Verlaine / RE: (TV) Dylan / Renaldo & Clara

["Casey, Leo J" <Leo.J.Casey@Volpe.dot.gov>]

To keep this slightly on topic I went to see Dylan in 
Boston in Dec. of 1995; Patti Smith opened and Verlaine 
sat on a folding chair in the shadows occasionally playing 
his guitar (mostly bottle-neck style). [Dylan was stupendous.]

Why don't Television ever play "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" 
(as an encore) since they "reformed" in 2001?
------

There's was a scathing review by the film critic Pauline 
Kael, in The New Yorker magazine Dylan's film (co-writer)  
and director, "Renaldo and Clara". [It appears in the book, 
"The Dylan Companion', and in Kael's "Reeling"]

I can't find it on the internet except for several quotes 
below.  .   

Unfortunately (or fortunately[?]), I can't find her most 
virulent, but best sentence (with which she ended her review) 
on the scene where Dylan standing over an Indian's grave 
tells Allen Ginsberg that he wants to be buried in an 
unmarked grave. (Maybe Ty has nearby, the review's 
last sentence?) 

"The camera keeps saying: this is no ordinary man who walks 
among you. ... It's not just people previously unexposed to 
Dylan who may be repelled by his arrogant passivity; even 
those who idolized him in the Sixties may gag a little."

"He is overpoweringly present, yet he is never in direct 
contact with us-not even when he performs. We are invited 
to stare at the permutations of his masked and unmasked face 
in close-up to perceive the mystery of his elusiveness-his 
distance." 

"(He has) more tight close-ups than any other actor can have 
had in the whole history of movies." 

".  [he's] a surly, mystic tease' concerned principally with 
confronting his audience with 'the mystery of his elusiveness'. 

It is a judgment that applies equally well to his entire career. 
Certainly the Dylan who emerges from the pages of this mammoth 
tome seems hopelessly trapped in his own mythology, unable to 
normalize his life in the way that peers like Paul McCartney 
and Eric Clapton have managed, still living in 'a pressure 
cooker of paranoia'.

For an artist of such brilliance, it seems a sad and probably 
unnecessary price to pay.

Dylan said the film was "about the naked alienation of the inner 
self against the outer self." 

Of its butt-numbing playing time, he said, "To me it's not long 
enough."

-----Original Message-----
From: tv-owner@obbard.com [mailto:tv-owner@obbard.com]On Behalf Of
Maurice Rickard
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 3:41 PM
To: tv@obbard.com
Subject: Re: (TV) dylan


I think Jesse meant to send this URL:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050919/REVIEWS/5
09200301/1023

D
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