By Stuart Mitchner
Blowing through the buttons of our coats / Blowing through the letters that we wrote / Idiot wind / Blowing through the dust upon our shelves….” The next lines, and the last, of Bob Dylan’s song are “We’re idiots, babe / It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.”
If the Dylan of Rough and Rowdy Ways truly contains multitudes, “we’re idiots” means everybody. In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan claims that his 1975 album Blood On The Tracks was “based on Chekhov short stories,” a reference that resonates in the Chekhovian sensibility behind that line. It’s said that Dylan’s revised the lyric over the years, but however you read it, the wording covers a lot of beautiful and unbeautiful universal ground, not just the relationship between the singer and his wife.
Meanwhile the idiot writing this column has been busy for days on an article about the new film A Complete Unknown. Besides being fixated on New York in January 1961 when the city was buried in snow and you could ski on lower Fifth Avenue, I’ve been staring over my shoulder at the devastation the idiot winds of Santa Ana have inflicted on my wife’s Pacific Palisades homeland. more