Bob Dylan

Hmmmm. Work is going ridiculously well. I'm booked for almost a solid year with entertaining and rewarding stuff, and I'll never had made as much money in my life. It means I have to revise my self-image, at least the public one.

Can't say it's made me happy, though, except for flashes where I dance Tom-Cruise-like around my apartment. I'm still the nervous worrier I've always been, finding some new thing to obsess over. Won't share that with you today.

What I will share is my portrait of Bob Dylan, transposed to a Montreal street. Watched Martin Scorcese's bio-doc No Direction Home about him, and while I wish there was more to it, it sheds some new life on his character. (this week, with a break in the work, but lousy weather, I've been inside doing nothing except watching DVDs. Sometimes drawing faces inspired by them, of which this is one).

I'm a fan of Dylan's music, and an admirer of his artistic integrity, while not liking him as a personality. The documentary covers all of that. It shows his priggish, opaque, and self-obsessed side, which was given in a film I haven't seen, the Pennebaker concert film (Don't Look Back is the title), but also gives some good reasons for this behavior. People, it seems, were trying to control him, make him into what they wanted, and he was resisting. "Poor little famous boy" you can think, but it is a faustian bargain. The press really does want him to perform like a monkey, and his fans really want him to stay in place forever. This where, as he says so well, "If you're not busy being born, you're busy dyin'."

What I love about Bob Dylan is that he's honest in his music, and he's always learning and changing. Not really caring so much about what other people think.

What drives me nuts about him are traits you see more in his imitators, like my former roommate here in this apartment. It's this artificial waif-like quality, "the don't touch me, I'm a sensitive poet," thing, with all the free-association writing on walls, and Peter Pan inability to deal with life, commit, or stand by friends. Of course, many women fall for this, and they mother these guys. I'm jealous, in part, because I can't pull it off. When I try that, I come off more as creepy or crazy. Haven't learned to tone down the insecurity vibrations, and turn up the cool, which will work for you if you are Peter Pan, or a bad boy.

Of course, a big part of my problem, if you can call it that, is that I'm not all that interested in other people much of the time. So I won't remember names, and I think that's a big part of the reason I'm not so good at drawing portraits.

But enough about me, as they say. Bob Dylan gets a pass because he is a great artist, and a kind of Shaman. There is that fakery there, but lots of famous people have put on what Ezra Pound (a famous practitioner of the notion) called "personae." These are the masks the artist wears. People are always interested in looking for the "True Face," behind those images, but they have no right in the end. That's if we have any right at all to control over ourselves as individuals, or the chance to do it. Even professing total honesty, and abjuring masks, the way I do, is a type of performance.

Enjoy the show! We're trying to make it an interesting one.