1. I returned home from England in June of 1975 after a month's visit and, in July, I watched Wimbledon tennis matches for the first time on television and, for many years afterward, watched Wimbledon matches with love and devotion. Then, for many years, I didn't watch Wimbledon because I didn't have a television.
Today, I watched the men's semi-final matches. It was especially scintillating to watch Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal play once again and to see Federer, at nearly 38 years old, play with calm, composure, power, accuracy, and consistency and win the match in four sets.
2. Later in the day, Byrdman told me he was coming over to Kellogg. He picked me up and we went up to Radio Brewing for a pint of delicious Silver Mountain IPA and some great conversation reviewing the Federer/Nadal match and marveling at men's tennis' three dominant players: Federer, Nadal, and Novak Djokovic, not only how superbly they have played over the years, but how superbly they are playing now, as thirtysomethings, as mature players, no longer young hot shots.
It's hard to believe that a day is coming when these three will not be playing tennis, but, for now, I relish being able to watch them play and I am eager to watch Federer and Djokovic play Sunday morning in the Wimbledon final.
After our beer at Radio, we headed down to the Inland Lounge and immediately ordered burgers from the Elks and took a spot at the bar and thoroughly enjoyed yakkin' with Cas and others and had a good session with Harley when he delivered our burgers. I thought our time at the Lounge was peak Kellogg. Cold beer. Great burgers from the Elks. Lots of laughing and story telling up and down the bar. A table of people ten to twenty years older than me having a drink before heading to the Senior Center next door to dance. Everyone was in high spirits, happy to see one another, and the good vibes had me walking on air as Byrdman and I left, around 8:00.
3. Afternoon gin and Bob Dylan. I finished watching the movie (Conjuring the) Rolling Thunder Revue and I loved it. Most of all, I loved how the movie portrays Bob Dylan as totally occupied by music, music he's heard, music he plays, the music of poetry, and the music of his heart.
I enjoyed the way the movie messed with its viewers' minds by mixing actuality with fiction. By bringing fictional figures into the movie, Scorsese and Dylan were able to explore aspects of this tour and Dylan's legacy in a more distilled and controlled way, exploring such matters as celebrity in the USA, politics and music, perceptions of Bob Dylan, perspectives on the Rolling Thunder Revue, the business side of popular music, and other things through imaginary characters who may not have existed, but who spoke insightful truths.
As I've written before, if you are interested in looking into what was actual and what was fabricated in this movie, a quick online search will get you to plenty of articles that deal with this. I would like to give away one of the fictional characters. I thought it was an ingenious and delightful bit of trickery that Scorsese and Dylan brought, from Gary Trudeau and Robert Altman's late 80s HBO mini-series/mockumentary Tanner 88, fictional former Michigan congressman, Jack Tanner, played by Michael Murphy. I loved seeing Michael Murphy play this role in Rolling Thunder Revue, as a much older Jack Tanner reminisces about his relationship with Jimmy Carter and tells a story about going to the Rolling Thunder Revue when it played in Niagara Falls, NY. The surface was fiction, but his words were shot through with truth about our culture, especially in the mid-70s.
I don't have a deep understanding of Bob Dylan's life and career, but my impression is that it's been an ongoing process of Dylan re-inventing himself, of presenting a series of different persona to the public -- a series, I'd say, of different fictional representations of himself. When I saw the movie I'm Not There, I thought it treated Bob Dylan as an ever fluctuating concept or idea, and, in that movie, Dylan's mutability was portrayed by having several actors play the multiple dimensions of Bob Dylan.
In other words, with my limited knowledge, I think it's fitting that Bob Dylan, a performer of many roles in his life, would be a part of a documentary mixing the actual and the factual with fiction and invention as a way of getting at the what he'd like audiences to think about -- and be confused about -- The Rolling Thunder Revue.
By the way, I also think this is a documentary about documentaries, magnifying that it's inevitable that documentary movies rely on the techniques of fiction in the ways they shape stories, leave things out, mess with chronology, and structure our responses as we watch them. This particular movie is just more audacious than most in its blending of fiction and the actual.
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