A Complete Unknown

I thought the movie A COMPLETE UNKNOWN captured the vibe of the era pretty convincingly. Especially the moody dives and night streets of Greenwich Village. I’ve never been there, but maybe I’ve seen photos or something. 

For me, the best characters and actors were Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie and Elle Fanning as Sylvie (the fictionalized Suzie).

Not for a moment did I experience a persuasive incarnation of Dylan by Timothée Chalamet or of Baez by Monica Barbaro. Their singing and playing is exceptional but not their characterization or interpretation of the two people. 

Chalamet’s performance seemed to be mere portraying or representing rather than inhabiting or becoming the character. It’s lacking in an eccentric vision of the enigmatic, abstruse Dylan. Others will disagree. 

The movie did hold my attention all the way through. Given that and some other pluses, I’d rate it maybe a 6.5 out of 10, or possibly a 7.

Impression

This morning bird racket

in my spring pine trees,

like a stream of rapids

sounding raucously.

A sunlit panic of ecstasy,

wonder, and mystery. 

Mystery confounded by itself.

A Greek chorus of winged things

speaking off-stage for Oracles 

writhing in the hallucinogenic 

caves of our strange souls. 

~TB

“Autumn”

A poem I wrote a number of years ago, as read by Heather Primrose. 

“Mortal Grin” lyrics

 A song I wrote 16 years ago:

Mortal Grin

The night is speaking in strange tongues,

and the heat hangs like a dead lung.

Surreal thoughts leaking out of my brain,

going up in smoke through this tepid rain.

I wander vague, disconcerting streets,

full of apparitions clothed in meat.

Staring into these confident faces,

I'm stupefied for explanations.

What should I think about this suavity

and body language so cavalier,

when I feel like an underground man

with a Dostoevskian fever?

I hear the murmur of latent cadavers,

waltzing just outside the graveyard fence.

No misstep, no pause in their palaver.

Where can I get one of those big, wide mortal grins?

My thoughts are running like a wild dog,

as I contemplate this complacent throng.

Hey you, yes you, with that bowler on your head,

what spell are you working on the mighty dread?

I stand perplexed, my mouth is agape,

mystified by reality's shape,

while all around me are gesturing blithely.

They know something I'm un-divining.

Should I purchase some opium,

join this conspiracy crowd?

They say there's strength in numbers, numbers,

but they're dropping like flies while the night's unbowed.

What should I think about this suavity

and body language so cavalier,

when I feel like an underground man

with a Dostoevskian fever?

I hear laughter coming from a midnight ball,

where the smiling masks are made out of skin.

Jesters tumble happily in absurd thrall

to the yawning god of sleep and mortal grins.

I hear the rumble of distant thunder,

that deep and unsettling symbolic din.

I wish I could put this fear asunder.

I want my very own big, wide mortal grin.

Words & Music by Tim Buck, 2008

Agafia where frost and birches

~ inspired by the life of Agafia Lykova

Gone to God now they are.

Bones will follow someday.
Rattling through moonlight.
Up to the angel stars.

Graves sway grass and crosses.
Blue star flowers wild I put there.
Crosses tell my own dear sleepers.
Blue star flowers strung on crosses.
Mountain makes the wind a hymn.

Fled to this far frost we did,
to hidden nights of birches.
Hard oh God, cold oh God.

Sky changing out the years.
Hungry and the soot of hours.
Once I heard an old saint speak
inside cold fire of soot and hours.
Frost and snow and silent birches.
How long oh God, how long?

Once they came to take us back.
We felt the sin on strange breath.
What more than faith is saving?
Why go when we are here?
They left us to our prayers.

Gone to God now my dear sleepers.
Nights we told our holy dreams.
The Devil circled our dark hut.
We swayed to scripture rhythm.

I sway to scripture rhythm, мама.
Now at night I hear the voices.
Time is harsh for ecstasy.

~ TB

Because we exist…

...certain thinkers try to think into the abstract structures of the situation -- of the ontological everydayness. They apparently think it can be described and explained. Maybe it can. Maybe the French postmodernist philosophers were onto something. Maybe their descriptions and explanations are accurate, more or less.

Of course, those French thoughts might not be accurate, but only fascinating:

"Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates."

-- G.C. Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)


The "textualness" of books, personality, and circumstance may indeed be amorphous and infinitely deferential. Something called "Event" may be eruptively efficacious in patterning great turns of time within abstract being. Contextualizing arenas of action and change may shed unexpected light. Social psychoanalysis may yield groovy ways for looking at the problem of identity. Critiques of power relations may tell us about general attitudes and systems of value. Semiotics may point to the elusiveness of any conceptual solids in our discourse.

Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Badiou, Lacan, Baudrillard...fine. Go ahead and think your stuff to the max. It's entertaining to read and ponder odd and original views of the world.

But....

at some freaking point, I think it would be a truer thing to replace the word that floats their thinking -- "abstract" -- with a different word -- "mystical."

So what would we gain by a mere word substitution? Probably not much. But just as Heidegger danced around none too nimbly trying to avoid the mystical implications of his own work, I think it would be more honest and more succinct for the French to cut to the chase: consciousness finds itself always and at every ontological location enmeshed not in intertextual patterns or reified ramifications but in the chronic impossible.

That's the rub of it. Being is best describable and explainable as a massive paradox. 

I keep wondering about what those French guys have said. Why in the world do they spend so much time being profound and arcane? What practical (existential) thing results from the dark rooms of thought where they develop their abstract pictures of reality?

The problem of mortality trumps the problem of thinking. Being death-haunted makes the student in the Lycée lecture hall grow impatient, fidgety. "Speak to me of why, not of what," she says to the French professor who thinks reality is contained inside language and abstruse prolixity.

Something is surely going on with all this human existing stuff. I'm just not sure it is accurate or aesthetically satisfying to account for it in terms of postmodernist abstraction.  It seems to me there is something that remains yet hidden (mysterious) behind our best attempts to map phenomena onto a coherent plane of deep thinking.

It's not just the French guys. There's also Slavoj Žižek, the Slovene. Inside his strange reality bubble, we bounce around trying to dodge the anti-matter particles of his contrariety. Those elusive particles eventually agglomerate into political shapes. But politics is a form of sleep, of normalizing trance. The true radical is the one silently screaming toward the mystic abyss. 

What do I mean by "mystic"? Not sure exactly. But maybe something like this: what is not possible has nevertheless found a way within the sentient doldrums of a dreaming Holism.

Does anything practical (existential) result from such an intuition? Not in the normal sense. Rather it offers a perspective in which the organic, the inorganic, and all the laws of process are imbued with traces of an old and weary magic. In such a milieu of the holographic uncanny, it behooves us to have compassion for all other drifting and tragic spells of being. 

The Sensitive Layer -- Yves Tanguy

I looked up…

…the dictionary definition of “Alito”:

a smarmy, condescending, theocratic asshat.