Bob Dylan At Midnight
Ah, you know the curse… getting up in the middle of the night, and you can't go back to sleep. That's what happened this night. I got home so tired from a long hard day of work, that I fell asleep before having anything like a normal evening. And then, around 11:30, I woke up, and it was a lost case. there was nothing to save me now. I got up to check what was happening…. If the cat was happy… if there was any mail that had come in…And the worst thing was the knowledge that when I'd start the day tomorrow, I'd be wasted.
So it's the middle of the night. After checking out what was on TV, and seeing there was nothing that would interest me, I put the new Bob Dylan movie on the disc player, No Direction Home, by Martin Scorsese and am watching the film. It sucks me back into the early 60s, and brings on a stream of nearly forgotten memories that fill me with late night inspiration. I've seen it before… but it is completely different the second time around, and it makes me think I should see it a few times.
For a couple of years now, after the heart attack, and after the expulsion of the jews from Gush Katif, I kept getting rid of all kinds of work I'd been doing. Stopped teaching. And basically, I thought it would give me a little time to work on some projects that I had saved and ready to work on. I have two films that I want to work on too…. One of them really looks like it has potential. But no matter what I got rid of, there's always something happening right now… and it is hard to get to the plans; to what I wanted to really do.
It was only last Friday that I finally assembled the DVD and the video in the new closet that I had bought about a year ago or more. The video had broken down and we took it to be fixed, and then when it came back, the programs didn't appear on the same TV channel that it had in the past. So I just put it aside and left it stay there for about a year. And now I really wanted to put the house in order. And on Friday I finally figured it out and programmed all of the channels so that I could record anything I wanted to on the video. And then, we assembled the new little closet we had ordered so that we could have the DVD and the video connected to the TV all the time, and ready to play. The unfortunate part of all of this is that I am finding fewer and fewer movies that really turn me on… but maybe I'll start going to the "third eye" again. They have a better choice; art movies, and more foreign stuff. I find that movies from the far east are more attractive to me these days. All of this seemed like more work than I really cared to do, but it felt good to have everything organized.
Watching this movie on Dylan, I am reminded of a whole lot of turns and learns that were part of my own experience of growing up in this world. When an artist tells the truth, everyone who sees it is able to relate to his own intimate experience. That is one of the most unique qualities of art. Everyone feels as if he is talking straight to them.