Brighter Than Creation's Dark

It's very very weird. Hey, I was a stupid metalhead hard rock jerk during most of high school, and shortly thereafter, and going to college, went into a bad bad punk and new wave arc that probably still hasn't tailed out (looking at that recently acquired Thompson Twins box set as evidence)

So, it was only on the basis of reading a couple of decent reviews of the movie I'm Not There, I popped it into the Netflix Q and promptly forgot about it.

But as these things go, it eventually showed up in the mailbox, like the mortgage fraud crisis showing up on the doorstep of All Our Favorite Banks.

So one late night, while I was trying in vain to salvage what remained of my career, I popped it in, and realized that it deserved more attention than I could spare while drafting. So I pulled it and went on my way, until today when I took a "weirdness/ personal mental instability/ do not push me over the edge" day. At least that is what we call them in my little corner of the world, and why not?

Yanno, this is the kind of movie that irritates the holy hell out of Wife Sublime. She hates movies that are non-linear, and for fuck's sake, a movie that goes beyond that to use  six different actors to portray one person in AT LEAST six different ways (and not only is one of the portrayals an actor portraying the initial subject, but one of the actors is a female portraying a male [and FFS, doing an arresting job of it]) made me think I made a good choice in taking a day off to work from home and watch it on my own.

Dylan was always background and side-noise to the music I was interested in. But you know, I also respect the interests and opinions of the artists I respect, and when I saw the list of folks lining up to play on this soundtrack...

• Sonic Youth
• Richie Havens
• Tom Verlaine
• Jeff Tweedy
• Eddie Vedder
• Cat Power
• Yo La Tengo
• John Fucking Doe!
• Malkmus
• The Hold Steady
• Calexico, with Willie Nelson, Roger McGuinn, Charlotte Gainsbourg
• Mark Lanegan
• Iron and Wine
• The Black Keys
• Sufjan Stevens

So what the hell could I do?  I watched the damn movie.

And really loved it.  Really Quite a bit.  "This Machine Kills Fascist" and not nearly damn enough.

Looking at my Ipod, I see that I had two of Dylan's more recent albums, Time Out Of Mind and Love and Theft; yes, really good stuff.  I know that at one point I bought the Bootleg album of the Albert Hall show, but somehow that never got digitized and I sold it to somebody so I could score drugs, so what the hell....

But every morning, I still wake up.  And I hear these songs.  Some of them I've heard before, from Cash, and Tupelo, and others; some of them I only hear echoing from the only bones I have and the ground I walk on.  It kind of freaking creeps me the fuck out that songs from a generation ago still make my spine tingle.  You know, it shouldn't feel that weird to a person who can see the same thing in buildings from a century or two ago, or art from even further back, but it still seems a bit tingly for something as newfangled as rock music. 

In the movie, one of the characters says that if you want to disappear, you need to NOT CREATE.  But how?  creative people create.  The only way out is to die.   And that is the point of the statement; that not creating is akin to death.

And John Doe sings me to sleep, and I hear Sonic Youth in my dreams.

And still,  I wake up.