‘no direction home’ and three music videos

furthering my argument that well meaning politics need not mean good art i had some support from scorcese’s documentary on bob dylan’s life. the film followed his life from when he was a folk minstrel singing ‘topical’ songs to the backlash he was the target of when he ‘sold out’ by slinging an electric guitar around his neck and talking about love and his own internal struggles. refusing to become a symbol for a movement he did sympathize with, he was adamant regarding the autonomy of the artist from being bounded within the restrictive shackles of a ‘cause’ and he was determined to stay free from any preconceived appropriateness that might be thrust on him by his followers or his detractors. it was brilliant to watch how his irony and engagement with the making of music kept him constantly moving and changing, taking what’s around him and turning it into great music and words.

i think i grew up with dylan. when i was younger and i began to listen to his music at the age of 19, i only could relate to the blatantly political songs. the more abstruse ones went above my head because i constantly was looking for the ‘message’ or the ‘meaning’. as the years went by i stopped trying to decipher and instead began to enjoy the word as sound, as image. the absurd dramas, the weird characters, the brilliant couplets became something i could create in my head, became stuff that i saw in my life. ginsberg in yesterdays film said something like dylan’s words expressed a certain subjective experience that related to people as an objective truth and then became poetry. i don’t really know what that meant; but i think he might have something there. to speak of love and beauty is not easy in the words of prose. they constantly escape descriptions and narrative. like this post, they seem so inadequate.

on the other hand, one wishes that the organizers of the screening yesterday had watched the dylan film a little more closely before subjecting us to the insult of the first three ‘music videos’ that were shown. if there was anything about the film that stood out, it was dylans refusal to let him or his work become merely an instrument in a cause. but the first three films were atrocious in their blatant disrespect for the intelligence of the audience and their placard carrying self-righteousness. everything that was wrong with the left that dylan was resisting was there on full-fledged display. the first insult was by some chennai based filmmaker whose brilliant idea it was to ‘juxtapose’ rehmans awful ‘vande mataram’ with footage of dalits cleaning toilets. lots of shots of shit. irony, i guess was attempted, and a violence to the senses of the audience. emotional blackmail of the tamilian type. i know it well (half of me does it all the time- the other half protests) it doesn’t affect me at all. in fact i am angered by it.

the second was a blue screened one liner joke which was, again supposedly ironical, an anti iraq war video. a female dancer struck various dance poses over footage of bush or bin laden while in the background played an irritatingly smug song about america and the gulf war. a child in school would have had a more sophisticated take on that (and done it better too). the last was a film by patwardhan that took peter, paul and mary’s sickly sweet version of ‘blowing in the wind’ and played it over a slideshow of sometimes gruesome, but mostly boring pictures of the war in iraq. all three videos were conceptually (and politically) simplistic, moralistic and badly made. it seemed like the perpetual movement and search that must be part of the making of art had been abandoned in favor of the posturing of political correctness. dylan would have said, ‘ who not busy being born is busy dying’. the sentiment in all three was a holier than thou preachiness that made me ill. this kind of film making- the protest placard type, is really not my cup of tea. but the audience seemed to like it. i wonder whether it is really the fear of being ostracized from the adamantly left wing film making community that kept them clapping. were they afraid because in this tight insular world the mantra said or unsaid is (o paraphrase bush) - “if you are not with us, you are against us.”