Just back from seeing A Complete Unknown at Los Feliz 3 and felt inspired to write a freewrite like review about the movie. Oh it was so fun and transportive. Been seeing a lot of transportive films recently about my favorite time periods that I’ve studied!
Oh yes the joy – having taken a folk music history course in undergrad! Listening to Alan Lomax’s American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and studying Leadbelly – and what this whole film was about – that moment at the Newport Film Festival when Dylan went electric!!
This magical time in American history as Martin Luther King Jr spoke, the Civil Rights movement, the murder of JFK and Malcolm X. Great changes coming! The Village in New York alive with transformation. How far we have come and yet not so far?!
When Cafe Wha and the Gaslight – thinking of that other movie by the Coen Brothers, about the other complete unknowns who never became known, who sunk off into alcoholic oblivion or sobered up and joined the system, many became teachers – these hippy people!
Kept thinking about how sitting here in the movie theater, I was a consumer. I wasn’t a musician, I wasn’t an artist, I wasn’t part of any community, I was a cog. And how wasn’t that the point of Dylan’s refusal to commodify his art, to be a product that is sold instead of ART, oh glorious art. Art, music, rock and roll, the divine, the joy, the ability to create life into something tangible, something you can hold, something you can listen to again and again, something you can watch over and over, and that same magic, that same ring of authenticity, of joy, of feelings, the depth of life flowing through you.
Dylan had this moment at a party, where he says how people always ask him where the songs come from. They don’t wanna know the magic, they just wanna know why it wasn’t them who was chosen.
Oh this desire for money and fame and power that seems to have only exponentialized until art with no fame, art that can’t make money is deemed worthless, dumb, bad!
I am here for the art that brings joy to only you and a small few. Caring deeply and joyfully and passionately about something that no one cares about. Spending hours and time and energy creating something because you love it, you love it and some people love you and so they indulge you, they gift you their attention, or perhaps, maybe they understand you, they are open to your ideas and values.
Oh I want to watch it again, I want to lose myself in a different time. I want to be an artist and write late at night when these ideas come to my head, I want to just do that and have some part-time job that pays for my low-rent apartment and perform and be part of community, and be around like minded people, have time to listen.
Oh I did, this burnt out bitch phase has recharged me and reminded me of who I am, this film did, too. Awoke my adolescent dreams, the poetry in the ordinary – my whole life felt like art, I made it artful. I saw the world through a lens, I saw myself as an artist, like my thoughts and ideas mattered and that my community wanted to listen, and that I thought the people around me were the most interesting people I had ever met, grateful for their time, their presence – our interactions were art, were literary history, a story that one day they’d make a film about like A Complete Unknown, when I was no longer a complete unknown.
And yet, Emily Dickinson said it, too. “How dreary – to be – somebody”. I don’t want to be somebody, and yet in our society, if you aren’t somebody – you are powerless.
Oh this city, this LA – too many creators and not enough consumers, or too many creators hanging exclusively with creators, and too many consumers hanging exclusively with consumers – instead of this give and take of creating and experiencing – a spiritual connection, how truly meaningful relationships are built.
This is why I am a teacher, I want this skill to be democratized both sides of art – to give and to experience.
Oh the times they are a changing Bobby boy! I just wanna listen to Bob and dreammmmm.
Here’s the trailer!
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