Reflective Essay: Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer and becoming Woody.

At the end of the quarter, things can get a little dew-y, a little melancholy, as you take stock of what came before this terrifying moment, when the revisions fall like snowflakes in the recently chilling air, a stillness just before the avalanche of portfolios, TA paperwork, and the usual spate of departmental and college related faux holiday fun.

Somewhat usually, though not at all, come to think of it, this quarter, which started with budgetary fear and dread (well, uh...if you don't know first hand, let's just say that the numbers weren't adding up, and those of us without tenure [as if we can expect such a dinosaur luxury anymore] were looking at unemployment, loss of health insurance, and the penunurious salaries we had all gotten used to for the purposes of rent paying , food buying , and, most importantly, keeping Al Quaeda at bay with optional purchases).

This fear subsided as Administration announced that, due to the attrition (which means scaring off some of my colleagues with this bullshit) we wouldn't have to be sacked. Allowed to "live" because of the "execution" of certain positions, it is now, and forever, that I may, can and will slap the next dumb motherfucker who runs their mouth about the "liberal/progressive/leftist/communist" academy.

THE ACADEMY IS ABOUT AS "LIBERAL" AS FORD OR CHEVROLET. Understand this. It's like your "liberal media", and for the same reasons.

As a result of the holiday, I was presented with a few of opportunities that I would not have been presented with because of time or location: I was able to watch the Scorcese's Bob Dylan doc No Direction Home in its entirety, as well as watching the new Julian Temple pic about Joe Strummer The Future's Unwritten last Saturday while recovering from a hangover, and the pregnant dread of knowing that they'll be a ton of work next week, yet, none right now. I got the same feeling back when I was in the Pyrotechnic Game. June 25TH, maybe ten people stop in the store...June 26TH, they're lined up out the door and down US 50...

...."Liberal" Media...for the same reasons...

At one time, Joe Strummer, changed his name to from John Graham Mellors to "Woody" in honor of Woody Guthrie, and in this way, paid a kind of tribute to the original populist American Minstral/Rabblerouser, the same as another irrascible poet/guitarist from a previous generation, Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham v'Rachel Riva aka Robert Zimmerman aka Bob Dylan.

Changing names is a personal apotheosis, for the change in the words which signify a person necessitate that what is signified also change. Is David Bowie still "David Bowie" if he's David Jones? Is Freddie Mercury "Freddy Mercury" if he's "Farokh Bulsara" (the most dangerous Persian since Xerxes, I might add)? Is Lou Reed still "Lou Reed" if he's "Lou Reed"-okay, that one's easy, because he's an asshole, he's a genius, and it's a bad example-unless "Lou Reed" is a character, a la Philip Roth (and Lou has said as much in Victor Bockris's Transformer)...

For John Graham Mellors, and for Julian Temple, it is this first choice of signifier that cements the foundation of who Joe Strummer is, because it was a concious decision to align with a tradition, and even though Mellors, and his medium, would become very different than Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan's, the essential need to, as Allen Ginsberg put it, "to take a subject truth and pin it to object reality" is very much the same. As a matter of fact, it is this that placed John Graham Mellors, also a fan of Ginsberg's (see "Capitol Air" and Ghetto Defendent", both collaborations with the Clash) in the company of poets, which is why the Clash were able to transcend where the rest of the so called punk bands continued jerking off on the same three chords, the same form, humping it until its death sometime in 1988 (sorry, Green Day fans.) For Woody Mellor, Joe Strummer is just a refinement, a synonym for Woody, because it signifies both musician (Strummer) and everyman (the average Joe)-a pose that Woody Guthrie, ever the populist, would have been very fond.

Bob Dylan ben Robert Zimmerman, as invention and as nomenclature, is no less instructive, because we, again, have the platonic thrice removed from the original nomenclature. Bob has a Hebrew name, an anglicized name, and then a constructed self, and all are swirl around that guy-over there, yet, it is difficult to pin down exactly what the words Bob Dylan exactly signify, a point made, I believe because I haven't seen it, in I'm Not There. Who is this Bob Dylan guy? Protest singer? Hippy Prophet? Independent Minstrel? Seller of undergarments?

I believe it was that tool from Peter Paul and Mary who said in No Direction Home that everybody wanted a piece of Bob Dylan, wanted Bob to be their own personal Bob Dylan. Everybody above, aside from Freddie Mercury, owes Bob big time, because he changed the rules of the game, changed what was possible in song, changed the paradigm of rock n roll, changed the paradigm of folk. Who said folk music has to be done on acoustic instruments? Who said folk is the only authentic music, and must be rural. Last time I checked, folks live in the city, too, and though the music changes, stories are stories. Bob Dylan made it possible for Lou Reed to make Urban Folk Records, with electricity from other planets, because Bob did it first. "Maggie's Farm" is a song for quitting your shitty job at Taco Bell the same as a migrant farmer protest.

Joe Strummer knew this as well as anybody, well aware of that power of self identification. We are entitled to define ourselves anyway we choose, because we are all chains of signifiers refering to an sign, each are as authentic as the rest. Is it possible for Joe Strummer/Woody/John Graham Mellor to exist without this synergy. Can we think of Bob Dylan without understanding this phenomenon? I dare say Bob can't.

The thing is, as we've observed during this campaign, there is a gnawing, clawing, desire for an increasingly irrelevent and definately irresponsible media to serve up some idea of authenticity in people while simultaneously undercutting the notion of objectivity. People get this point confused, but let me try to be clear on this: It is possible to look at a person objectively, that is to say, looking to merits, etc. However, it is impossible then to declare this objective view as being authentic, because you are, even from this safe distance, you are looking at a version of a person, not the person in and of themselves. Proclaimations of "authenticity" are attempts to control the discourse, and therefore, are fascist. This goes for applies to all cultural constructions, really, from Barack to Punk Rock. The minute you start talking about authenticity, you are really talking about an ideological purity, and when you start talking about ideological purity...it's a just a whistle stop on the midnight train to Belsen.

....Editions of You(me)...

Anyway, it is something that these artists were aware of, because everybody was vested in some version, some signifier of the sign Dylan or Strummer, that touched them and they feel is authentic. This is vexation of all artists, because the flattery, and the accolades from the adoring is certainly tethered to another fine signifier of you, or them, or us.

This Wizard is moved by the poignancy of both and all, and set me to thinking about the nature of my business. This quarter was a giant heaping shit sandwhich that I, and many of my colleagues, had to take steaming bites like some offal manwhich, chunks of the past colleagues, chunks of University College, chunks of the hangovers that come with living idealistically in a Machiavellian Machine that is the contemporary university.

I think the most poisonous thing here is that the facticity of the situation made me a hell of a lot more mercenary, made a lot of us more mercenary. See, I'm not a mercenary. This pedagogy is not for the green, yet I had to think about the green, being one small step past contigent on administrative whims. Thus, I feel that I was phoning it in a bit, that I wasn't bringing my A game because, frankly, I was too goddamned disheartened most of the time to do so. My weekend of independent minstralry, social activism and pure fuck you-ness of these two artists have, plus some well placed cheerleading, have helped me re-order the chain of signifiers, to the originary notion, articulated by Nietzsche in his discussion of Schoepenhauer:

EDUCATION=LIBERATION

Teaching= Indoctrination=Status Quo=Plump Happy Consumers Consumering....

To educate is to liberate an individual by liberating their thinking, liberating their epistemological sense of what is possible and thus, liberating what is ontologically possible.

To teach is to read from a text book, and thus, to instill the corporatist ideology of the textbook manufacturers, whose sole purpose is to make money with half truths, bald faced lies, and the continued supremacy of dead white guys, many of whom were only marginally talented. All are controlling the discourse, circumscribing reality, providing students with an identity that makes inquiry impossible.

In is in education that I find Dylan and Strummer (let's not forget John Lennon, Lou Reed et al.) to be the most inspirational, instructive, in the same breath as Nietzsche, Marx, Derrida, Foucault, James Joyce, because they didn't tell people what to think, but how to think, and this was importance of them all, and the importance of Woody Guthrie as well, for while we remember Woody's guitar as a machine for killing fascists, it is ultimately Woody himself, and Bob and Joe and Derrida and Lennon and Reed, that, by virtue of accepting the signifier of Woody, become similar machines for killing fascists.

It's funny, because, on the last day, when I was finishing up, and the students were putting together portfolios, I looked at one of my students, who worked her ass off all quarter, came to class after having been struck by a bus, who lived with her sister, who's life has been struggle and toil and the institutional racism that is the city of Cincinnati, with her brow furrowed, glasses down on her nose, combing her paper for for comma splices, growing and perfecting a language that is not native to her and beginning to claim ownership of it, liberated and liberating, redefining by her own rules, and I thought "this machine kills fascists"...