Glower Power: The Darker. More Interesting Sixties

My most common thought about the Sixties is, "Oh shut up about the damn sixties." If you're my age, the decade is often a club with which one is beaten and an exercise in bullshit nostalgia. But recently there have been three attempts to get at some of the decades' real artistic accomplishments and, what's really interesting, to get at the microscopic headwaters and polluted tributaries of art: Bob Dylan's memoir Chronicles, Zachary Lazar's novel Sway, and Todd Haynes' film I'm Not There.  To treat them properly would require one of those lengthy New York Review of Books style essay-reviews.  I'll treat them improperly, with these few notes:   

All three of these attempts push their chosen form around.  Function bullies form, as is proper.

Chronicles I ignores the expected timeline and the biographical greatest hits and explores three seemingly much smaller artistic incidents. Sway fictionalizes the 1960s Rolling Stones ( as well as a Manson family member and the film maker Kenneth Anger) because the book needs the freedom of fiction.

And now I'm Not There, which we just rented last week, uses multiple actors to portray Bob Dylan and multiple modes (bio, fiction, black and white, color)  to tell its story. Scrambled and gliding, it feels like a Dylan song circa Highway 61 Revisited.

What are the elements of this version of the Sixties: the scrambling suggested by drugs; the cultural richness of traditional music; the energy of an electric, high-octane world;  the smear of war and murder.  It's art that shakes hands with evil or, at any rate, the thoughts we're less proud of.

It is flawed art: the puns and juxtapositions and musical cascades in mid-Sixties Dylan sometimes seem to hide hateful, two-dimensional songs. Like A Rolling Stone spits at a cartoon slumming rich girl; The Ballad of A Thin Man mocks a nameless philistine.  The Stones circa Beggar's Banquet are often misogynistic and sometimes just lame.

But there is something in the handful of albums Dylan and the Stones created at their peaks that I keep coming back to and which I judge all other music by.

Comments

[Carolyn]

Can I just say this is a fantastically clever post title?