FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 2025
A nutcase, completely unknown: In full fairness, let it be said:
Manohla Dargis is a highly accomplished film critic. In her review for the New York Times, she didn't rank A Complete Unknown as an "NYT Critic's Pick."
In her review, she seemed to work the old double switch. She seemed to praise the (Oscar-nominated) film to the skies, but she didn't afford it the status of a Critic's Pick.
Along the way, she made a remark which captures the current state of western world cogitation. Tomorrow, we'll offer our own thoughts about the film. For today, here's the odd thing Dargis said:
‘A Complete Unknown’ Review: Timothée Chalamet Goes Electric
Every so often in “A Complete Unknown,” an enjoyably easy-listening and -watching fiction about Bob Dylan’s early road to immortality, Timothée Chalamet lowers his gaze and sends a shiver up your spine. It’s as startling as it is welcome because Chalamet has never seemed especially threatening, even in his more darkly messianic moments in the “Dune” series. He seems too anodyne to play a disruptive trickster like Dylan, yet Chalamet proves an ideal conduit in “A Complete Unknown” because the music and its maker have such power. As with any great cover band, it’s the original material that carries you through the night.
[...]
“A Complete Unknown” probably won’t please Dylan purists or anyone, really, who’s a stickler for documentary facticity in fiction. The movie blurs and plays with years and events, creating a generally seamless narrative out of a messy life as it glances at the larger world (the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights movement). Some of these global affairs affect the characters more directly than others. Yet while the world’s sorrows and outrages help fuel the folk scene, its finger-pointing (Dylan’s term) protest songs, its politics and concerns, are subsumed by vague notions of authenticity, which are embodied by the suffocatingly sincere Pete and the more openly strident musicologist Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz).
We gave you the two complete paragraphs. In fairness, Dargis didn't invent this particular hook, but there it, just as plain as a Ballad in Plain D.
The film is "fiction," she oddly says. Why would a "purist" seek "facticity" in a fictional work like that?
Is the film in question "fiction?" If so, it's a peculiar offshoot of that species—an offshoot which, in a slightly more rational world, might have been completely unknown.
The film is fiction—except for the fact that its protagonist is a young singer whose name seems to be "Bob Dylan."
Also, the film is fiction except for the fact that it ends up in an embarrassing, clown car scene at the (1965) Newport Folk Festival, with the fictional character known as "Bob Dylan" strumming a few songs.
He even agrees to sing a duet with a fictional character who's known in the film as "Joan Baez!" And forgive us, but in the dumbest moment of the whole film, someone actually says the following as a brawl is taking place:
"Sorry, Odetta," someone says, speaking to another character who happens to be backstage.
Fellow humans, please! On what planet—within what realm of cogitation—does any of this qualify as "fiction?"
To appearances, it qualifies as fiction within the human realm in which we want to have our history and gimmick it pleasingly too. It qualifies as fiction within the realm a 21-year-old performer chose to burlesque when he introduced a song this way right there on his second album:
Unlike most of the songs nowadays that are being written uptown in Tin Pan Alley—that's where most of the folk songs come from nowadays—this, this is a song, this wasn't written up there. This was written somewhere down in the United States!
The (apparent) madman was speaking to the (fictional) "cable news" journalist. Twelve minutes into Wednesday night's TV show, demonstrably at 9:12 Eastern, the (apparent) madman, an actual person, for some reason vocalized this:
ACTUAL PERSON (1/22/25): I think one thing is happening is, people are learning that they [apparently, the Democratic Party] can't govern and that their policies are terrible.
I mean, they don't want to see a woman get pummeled by a man in a boxing ring. They don't want to see men in women's sports in other ways. And they don't want to see them, and they don't want to have transgender for everybody. They don't want to have a child leave home as a boy and come home two days later as a girl.
A parent doesn't want to see that. And there are states where that can happen.
According to this actual person, parents "don't want to have a child leave home as a boy and come home two days later as a girl." Based on what this person said, that can't happen in every state—but there are states where it can!
And yes, that's what he actually said. To see him as he actually says it, you can just click here.
At this point, let's make sure that you understand the basics of what we've just said:
An actual person actually said that on a putative "cable news" program. He said that to a second actual person—to an actual person who is the multimillion-dollar employee of the alleged news station.
Also, it gets worse. The second person—the employee—had said this just a moment before:
"We've known each other for thirty years, so we have a friendship and we have a professional relationship."
That's what the second person said. We'll assert that he was acting from his friendship when he didn't say a word—didn't strum a single chord—about what the first person said.
Once again, here's what that first person said:
He said it can't happen in every state—but in some states, he said it can happen!
In those states, a child can leave home as a boy and come home two days later as a girl. Parents don't want that to happen, this apparent nutcase actually said—and yes, you can see him say it!
Our question to you this morning is simple. We'll skip past the other million and one crazy statements this apparent nutcase has made in recent weeks, months and years.
Our challenge to you is very simple. Review again what that first person said. After that, riddle us this:
On what planet—in what realm—is that not presumed to be the statement of an apparent madman? Of someone who seems to be some version of crazy or insane or, more politely, just some form of mentally ill?
In what realm is that actual person not described as a "nutcase?" Today we have answering of questions:
The realm in which he's not insane is the ream in which that Oscar-nominated film is somehow said to be "fiction." It's the realm of jumbled human cognition—a realm in which various guilds, Red and Blue alike, have long been performing their various puzzling roles in the play.
That one person told the other that that can actually happen! It can happen somewhere down in the United States, though not in all the states.
The second person, cast as a "cable news" person, didn't ask him to name the states to which he referred—to explain what in the name of sanity he could possibly be talking about.
That second person just kept going, pretending that nothing had happened. And then, in stepped David brooks and Rachel Maddow and Krugman and David French.
In stepped Lawrence O'Donnell; Bret and Gail stepped in too. Nicolle Wallace kept performing her part in the play. None of them made the world's obvious statement:
By any normal reckoning, the first of those actual persons had made a crazy remark. By normal reckoning, when people keep making statements like that, we tend to say that such people are crazy—seem to be some form of insane.
Dargis pretended that the film in question is fiction. Brooks is pretending too. But this is one of the fictions our guilds have all chosen, and this is the realm we inhabit.
(Also, Al Gore said he invented the internet. Starting 25 years ago, they all started saying that!)
For the record, none of this is going to change. To all appearances, this is one of the basic ways our imperfect species is wired.
Man [sic] is the rational animal? Various people have challenged that song. The rest of us take what those people have said and kick their remarks to the curb.
I Pity the Poor Immigrant, the actual Dylan once wrote. As we've noted in the past, he was speaking of the very person who, on this Wednesday night, made his latest nutcase remark.
All along the alleged watchtower, good decent people like Stephens and Brooks are refusing to state the obvious truth.
They're refusing to say that this actual person seems to be a nutcase. This is the way we substitute fictions for the less pleasing realm called plain truth.
"good decent people like Stephens and Brooks"
ReplyDeleteLOL.
Somerby is a right winger, it’s unsurprising he endorses those two Republican propagandists.
DeleteWhat kind of idiot thinks a Republican voter would care about inflation?
ReplyDeleteRepublicans, definitionally, are people obsessed with dominance, they only care about an issue to the degree that it helps them attain and maintain dominance over others.
DeleteMaybe I’m misunderstanding Bob’s convoluted sentences. He seems to be discussing transgender surgery for children. I think he says it’s false to assert that some parents disapprove of such surgery for their children. And, that the assertion is so false that only an insane person would say that.
ReplyDeleteI can’t believe Bob would say something so ridiculous. Can someone explain what he was really trying to say?
Somerby has gotten even less coherent, ever since he gave up trying to find a reason other than bigotry for someone to vote for Trump.
DeleteBob's not coping very well with that disappointment.
Bob should have known he was setting himself up for failure.
DeleteOr suggest something so ludicrous such as that a child may be violently mutilated because a parent approves.
DeleteDavid lies about who he is, what he does, who is family members are, yet he wants clarification on Somerby’s typical convoluted nonsense?
DeleteRepublicans do little more than lie and game the system, so it’s pretty rich, their faux moral panics over nothingburgers.
TDH's post is somewhat incoherent. I suppose it practically never happens that a parent's son leaves home for 2 days and then returns as a girl. I suppose if that ever happened, it would displease a large number of parents. I don't know why TDH is seizing upon this statement as an example of Trump's madness. People often exaggerate. They'll say, "I've heard that a million times" or "nothing could be worse that [fill in the blanks]" when there a plenty of things worse. I'm not defending Trump. His abundant "exaggerations" are of a different category, they are similar to fascistic propaganda. But there is a thing where children announce in school that they are a different gender - John is now Mary - and wants to have others use feminine pronouns when referring to him/now her. - and the school keeps it a secret from the child's parents. Seemingly, Trump was referring to that situation. It currently an issue, a wedge issue.
DeleteIs it a real issue?
DeleteWhat exactly is the extent of this issue?
How are you able to mind read if Trump is “exaggerating” or sincere?
Every person forms their own identity. You can't stop it but you can help that process along by respecting the right of each person to be themselves, however they define that. Our identities are in flux throughout our lives.
DeleteI don't see using feminine pronouns and being called Mary as any different than the child who goes through a religious conversion at age 14 (that they will later abandon), or the child who wants to be called Spike instead of Theodore and dresses in team jerseys or who adopts four different names (as JD Vance has done) and lies about his childhood in a supposed memoir.
Parents freak out about some things kids do. They also try to dictate and oppose restrictions and choices that are not theirs to make. Issues of who to love and who to be sexually are private and belong to the kids, not their parents. Republican parents sometimes kick their kids out of the house for being gay or just being sexually active in their teens. Some parents demand that a child be athletic because music and art are "gay" and some want to ban books that they fear will cause their kids to know too much about the world. Schools know this about parents, but their job is to nurture the child, not obey parents wishes, especially when they are overreacting about something that may be transitory. It is better for a parent to preserve a relationship with their child than to evict him or her as a spawn of satan (as some parents do).
The problem is that Republicans and Trump have now politicized something that used to remain a developmental issues for parents, doctors and schools. It doesn't belong in politics, even if you feel that whatever you believe about this is right and the only way to think about it. If you leave it alone and don't make a big deal about it, your son might eventually abandon dreams of joining the NFL and become a rapper instead. You can only hope.
When a person does not form a stable identity by adulthood, they are diagnosed as having a personality disorder, or may be mentally ill with schizophrenia or some other serious disorder. That's why parents should not be rigid and interfere with their kids' efforts to figure themselves out.
DeleteImagine thinking the problem is how fast "a boy can come home a girl" instead of the belief "a boy can come home a girl" at any point, after any period of time, ever.
ReplyDeleteFreud described a malady he called "castration anxiety". Maybe this is what the right is feeling when it proposes that this can happen to a child, simply by going to school among Democrats.
DeleteWe already have seen that Republicans think a lot about penises. They tried to castrate Hunter Biden by spreading his dick pics all over social media. They tried to castrate Biden during his own presidency by portraying him as a senile old fart, a doddering fool while Biden attended foreign meetings and public functions. They are totally afraid of strong women who might make them impotent by being accomplished and holding he-man male jobs, such as Senator. They have discovered that ball-tanning doesn't work, so they have to surround themselves with 17 year old girls and fawning bimbos. But this exaggerated concern with drag queens and trans-athletes reveals their worst fears -- that someone might mistake them in their puny-ness as girls instead of the robust, masculine boys they want to be, but fear they are not.
Look how this baseless fear warps their worldview and makes them worry about all of the wrong things -- having their penis chopped off at a public place (school is a dream-substitute for Congress or work or the golf course). Trump emasculates them but they displace that humiliation onto fears of children being made into that most feared of objects -- women.
At least the right hasn't made women into the villains -- oh, wait, they have equated the Democrats with being female (the mommy party) and placed all of their fears onto Dems as the agents of their loss of manhood. Ironically, it is the emasculated Trump who does this to the men on the right, forcing them to grovel and do girlish things like flatter him and symbolically fellate him. But Dems get the blame, just as Trump has made scapegoats of immigrants and women in his own life.
This pathology is so transparent it hardly needs explaining. Republican men fear threats to their perceived sexual virility, just like Col. Ripper in the Dr. Strangelove film. Can it be any more obvious?
And today Somerby joins in the fun, except he won't name names and blames a stupid film about Dylan. Dylan cooperated with the filmmakers, so of course they aren't going to portray anything real about him, anything that might offend his ginormous ego, nearly as large as Trump's. But they do a good job with the songs.
Somerby has yet to explain why he found it so offensive that someone apologized to Odetta (a real folksinger who may have been backstage in real life) in the film.
And no, the folksongs performed by folk singers in that time period were mostly traditional (which means they were actual folksongs) not written by Tin Pan Alley. Somerby is making that up in order to sound like someone who knows a single thing about folk music, when he quite obviously does not. Even Bob Dylan grabbed traditional forms and lyrics from the blues songs being sung around him, to produce his folk-style songs on his first few albums. Look at "I Shall Be Free" for example in which he updates traditional blues lyrics.
No one on the right ever seems to worry about a girl leaving home and coming back as a boy. They only worry about the boys being unmanned. The real fears behind this are so transparent.
DeleteIn England, there were laws against women dressing up as men (and against poor men dressing up as wealthy men) intended to protect male privileges and class status, which included everything from banking and owning property to eating in pubs without a chaperone. These were motivated by status and privilege. They were not about protecting one's wee wee from ridicule, as in the US.
Every woman learns that the surest way to get herself beaten or killed is to laugh at a man's penis. Trump hates Stormy for ridiculing him. Somewhere in Somerby's past there is a girl who laughed at him instead of rejecting him courteously and letting him down gently, as girls are taught to do (for their own protection). This is what sexual politics is about, not Somerby's insistence that women were being raped right and left in sacred Troy.
This whole scenario in our country is ridiculous because Trump is ridiculous and so are the men who are tolerating or vicariously participating in Trump's search for a larger penis.
You know who had a huge cock? Arnold Palmer. People say that thing was ... immense.
DeleteThe concerns about what happens at nature's category boundaries reflects the Republican anxiety about whether they are manly enough. That's why they insist that their women make them feel more manly by being trad wives and girly girls. People who really are ambiguous in their physiology make these insecure men feel too much anxiety for them to tolerate, so they attack the people who make them nervous.
DeleteEverybody knows Trump is nuts, the 70% of the electorate that did not vote for Trump knows he is nuts, the 30% of the electorate that voted for Trump knows he is nuts AND THEY JUST DON’T CARE.
ReplyDeleteWhen you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
DeleteThe 30% that voted for Trump have dominance, and they do not care about what crazy nut comes along, as long as he saves them from losing their dominance.
DeleteTrump voters have dominance. They don't care about what crazy nut comes along as long as they save them from losing their dominance.
DeleteSomerby’s buyer’s remorse is hilarious.
ReplyDeleteanon 10:07 - your "witticism" is absurd. 100% - TDH did not want Trump to win. What you and the other trolls (or it could be that all the anons are only one deranged person) easily match the worst "lies" of the MAGAs by claiming TDH wanted to win; the "basis" for the claims is absolute rubbish. I'm not looking at this in a partisan way - other than being a partisan for common sense and basic reason.
DeleteAh the finger pointing troll (you know, the Republican right winger that used to pretend he’s a lawyer and a Dem), hilarious!
Delete" ... other than being a partisan for common sense and basic reason."
DeleteLOLx2!
If Somerby didn't want Trump to win, why did he take every opportunity to repeat right wing criticisms of Harris? The only positive thing he said about her before the election was that she has a nice smile. He also said that Republicans would win if we didn't stop attacking The Others (ie. Republicans and their memes and lies).
DeleteAC/MA, you are absolutely partisan, like Somerby. You might be him for all we know, in fact you could all be one big Republican (you, Cecelia, PP, and the other nymed conservatives who do nothing but namecall the Dems here).
I told you this would happen if Trump were elected. Now we citizens must carry ID at all times or risk being swept up in a govt raid and being forced to prove our right to be in the country where we were born. Show us your papers -- that used to be a line from a WWII paper in which Nazis bullied their own people. Now it is us:
ReplyDelete"Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided a worksite in Newark, New Jersey on Thursday and detained several U.S. citizens, including a U.S. military veteran. ICE will not provide exact details on the raid citing an ongoing investigation.
According to a statement from ICE on the raid, agents "may encounter U.S. citizens while conducting field work and may request identification to establish an individual’s identity as was the case during a targeted enforcement operation at a worksite today in Newark."
In other words, in Donald Trump's America, individuals must be ready at all times to show their papers to avoid being caught up in deportation sweeps to detention centers where they will be forced to wait to see an immigration judge to prove their status. The veteran was reportedly forced to prove his military service to avoid detention."
This arises from Trump's new catch and release approach to deporting undesirables. It is now a short step from forgetting to release those caught up in a sweep even with ID.
This citizen had to prove his military service to be released. What if he were a woman, someone who was unlikely to have served in the military? Someone with a medical disqualification perhaps? How do those of us who were not vets prove our right to be in the USA, after having been born here and lived and worked here all of our lives? This is what our country has come to. All we need now is govt surveillance and digital ID and we will be an authoritarian police state. Welcome to our brave new world.
And you assholes on the right did this to our country.
Drama. Someone was lightly inconvenienced because the US has a border crisis and thanks to Democrats is forced to weed out criminal aliens. Likely you watch Handmaid's Tale on a loop.
Deletethere is no border crisis, maggot snowflake.
DeleteDrama. White people are being out-classed in the job market, and snowflakes cry out that its a "crisis".
DeleteWhat’s the crime rate of immigrants vs native born citizens?
DeleteWhat is the border crisis?
How is being swept up in a raid by federal agents “lightly inconvenienced” as compared to common light inconveniences like stoplights and grocery store lines?
Mark my words.
DeleteWhen immigrants continue to outclass white people in the job market, even after axing the DEI initiatives, Trump will move on to deporting all immigrants, so whitey has someone to blame for being losers.
Blue America provides the labor and the gdp that Red America parasitically lives off of.
DeleteRepublicans are human, they feel guilty as they laze around while everyone else works themselves to the bone, but it’s the pernicious way they cope with their guilt that’s the issue, they scapegoat the very folks that feed them, perfectly fine cutting off their nose to spite their face. Republicans are deeply weird.
It is not "lightly inconvenienced" to be detained and worry about whether you will be deported, especially if you don't carry around proof that you served in the military with you all the time.
DeleteJoe Arpaio was convicted, in part, for locking up citizens in his jail and claiming they were illegal aliens. Trump pardoned him. Does that make it more or less likely that Republican storm troopers will care whether they sweep up citizens in their raids?
DeleteIf you are given a quota, told how many people need to be deported, are you going to be careful about screening who is and is not a citizen? Does being brown-skinned or having a "foreign" surname make it less likely or more likely you will be deported? Would you want to live in one of the tent cities Mexico has set up for deportees, while seeking an attorney to arrange for your release, all in a language you may not speak?
DeleteThis seems to me to be a way to persecute Democrats for supporting the civil rights of immigrants, by accidentally including us in their sweeps. It is not a minor inconvenience for people who may lose their jobs or not have the money to pay a lawyer, and cause family and loved ones to be worried about where they have been taken. All immigrants (legal or illegal) will go through that anxiety. Citizens don't expect it to happen to them, but it is obviously happening and this is only the first week of Trump's term.
Nazis used to use their detainment of Germans in camps like Dachau as a threat against the entire populace, to deter opposition to their activities by showing the public that anyone, even those who were not Jewish, not Communists, and so on, could be detained just on a whim by their own govt. Trump is showing us that he too can do that, picking up citizens and veterans in their workplace, without repercussions. That is how authoritarian leaders instill fear -- by disappearing people without cause.
We need to oppose this. One way to start is to donate to the ACLU. They and similar organizations will be involved in getting citizens out of detention and bringing class action suits on behalf of those Trump terrorizes.
Why has Somerby adopted this odd way of writing, in which he refers to Trump using terms other than his name, and refers to others again without names but simply designating them as "first person" and "second person" or "child"? This has to be one of his weirdest essays. It is carrying plausible deniability too far.
ReplyDeleteIs this paranoia? Does Somerby worry that someone may blame him for whatever he has written? Does he want to wiggle out and say he wasn't talking about anyone specific? If so, I suggest that Somerby stop writing. The piffle he has written today is not worth the anxiety, if that is what makes him avoid naming names today. I certainly have no time for this idiocy.
He's upset because the FBI communicated with social media platforms to censor posts related to the Hunter Biden laptop story. (The laptop contained documents showing Hunter Biden’s involvement with foreign companies that took in over 20 million dollars during the time his father was Vice President).
DeleteCool story.
DeleteThe laptop was stolen and material was both added and deleted (according to forensic computer scientists who examined the laptop after it had passed through the hands of a Russian agent and Rudy Giuliani). That's why anything found on Biden's laptop is not evidence of anything except the Republican desire to smear and incarcerate him.
DeleteCool story.
DeleteIn the battle of science vs the loons, the loons are winning.
DeleteThey may think they are winning, but reality doesn't change simply because people don't believe it. Science wins because the world remains what it is, regardless of Republican false beliefs or wishful thinking.
Delete"In what realm is that actual person not described as a "nutcase?"
ReplyDeleteAmerica elected a president who knows there are no such things as drugs or surgery that will turn a boy/man into a girl/woman and vice versa, and that the only people who believe there are such things are accurately described as complete nutcases and child abusers.
The only gender affirming surgery minors are permitted is top surgery, and only after extensive protocols involving consultations with psychologists and medical doctors.
ReplyDeleteMinors are routinely permitted top surgery for breast reduction and breast enhancement, this is vastly more common than gender affirming surgery, does not require protocols, and gets nary a peep from Republicans.
Furthermore, hormone and steroid therapies are commonplace (little guys that are insecure like Joe Rogan love this stuff), yet with gender affirming hormone therapy, Republicans clutch their pearls and require a feinting couch.
As the head of the NCAA recently testified, there are 500,000 college athletes, less than 10 are trans.
Transgender is natural, they exist, but it’s a tiny percent.
It’s a non issue, and no Dem centers their politics on the issue.
The only ones making a big issue about it are Republicans, but it’s completely performative. They do not really care about the issue, they merely recognize they can weaponize the issue to motivate their voters. It’s a cynical ploy by Republicans.
Evidently, the movie about Dylan in the ‘60’s was interspersed with clips of Fox News. Who would have guessed?
ReplyDeleteI was a boy when I was born, and I’m still a boy today. But I want to become a girl, from top to bottom, so I can be like Cecelia.
DeleteAnonymouse 2:19pm, just do as everyone else did before Marxist morons gained so much influence.
DeleteGo with what you got. .
What does Marx have to do with this boy-girl crap?
DeleteSays the man pretending to be a woman.
DeleteDylan: I’m a Jew
ReplyDeleteDylan: I’m a poor Black sharecropper
Dylan: I’m a sincere protestor
Dylan: I’m a simple backwater Appalachian
Dylan: I’m a rock star
Dylan: I’m a born again Christian
Keith Richard’s assessment of Dylan: he’s a prophet of profit
Sounds like the plot of a Todd Haynes movie.
DeleteBut he's not allowed to say I'm a girl?
DeleteSounds like the plot of The Jerk.
DeleteDylan found a way to excel at commodifying authenticity while being disingenuous, foreshadowing the rise of Trump, priming a generation to roll over for right wingers and lay across a big brass bed and take it.
Why mention Trump in connection with Dylan?
DeleteIf the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
Oh
A bit too on the nose. Interesting, how that triggered David. Good to know.
Delete"Authenticity" is appealing to a young market because teens are engaged in the developmental task of forming their "adult" identities. That causes them a lot of anxiety about being fake, a poser, as opposed to figuring who they are and being that person.
DeleteIn CA surf music in the same time period, there were real surfers who didn't go to school but lived at the beach and were good at surfing, and there were posers who showed up on weekends and didn't know how to wax their boards properly, or wore swim shorts (baggies) that were too new.
The film Urban Cowboy contrasted the real cowboys who worked on ranches with cattle against those who bought new fancy western clothing and went honky-tonking but had never ridden a horse.
In Dylan's folk scene, there were the authentic folk singers who sang the traditional songs on acoustic guitars contrasted with the newbies who corrupted the pure folk genre and were attracted to rock and roll and electrified instruments. Too loud meant too electric in the film. Dylan was absolutely a fake at being folk but that didn't matter because he adapted to whatever sound young people wanted to hear next. That was a sin to those seeking authenticity (real hippies for example, as opposed to those who held day jobs and bought tie dye in a store).
This is all driven by the fact that it was young people buying the records, not people over 25 (who couldn't be trusted because they were sell-outs -- the theme of The Big Chill). Those over 25 have figured out who they are.
Somerby's dig that music from Tin Pan Alley was bad is ridiculous because all of the folk artists had recording labels and agents too, or they didn't get heard anywhere beyond Greenwich Village and livingrooms. Only the musicologists didn't go on to record songs someone had written. The protesters wrote their own songs (Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie) and sang them at protests. This idea that Tin Pan Alley (whatever Somerby means by that, since he clearly isn't referring to the actual place or the time when songs came from there), is bad or wrong or inauthentic mischaracterizes the music scene. Somerby himself was no where near that scene, having moved to CA. He likely encountered surf culture among the teens there, or maybe he missed that, given that it originated in Southern CA and Somerby lived in the northern part of the state. He was a bit too late for the actual folk scene when he got to Harvard. It is understandable that he would feel like a poser and fake if he tried to join folk musicians in Boston. He would be regarded as just another rich boy at an Ivy League college, an audience member not a participant.
Dylan was whatever he had to be to make money. When he left his home to go to NYC, he stole rare records from his musical mentor. That isn't how real people treat those who have helped them. His lyrics are about people pretending and being found out, getting some sort of comeuppance. They are unpleasant to listen to, unless you are a confused teen without a real place in the world yet. Try It's All Over Now, Baby Blue for a taste of his nasal snotty derision of ordinary people. Dylan never likes the people he writes about. Looking down on others is what insecure youth do, so it appeals to that audience of record buyers. But he isn't saying anything wise or true about the world.
Christianity is an entire religion based on the circumstance that a woman cheated on her man, and the man couldn’t handle it so he made up a story about “immaculate” conception.
DeleteObviously, it’s all just a myth.
Of course “Christians” will buy any nonsense being pandered to them.
Dylan figured this out and already lacked the integrity to benefit from it.
Somerby sees to forget, or want to forget, that Dylan never denied he sexually abused his daughter more than three decades ago.
Delete1:55, you’re confusing the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth.
DeleteNo he’s not.
DeleteWhere I work, a corporation filled with right wingers and Republicans, there’s a trans man that uses the men’s bathroom, and no one cares.
ReplyDeleteSoon you will be asked to report this corp to the nazis who've taken over our government. you will be forced to comply, there will be no institutions left to support you.
DeleteWho provides their tampons, should they need one for their vagina? There could be a mess down there. In a free market, they would provide their own tampon even if it had to be placed into their vagina during ordinary hours of operation.
DeleteFear of women's vaginas is a condition that Freud called "vagina dentata". This guy @2:02 has it in spades. Men who think women's biology is icky are not well adjusted. Where would men be if women were excessively fastidious and thought men's privates were "mess down there"? A guy who writes something like this is usually a misogynist and woman hater. Sensing their attitude, women have nothing to do with such guys, who then migrate to incel webpages where they complain that the Chads get all the 17 year olds. I expect that @2:02 might argue that women shouldn't appear in the workplace because the same questions can be asked about them.
DeleteAnonymouse 1:34pm, doesn’t surprise me that those guys don’t care.
DeleteSo, Republican and right wing men don't really care about transgender issues, they just use it as a political issue? Why, because Trump does? You seem to be saying that Republicans and right wing men don't take their own party issues seriously. Is that so?
DeleteCorrect, Republicans do not genuinely care about these wedge issues, they only care about things to the extent they can weaponize them to remain dominant over others.
DeleteAnonymouse 2:48pm, do you know anything at all about men?
DeleteDylan was not speaking about Trump when he wrote Pity the Poor Immigrant. It is unhelpful when Somerby invents this kind of misinformation.
ReplyDeleteRed states currently get a higher percentage of their school funding from the government than blue states do. Trump is talking about eliminating FEMA and returning disaster relief to the states. He is also talking about eliminating the Dept of Ed and moving those functions back to the states. That is going to affect the red states way more than the blue states, especially since the red states do not have the revenue and resources to absorb those expenses. That means education and schools in red states are going to suffer compared to the blue states, worsening the education divide across red and blue America.
ReplyDeleteSomerby might talk about that, if he weren't saying vague weird things about Dylan and transgender people.
https://curmudgucation.substack.com/p/are-red-states-more-dependent-on