"A Complete Unknown"

 

The other night—and again the next afternoon—I watched A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan bio-pic that depicts his rise from his arrival in New York City to his 1965 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, in which his adoption of folk rock truly did electrify American popular music.  For people like me, who first discovered Dylan in the Sixties with the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown was a delight, especially knowing that Dylan himself was involved in the production.  Timothy Chalamet plays Dylan and sings his songs throughout the movie.  I am confident that, since Dylan was personally involved, Chalamet also accurately reflects some of Dylan’s personal quirks as he delivers his lines. 

One of the most interesting characters, it turns out, is fictional—sort of.  Dylan’s girlfriend in the film is named Sylvie Russo, played by Elle Fanning.  As Elle noted, “Sylvie is intended to represent the real-life woman who inspired much of Dylan’s early work, and who appeared clutching his arm on the famous cover photo for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan: the artist and activist Suze Rotolo.”  Dylan did not feel it appropriate to use her real name, as she was not a professional colleague, like Joan Baez, but a purely personal friend and lover who stayed out of the limelight and who died a few years ago.  That said, their relationship is an important part of the film.

Beyond that, there are many very interesting moments in the film that give us viewers insights into the music scene at a time when we were on the verge of a cultural revolution.  For my generation, it is a great look back to our roots.

I heartily recommend A Complete Unknown.

A Lesson from Samuel Adams

 

I am reading The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Stacy Schiff’s biography of one of the people who helped set in motion the events that shaped the American Revolution 250 years ago.   Adams, who entered Harvard as a thirteen-year-old undergraduate in 1743, eventually earned his Master’s Degree there, too.  In those days, higher education centered around the ideas of the great thinkers of the classical era, but the study of Enlightenment thinkers was also popular.  Schiff notes that “the sole academic requirement for the degree was a thesis: in Latin, a master’s candidate answered a theoretical question drawn from a list of 400 questions covering the realms of philosophy, ethics, religion, and science” (p. 31).

Adams, then twenty years old, chose this topic: “Is it lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the republic cannot otherwise be preserved?”  As Schiff reports, “Few others asked at the time—when George Washington was a child, Thomas Jefferson months old, and James Madison yet to be born—if resistance to a king might be justified” (p.33).  Adams’ answer was a firm “Yes.”  He argued that, while civil government was a blessing that protected individual citizens from the self-interest of others, when a leader’s actions imperil the rights of other citizens, “he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience” (ibid.).   Three decades later, Adams would become a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the architects of the principles that made American democracy a model for other nations.

Today, as we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America in 2026, the principles that Adams and his colleagues debated are being challenged again, and we need to re-affirm the principles on which the nation was founded.  What is the responsibility of a leader?  How should citizens—individually and through their government representatives in Congress—respond when a leader dis-respects the principles that shaped and continue to guide the way we govern ourselves as a community?  A year away from our 250th anniversary as a constitutional democracy, we need to re-affirm our understanding of and commitment to our constitutional democracy.

Finding Our Way in a New World: The Native American View

 

This winter, I read three books that gave me an insight into the culture that we inherited from the Native Americans who called North America home long before the Europeans "discovered" this place.  

Dwight Jon Zimmerman’s Saga of the Sioux (Henry Holt and Company 2011) is an adaptation of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that sets the scene by describing how Native Americans’ culture and traditions in North America were shattered in the time of Sitting Bull as the U.S. Army invaded the last remnants of Native territory in the U.S. in order to create roads for settlers headed toward the gold fields.  This 200-page book was designed for younger readers, but it paints a clear picture of this critical period in the Native American experience.

In Becoming Kin (Broadleaf Books, 2022), Patty Krawec takes a longer view, describing how even the earliest European settlement in what is now Canada and the U.S. wreaked havoc on longstanding native American communities, essentially taking their ownership of their tribal lands away from them.  Krawec, whose ancestral roots are in the Anishinaabe, as well as Ukraine, lives in Canada.  Her book is subtitled An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future.  It tells how European settlers took over Native American lands, pushing Indigenous communities from their homelands and forcing them to re-settle on lands controlled by the European settlers.  It is a powerful story of disenfranchisement of an entire culture and a call for today’s generation to recover their identity and kinship with each other and their culture.

At the same time, though, Krawec gives us an important insight into how Indigenous Americans experienced--and continue to experience--their relationship to the world around them.  She demonstrates how they see nature as a community of living things that require respect at every level and how we humans are part of that community.

That relationship with Nature is the focus of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which has the subtitle Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.  In a time when the environment seems to be increasingly threatened by human technology and mis-use of the living world around us, Braiding Sweetgrass has powerful lessons from our indigenous neighbors about how to live within nature—as a part of nature--rather than on nature.  It is an important book that brings to life a perspective on our relationship with the world in which we live.