Pull My Daisy: 1959 Beatnik Film Stars Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Shot by Robert Frank

in Film, Poetry | October 11th, 2012

Sure, you could expe­ri­ence the Beat sen­si­bil­i­ty on film by watch­ing The Beat Gen­er­a­tion. But why set­tle for that high-gloss Metro-Gold­wyn-May­er fea­ture treat­ment when you can get an unadul­ter­at­ed half-hour chunk of the real thing above, in Pull My Daisy? Both films came out in 1959, but only the lat­ter comes from the lens of pho­tog­ra­ph­er Robert Frank, he of the famous pho­to­book The Amer­i­cans. And only the lat­ter fea­tures the uncon­ven­tion­al per­form­ing tal­ents of Allen Gins­berg, David Amram, Del­phine Seyrig, and Jack Ker­ouac. That Ker­ouac him­self pro­vides all the nar­ra­tion assures us we’re watch­ing a movie ful­ly com­mit­ted to the Beat mind­set. “Ear­ly morn­ing in the uni­verse,” he says to set the open­ing scene. “The wife is get­tin’ up, openin’ up the win­dows, in this loft that’s in the Bow­ery of the Low­er East Side of New York. She’s a painter, and her hus­band’s a rail­road brake­man, and he’s comin’ home in a cou­ple hours, about five hours, from the local.”

Ker­ouac’s ambling words seem at first like one impro­vi­sa­tion­al ele­ment of many. In fact, they pro­vid­ed the pro­duc­tion’s only ele­ment of impro­vi­sa­tion: Frank and com­pa­ny took pains to light, shoot, script, and rehearse with great delib­er­ate­ness, albeit the kind of delib­er­ate­ness meant to cre­ate the impres­sion of thrown-togeth­er, ram­shackle spon­tane­ity. But if the kind of care­ful craft that made Pull My Daisy seems not to fit with­in the anar­chic sub­cul­tur­al col­lec­tive per­sona of the Beats, sure­ly the premis­es of its sto­ry and the con­se­quences there­of do. The afore­men­tioned brake­man brings a bish­op home for din­ner, but his exu­ber­ant­ly low-liv­ing bud­dies decide they want in on the fun. Or if there’s no fun to be had, then, in keep­ing with what we might iden­ti­fy as Beat prin­ci­ples, they’ll cre­ate some of their own. Or at least they’ll cre­ate a dis­tur­bance, and where could a Beat pos­si­bly draw the line between dis­tur­bance and fun?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bob Dylan and Allen Gins­berg Vis­it the Grave of Jack Ker­ouac (1979)

Jack Ker­ouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cov­er for On the Road (And More Great Cul­ture from Around the Web)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Leonard Cohen Plays a Spellbinding Set at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival

in Film, Music | October 10th, 2012

Jimi Hen­drix was a tough act to fol­low under the best of cir­cum­stances. But to fol­low him onstage after mid­night in front of a crowd of more than half a mil­lion peo­ple that had been set­ting fires and throw­ing bot­tles at the stage seemed like an impos­si­ble task for a poet with an acoustic gui­tar and a gen­tle band of back­ing musi­cians. Yet Leonard Cohen turned the volatile sit­u­a­tion at the 1970 Isle of Wight Fes­ti­val into one of the most mag­i­cal per­for­mances of his career.

A lit­tle piece of land four miles off the south­ern coast of Eng­land, the Isle of Wight was host to three great music fes­ti­vals from 1968 to 1970. The last of these was some­thing of a cross between Wood­stock and Alta­mont: flower pow­er with an under­cur­rent of men­ace. Like the Wood­stock fes­ti­val the year before, the 1970 Isle of Wight fes­ti­val was crashed by thou­sands of unpay­ing fans.

Head­lin­ers for the five-day fes­ti­val includ­ed Hen­drix, Miles Davis, the Who and the Doors. By the time Cohen appeared–near the very end of the rainy final night–the atmos­phere had become dan­ger­ous. Dur­ing the Hen­dix per­for­mance, some­one threw a flare onto the top of the stage and set it on fire. Jour­nal­ist Sylvie Sim­mons describes the scene in her new book, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen:

Ten­sion had been ris­ing at the fes­ti­val for days. The pro­mot­ers had expect­ed a hun­dred and fifty thou­sand peo­ple but half a mil­lion more turned up, many with no inten­tion of pay­ing. Even after the pro­mot­ers were forced to declare it a free fes­ti­val, ill will remained. Dur­ing a set by Kris Kristof­fer­son, bot­tles were thrown and he was booed off­stage. “They were boo­ing every­body,” says Kristof­fer­son. “Except Leonard Cohen.”

As Cohen and his pro­duc­er and key­board play­er Bob John­ston stood watch­ing the may­hem dur­ing Hen­drix’s per­for­mance, Cohen stayed calm. “Leonard was­n’t wor­ried,” John­ston told Sim­mons. “Hen­drix did­n’t care and nei­ther did we. Leonard was always com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous to any­thing like that. The only thing that upset him was when they told him that they did­n’t have a piano or an organ–I don’t know, some­one had set them on fire and pushed them off the stage–so I could­n’t play with him. Leonard said, ‘I’ll be in the trail­er tak­ing a nap; come and get me when you’ve found a piano and an organ.’ ”

Accord­ing to most accounts it was a lit­tle after two o’clock in the morn­ing when Cohen took the stage. His back­up band, or “Army,” includ­ed John­ston on key­boards, Char­lie Daniels on fid­dle and bass, Ron Cor­nelius on lead gui­tar and Elkin “Bub­ba” Fowler on ban­jo and bass, along with back­up singers Cor­lynn Han­ney, Susan Mus­man­no and Don­na Wash­burn. Cohen had a glazed-over look in his eyes through­out the per­for­mance, the result of his tak­ing the seda­tive Man­drax. “He was calm because of the Man­drax,” John­ston told Sim­mons. “That’s what saved the show and saved the fes­ti­val. It was the mid­dle of the night, all those peo­ple had been sit­ting out there in the rain, after they’d set fire to Hen­drix’s stage, and nobody had slept for days.”

The his­toric per­for­mance was cap­tured on film by Mur­ray Lern­er, who released it in 2009 as Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970. The film (above) includes the fol­low­ing songs from the show:

  1. Dia­monds in the Mine
  2. Famous Blue Rain­coat
  3. Bird on the Wire
  4. One of us Can­not be Wrong
  5. The Stranger Song
  6. Tonight Will be Fine
  7. Hey, That’s No Way to Say Good­bye
  8. Sing Anoth­er Song Boys
  9. Suzanne
  10. The Par­ti­san
  11. Seems So Long Ago, Nan­cy
  12. So Long, Mar­i­anne (dur­ing clos­ing cred­its)

Per­haps the most mov­ing moment in the film comes at the begin­ning, when Cohen brings the mas­sive crowd togeth­er by ask­ing a favor: “Can I ask each of you to light a match,” Cohen says, “so I can see where you all are?” As Sim­mons puts it, “Leonard talked to the hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple he could not see as if they were sit­ting togeth­er in a small dark room.” Or as film­mak­er Lern­er lat­er said, “He mes­mer­ized them. And I got mes­mer­ized also.” Sum­ming up the con­cert and the film, Sim­mons writes: “It was a bril­liant per­for­mance. Lern­er’s cam­eras cap­tured Cohen’s com­mand­ing pres­ence, hyp­no­tist’s charm, and an inti­ma­cy that would seem unfea­si­ble in such a vast, inhos­pitable space.”

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Orson Welles Remembers his Stormy Friendship with Ernest Hemingway

in Film, Literature | October 9th, 2012

In this fas­ci­nat­ing clip from a 1974 inter­view by Michael Parkin­son of the BBC, Orson Welles describes his “very strange rela­tion­ship” with Ernest Hem­ing­way, cast­ing him­self in a sto­ry of their first meet­ing as a torero opposed to Hem­ing­way’s bull.

The two men met in New York in the ear­ly sum­mer of 1937, when Welles was asked to nar­rate The Span­ish Earth, a doc­u­men­tary orga­nized by Hem­ing­way and oth­er artists to pro­mote the Rebubli­can cause dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War. Welles was a great admir­er of Hem­ing­way, who was 16 years his senior. When he was 18 years old he went to Spain to study bull­fight­ing after read­ing Hem­ing­way’s Death in the After­noon. But despite some sim­i­lar­i­ties, the two men were poles apart, as Welles’ anec­dote of their first meet­ing sug­gests.

The brava­do in Welles’s sto­ry may have some­thing to do with a need to com­pen­sate for his own injured pride over the recep­tion of his nar­ra­tion for The Span­ish Earth.  Under pres­sure from Lil­lian Hell­man and oth­ers in the project, who com­plained that Welles’ per­for­mance was too the­atri­cal for the doc­u­men­tary, direc­tor Joris Ivens decid­ed to scrap it and asked Hem­ing­way to come back in to read his own words. Welles lat­er drew on the inci­dent in the pro­jec­tion room as inspi­ra­tion for his script “The Sacred Beasts,” about the rela­tion­ship between a young bull­fight­er and an old­er film direc­tor. The script was even­tu­al­ly devel­oped into The Oth­er Side of the Wind, an unfin­ished film star­ring John Hus­ton as the Hem­ing­way-inspired film­mak­er Jake Han­naford. Welles was work­ing on the project when the inter­view with Parkin­son took place. You can see the com­plete inter­view on YouTube, and read a tran­script at Wellesnet.

via 3 Quarks Dai­ly

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Span­ish Earth, Writ­ten and Nar­rat­ed by Ernest Hem­ing­way

Remem­ber­ing Ernest Hem­ing­way, Fifty Years After His Death

Orson Welles’s Last Inter­view, Two Hours Before His Death

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Miranda July Teaches You How to Avoid Procrastination

in Film, Life, Psychology | October 8th, 2012

I’ve always thought of writer, actor and film­mak­er Miran­da July as some­one who cre­ates her own oppor­tu­ni­ties. Long before her sto­ries in The New York­er, and before Me and You and Every­one We Know, the award-win­ning first fea­ture that cement­ed her indie dar­ling sta­tus, she was cir­cu­lat­ing video chain let­ters fea­tur­ing her own work and that of oth­er young, female film­mak­ers. She record­ed LPs and toured orig­i­nal per­for­mance art pieces.

What a relief to find out she’s a pro­cras­ti­na­tor, too.

July insists that her chat­ter­ing mon­key mind near­ly deprived her of the con­cen­tra­tion nec­es­sary to fin­ish writ­ing The Future, her sec­ond full-length film. One of its most com­pelling parts actu­al­ly wound up on the cut­ting room floor. In it (above), we see Sophie, the under-employed would-be dancer played by July, com­ing to grips with her own self-sab­o­tag­ing ten­den­cy toward pro­cras­ti­na­tion.

Of course, the rea­son we’re able to see it at all is that July, whose indus­tri­ous­ness sure­ly has earned her the right to spend a decade or so doing noth­ing but watch­ing YouTube and Googling her own name, repur­posed it as a short, instruc­tion­al film (A Handy Tip for the Eas­i­ly Dis­tract­ed), which offers an anti­dote for those of us who share her afflic­tion.

(Admit it. You’re pro­cras­ti­nat­ing now, aren’t you?)

In addi­tion to the sound­ness of her advice, her method­ol­o­gy is endear­ing­ly low-tech. As one who’s been known to attribute a lack of cre­ative out­put to a less than ide­al work­space, I found the clut­tered, shab­by apart­ment set both famil­iar and gal­va­niz­ing. If we’re going to make excus­es, we may as well own them. July takes yet anoth­er step by har­ness­ing them and forc­ing them to work for her.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Life-Affirm­ing Talks by Cul­tur­al Mav­er­icks (Includ­ing Miran­da July) Pre­sent­ed at The School of Life

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author of any num­ber of books includ­ing The Zinester’s Guide to NYC and No Touch Mon­key! And Oth­er Trav­el Lessons Learned Too Late.

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Christopher Lee Narrates a Beautiful Animation of Tim Burton’s Poem, Nightmare Before Christmas

in Animation, Film | October 5th, 2012

Almost nine­teen years ago, the ide­al fall-hol­i­day ani­mat­ed film first opened: The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, direct­ed by stop-motion mas­ter Hen­ry Selick and pro­duced by Tim Bur­ton, pos­ses­sor of one of the best-known imag­i­na­tions of our time. Over a decade before that, in 1982, Bur­ton wrote a poem of the same name, telling essen­tial­ly the same sto­ry as would the film. Work­ing at the time as an ani­ma­tor at Dis­ney, he man­aged to catch his employ­er’s atten­tion by turn­ing these vers­es into con­cept art, sto­ry­boards, and char­ac­ter mod­els for adap­ta­tion into a poten­tial half-hour tele­vi­sion spe­cial fea­tur­ing Vin­cent Price. But the world, much less Dis­ney, did­n’t yet seem ready for the Bur­ton­ian sen­si­bil­i­ty, much less the par­tic­u­lar note of jol­ly grim­ness struck by The Night­mare Before Christ­mas. Years would pass, both in terms of get­ting the project into the right hands and in terms of the painstak­ing pro­duc­tion itself, before we could enjoy Jack Skelling­ton’s acci­den­tal jour­ney into Christ­mas Town and his well-mean­ing but ill-fat­ed attempt to take that hol­i­day for him­self.

But when we got to enjoy it, boy, did we ever enjoy it: in its near­ly two decades of exis­tence, The Night­mare Christ­mas has, with its dis­tinc­tive intri­cate dark-yet-light aes­thet­ics, askew humor, and sur­pris­ing intel­li­gence, spawned a vast inter­na­tion­al sub­cul­ture of enthu­si­asts. But you can still expe­ri­ence the core of every­thing the film is, and every­thing it has become in the zeit­geist, in Bur­ton’s orig­i­nal poem. So why not also see it ani­mat­ed and read aloud by Christo­pher Lee, as you can in the video above? “It was late one fall in Hal­loween Land, and the air had quite a chill,” the hor­ror vet­er­an intones. “Against the moon a skele­ton sat, alone upon a hill.” Night­mare Before Christ­mas fans know where this is going, but they’ll still want to hear the rest; though clear­ly the direct source of so much in their beloved movie, the poem looks on Skelling­ton and his mis­ad­ven­tures from a few angles they would­n’t quite expect.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Six Ear­ly Short Films By Tim Bur­ton

Tim Bur­ton: A Look Inside His Visu­al Imag­i­na­tion

Tim Burton’s The World of Stain­boy: Watch the Com­plete Ani­mat­ed Series

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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1972 Diane Arbus Documentary Interviews Those Who Knew the American Photographer Best

in Film, Photography | October 4th, 2012

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Diane (pro­nounced Dee-Ann) Arbus received much new press a few years ago with the release of the high­ly fic­tion­al­ized and mis­guid­ed biopic Fur, star­ring Nicole Kid­man. The movie did not do well, and its crit­i­cal fail­ure may have eclipsed some re-eval­u­a­tion of her work in favor of pruri­ent spec­u­la­tion about the woman behind it. Anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty arrived last year on the 40th anniver­sary of Arbus’s death by sui­cide at age 48, and with the pub­li­ca­tion of William Todd Schultz’s Arbus biog­ra­phy An Emer­gency in Slow Motion. But long before all of this renewed inter­est in Arbus, there was the short doc­u­men­tary Mas­ters of Pho­tog­ra­phy: Diane Arbus (above). Pro­duced in 1972, one year after Arbus’s death, the film is built on inter­views with the peo­ple who knew her best: her daugh­ter Doon, her teacher at the New School, Lisette Mod­el, col­league Mar­vin Israel, and the direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy at the time for the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, John Szarkows­ki. That same year, Arbus became the first Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­ph­er to be fea­tured, posthu­mous­ly, at the Venice Bien­nale.

Born Diane Nemerov to wealthy par­ents in New York City, Arbus once con­fid­ed to Studs Terkel that she “grew up feel­ing immune and exempt from cir­cum­stance.” “One of the things I suf­fered from,” said Arbus, “was that I nev­er felt adver­si­ty. I was con­firmed in a sense of unre­al­i­ty.” Arbus gained a rep­u­ta­tion for pur­su­ing the seem­ing­ly “unre­al” in the midst of real­i­ty; her pho­to­graph­ic sub­jects were cir­cus “freaks,” social out­siders, eccen­tric per­form­ers, the phys­i­cal­ly dis­abled (whom she called “aris­to­crats”) and just ordi­nary, not very attrac­tive, peo­ple.

Some­times her sub­jects seem unre­al because their warts-and-all ordi­nar­i­ness con­trasts so stark­ly with the glossy denizens of slick, full-col­or magazines–those who can seem more real to us than we do to our­selves. She may have been dri­ven to the mar­gins because of her hatred for the fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy she and her hus­band, Allan Arbus, did for Vogue, Sev­en­teen, and Glam­our.

Arbus had a unique abil­i­ty to coax pow­er­ful por­traits from her sub­jects, most of whom stare direct­ly at her cam­era, and the view­er, and do not shrink from con­fronta­tion. As with most artists who com­mit sui­cide, a “cult of Arbus” has sprung up to defend her from crit­i­cal scruti­ny, but there are legit­i­mate ques­tions about whether her por­trai­ture human­izes or exploits her sub­jects. Susan Son­tag believed the lat­ter and described her work as “based on dis­tance, on priv­i­lege.” React­ing to her por­trait of him, Nor­man Mail­er found her work dan­ger­ous enough to quip, “Giv­ing a cam­era to Diane Arbus is like giv­ing a hand grenade to a baby.” But Arbus was not naïve: she describes her­self in an audio inter­view above as “kind of two-faced, very ingra­ti­at­ing,” and “a lit­tle too nice” to her sub­jects while she cap­tures their flaws. I’ll admit, it’s a lit­tle hard to make up one’s mind about her moti­va­tions, but the pho­tographs are always deeply com­pelling.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Steven Spielberg Reveals He Is Dyslexic. Making Movies Offered Him a “Great Escape” as a Child

in Education, Film | October 3rd, 2012

We recent­ly brought you an inter­view with Steven Spiel­berg and his father, dis­cussing the films the direc­tor made as a teenag­er. Of all Amer­i­can auteurs, Spiel­berg may be the most in touch with his inner child, so it comes as no sur­prise that the young Spiel­berg record­ed train crash­es and bat­tles using his own room or yard as the back­drop.

What no one, includ­ing the Dream­Works co-founder him­self, knew until recent­ly is that all those 8 mm shorts were more than just a pas­time. In a recent inter­view Spiel­berg revealed that he is dyslex­ic and that he was only diag­nosed five years ago. “It explained a lot of things,” Spiel­berg told Quinn Bradlee. “It was like the last puz­zle part in a tremen­dous mys­tery that I’ve kept to myself all these years.”

Always two years behind the class in read­ing, Spiel­berg was teased by oth­er kids in school. He dread­ed hav­ing to read in front of the class. He nev­er lacked for friends, though look­ing back on it sev­er­al of his friends were prob­a­bly also dyslex­ic.

“Even my own friends who were just like me, we didn’t have the skills to talk about it,” he recalled in the inter­view for Friends of Quinn, a site for peo­ple with learn­ing dif­fer­ences. “I got bul­lied. I dealt with it by mak­ing movies. That was my cov­er up.”

Spiel­berg, whose films have spanned all gen­res over more than four decades, says that moviemak­ing was his “great escape” from feel­ing painful­ly dif­fer­ent.

“I nev­er felt like a vic­tim. Movies helped save me from shame, from guilt from putting it on myself when it wasn’t my bur­den,” he says. “In light of feel­ing like an out­sider, movies made me feel inside my own skill set.”

He says that it takes him about three hours to read what most peo­ple could read in a lit­tle more than an hour.

“I’m slow, but I’ve learned to adjust,” he says. “I am in a busi­ness where read­ing is very impor­tant. I read often and I have great com­pre­hen­sion. I retain almost every­thing I read. I real­ly take my time going through a book or a script.”

With all of that said, don’t miss our pre­vi­ous post: Steven Spielberg’s Debut: Two Films He Direct­ed as a Teenag­er

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. Find more of her work at .

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Bob Dylan’s Historic Newport Folk Festival Performances, 1963–1965

in Film, Music | October 2nd, 2012

“You know him, he’s yours: Bob Dylan.” It’s hard to imag­ine a more iron­ic intro­duc­tion, but those were the words used by Ron­nie Gilbert of The Weavers to intro­duce Dylan at the 1964 New­port Folk Fes­ti­val. “What a crazy thing to say!” Dylan wrote in his mem­oir, Chron­i­cles. “Screw that. As far as I knew, I did­n’t belong to any­body then or now.” A year lat­er at New­port he made his point loud and clear. They did­n’t know him, and he was­n’t theirs.

On July 25, 1965 Dylan shocked the folk purists at New­port by plug­ging his Fend­er Stra­to­cast­er into an ampli­fi­er and join­ing gui­tarist Mike Bloom­field and oth­ers from the But­ter­field Blues Band in a blis­ter­ing ren­di­tion of “Mag­gie’s Farm,” a song often inter­pret­ed as Dylan’s protest song against the expec­ta­tion of singing protest songs. (The farm in the title is viewed as a pun on Silas McGee’s farm in Mis­sis­sip­pi, where Dylan made his famous appear­ance dur­ing a civ­il rights ral­ly.) Many in the audi­ence took it as a slap in the face. Boos rose up amid the cheer­ing, and the boo­ing con­tin­ued into Dylan’s next song, the now-clas­sic “Like a Rolling Stone.” Music writer Greil Mar­cus described the scene:

There was anger, there was fury, there was applause, there was stunned silence, but there was a great sense of betray­al. As if some­thing pre­cious and del­i­cate was being dashed to the ground and stomped. As if the del­i­cate flower of folk music, the price­less her­itage of impov­er­ished black farm­ers and des­ti­tute white min­ers, was being mocked by a dandy, with a gar­ish noisy elec­tric gui­tar, who was going to make huge amounts of mon­ey as a pop star by exploit­ing what he found from these poor peo­ple.

The con­tro­ver­sial “elec­tric” per­for­mance was the last of three Dylan appear­ances at the New­port fes­ti­val. His first time there was in 1963, when he was an obscure young singer, lit­tle known out­side of Green­wich Vil­lage. He appeared at the fes­ti­val as a guest of Joan Baez, who was far bet­ter known and had recent­ly appeared on the cov­er of Time mag­a­zine. Baez intro­duced Dylan to audi­ences around the coun­try and encour­aged him to write polit­i­cal­ly com­mit­ted folk songs. But by the 1964 fes­ti­val Dylan had already caught up to Baez, in terms of fame, and by 1965 he was break­ing free of Baez and her expec­ta­tions, and of folk music in gen­er­al.

Mur­ray Lern­er’s The Oth­er Side of the Mir­ror: Bob Dylan Live at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val 1963–1965 (above) cap­tures Dylan’s evo­lu­tion over those three years. The footage was orig­i­nal­ly shot for Lern­er’s clas­sic 1967 doc­u­men­tary, Fes­ti­val!, and was even­tu­al­ly acquired by Dylan, whose man­ag­er agreed to let Lern­er assem­ble it into a film–but only after the release of Mar­tin Scors­ese’s No Direc­tion Home, which uses some of the mate­r­i­al. The Oth­er Side of the Mir­ror was released in 2007. The doc­u­men­tary was shot on Kodak Plus‑X and Tri‑X film with a three-per­son crew. As Lern­er lat­er explained in an inter­view, his inten­tion was to let Dylan’s evolv­ing music speak for itself:

We decid­ed on no nar­ra­tion, no pun­dit inter­views, no inter­views with Dylan. noth­ing except the expe­ri­ence of see­ing him. That to me is excit­ing. Just the clear expe­ri­ence gives you every­thing you need. I felt that when screened the music of The Oth­er Side of the Mir­ror, because he’s tout­ed metaphor­i­cal­ly as the mir­ror of his gen­er­a­tion, and I thought no, he’s beyond that. He always takes the gen­er­a­tion beyond that, and he’s like on the oth­er side of the mir­ror. But I also felt the won­drous qual­i­ty of his imag­i­na­tion took us like Alice to a new world on the oth­er side of the mir­ror.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bob Dylan’s (In)Famous Elec­tric Gui­tar From the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val Dis­cov­ered?

The Times They Are a‑Changin’: 1964 Broad­cast Gives a Rare Glimpse of the Ear­ly Bob Dylan

 

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