Donkey School

Oy. Today’s Forward is asking us to compare Paul Simon and Bob Dylan.

My cred here: Have followed Paul Simon live and recorded since 1972, jesus, 39 years! (and S&G on LP before that). Straight through Songs from the Capeman, every new Paul Simon album dropped into my world like a letter from an old friend. Me and the girlfriend (the no-longer girlfriend; tale worthy of a Paul Simon song or, knowing Paul Simon, several) saw The Capeman on Broadway twice; we were rewarded with a last-minute invitation to the cast party closing night because Eddie Simon, whom we chatted up in the aisle, was thrilled to be recognized, not mistaken yet again for his big brother.

We also, the girlfriend and me, suffered a night in a crap Freeport, Long Island, motel so we could hear three evenings straight of Paul & Bob/Bob & Paul at Madison Square Garden and Jones Beach. That weekend proved Paul Simon should be honored by the comparison alone. Dylan was different every night: kaleidoscopic, charismatic, alluring and impenetrable. Paul and the hundred-fifty Africo-Brazilians behind him were note for note, gesture for gesture, fabulous, make no mistake. They sure didn’t. The act was outrageous, James Brown tight, and identical night after night, like watching a video.

Paul Simon still has the songwriting juice, his last two albums of glib, random ramblings about old age & new babies notwithstanding. But, as he once told The New Yorker’s David Remnick, kvetching about the challenge of duets with Bob Dylan, it’s “the words, the words.” His own words have ever veered from undervalued gems like “You’re the One” (available today for 1 cent at Amazon) to flaccid wise-assery like “Pigs, Sheep and Wolves” (on the same 1 cent CD). As tearful as “Sounds of Silence” or “Homeward Bound” may make tri-generational stadium crowds, they forget “We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin’ Baby.” (Simon, of course, is silently glad of this: It ain’t “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” I, meanwhile, admit I often sing “Groovy Thing” to myself, moving too fast down Morningside Avenue.)

Paul Simon concocts endless, seemingly effortless, wry incidents and accidents, not only in song but, though rarely acknowledged, in screenplay. He’s virtuously fearless of self-parody too: “Soft Parachutes” disrespects Simon & Garfunkel as deftly as “A Simple Desultory Philippic” did Bob Dylan. But his incidents rarely come to as sharp a point as, say, Dylan’s “Black Diamond Bay.” Why do God and son come to Earth in “Love and Hard Times” anyhow, only to split and make simultaneously self-aggrandizing and -effacing room for “an old songwriting cliché”?

Since Rhythm of the Saints, Simon’s serious lines have been obscure as Dylan’s, if usually to some cringingly obvious end: Consider “The Teacher,” “Beautiful,” or (department of boundless vocabulary) “So Beautiful or So What.” On the other hand, hook-hooky “boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart” wants to say something about modern times but, as the bard himself might moan, “What? What?”

With respect to Simon’s self-promoted sincerity (see the recent interview in Rolling Stone), those who accuse Dylan of exploiting 1960s folk music generally ignore the fact that a lyrically sensitive Simon emerged only after Bob built a market for folk-pop. His eye always on “the marketplace, the marketplace” (Simon, again, to Remnick of The New Yorker), mid-60s Paul (“Jerry”) shlepped Artie (“Tom”) from doowop to full-frontally Queens-Jewish acoustic folk. As Bleecker Street displaced the Brill Building, so Everly ooh-baby danceables gave way to off-the-shelf angstunes like “I Am A Rock.” He’s nothing if not a professional.

Sigh. I love Paul Simon. I can watch One Trick Pony again and again; I hear “Hearts and Bones” coursing through “Graceland.” But while Simon fruitfully, brilliantly borrowed from obscure third-world, Zydeco and gospel artists, Bob Dylan, seeming to pay those musicians no heed, changed their music and their lives. Dylan didn’t lift tracks from Nashville; he became Nashville, and gospel, and Aaron Copland and Blind Willie McTell. I cherish my old packets of letters from Paul, and lord knows aspergersy Bob never talked to anyone but himself. Still, you don’t need a weatherman to know your windows are shaking, your walls rattling, and the words of the prophet have long faded therefrom. It’s sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon, but Paul Simon–like pop paragons as varied and fine as Harold Arlen, Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney–may be history. Dylan, incontrovertibly, still makes it.

There’s this scene of longing in Portnoy’s Complaint. I’m not going to fact-check, because the recollection’s what counts: Young Alex Portnoy has gone down to the neighborhood park on a snowy day; there he sees a single perfect pardon-the-expression shiksa skating gracefully across a pond, dubs her Thereal McCoy, goes home to make use of her memory.

It’s one of those pages where Philip Roth captures the precise in/outness, possession/rejection and, pardon the double meaning, self-love of being a non-Orthodox American Jew/Jewish American. It popped to mind last night within a note or two of my first listen to what I soon knew was the most important American pop album since “The Rising”: Bob Dylan’s “Christmas in the Heart.”

Is this record sincere and in ghastly taste? Might be, but so are its models–the Great American Pop Star Holiday Albums. Is it a spot-on incarnation of a particular, half-century-dead, school of American recorded music? Roger. Is it a, pardon this expression too, post-modern commentary on same? Of course. Is it awesomely (in the pre-21st-century sense) specific in its musicality? Oh yes.

And does “Christmas in the Heart” embody, parody, celebrate, embrace, gaze upon dumbstruck as at a slow-motion pile-up, the gaiety and religiosity to which America pretends each December? Uh, duh. But does it at the same time convey the whole-bodied sense of ownership, the whole-souled sense of not-having-been-invited-to-the-party-and-secretly-glad-of-that, together with the slightly shameful ridiculous feeling when you show up anyhow (singing “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” in the 5th-grade choir) that is the rootless-cosmopolitan secular American Jewish condition at Holiday Time? Mm-hmm. And does it, even so, with wisdom unavailable to the early Roth, capture the complement: our great and good nation’s heartfelt, yet suspicious, yet nonetheless dutiful welcome of the Other?

Oh, mama.

But wait, there’s more. Listen to Dylan’s final “t”‘s. Listen to the precision in his phrasings, rhythmic, melodic, and in intonation: Bob Dylan rising to the level of a Sinatra, a Fitzgerald, a Holiday in blazing his own trail through stands of chestnuts, roasting, open-fired, songs we can sing in our sleep, the tunes to which visions of sugarplums dance. Listen to the interplay of classically synthetic pop-choral/orchestral sounds-of-the-season with his own certified-organic vocal instrument. And recall that “Jack Frost,” the nominal producer–i.e., the man who made every musical choice you’re hearing–is Bob Dylan himself, once famous for his one-take intolerance of the studio.

I used to wonder why Dylan, already pseudonymed, chose that seasonal second-degree nom de travail. “Christmas” may be the answer. It may even be the album he’s waited all his life to make, its formalism, its jaunty, maudlin material, and the wintry ravage to his vocal cords achieving the effect “Self Portrait” could not. After 48 years writing killer songs and singing them live every which way, Bob breaks out here at last as master of that peculiarly American art form: studio-recorded performance of standards.

But the brilliance of this record is not merely formal. Dylan knows something is happening, and he knows just what it is. It’s Portnoy’s pristine skater; it’s us, watching from the shore. Every note and every beat of “Christmas in the Heart” prove Thereal McCoy knows what America needs, but Bob Dylan knows what we want.

A pretty long while ago, I spent too little time working on a screenplay. I was the third writer on the project, not counting my pal T. and his partners, whose idea it had been in the first place and who’d figured why not give the reporter a chance. They were fine with whatever explosions, glass-shattering, air- or waterborne biological agents or massacred troops I might want to adjust, but the name of the picture wasn’t changing: Memorial Day.

It’s a little embarrassing, but it’s also one of the two most important causes facing the USA today, so I’ve written to President Obama again (an undertaking that has become uncannily like writing a letter to God).  Not sparkling prose, so take this message, rewrite it your way and tell your representatives to get on the stick…

I went to a disappointing lecture last night. It was another one of those things I didn’t really have time to do; I should have used the hour and a half in Starbucks reading peer-reviewed papers on the value, or not, of reading aloud to young children: pdfs pulled magically into my little white plastic box through the combined juju of the Starbucks-card free WiFi and the electronic subscriptions of the Mina Rees Library of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  But my pal Dixie had posted (on Facebook, a pattern here?) that she was on her way to hear a neuroscientist talk about God, and (further seductions of that telecom sidestreet) my pal Robin, going as well, found me a ticket.

A few days back, as I have noted, my having no more to do than memorize a list of discredited psychological theories, settle late-payment-charged bills and bone up on media violence, it seemed a good time to upgrade Donkey School’s iGoogle. How happy a boy was I (as you can see below) to discover that avoidance shame in the blogosphere is now as easy as placing a text-box gadget anywhere on your home page and letting it sit there, gaping, disappointed in you.

Rip Van Winkle wakes, comes upon iGoogle gadget, yawns loudly. More to come? Only time will tell.

Dear Mr. President:

A friend who teaches teachers how to teach reading comprehension taught me a terrific expression: “inconsiderate text.”  Doesn’t that just nail a particular kind of bad writing?  You know, the kind of bad writing in yesterday’s post?