The Moving Image

Last month I went on a road trip through Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and then back to New York via Baltimore (more on that later, hopefully). As might be expected, I saw a lot of things on cars and other moving objects. Here are some notable examples:

Bathroom cowboys; truckstop on Route 281 north of Austin, Texas, January 17.

The Stockyards, Fort Worth, Texas, January 18.

Dallas, Texas, January 18.

Route 190, near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, January 20.

This guy came out of nowhere at a gas station in southern Alabama, January 23.

Sign of the times; January 28, near Strasburg, Virginia.

It was really funny at the time

I saw what I thought was a book by William Carlos Williams called An American Dad. In fact, it was a book called William Carlos Williams: An American Dad.

This is the cover illustration:

The Moose in the Coffee Shop

Sometime around New Year’s I was sitting in a coffee shop in Chelsea when a man who looked to be in his forties walked in wearing calf-high leather lace-up boots, into which his jeans were tucked, a red flannel jacket, and a wool cap. He was dressed as if he had just gotten back from a hunting trip in 1955. He ordered a coffee, sat down at the table next to me, and proceeded to read the New York Times. There was no moose strapped to the trunk of his car: I learned from a conversation I overheard that he intended to spend most of the day in that fashion. What struck me about his outfit was that just the week before I had noticed an identical pair of boots in a J. Crew catalog on a friend’s kitchen counter. They were prominently displayed as part of the new winter collection. "Red Wing Shoes® went back to the archives to find this one for us," the catalog read, "the Classic Irish Setter [$325.00]. They even brought back the old-style Irish Setter label and Red Wing logo just for us. You won't find this version anywhere else—unless you hit the jackpot in a vintage store. Put them on, and you'll feel like you've stepped back in time—1952 to be exact, when the original version of this style was first introduced." Then just this past week, I was passing a vintage store in the Village when I saw an entire row of similar hunting boots on show in the window. Is “fifties hunter” the trendy retro look of the moment?

The “retro” element has been an important part of fashion since at least the mid-1960s, when pop musicians started rummaging through second-hand clothing shops for particularly flashy items. This kind of vintage fashion always had as its purpose the re-appropriation of out-of-fashion objects. Wearing a nineteenth century military coat or a WWII bomber jacket looked jarring precisely because it would be juxtaposed with contemporary pants and shoes, and/or with items from a totally different era. A hodge-podge look often resulted. The point of re-appropriation was not to look like anything that had been seen before.

Hipsterism has killed re-appropriation. Now the point of retro fashion is not to integrate out-of-fashion items into a new look, but to recreate an entire “out-of-fashion” look from one era or another, whether the look is fifties housewife, seventies housewife, eighties housewife, fifties greaser, eighties greaser, eighties punk, eighties metal fan, eighties hip-hop fan, eighties nerd, etc. (Although of course the range of acceptable eras is limited. No one dresses like a twenties flapper or a belle-epoque society woman, for instance.) American Apparel has created a whole industry out of providing hipsters everything they need to look just like the high school students in eighties sitcoms they’ve seen mostly in re-runs—from t-shirt to backpack to gym socks. A truly enviable hipster will make sure to get an entire look down, coordinating clothes, shoes, hair style, and accessories into an easily identifiable whole. Even when clothes from different eras are worn together, the look will be a sum of identifiable parts. The point here is to look exactly like something that has been seen before.

Which brings us back to the man in the hunting boots in the coffee shop. The condition of his boots, coat and beard (he had a too-perfectly trimmed beard intended to denote a rugged outdoorsman) indicated that his outfit had never seen the woods, and had most likely seen very little besides the box they came in. Why does a grown man dress up like he’s going on a hunting trip in 1955 when in fact he’s going to read the paper in a coffee shop in Chelsea? Today, in New York, this is not ridiculous—it’s trendy. It’s supposed to signify creativeness, individuality. But in fact it reduces individuality to choosing your favorite decade. This is hipsterism. This is what it does to people. And now it is powerful enough that it has reached the middle-aged.

The Knows

I was reading an article about the bonds between memory and smell when suddenly the air in my subway car was filled with the scent of a wood fire and I was instantly and simultaneously transported to this summer and a Fourth of July barbeque in Michigan; to a camp fire in Bryce Canyon seven years ago; to many winter nights by the fireplace when I was young. "The passage of time, which rots and corrodes the content of visual memory, has no measurable impact on the olfactory senses," the article explains. Strangely, while we are very bad at recalling smells, nothing triggers a recollection as surely as the smell to which it is linked. Indeed, "the ability of specific smells to trigger episodic memory," as the article points out, is immortal as well.

Many authors have explored the layers of memory that a sensation can produce. Proust, Faulkner and Sebald, to name a few, have produced famous sentences and paragraphs and pages and novels excavating the mental strata revealed by the fissure a particular taste or sight opens up. But has any author reproduced the instanteity of those recollections - the experience of being in several places and times piled on top of one another, resonating with one another? What would that look like?

I've long thought that we only feel at home in a place when we become accustomed to its smell. It is as if the unconscious says this does not smell like home - I can not feel at home here. I could never quite get comfortable at a friends' houses that didn't smell right to me.

Scent's memories may be immortal, but scents are not. Before I can locate the phantom subway campfire, its odor evaporates from my consciousness. "Smells are fleeting," the article points out; "the smell of violets is famous among perfumers for persisting for only about half the duration of an inhalation." The scent becomes as unnoticeable as the gray of the car or the rumble of the tracks.

Verse on the Tracks

You know that line in Dylan's "Tangled up in Blue" about the Italian poet from the thirteenth century? Apparently a few other people have wondered who that poet might be, and it seems Bob wasn't too sure either. There's been some intense online debating about it. One guy tried listening to every live version of the song, and somewhere in December 1978 things start getting weird:

ORIGINAL ALBUM RECORDING:

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
"I thought you'd never say hello," she said
"You look like the silent type."
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue.

--

Source: 15 November 1978, Forum, Inglewood, California, USA.

Then she opened up a book of poems
And she started quotin' it to me
It was either written by Charles Baudelaire
Or some poem from the 13 century

--

Source: 23 November 1978, Lloyd Noble Center, Norman, Oklahoma, USA.

It was either written by Charles Baudelaire
Or some Italian poem from the 13th century

--

Source: 2 December 1978, Municipal Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeremiah, (??),
Chapters 1 & 33

--

Source: 9 December 1978, Carolina Coliseum, Columbia, South Carolina, USA.

Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeremiah, chapters 32,
Verses (21 & 33)

--

Source: 10 December 1978, Charlotte Coliseum, Charlotte, North Carolina,
USA.

"You know, you look like you could be the silent type"
And she opened up the Bible
And she started quoting it to me
Jeremiah, chapter 17,
From verses 21 and 33

--

Source: 12 December 1978, The Omni, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeramiah, chapters 37 (& 38,)
Verses 29 & 33

--

Source: 13 December 1978, The Coliseum, Jacksonville, Florida, USA.

She lit a burner on the stove
She was wearing a housecoat made out of stars and stripes
"Thought you'd forgot how to-know how to say," she said
"You look like the silent type."
Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeramiah, chapters 10 & 20,
Verses 21 & 33

--

Source: 15 December 1978, Civic Center, Lakeland, Florida, USA.

She was dressed in a dress had stars and stripes
"Thought you'd never say hello," she said
"You know, you look like you could be the silent type."
Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeremiah, chapters 36,
Verses 21 & 33

--

Source: 16 December 1978, Hollywood Sportatorium, Hollywood, Florida
[=Miami?], USA.
This was the last performance before the "Gospel era".

She was wearing a housecoat made of stars and stripes
"Thought you'd never say hello," she said
"You know, you look like you could be the silent type."
Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeremiah, chapter 31,
Verses 9 to 33

--

All the following performances omit this verse altogether!

Source: 4 June 1984, Sportpaleis Ahoy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
This was the first post-Gospel performance.
Source: 9 June 1984, Ullevi Stadion, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Source: 11 June 1984, Stadion Bierberer Berg, Offenbach, West Germany (as
it then was).
Source: 13 June 1984, Waldbuhne, West-Berlin, West Germany (as it then
was).
Source: 19 June 1984, Roma Palaeur, Rome, Italy.
Source: "Real Live", 29 November 1984 (performed 7 July 1984, Wembley
Stadium, London, England).
Source: 8 July 1984, Slane Castle, Slane, Ireland.

Bob weighed in during a 1978 interview:
Dylan:       I like that song. Yeah that poet from the 13th century....
Interviewer: Who was that ?
Dylan:       Plutarch. Is that his name ?
Interviewer: Yeah.