the train bends the track
bob dylan's christian period, paul thomas anderson's thomas pynchon's inherent vice, wrestling in arenas empty as the moon, sailor moon and the unending world
1 bob dylan’s christian period (slow train coming (1979), saved (1980), shot of love (1981), the bootleg series volume 13: trouble no more, 1979-1981 (2017)). about a year ago i decided to listen to every bob dylan album in order, attempting to get as far as desire and the rolling thunder revue, as i’d been curious about the former, the weedy and weird follow-up to blood on the tracks, for years, and the latter had recently become the subject of a martin scorsese documentary released to netflix. i had some experience with dylan’s catalog already, logging a ton of hours in high school and college trying to understand blood on the tracks and blonde on blonde. blonde on blonde made immediate sense to me because my taste in writing was shifting toward the beats and hunter s. thompson and blonde on blonde presented the same kind of unabridged scrolling of the unconscious while also evoking the total loneliness of watching a moment in time leave you behind. plus the melodies were really pretty.
blood on the tracks didn’t make sense to me until i was 30. i thought i got it, but i didn’t. when i got it, it was horrible. it was like i had stumbled backward to behold a map of every time i’ve ever been hurt, threads connecting each momentary grief across time and space. just awful. blood on the tracks is like “history is a conspiracy of heartache and disappointment” and i’m like “yeah ok.” but even before that, way back in middle school, i asked my parents to buy me highway 61 revisited because i wanted to know more about one of the artists who codified the thing i loved—the album—as a thing, a format through which arrangements of songs—on an album side, in a setlist, in a dj mix—became stories.
even then i don’t think i had any specific feelings about dylan, just general ones, the feelings almost everyone had—couldn’t sing, didn’t matter, changed music with songs that took folk from the bleak physical world into a bleary metaphysical one and back again, then went electric and reeled out lyrics that jigsawed so much allusion and incident together that they felt produced by a brain slipping into and out of a fever and/or a vision of the end of the world. then i went through a reflexive period of a few years where i wondered if i even needed to be someone who listened to and thought about bob dylan, wasn’t music criticism lousy with that kind of person? but the truth is that people who’ve been thought about a lot over a long period of time tend to be fun to think about. they also tend to have periods of their life that people don’t think much of at all.
which is why i was so surprised to discover, when i picked up this bob dylan listening project again a few weeks ago, that i love bob dylan’s born-again christian records. they’re great. they often remind me of van morrison, another artist who built a bridge into gospel from his own weird isolated island of rhythm and blues. i think saved is one of the best albums dylan ever put out. now that i’m a bigger fan of his, i think that he can sing, in fact he’s a great singer. the way he stresses, elongates, rushes through certain words so that they each have their own weight, feeling, perspective, and character—he’s an interpreter who makes choices that serve his writing, even when the subject matter of the writing is narrowed to either the love and security offered by jesus or the horror and damnation awaiting all sinners. dylan hammers out quite a few fire and brimstone songs across these records, sounding so alienated in his fury that it’s like he’s an exile from the human race, wandering alone under the watchful eye of an angry god. then there are songs like “pressing on” and “covenant woman” where he sounds so connected to the love from which all things emanate that it’s hard not to believe that he really was saved for instant, even though a few years later he would dismiss and disparage this era as a mistake, a stumbling down the wrong path.
one of my favorite songs is “when he returns,” overwhelmingly powerful in any form, whether the barely-contained yearning heard in the studio version on slow train coming or the even more devastating live version where an organ bleeds daylight all over dylan’s piano. my other favorite is “what can i do for you?” especially the live performance included on the dvd in the trouble no more box set. from the moment dylan stops playing guitar during the second verse so that he can cradle the microphone with his hands and really bring the words into focus—so he can, in other words, preach—it’s like a totally different energy has taken over. “well i don’t deserve it, but i sure did make it through,” he sings, so humbled it’s like he wants to disappear from the song so god has room to enter, “… what can i do for you?” so he disappears. he starts playing the harmonica, bending his body with every contour of his solo, an antenna tuning itself to the least scrambled signal. the rest of the band dies away, leaving only the drone of the organ and the liquid chords still spilling from dylan’s harmonica into the silence, his hair held in a nimbus of red stagelight, his eyes closed in deep concentration as he plays, lost, searching, not quite knowing where his destination is but having faith one will arrive, sinking away into some layer beyond the self, into pure unconsciousness.
2 inherent vice (2014, dir. paul thomas anderson). i’ve seen a lot of movies that are intended for stoners, driven by the kind of almost-funny-and-therefore-bottomlessly-funny sense of humor that being deeply stoned makes you sensitive to. i love those movies, they’re great. but paul thomas anderson’s adaptation of thomas pynchon’s inherent vice is one of the few movies i’ve seen that is actually stoned. like “everything you can perceive with your senses is made of a fabric that you can sink into” stoned. walls covered in forests of purple shag carpeting. a set so mummified in clouds of fog that i can’t tell if the actors are walking through a harbor at night or through the smog of a club. words, phrases, conversations that start normal and gradually warp into a nonsense so confidently delivered it must be some kind of ultrasense. reactions that don’t seem as tethered to actions as they used to be.
every lead private detective doc sportello follows in the book and film turns into a rope of sand or tugs at something glowering beyond the limits of his imagination, some invisible superstructure that governs our actions through the confusions and inefficiencies of the actual government. just as it starts to come into view it goes out of focus. “i don’t even know what i just saw,” sportello whispers to anonymous surf rock studio musician and government informant coy harlingen in the thick of the harbor or club fog. blackened harmonies sing just beneath the veil of perception. “me neither,” says harlingen. “fact, i don’t even want to know.”
doc is ultimately trying to find his disappeared ex-girlfriend shasta fay, even as this objective tends get dim and misty beneath the countless submysteries and subconspiracies that wrap around her disappearance. sportello spends the whole film trying to hold this image of shasta in mind, trying to remember her not through his confused yet enduring feelings for her, but just as herself. that’s who he wants to find—not the projection, but the person. everyone in this world is so sunken into their murky exoskeletons of selfhood that this kind of clarity is not only precious, it’s love. when doc first discovers that shasta is gone, he writes her name on a rolling paper and rolls a joint with it; as he lights it we see a superimposed image of shasta flicker both to the surface of his mind and the frame of the movie, her eyes averting from the camera as if she’s uncomfortable being seen so clearly, having bypassed the layers of weed and forgetting to break the surface, just for an instant, before slipping away again.
3 all elite wrestling: dynamite, march 25, 2020. because the real and the surreal are currently (and have always been?) indistinguishable, all professional sports have been canceled for the year except for professional wrestling, and i have been fascinated by the way wrestling, already in a pretty flexible relationship with reality, is bending in on itself further in response. last week’s wrestlemania transposed the near-annual undertaker match from the ring to a literal graveyard and for a brief moment wrestling tripped into the ‘80s action-horror b-movie universe that characters like the undertaker always seemed derived from. (i say this while also condemning wwe for their recent, really nauseating bids to be considered an “essential service.”)
and all elite wrestling is arguably as good as ever, even without an audience for the wrestlers to play off of. a few weeks ago the emptiness and silence of the arena allowed for increasingly bizarre and reality-breaking performances; chris jericho could open a promo by antagonizing a hovering drone, and matt hardy, now a mystic who has traveled distantly beyond all metaphysical conceptions of the self, could astrally project himself into different levels of the arena and blow minds. even though i’m constantly aware of the outer horror that’s contorting wrestling into these new odd shapes as i watch it, it is both inspiring and comforting to see it adapt to the moment by morphing into its best self. reality is bent; on some level professional wrestling, in its elaborate gymnastic displays of fakery, has proved that it always is. but it is not broken.
4 sailor moon r (1993-1994, toei animation). the birds have taken over the streets. when i walked up to my roof last week all i could notice was the silence between ambulance sirens filling up with birdsong. they yelled, warbled, sketched out a rhythm and melody and looped through it, pleased with themselves. i started to wonder if the louder birds were actually trying to talk to the sirens, their caws yawning wider and wider to emulate the native screams of ambulances.
the other thing that struck me was the size of the full moon the other night. it swelled in the sky and hovered there. and i wondered how closely the silence of the sidewalks and the streets—even the few cars on 21st street have just been softly hushing by as if they were ashamed of their own presence—approached the silence of the moon.
when i have not been looking at the sky, i have been rewatching sailor moon for the, i think, third time? it is 200 episodes long and many of the episodes are bad and/or boring but bad and boring are kind of my speed right now, and when the show is good it is the kind of good that makes you believe that friendship will save the world. (it might as well.) its second season, sailor moon r, is probably the most frustrating of the five. the first twelve episodes are devoted to an arc about aliens and an evil tree and it is tediously bad and boring, and afterward it spends a lot of time walking in place instead of exploring the ripples and bends of its cool time travel plot, which is why i fell in love with the show in the first place: i love time travel. it is a significant plot device in most of the media i love, or at the very least time is rearranged loosely enough in the media i love that moving from scene to scene or chapter to chapter is like time travel anyway (c.f. the dispossessed).
time in sailor moon is wildly crooked. sailor moon herself is a reincarnation of a moon princess who existed centuries ago. her current incarnation on earth eventually becomes an eternal being and queen of 31st century earth? the capital city of which is a tokyo filled with crystalline structures? we find this out because her (also ageless) daughter, chibi-usa, travels back in time to evade the black moon clan, who are trying to reduce all life to a deathlike silence and nothingness simultaneously in the years 1994 and 3000. it’s a lot. as a kid it rocked my world to know that a show about a magical girl that used the same looped transformation sequences in every episode could have this kind of mindbending scale, could fold time up as if it were paper.
but what really kept me yoked to the show were the relationships between its characters, the bond of friendship that unites and keeps each of the sailor guardians fighting for each other. there’s an incredible episode late in sailor moon r where ami aka sailor mercury is attacked by a monster who places her in these terrifyingly vivid hallucinations where fake versions of the other sailor guardians ridicule and criticize her in the psychedelically warped space. ami only survives this because she knows who her friends are; when the monster is shocked that she refuses to succumb to the delusions, ami tells her, “you wouldn’t understand—our hearts are bound by trust.” that’s what i think keeps you afloat when you’re surfing through the unknown, whether you’re born-again bob dylan or doc sportello or a professional wrestler or a magical girl in an anime wrestling with the emptiness of the future—there’s a trust that binds you to the things you truly care about and believe in. and that’s what i hope this newsletter will be about every week. thank you for reading.