Jacked Up
Millennium Park, Chicago
Watching Los Angeles Now, I was struck by the descriptions of LA comparing it with traditional cities. Several writers claimed that LA was a city without a center. It seems to me that LA (from my decade-old memories now) is not a city at all, but rather an aggregate of small towns. There are “centers” but nothing that one can think of as being typical or iconic of the whole city. One writer hinted that the sprawling pancake-flat space was “natural” compared to older skylines. Natural isn’t a term I'd apply to LA.
Another suggestion went something like this: tall skylines are phallic, but their phallocentrism is completely artificial as if they were jacked up on Viagra.
I don’t think I buy that either.
October 3, 2005 11:41 PM | Comments (2)
Song and Dance Man
Watching No Direction Home, I thought Dylan’s response to questions branding him as “political” interesting. He claimed something to the effect that it isn’t political to support your friends or people you like against injustice. For most people, that is a fair definition of what politics is all about. Admitting the possibility that justice is relative, it seems as valid to argue that Tom Delay’s shuffling of funds was merely a case of “supporting his friends.”
However, I suppose that making the “strong argument stronger” doesn’t garner as much support as the sophistry of “making the weaker argument stronger”— the haves and have-mores seem to be doing fine.
But I wonder most about Dylan’s claim to not know what he’s talking/singing about: it is either brilliant or naïve. Mark Woods pointed to some good stuff. Dave Marsh seems to suggest that abandoning politics was driven by solipsism. I sometimes wonder if the traditional artistic pose of “I don’t know what it means—you tell me” isn’t simply laziness. But then, watching the news people who interview Dylan at full length in Scorsese’s opus, it seems as if it’s the only possible defense a person can make when pressed to answer questions that they hardly understand, let alone know the answers to.
Marsh is right—the full transcript is really a gem.
