desperately to be a cool dick. Looking back on that time in my life it was easy being a dick. Even being mildly cool wasn&#8217;t that hard. Having talent and fame to go with those qualities was another matter.<\/p>\n<p>Being a cool dick didn&#8217;t make up for what I lacked. And to tell the truth it wasn&#8217;t all I was after in whenever I holed up in my room and spun Dylan records. I wanted to get to the heart of the matter in my own affairs, the way Dylan is so good at doing in his music. Dylan in <em>Don&#8217;t Look Back<\/em> without the music is just a dick, not even that cool: unable to look anyone in the eyes, jittery and coiled up anywhere but on stage. <strong>Johnny Cash <\/strong>was cool. He could look a bad guy down in his tracks. What was the Dylan of that period going to do if <strong>Donovan<\/strong> had had the stones to sock it to him? Would <strong>Bobby Neuwirth<\/strong> have had to jump in and take down the tiny Scotsman? That&#8217;s not cool!<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Dylan&#8217;s totally cool; you&#8217;re more square than I already thought, Mod.&#8221; I hear someone muttering. &#8220;You and your weird admiration for &#8216;Kokomo.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Dylan was\u2014he is\u2014but from what I&#8217;ve seen the half dozen Dylans in <em>I&#8217;m Not Here<\/em> play into all that myth-making that I long ago exhausted. The 45 minutes I&#8217;ve seen of this movie (granted, out of sequence) do not compare to the experience I would get from a single spin of &#8220;I Don&#8217;t Believe You,&#8221; my personal favorite album cut. That&#8217;s cool. That&#8217;s meaningful. That&#8217;s Dylan.<\/p>\n<p>The Dylans in this movie strike me as a reflection of &#8220;You&#8221;\u2014not you, my friend, but the general You that&#8217;s out there on the edges of the fields in which we play. The You we&#8217;ve been ourselves.\u00a0You&#8217;re not cool. I don&#8217;t want to be like You.<\/p>\n<p>Seeing well-shot montages of actors dressing up in their Dylan duds, spouting off imagined dialog is for the birds, or should I say The Kidz. Seeing the <strong>singer from My Morning Jacket<\/strong>, I believe, in whiteface and a hobo hat on a country fair stage with a band of musicians dressed up in Civil War threads is what my life strove to be at 21. Man, I wanted that to be my cool, but it wasn&#8217;t happening. It had happened already. To someone else. Not me.<\/p>\n<p>We don&#8217;t need to bother getting into <strong>Richard Gere<\/strong>, do we?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My friend, How&#8217;s it going? I know we spoke on the phone last night and I know we discussed plans to get together and hash out some serious stuff, but I miss the private, personal communications we used to have here, in public. I&#8217;ve got something I&#8217;d like to discuss. Man to man. I just <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/an-open-private-letter-to-epg\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[54,34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14974"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}