18 ★ 4 April/5 April 2020W
ithin hours of the
release of Bob Dylan’s
“Murder Most Foul”,
his first new song in
eight years, the music
website Genius had written up the full
lyrics and invited its readers to
annotate the text.
Contributors piled in. There were
historical notes on the details on the
assassination of JFK, the theme of
Dylan’s song. One person spotted the
obscure references to the crossroads
where Robert Johnson sold his soul to
the devil. Another found the history of
forgotten Scottish marching bands that
Dylan mentions in passing. Within a
couple of days, the text looks like an
Arden edition of Shakespeare.
Dylan’s followers demand something
of their hero that few other artists have
to contend with. When it comes to a
new recording, the tune is optional —
in its almost motionless cello and piano
arrangement, the 17 minutes of
“Murder Most Foul” barely qualifies as
music. Refined vocals are not required
— even Dylan admits he can’t sing. But
when the guru comes down from his
mountain, he is expected to offer some
guidance to life.
Some were unhappy that Dylan had
been elevated to poet status when he
won the Nobel Prize in 2016 but there
was also a counter-reaction from
others — that he’d been laid out on the
cold hard altar of literature when in
fact he was more: not just a songwriter
or writer but also spiritual guide for a
godless generation. “I’m still convinced
Dylan is some kind of a religious
reincarnation,” one commentator
wrote on Genius, speaking for many.
That is a heavy load to bear for
someone who has always styled himself
as a wanderer, akin to the troubadoursof the medieval ages or a hobo of the
Depression. Dylan’s been trying to
avoid responsibility all along.
Many of his songs do not carry the
baggage of locating themselves in any
particular time, just an endless
nondescript America. (In this respect,
“Murder Most Foul” is an aberration,
starting in Dallas in 1963.) Most don’t
even come with the baggage of having
to make sense. Who was that dancing
boy in the Chinese suit in “I Want
You”? I still don’t know.
Nor does Dylan pretend to have the
wisdom of a professor. Call him a
modernist like TS Eliot, if you will.
Given how he swallows up and
regurgitates so many cultural
references, he fits the bill. But he is
more vernacular — a magpie, perhaps.His 2006 albumModern Timeswas full
of glittering lines from Shakespeare set
to borrowed blues. His allusions drift
into songs from all eras but drop into
the text so lightly you could miss them.
Elvis Costello did: when he recorded a
cover of “You’re Gonna Make Me
Lonesome When You Go”, he misheard
the line “Relationships have all been
bad/Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and
Rimbaud” and sang instead “Mine have
been like the lanes and rambles”.
Academics want to make him part of
a grand literary legacy. Christopher
Ricks, former Oxford Professor of
Poetry, has tried to tie his themes to the
sins in the Bible. Richard Thomas, aVirgil scholar, argues that Dylan is the
reincarnation of an ancient Greek bard.
His guitar is just a cithara with fewer
strings. The heartbroken want to
unlock their distress through “Tangled
Up in Blue”, where a Beatrice figure
shimmers behind the lyrics. But the
search for the grand wisdom in Dylan
is a road to nowhere, and I say this as
one who has lovingly taken apart his
songs on a guitar and memorised the
incomprehensible lyrics. Ask Dylan
himself what “Murder Most Foul” is
about and he’d probably give his stock
answer: “It’s about 17 minutes.”
I keep returning to him not because
I’ve found the answer in him but
because I crave the unknowability. In
an age of consumerism, where there’s
little to hunger for in our well-padded
lives, he sets it off again. And that
hunger won’t be satisfied simply by
uncovering the literary references in
“Murder Most Foul”, but by being
stripped of the comforts of certainty.
You’ve got to go figure it out for
yourself. It might not be pretty.
Missed in the scramble to find the
references in this song is what feels like
an admission by Dylan himself — that
he is unable to answer his own
question: why was JFK assassinated
and what happened to the age of hope
he embodied? After the initial darkness
of the two verses recounting the
assassination, the song gives way to a
voice of what could be an old man at
the bar, asking the pianist to play the
great tunes of the 20th century, trying
to make sense of it all. “Play ‘Misty’ for
me and ‘That Old Devil Moon’,” he
sings; “Play ‘Anything Goes’ and
‘Memphis in June’.” Just like the rest of
us, Dylan’s looking for the answer too.@joy_lo_dicoThe answer, my friend,
isn’t in this song
T
he late Angeleno food
critic Jonathan Gold once
resolved to try every
restaurant on Pico
Boulevard, from
downtownpupuseriato beach huts on
the Pacific. So numerous were the
stops that this intrepid glutton had to
abandon the trail, defeated, near the
mid-market vendors of Century City.
Whenever it is that life resumes,
eating a course through Pico, or any
urban tract, promises to be much
shorter work than it was in his day.
And far less interesting.
There is a null hypothesis in which
the best things in life are ultimately
unchanged by the pandemic. Sport
returns in more or less familiar form.
The Ice Age of dating thaws, probably
with a vengeance. Light falls again on
theatre stages and on our museums’
dormant paintings. As a housebound
people stagger blinkingly into freedom,
the travel industry rebounds at a
ferocious rate.
The one pleasure for which it is hard
to make a sanguine case just happens
to be my most cherished. I fear we will
look back on the pre-virus years as the
unrecoverable belle époque of the
restaurant. Ahead of us is a dining
desert that could last a generation.
Barring a surge of masochism, fewer
entrepreneurs are going to brave the
economic risk of the restaurant trade.
Those who do will meet fewer willing
investors. A sector that is already
defined by overcapacity and hair’s-
breadth margins will have to get
smaller. Logic implies that takings for
those who survive could stabilise and
grow. But it also implies a narrowing in
consumer choice.And, with that, a loss of globalism.
Being able to eat like a Basque, a
Laotian, an Israeli, all in one day, and
often within one postcode, might come
to seem as improbable as the passport-
free travel of the era before the first
world war does now.
Irregular or conservative restaurant-
goers will not care, or even register
the difference. But we every-nighters
(I once passed a whole year in a flat
without cutlery) must brace for a
more parochial scene as chefs and
proprietors play it safe. And, as in the
fashion world, what goes on at the
avant-garde ends up washing back
into mass tastes. The deglobalisationof food would come to a kitchen
near everyone.
I have feared for restaurants
twice before — first after the financial
crash of 2008, and then after Brexit —
only to be confounded. In the end,
dining choices were even better in,
say, 2012 than in 2007, and in 2019
than in 2015. This time, though, it is
not “just” a macroeconomic shock at
work. It is an attack on the specific
lifeblood of the restaurant trade:
supply chains, entrepreneurial
risk-appetite, the public’s openness
to experimentation. The crisis
seems almost scripted to do for
this one sector.
Now look, I feel like Imelda Marcoshere, cursing the loss of one sensual
pleasure amid so much general
suffering. A realist would stress the
point that restaurants, like stand-up
comedians, are oversupplied. Just as
the market can only absorb so much
confessional humour in pub
basements, the demand was finite at
the best of times for new iterations of
Scandi-Nepalese concept tapas or
whatever. What is happening is not
fair, but some kind of shake-out might
have been due anyway.
But if the lamps are going out in the
trade for some time, its important
social function will have to be done by
some other institution. Restaurants
provide the first wage that many
people ever earn. They are the first
and sometimes last asset that some
poor immigrants acquire. And for
those of us on the demand side, they
can be landmarks in our own
progress, from never visiting them
before adulthood, to shy forays into
chain eateries on our own nickel, to
debt-incurring nights at cypress-wood
sushi counters. A sentimental
attachment to the industry might
be unwarranted, but no less intense
for that.
And if the crisis is a matter of life
and death, then the lockdown has
accentuated the things that make life
worth living. I will see Arsenal again.
I will board a plane. I will lose an hour
in the Rothko Room of the museum
down the road. I am just not sure I will
taste the hamachi collar at Bestia or
the blood orange at Relae or the
Madeira broth at Clove Club.[email protected]
More columns at ft.com/janan.ganeshBeing able to eat like a
Basque, a Laotian, an
Israeli, all in one day, mightcome to seem improbable
Jason Fulford travelled across the
world for his latest series,Picture
Summer on Kodak Film, yet his images
speak as one. Hazy, golden hues
colour the still lifes and street scenes,
gently warped by refraction and
shadow, while architectural textures
and eccentricities are plucked from
the sprawl and given space to breathe.
The Brooklyn-based photographer
and publisher has created a
kaleidoscope of a book, with mirrorsand illusions and elusive fragments of
verse. Individually, the images are no
less striking: an apparition of apples,
rainbow gobstoppers in a dusty case,
a stolen glimpse of lipstick on glass.
The result is a mirage — fleeting,
fictional and abstracted, and all the
more entrancing for it.
Chris Allnutt‘Picture Summer on Kodak Film’ is
published by MACKSNAPSHOT
‘Picture Summer
on Kodak Film’
(2020) by
Jason Fulford
Chess solution 23611 Qg3! If Kd2 2 Qf3 Ke1 3 Kc2 mate. If Ke2 2 Kc1 Kf1 3 Kd2 mate (composed by Otto Wutzburg).Thelost belle époque
of the restaurant
Janan Ganesh
Citizen of nowhere
Ask Dylan himself what
‘Murder Most Foul’ is about
and he’d probably answer:‘It’s about 17 minutes’
Joy Lo Dico
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APRIL 4 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 2/4/2020 - 18: 27 User: andrew.higton Page Name: WKD16, Part,Page,Edition: WIN, 18 , 1