Tag: Bob Dylan

Screening Room: ‘A Complete Unknown’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

I wrote about James Mangold’s Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown as a folk anti-Western for PopMatters:

Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in New York at the start of A Complete Unknown in the back of a station wagon rather than on a horse. He might as well be a gunslinger showing up in a frontier town that needs his help. With just his bindle, guitar, and a cunning up-for-anything look, Dylan scans the Greenwich Village coffeehouse folk scene not like some rube from the sticks but rather a cool operator who knows virgin territory when he sees it…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Dylan Says Study

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Omnicultural, WritingLeave a comment

Learning anything means practice. It means trying and trying and messing up and circling back and trying again and again. It generally also requires studying those who came before you. Some would criticize this as imitation.

Bob Dylan disagrees. In a 2004 interview, he said:

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there’s Frank Gehry.

But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to…

And that is from a Nobel Prize winner.

Writer’s Desk: Dylan Says

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

bob_dylan_-_the_freewheelin_bob_dylanSince Bob Dylan has been honored with a Nobel Prize for Literature, we may as well welcome the man into the community of those practiced in the art of belles lettres. Good to have you, Bob!

Here’s some advice from Mr. Zimmerman contained in Paul Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting, which could apply to most any writers:

It’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down…

If you follow his often stream-of-consciousness lyrics, that approach makes sense. It’s harder to do, of course, than it sounds. Be open to the muse, but direct it.

Weekend Reading: February 26, 2016

On By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

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Music Break: Rodriguez

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Omnicultural, WorldLeave a comment

The story of Sixto Rodriguez—the Detroit singer-songwriter with the Phil Spector soar to his music and the dark Dylan grit to his lyrics—and how he was rediscovered by a world that was shocked to find out somebody of his talents had lived in the shadows for so long, is one of those rare tales that’s astonishing not just for its oddity but its beauty.

Malik Bendejelloul shot an incredible documentary about Rodriguez, Searching for Sugar Man (much of it using an iPhone with a $1 Super 8 app), that’s well worth seeking out—check out the trailer here.

Ebert was not far off when he wrote:

I hope you’re able to see this film. You deserve to. And yes, it exists because we need for it to.

60 Minutes did a segment on Rodriguez recently (“The Rock Icon Who Didn’t Know It“) that gives you the bare bones of the story.

If you listen to him sing “Sugar Man,” you get some idea of what the fuss is all about and how unfathomable it is that we haven’t been listening to this song on classic-rock radio for the past four decades: