Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Two Jacks and a Joker Bob Dvlan, Metaphysician THEY SAY ABOUT Mr. Bob Dylan's lyrics that they are filigreed with "metaphysical subtleties" and "surrealistic epigrams." They have embalmed him...
...The entire herd of them simply gave themselves over to nitwit maunderings that displayed the kind of seasoned skepticism one might expect from a rosy-cheeked milkmaid of Bucolia or from a pious sister of the Church...
...The seventies are more realistic, but the sixties exposed the roots of that realism...
...Well, are they right about Mr...
...By the time he had come to, his hour had passed...
...Yet through it all, as the charismatic struts and poses and releases his sonorities, where do his thoughts really dwell...
...Instead, he grinned...
...When he groans one hears Brahms...
...J. W. Fulbright, Heavenly Body IF AFTER MY YEARS ~ of puzzling travail on this earthly ball I should exit for the Heavenly Feast, I pray that I shall find myself strumming a harp somewhere in the vicinity of J.W...
...ever lived--more important than Ludwig Still, despite the pedestrian quality of van Beethoven...
...But the fact remains thst he obviously sparkles with the stuff and even leaves it in the ring on his bathtub...
...He has been democracy's conscience, an intrepid warrior against the totalitarians of the world, and an tm/hgging defender of international civility...
...The man who has it can fix his eyes upon you and remind you of the glories of Alexander...
...When he sighs one thinks of Goethe...
...I suspect that while he nods magisterially and intones his platitudes, his mind--when not fixed on your wallet or your woman--wanders off towards the golf course, or a swell cherry soda to which he once abandoned himself, or a cold beer for which he now yearns...
...The pioneers of adult theater had to loosen up the Supreme Court with a few shots of the First Amendment...
...He nods his head or waves his hand, and you see Caesar and Marc Antony...
...To my mind the man is one of the glories of American diplomatic history...
...i i The most eloquent evidence of his intellect resides in a remarkable ~tatement he recently made to a gaping young reporter from Newsweek, a journal that has come to be a kind of intellectual delicatessen for clods and intellectualoids alike...
...I shall tell him that I have always considered him the preeminent civil libertarian in the Senate, the most humble man in public life, and the modern paradigm of Jeffersonian simplicity...
...Any of a dozen just causes could have been put over on the American people had he but uttered a threatening declaration...
...Their prodigious estimates of him are amusingly instructive and bound to transport you from hee to haw and back again...
...Admittedly he shares Beethoven's manners, but does he have Beethoven's famed humility and probity...
...I shall tell him that for my money he is the exemplar of principled statesmanship...
...They wasted countless forests of pulp in a journalistic potlatch so prodigal with superlatives and arcane gibberish that even Mr...
...While looking a gift horse inthe mouth, he fell into a funk, and the wheel of history ground on...
...And, though Newsweek described it as a "cryptic" grin, it was a grin nevertheless...
...He could have mentioned the cruel condition of our women, the political castration of our homosexuals, the impending demise of the black-footed ferret, or the heartbreak of psoriasis...
...They had to address themselves to a worthy cause, the cause of free expression and art...
...Dylan: "Saturn has been an obstacle in my planetary system, It's been there for the last few ages and just removed itself from my system...
...It was as though Harry Truman had turned down the call to public service and continued to bankrupt himself, or the Pope had snubbed the summons of the angels and opened a spaghetti parlor...
...Preston blew it...
...Quaid is too dumb to be believed...
...In short and in sum, Mr...
...He committed a mischievous and indeed criminal act and did not make the faintest gesture to embroider it with noble purpose or high-toned symbolism...
...And his simple utterances---no matter how inane or paralogistic they might be--are art...
...And when you are abused with that claptrap about his being the conscience of an era, remember how he squirmed through this one: 'Td be doing what I'm doing if I was a millionaire or not, whether I was getting paid for it or not...
...I shall congratulate him for his gallantry, his manners, and his enormous contribution to the commonweal...
...On top of all of this pretension, the movie is just plain slow...
...He forthrightly supported black men in the South even during those grim days of yore when, among other abominations, they suffered the cruelty of being called Negroes...
...Dylan does possess one talent that fetches my admiration...
...Dylan has charisma, that curious anesthetic that reduces the most gnarled cynic to the gentleness of a cooing babe even in our own era of compulsory impiety...
...Robert Preston, Ignoramus No YOKEL IN American history has quite so artlessly flummoxed an appointment with celebrity, prosperity, and power as Mr...
...ellipses that you can still assume you are in the presence of Socrates...
...ROBERT PRESTON...
...Dylan has chosen The begetter of domes judges that '~he's not to avoid public interviews, a few more ema god, more like a genius...
...Now a man sporting charisma has a huge and unfair advantage over his fellows, and when socialism comes to these shores, charisma will be the first thing we shall expropriate...
...Will the part-time builders of geodesic domes in the year 2074 find Mr...
...Huey P. Newton be the fantastic celebrity he is today had he admitted that he shot cops and tortured fellow blacks because '~there wasn't anything else to do...
...Imagine where the Black Panthers would be today had they merely grinned after a shoot-up...
...I shall slap him on the back, offer him a voluptuous cigar, and extol his sincerity...
...He is someone's dream of an obedient puppy of a man...
...Like everything $1se in the movie, it is an example, not of how the other half lives, but of how the top 5 percent would like to think the other half lives...
...Does The Times They Are A-Changin' always ventilated by enough ingratiating really match the complexity of the Great Fugue...
...They have embalmed him as the "conscience" and "oracle" of the sixties...
...Jehovah must have been appalled, and surely many sharp public relations men still shake their heads as they muse upon the vast fortune poor Mr...
...Fulbright's cloud...
...The seventeen- barrassments of that magnitude and year-old future van Gogh is more specific: Woody Allen will be making movies about "He's the most important musician who this renowned lyrical conscience...
...Not only is he a grinning ignoramus, but he is also selfish...
...He is consistency unalloyed...
...Frankly, I have some doubts...
...He merely stepped from his wounded helicopter and confessed, "There wasn't anything else to do"--not a word about political repression, ecological suicide, or the rampant poverty of those thousands of starving young Californians who after queuing up for Mr...
...Or consider the marvelous breakthrough we are now experiencing in adult films...
...Perhaps he has laid hands on the secret ingredients to Teddy Kennedy's deodorant or maybe the Holy Ghost had a hand in it...
...How he, an unlettered slob, acquired this mysterious effluvium I do not know...
...The long and the short of it is that when we guzzle ambrosia together I shall toast old Fulbright for all those admirable qualities that in his heart of hearts he knows he does not possess...
...Rather, he grinned...
...He ranks with Senator Key Pittman and the great Borah, and I shall not be coy about telling him of the colossal esteem I have borne for him...
...you will probably never hear his name again...
...Dylan must have blushed...
...Dylan's work as lovely as they do today...
...He is integrity, solid and unblemished...
...The minutes seem like hours as we watch the trio move down the dull and dusty road to filmic oblivion...
...In the end I suspect charisma is that solemnity of countenance that deludes an audience into thinking it sits in the presence of a trulystupendous intellect even when all that the great man is thinking about is how he longs to slip into a dry pair of socks...
...Not since a youthful Edward Kennedy turned his back on driver's education classes has a mortal so thumpingly sealed his own fate...
...I feel free and unburdened...
...Nashville Skyline [one of Dylan's country albums] is okay, but it's not the Dylan I needed when I listened to him back then...
...He had slipped back into the shadows where (continued on page 27) 4 The Alternative May 1974 chooses to be the same rank as Nicholson...
...It is all just piled on a bit too thick...
...Preston could have earned for them...
...If he does not resign now the country will be torn apart," they would admonish, and that idiotic chorus that most American journalists fall in with would across a blackboard, pick up the theme and bellow it intermiSo let us wash our hands of this wretch, nably until some other psychopath sent He committed an audacious act and fouled them off on yet another just cause...
...His concerts are habituated by such American originals as a '~budding" seventeen-year-old painter escorted by a father who, when not patronizing the arts, serves society as an advertising executive, a twenty-eight-year-old part-time builder of geodesic domes, a twenty-three-year-old part-time teacher at not one but two Montessori schools who also instructs aesthetes at Chicago's Art Institute, a vegetarian from the Department of Transportation, and herds of entranced young journalists representing the prepotent voices of American media...
...Hero worship...
...Then I shall wink at him and depart for Mr...
...I mean, I was going through some personal changes, and his crazy imagery was a good escape for me...
...Presto, progress was at hand, the greatest advance in art since John Cage heard fingernails scratch that his flight was meant to symbolize the exigency of presidential impeachment, he would be on the cover of every newsweekly in the country...
...Had he called a press conference and announced R. Emmett T y r r e l l , J r . The Alternative May 1974 27...
...There is no sign of that happening...
...His public utterances suggest that he does, but then there is the matter of his those of Hoagy Carmichael, Mr...
...I shake my head but perhaps complexity is not the soul of the issue and perhaps we would have a more fruitful line of inquiry were we to ask whether or not these two compositions' share the same timeless beauty...
...The sixties were filled with it...
...Dylan follows in the great tradition of Aimee Semple McPherson and Warren Gamaliel Harding...
...He is at one with Rod McKuen...
...it with a stupid and irresponsible grin...
...According to Mr...
...Dylan performs for intellectualoids...
...It is not without reason that Mr...
...Finally, there are those eager young journalists...
...In fact I shall gambol right up to the great man and tell him that in my opinion he has been the most intelligent man in the entire United States Sehate...
...Had he possessed the astuteness to boom for any one of the aforementioned causes he would be a free man today with a gorgeous publishing contract, lecturing engagements for the next decade on the college Chautauqua circuit, and an office in Washington paid for by some occult rivulet of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
...Bob Dylanm troubadour, metaphysician, and millionaire...
...The exact date of his tryst was February 17, and, so far as my staff has been able to ascertain, Jehovah reserved t h a t d a t e for him with no strings attached...
...Last Detail would have served some purpose only if it were clearly seen to be so dull and so condescendingly offensive that moviemakers tried to serve up a little more realism and excitement...
...He had a two-way radio, why did he not use it...
...Nixon is imperiling the Republic and the whole free world...
...Why not a clenched fist when he emerged from the Huey...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) millions of other similarly endowed patheticoes stumble through a meaningless existence, wait for their breaks and grouse about the "good fortune" of their betters...
...Dylan is a genius...
...There was a lot of death during that time...
...Would Mr...
...About what is he really thinking...
...In the sixties there was a certain bunch of us who came through the wars...
...And the pedagogue, ah the man's mind and my perverse suspicion he is most memorable of all, he is a master- . that his musical gifts are on a par with piece of modernity, and he must be quoted without editorial redactions: 'Tve been listening to Dylan since 1966...
...Bear this in mind the next time someone tells you Mr...
...Nonetheless, Mr...
...If the forward-looking aesthetes who produce these delicate renderings of man's goatish nature had stated at the outset that they wanted to create foul movies so that they could make mounds of money and retire to Arizona, how many opportunities do you suppose we would have to appreciate the beauties of sadism, bestiality, masochism, sodomy, and other libidinal variations...
...He would be T/meg "Man of the Year" and the New Republic would be editorializing about how Mr...
...Hearst's victuals held a nationally televised food fight...
...It has helped me to grow up...
...Dubiety steals upon me, so for the nonce let us leave these ponderosities to our friend, the '2mdding" painter, and behold the master himself...
...I've been really heavily into him for about the last five years...
...Robert Preston, the audacious young grease monkey who became the first person ever to lead an aerial assault on the White House when he attempted to ram it with his pilfered UH-1 (Huey) helicopter...
...Au revoir, oaf...
...What this poor fish did was, in this glorious era, well nigh unthinkable...
...Nixon's cloud...
Vol. 7 • May 1974 • No. 8
