Comments for Gardener Is Gone

Comment on I Entered Without My Hat + Rocks and Gravel = Rapid City by Jacob Maymudes

Jacob Maymudes — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:00:50 +0000

Wow, great stuff here. You might be interested in what I’m up to, I’m writing my fathers un-finished biography. He was Bob’s #1 roadie for over 38 years. Check it out, you might dig it.

Kickstarter campaign
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1845647414/the-victor-maymudes-biography-friend-and-mentor-to

Book trailer on youtube

and

Peace, Love and Rock & Roll
-jake

Comment on We’re So Alone. And Life Is Brief by Kimberly Collins

Kimberly Collins — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:25:29 +0000

“Anybody who’s not to some degree autistic and/or depressive these days, has not got their eye on the ball.” I think you’re totally right, schuyler lake. I’m sure I wasn’t alone last week, anxiously watching the events unfold in the wake of the Boston marathon bombing, in having random crying jags & feeling utterly bereft & despairing at times. In fact, I *know* I wasn’t alone. Very well said. (BTW, I especially loved your point about Dubya being a cheerleader. I’d never thought of that before!)

Comment on We’re So Alone. And Life Is Brief by schuyler lake

schuyler lake — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 02:36:11 +0000

Anybody who’s not to some degree autistic and/or depressive these days, has not got their eye on the ball. Remember Dubya started out as a cheerleader in college, and kept on being one. To ever greater acclaim.

Psychiatrists who prescribe Pharma-approved pills for what ails ya, those guys are the definition of what’s normal. And what’s not. As the very planet upon which we all stand and depend gets defiled, raped, injured before our very eyes, then yes — tears of rage and grief are entirely appropriate.

The “dear daughter ‘neath the sun” is the promise of the USA, that it once had, the Enlightenment….. and the father is God himself, dreadfully disappointed.

Aww this is just bullshit. Just one of many interpretations of this deeply painful song. It’s kinda universal.

Comment on What Good Am I. Strengthen The Things That Remain. Lay There Dreaming. by Bradleyman

Bradleyman — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:44:23 +0000

On the subject of Art “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
― Leonardo da Vinci
Bob has stated numerous times that he is doing what the “Commander And Chief” has gifted him to do and will continue to do this as long as he can (Check out Interview with the late Ed Bradley) So it would seem that Bob unlike most of us Knows his calling as stated…
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”
― Émile Zola
Bob,unlike most of us,lives out loud with his Art. I admire this and him for doing so. I think of him (and his kind) as prophets for our age. Encapsulating and then like the olden town cryer shouting out what needs to be heard. Am I looking to this stranger as ‘a moral compass’? Yes and no. Am I finding myself “at least psychically, adrift, washed up and alone on an island of delusions? “Yes and no. Delusions are often the subject threaded throughout Bob’s Art, Who in this life have not or are right now living in some kind of delusion? Of all Gods’ creatures we humans are (I would propose) the only living beings (besides the fallen angels) who are confused if honest seek “the path”. Have I found my path? I think I’ve squeaked out some idea of it, but the older I get the less it seems I know. Scary at times, especially when one goes through and is the subject of injustices.But I digress, I would love to be a friend of Bobs’, as I’m sure millions of others imagine. I listen to his Art, I have had the experience of attending 6 concerts of his between the years of 92-2012. One in LA. with my then 16 year old son in a very small venue (the very best one) and one with my youngest son (14) a few years later in Lethbridge Ab. last summer ( a very great bonding time of 5hour drive 3hour concert and then 5 hour drive back). I do feel Bob is more than a “hobby” to me. When I was a teenager living on the streets many many years ago I heard his Art being played by what are now called ‘Buskers’ and it stopped me in my tracks. That guy got it ! I have over the years enjoyed and sought out anything Bob, because i found him most interesting and also most very human. Am I consumed by Bob? Have I become a Bobite? I would argue not really! But as far as admiration for a fellow sojourner?That I do. I also don’t like some things about him as well, these are- his exile from us real folk (understandably because of all the ‘nutjobs’ out there), – his riches (that being said I do not know how he honors his fellow man with it), -his not singing “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” the way it came out in “Pat Garret & Billy The Kid” when Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens) was shot and dying looking down that lonely river. All in all I still every now and then I place my ear to the ground and listen for Dylan. I have resolved that if I do not get that opportunity to be washed up on the shore and break bread & burbon with Bob this side of Heaven I hope that in another life we can.
I leave you with this:
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

Comment on What Good Am I. Strengthen The Things That Remain. Lay There Dreaming. by Scott

Scott — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:00:54 +0000

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned, which I have discovered to be true, is that art must exist relative to the society it dwells in. It is as much a social event as it is an individual event. Art, like anything else, can only be considered in relation to the ripples it sends across the currents of society. It is a product of society – like the spawn of a fish is a product of the river as much as the fish. Thus an artist risks, is vulnerable.

So too must it be with criticism or “interpretation” (though as I restate, so much that occurs around Dylan tends to exist nearer to the “interpretation of speaking in tongues type. You can see what you want to see. To the person that posted their “Bob Dylan Dream”: have you considered that your dream could also reflect that the part of your psyche that seeks out a complete and utter stranger as a moral compass could also be responsible for your finding yourself, at least psychically, adrift, washed up and alone on an island of delusions? Because I bet if you were to impose yourself on the actual guy like that you’d experience the shock of your life. Like those that prefer to trust the singer, not the song.).

But I digress.

Therefore, it must be the case that there is bound to be a rift between artist and audience. If there were not it would be cease to be art, and perhaps be mere propaganda (or simply pop, made solely for consumption). I guess the best case is that the riff between artist and audience is not too big. But that calls for intelligent interpretation and authentic experience. And it’s not all one or the other. As I stated, Dylan comes from certain specific places. If your “thoughts on Dylan” do not include at least some reasonable (as in – interesting) effort to mine those sources then you are merely indicating that a cloud looks like a rabbit to you, and that one looks like a dog….

Just as Dylan takes from the works of an obscure US Civil War poet and blends it into something new and perhaps interesting, so too the audience must, if to create analysis that is interesting, realize to some extent what he is doing and how. You must be speaking the same language, to some degree.

To do otherwise is to reside on the same level as describing what your “Bob Dylan” dream meant to you. It is like, while reading a sentence, coming across a word you are unfamiliar with, and then go on in great heuristics about what the strange word may represent, rather than simply looking it up. Meaningful (as in, interesting) interpretation or criticism of an artist resides somewhere in the middle – there is room for creative infusion (as it is with the artist), but at least go to the effort of looking up the word, and start from there.

Comment on We’re So Alone. And Life Is Brief by eruke

eruke — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:28:40 +0000

Thank you for writing this–I am sorry for your troubles. Depression is much about losing one’s own borders–you don’t know that you have a shape of your own and you seem too permeable to the outside–rather amoeba-like but amoebas seem quite bold and content in their protean and mobile blobbiness. And engaging with art isn’t a therapy for this no-self problem, instead it makes it real and felt and parsable for a few moments–like invisible ink seeping into view, the very condition of what’s me?+what’s other? seeps into view when you open your attention to art that does capture very strong feeling and sensation. It’s a kind of intimacy, not a kind of intoxication or escape. This isn’t a therapy, as I said, and it’s not a method, and it’s not science, and it’s not psychology, it’s just a way to think about something that’s provoked too much scientistic unethical philistine shite. Genius, defective–shite shite shite. Good luck to you.

Comment on What Good Am I. Strengthen The Things That Remain. Lay There Dreaming. by eruke

eruke — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:12:28 +0000

I always think the Whitney Biennial is the ne plus ultra of what you’re talking about here, screaming intellectual radar. It could be screaming sensual/moral radar as well. I forgot who once said that western culture cycles through periods of creativity and periods of criticism and we now live in a period of criticism (who said this??? George Steiner?? my memory gives up). And the wors cesspool of the Age of Criticism is that art is just another language of criticism. A pile of hard candies wrapped in silver paper that is intended to represent/embody the evanescence of presence and art, as interpreted for me on the wall placard–well, that is a formally uninspired and sensually unarresting piece of art rhetoric, it is a thin little bit of critical theater, and there is a good deal of this in contemporary art. When there is no thunderbolt to the central nervous system, no lasso to the imagination, and instead your immediate response is “what’s the argument here? I’d better read the wall to find out the argument here,” then we’re in that self-sufficient airless zone of art qua criticism. And I like your comment about interpretation as trying to wrest a “knowing wink” from the “hero”– you want your own little imagined wink, and that’s just fine. It’s not proprietary and it’s not naming and defining–just your own fleeting wink. Whoever the first person was to have that “D’oh!” moment in Roll on John–go where the buffalo roam–the Dakota!!–they earned their little wink. That’s what I mean.

Comment on What Good Am I. Strengthen The Things That Remain. Lay There Dreaming. by eruke

eruke — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:52:02 +0000

Mary Lee Kortes used to have a website where people contributed their Bob Dylan dreams, I don’t think it’s still running. In your dream, Mr Bob Dylan is a mensch, and kudos to your unconscious for seeing a life of normal brotherhood for both of you.

Comment on What Good Am I. Strengthen The Things That Remain. Lay There Dreaming. by eruke

eruke — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:45:58 +0000

Sontag wrote, “In a culture whose classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.” “Hypertrophy of the intellect” was a quaint grievance even in 1964, don’t you think? I wish that she just hadn’t used intellect throughout Against Interpretation, because the word invites misconstruing her argument/manifesto as defending anti-intellectualism, which she’s not doing. I’m with her on interpretation when it’s the vanity of *restoring* any artwork to some origin or intent that can define it, diagnose it, bag it for good. Interpretation that is restoration and etiology does what Sontag claims, it “makes art manageable…” But when she calls for an “erotics of art” she’s not calling for sentimentality, or I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout art but I know what I like, or No Fear Shakespeare (if you’ve never seen one of these books, it’ll make you want to tear out the liver of the person who came up with the idea), or one anencephalic moshpit after another. She’s calling for deep play with art, getting in there with it, getting that the act of attention is a making and a fusing and a remaking–and seeing what’s happened to you and to the work when you attend to each other in this way. I don’t think that works passively and I don’t think it works anti-intellectually, that’s for sure. Bob Dylan is a hard hard case–the hardest case there is, I think–because he can feed so many kinds of attention. The banal and manageable thing to do now would be to say, And everyone’s attention is as good as everyone else’s. But so what? I say, dig in as far as you can with your own organs of attention, see what happens to you and to Tempest or Idiot Wind or The Ugliest Girl in the World. Forget about intention, it’s a million dead ends or a million banalities. But claim your own creative, strange, provoking, preposterous story of any Bob Dylan song at all, and stake your claim with some ethics and some intelligence and we can be friends forever.

Comment on What Good Am I. Strengthen The Things That Remain. Lay There Dreaming. by Jean Fairy Queen

Jean Fairy Queen — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:12:59 +0000

Bradleyman, I love your story. Bob in your dreams is not such an unusual theme. I don’t know what the real purpose of dreaming is, but sometimes it helps you find something that you can’t find in the waking world. Uniquely Bob has a way of letting you find him awake or asleep.
Interpreting his work is impossible and completely obvious at once. But what each of us believes in as obvious is so unique that I’m sure our interpretations would get lost on each other. But at least on this forum some of us attempt to open our minds to each other. I do believe, that like many renegade artists and scientists of all kinds, Dylan succeeds in opening his mind to his audience for our own experience of it. And in many ways the first impression and impact of the emotion in his music is the simple truth of the message. Like a puzzle or a riddle, there is enjoyment in taking it all a step or (a thousand steps) further in trying to go deeper into the mind of a creative person. Music and lyric lend itself to that. I do feel that visual art is meant to be interpreted on a visual level, and that the gut reaction to it is it’s purpose. Knowing more about the artist and their intention is fun in an historical vein, just like our obsession with knowing the biography of a performer like Robert Zimmerman. Dream on.