BOB DYLAN: NOBEL PRIZE 2016 / TOM PAINE AWARD 1963

News that Bob Dylan has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature took me

back to a previous Award ceremony in December 1963 when the young Dylan was awarded the Tom Paine award, given in recognition of distinguished service in the fight for civil liberty, by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC) at their annual Bill of Rights Dinner in New York which also featured the writer James Baldwin.

Bob Dylan's acceptance speech, reproduced below, caused quite a stir and triggered a long and lengthy poetic explanation from Dylan that you can read in full here: 

Martin Scorses revoiced some of the speech for his documentary 'No Direction Home'. See YouTube clip which contains come great still photos.

  I haven't got any guitar, I can talk though. I want to thank you for the Tom Paine award in behalf everybody that went down to Cuba. First of all because they're all young and it's took me a long time to get young and now I consider myself young. And I'm proud of it. I'm proud that I'm young.

 And I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here today or tonight weren't here and I could see all kinds of faces with hair on their head - and everything like that, everything leading to youngness, celebrating the anniversary when we overthrew the House Un-American Activities just yesterday, - Because you people should be at the beach. You should be out there and you should be swimming and you should be just relaxing in the time you have to relax. (Laughter) 

It is not an old peoples' world. It is not an old peoples' world. It has nothing to do with old people. Old people when their hair grows out, they should go out. (Laughter) And I look down to see the people that are governing me and making my rules - and they haven't got any hair on their head - I get very uptight about it. (Laughter)

     And they talk about Negroes, and they talk about black and white. And they talk about colors of red and blue and yellow. Man, I just don't see any colors at all when I look out. I don't see any colors at all and if people have taught through the years to look at colors.

 I've read history books, I've never seen one history book that tells how anybody feels. I've found facts about our history, I've found out what people know about what goes on but I never found anything about anybody feels about anything happens. It's all just plain facts. And it don't help me one little bit to look back.

     I wish sometimes I could have come in here in the 1930's like my first idol - used to have an idol, Woody Guthrie, who came in the 1930's (Applause). But it has sure changed in the time Woody's been here and the time I've been here. It's not that easy any more. People seem to have more fears.

     I get different presents from people that I play for and they bring presents to me backstage - very weird, weird presents - presents that I couldn't buy. They buy - they bring me presents that - I've got George Lincoln Rockwell's tie clip that somebody robbed for me. (Laughter) I have General Walker's car trunk keys - keys to his trunk that somebody robbed for me. Now these are my presents. I have fallout shelter signs that people robbed for me from Philadelphia and these are the little signs. 

There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They has got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt.

     I want to accept this award, the Tom Paine Award, from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. I want to accept it in my name but I'm not really accepting it in my name and I'm not accepting it in any kind of group's name, any Negro group or any other kind of group. T

here are Negroes - I was on the march on Washington up on the platform and I looked around at all the Negroes there and I didn't see any Negroes that looked like none of my friends. My friends don't wear suits. My friends don't have to wear suits. My friends don't have to wear any kind of thing to prove that they're respectable Negroes. My friends are my friends, and they're kind, gentle people if they're my friends. And I'm not going to try to push nothing over. 

So, I accept this reward - not reward, (Laughter) award in behalf of Phillip Luce who led the group to Cuba which all people should go down to Cuba. I don't see why anybody can't go to Cuba. I don't see what's going to hurt by going any place. I don't know what's going to hurt anybody's eyes to see anything. On the other hand, Phillip is a friend of mine who went to Cuba. 

I'll stand up and to get uncompromisable about it, which I have to be to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don't know exactly where —what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too - I saw some of myself in him. I don't think it would have gone - I don't think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me - not to go that far and shoot. (Boos and hisses) 

You can boo but booing's got nothing to do with it. It's a - I just a - I've got to tell you, man, it's Bill of Rights is free speech and I just want to admit that I accept this Tom Paine Award in behalf of James Forman of the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and on behalf of the people who went to Cuba. (Boos and Applause)

[Note: JFK was assassinated November 22, 1963]

Bob Dylan And Pete Seeger July 2, 1963 Greenwood, Mississippi

 Bob Dylan, James Forman and Pete Seeger sitting outside SNCC office.

See full set of pics here: 

PREVIOUS POSTS: There are numerous stories about Dylan on THE GENERALIST. 

Just type Dylan in Search box at top left.

GRAPHIC BIOGRAPHIES: AUDUBON and DALI

These two recently published graphic biographies represent the tip of a very large iceberg of similar works that offer the reader a wonderful introduction to the life and works of significant characters. It's an area of publishing that THE GENERALIST hopes to get into in the year ahead.

John-Jaques Audubon was born illegitimately in 1781 in Santo Domingue in 1780 (now known as Haiti), the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and plantation owners and his French mistress. His mother died shortly after his birth and he was  sent back to France where he grew up in and around Nantes and had a lively interest in birds, nature, drawing and music. At the age of 18, his father sent him to America to escape being drafted into Napoleon's army, to Mill Grove, a family property near Philadelphia, where he met and married Lucy Bakewell. They had two boys who worked with their father and two girls that died in childhood. 

Audubon spent more than a decade as a businessman, eventually travelling down the Ohio River to western Kentucky—then the frontier— where he establshed a dry-goods store in Henderson. He continued to draw birds as a hobby, amassing an impressive portfolio.

While in Kentucky, Lucy gave birth to two sons, Victor Gifford and John Woodhouse, as well as two daughters who died in infancy. Audubon was quite successful until his sawmill failed and in 1819 he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy.
After being released from jail he decided to devote himself to what was to became his grand obsession -  to discover and paint all the species of American birds. he had little idea of the mammoth nature of his task. 

He spent more than 30 years exploring the American wilderness, beginning with a major expedition down the Mississippi with his assistant Joseph in the 1820s, a journey we follow in this book. Both of them were almost killed by a giant bear. Audubon shot most of the birds he depicted in his immaculate life-size paintings, eviscerating and arranging them in poses that were meant, ironically, to be full of life. 

The graphic account also depicts the incident when Audubon's contracts a serious fever (complete with dream-like hallucinations) which is intercut with the remarkable sight of a unnumbered giant flock of passenger pigeons that took three days to fly past them. His small party are happily rescued by a passing river boat and taken downstream to New Orleans.

The paintings he had made up to that time were soundly rejected as Audubon's former friend Alexander Wilson had already written, illustrated and published his 'American Ornithology'. By contrast, Audubon's paintings were considered too artistic and not scientific enough, more appropriate for an art gallery than a science museum.

In search of sponsors, Audubon travelled to Britain, arriving in Liverpool in 1826, where he met with great success, being billed as 'The American Woodman'. The graphic bio dwells on his meeting with Charles Darwin. He also gained support from Cuvier and other scientists in Paris.

Equally importantly, Audubon found the talented engravers of Havell. It took them 12 years to print the 436 aquatint plates that compose 'Birds of America' Audubon's masterpiece, first released in 1936. 

A smaller edition also proved highly successful and Audubon became rich and famous. He made one final expedition, documented from his letters in this work, before finally returning to his family. In his last years he suffered from dementia before he died in 1851 in New York.

Excellent and detailed Wikipedia entry

[Left]John James Audubon. Painting: John Syme courtesy of White House Historical Association

The Audubon Society, established in the late 1800s, has made his name synonymous with birds and bird conservation all over the world.

Audubon's work is highly valued. Only 120 complete sets are known to exist. On 20 January 2012 a complete copy of the first edition was sold at Christie's auction house in Manhattan for $7.9 million. Fortunately the University of Pittsburgh has created a website where you can view their entire set. This is a remarkable resource as you can examine each image in great detail.
[See also Birds of America Wikipedia entry]

[Left] Carolina pigeon (now called mourning dove)


'Audubon: On The Wings of the World' is written and illustrated by Fabien Grolleau and Jérémie Royer. [Published by Nobrow to their usual high standards] They make the point that, in France, Audubon remains practically unknown, presumably their motive for producing it. It's a substantial and beautiful tribute to a remarkable man. 

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The fourth title in the Self Made Hero Art Masters series after Pablo, Vincent and Munch, Dali by Baudoin is a delightful work of inventive skill, a heartfelt homage to this extraordinary individual. 

Baudoin is short for Edmond Baudoin who I am ashamed to say I was previously unaware of. Here's his Wikipedia entry and website. 

We all know Dali or think we do. His images have become ingrained in our culture. The soft watches are still ticking. 

Personal digression: I still remember the shock of seeing my first Dali in the flesh - 'Metamorphosis of Narcissus' - when on a school art trip to the Tate                                            back in the '60s. 

I am thrilled to still be in possession of the remarkable book on  Dali published by Abrams in 1968, a collaboration between Dali himself and Max Gérard, French author, film producer and director. A giant candy box of a book, it's a constant inspiration. [A kind gift to my family from Michael M, still appreciated after all these years] 

Perhaps to be matched in sumptuousness by the new Taschen book, flagged up on the ever wonderful Colossal website: See: 'Salvador Dali’s Rare Surrealist Cookbook Republished for the First Time in over 40 Years'

Baudoin's book is in this high company and offers a wonderful introduction to Dali's life and work through the life and spirit and imagination of Monsieur B himself, who brings a high level of thought, intelligence, skill, humour and craft to his task.

The body of the book is in bold, stark black and white, drawn largely in what looks like charcoal but with other b&w styles that might use ink. There are pages with frames, others that break out across spreads, others that combine many elements in a constantly surprising cornucopia. To add icing to the cake, Baudoin occasionally and effectively drops in colour touches. Superb! 

The way he handles the narration is also masterly: a groovy boy and girl pass through and into the frames of famous paintings, scenes and elements of Dali's life and also have discussions with the artist himself who appears from time to time.

The book is completed with a carefully researched 20pp chronology of  Dali's life (1904-1989) and a Selected Bibliography. A great piece of work.

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THE GLOBAL WATER CRISIS

'Watermark' describes itself as a documentary on how water shapes humanity. It's written by Jennifer Baichwal who also co-directs the film with photographer Edward Burtynsky. First released in 2013, this remarkable movie will stun and amaze you and inform you and scare you and inspire you. 

The film takes us around the world, flowing from scene to scene like a river and throughout concentrates on tiny details and human-scale activity  before smoothly gliding upwards to reveal a massively large-scale vista that cannot help but take one's breath away.

We see ancient ways of conserving water (the stepwells of Rajasthan) and vertiginous terraced paddies where a young man sits as a water guard. We see 35 million people bathing in the Ganges to wash away their sins at the largest religious pilgrimage on the planet and, in California, watch miraculous solo surfers ride giant waves with grace.

Throughout the film we see and return to a gigantic dam project in China, the size of which is beyond imaging and the skills of Hollywood. They are using the most advanced hi-def cameras, for both still and moving pictures, on the ground, strapped to tripods, or fixed underneath helicopter drones or, higher still, flown in helicopters. Having had the privilege to first watch this on a desktop and then, round at my friend's house, watch it again on a massive screen, the detail and fidelity are stunning.

We also see drought in the dried-up delta of the Colorado river in Mexico, we see leather factories, damaging humans and polluting rivers with harsh chemicals to produce goods for export to the West. We realise the sheer amount of water it takes to grow crops on a landscape scale in Texas, depleting an ancient subterranean aquifer, and learn the history of the aqueduct that brought water to the Los Angles basin - and the deleterious effects that had. The film tells us that agriculture represents - by far - the largest human activity upon the planet. Approximately seventy percent of all fresh water under our control is dedicated to this activity.

Perhaps most important of all, the film takes us on a journey to Greenland where a team from Denmark complete their mission to document ancient climates by extracting ice cores from the pristine polar Arctic. For much of our planets history there have been long ice ages interspersed with (relatively) brief interregnums when the planet's atmosphere heats up. The one we are in has lasted 11 million years and encompasses the entire history of human on earth. Now, for the first time, we are not just watching but adding to the warming. The historic record shows that it takes very little to make the climate flip into another mode - and it happens fast.

Two of the scientists talk to camera. The woman tells us that all the water we have on the earth came from space, from icy comet crashing into the plant over billions of years and being captured by our gravitational field. The man tells us:

"We can't live if we're not in water because no two cells can divide without being in water. We spend the first nine moths of our lives in our mother's womb inside ... a reconstruction of the ocean where all life has to take place. Even inside plants you can't have a cell division without it happening in water. So water is everywhere. If that water link would ever break allowing a cell to rupture and dry out, life would end . So I think it's a fascinating thought to think that you and I can only sit here and have this conversation because we both represent an unbroken link of divided cells in water at all times in the last three billion years."

My other favourite quote comes from a man, in a boat in a lake, who tells a that each of the Canadian native tribes like the Haida and the others would have a mountain creek or river that was there's to fish and talks of the cycle of water up the heavens. shed on the mountains, down back to the ocean through the rivers.

"In that process of the cycle, we fit in...whatever falls from the sky lands here and if I drink it and you drank the same water for a month or so, we'd be 70% the same water. We won't be the same. We'd be the same water...We're all water."

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. has spent his life photographing landscapes damaged by man. He says of his work on this film:

"I wanted to understand water: what it is, and what it leaves behind when we're gone. I wanted to understand our use and misuse of it. I wanted to trace the evidence of global thirst and threatened sources. Water is part of a pattern I've watched unfold throughout my career. I document landscapes that, whether you think of them as beautiful or monstrous, or as some strange combination of the two, are clearly not vistas of an inexhaustible, sustainable world."
(Walrus, October 2013)

His extensive website www.edwardburtnsky.com has much video footage and many intervuews worth studying. I like this quote about what lies behind a lifetime behind the lend:

'Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.'

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This wonderful and important film owes a debt I am sure the filmmakers would acknowledge, to the style and approach of Godfrey Reggio in the remarkable 'Koyaanisqatsi' trilogy, featuring music by Phillip Glass. It was shot by Ron Fricke who went on to make his own films including 'Baraka' [See Previous Post: Film: Terrence Mallick/Godfrey Reggio]

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WATER NEWS

How much water is there on, in, and above the Earth?

All Earth's water, liquid fresh water, and water in lakes and rivers

Spheres showing:

(1) All water (sphere over western U.S., 860 miles in diameter)

(2) Fresh liquid water in the ground, lakes, swamps, and rivers (sphere over Kentucky, 169.5 miles in diameter), and 

(3) Fresh-water lakes and rivers (sphere over Georgia, 34.9 miles in diameter).

Credit: Howard Perlman, USGS; globe illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (©); Adam Nieman.

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We're sucking our water world dry: 

An interview published in the New Scientist' [23rd April 2016]

Arjen Hoekstra came up with the concept of the  'water footprint' in order to measure the total volume of fresh water used  in the making of products such as food, clothing and energy. There's a great site which explains it all: www.waterfootprint.org.

He tells us that our home consumption of water is only 1 or 2% of our personal water footprint. Most of the water we do use at home is recycled and doesn't count towards our footprint. The vast majority is in the products we consume, especially food. All food has a big water footprint. Grains require 1000 litres per kilogram. Beef on average requires 15,000 litres per kilogram. Hoekstra says:

"Really we need to go to a world where eating less meat is seen as a logical way to reduce the pressure on the environment. This is really the elephant in the room. Nobody's talking about it."

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Not a drop to drink

Staving off a global water crisis requires a formidable rethink about how to value it 

Sally Adee [New Scientist 13th August 2016]

'The value of water is incalculable. All humans are reliably dead after a week without it, which is why the UN in 2010 declared access to clean water a universal human right.'

We need to think about water as renewable resource. We need, says Adee,  to 'consider whether it's possible to contain an area's water inside a reusable, closed loop system, that reduces waste while making money from the stuff that water carries.'

Water purification techniques have advanced: "You can take the worst industrial waste  and turn it into incredibly high quality drinking water" says  Peter Gleick of global water think tank the Pacific Institute. "It's just a matter of economics."

'The most radical vision is a city based on a perfectly closed loop, with water flowing from one application to the next on the basis of the purity required for each. For example, your drinking water could become household sewage that irrigates agricultural fields, whose run-off then goes to industrial use or to enable fracking. After its final use, the water returns to a treatment plant. “Then you treat it all again, and return it to drinking water, and the whole thing starts again,” says Dominic Waughray [Head of Environment at the World Economic Forum]. “But now the plants can get energy and fertiliser out of the water and monetise treatment.”

REALISTICALLY NONE OF US USE NEW WATER

"All the water in the world has been here since the dinosaurs. In fact the water you're drinking has probably been through a dinosaur."

- Ernest Blatchley at Purdue University in Indiana

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GLOBAL FLOODS

Two sets of statistics give some indication of the effect of flooding worldwide.

A 2015 report by the UN, “The Human Cost of Weather Related Disasters”, revealed that, in the previous 20 years, there were 3,062 flood disasters, affecting the lives of 2.3 billion people, 56% of all the people affected by weather-related disasters in total. The death toll was 157,000. 

Increasing Frequency and Severity of Floods

The report points to an alarming trend of flood disasters affecting ever wider areas, while at the same time becoming more severe. Furthermore, flooding has taken its toll on agriculture and food supplies, exacerbating malnutrition problems in poorer areas of the world.

Floods Increasing Across the World

According to the report, floods strike in Asia and Africa more than other continents, but pose an increasing danger elsewhere. In South America, for example, 560,000 people were affected by floods on average each year between 1995 and 2004. By the following decade (2005-2014) that number had risen to 2.2 million people, nearly a four-fold increase. In the first eight months of 2015, another 820,000 people were affected by floods in the region.

This trend has continued into late 2015 where overflowing rivers forced over 100,000 from their homes in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay.

More Lives Lost

The report also says that death tolls from flooding have risen in many parts of the world. In 2007, floods killed 3,300 people in India and Bangladesh alone. In 2010, flooding killed 2,100 people in Pakistan and another 1,900 in China, while in 2013 some 6 ,500 people died due to floods in India.

Flood Events Becoming More Severe

The nature of disastrous floods has also changed in recent years, with flash floods, acute riverine and coastal flooding increasingly frequent. In addition, urbanization has significantly increased flood run-offs.

[Source: www.floodlist.com The site is funded by Copernicus, the European system for Earth monitoring.]

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FLOODED CITIES

This is a map compiled initially from inundation maps of 53 large floods between 2003 and 2008. Each of these floods displaced at least 100,000 people and, taken together, the floods affected 1,868 cities in  40 countries, mostly in the developing world. About 16% of these are flooded in multiple years.

'Urbanisation is increasing around the world... More than 860 million people live in flood-prone urban locations worldwide, and this population increased by about six million a year between 2000 and 2010. Our finding that low elevation locations concentrate much of the economic activity even in poor urban areas with erratic weather patterns highlights the tragedy of the recurring crisis imposed by flooding....In the aftermath of large floods, economic activity tends to return to flood-prone areas rather than relocation to higher ground.'

Source: 'Flooded Cities': Research by Adriana Kocornik-Mina, Guy Michaels, Thomas McDermott and Ferdinand Rauhc. Published in  'Centre Piece': The Magazine of The Centre for Economic Performance. Winter 2015'16.

WATER IS WEIRD

Marcia Barbosa is a Brazilian physicist who has devoted her working life to studying water and its 72  anomalies - physical and chemical properties that are very different from other materials - as she explains in this unusual TED presentation at CERN. It seems that the weirdness of water could help solve our water supply problem by using a mesh of nanontubes to remove salt and pollutants in processes that use less energy than existing plants.

Another interesting physicist is Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington whose book is entitled 'The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor'. His TED talk can be viewed here

LIFE AND DEATH: JAMES DEAN, DENNIS STOCK, NICHOLAS RAY, SAL MINEO

Everyone called him Jimmy.

This post is triggered by a recent first-time viewing (belated) of 'Life' (2015), a biopic of a very short episode in the very short life of James Dean, who memorably died in a car crash on September 30th 1955 at the age of 24, four weeks before the release of 'Rebel Without A Cause'. He never fully completed his work on Giant - overdubs on some of his dialogue was completed by Nick Adams - which spent a year in post-production before it was released in 1956.

'Life' is is set in New York and Indiana and centres on the relationship between a would-be Magnum photographer Dennis Stock and the very young James Dean, who has just completed 'East of Eden', directed by Elia Kazan and is going through the process of being groomed for stardom and prepared for the red carpet treatment at the New York Premiere. Stock is fighting wars on several fronts: his personal relationship, his struggle to convince Magnum that Dean is something special, and Dean himself who is diffident, beat, not willing to follow the rules, cool as hell.,

Let's get this straight, I generally really dislike biopics (generally not as strong as docs) and period costume pieces and films about the '40s and '50s which, these days always means a kind of brownish golden light and people with good teeth when dental practices were still pretty barbaric. So hard to get beyond the dress-up, so hard to make it feel really real.

WOW! 'Life' is the real deal and I can't stop thinking about it. Dane DeHaan is so brilliant as Dean - a truly great performance, beautifully pitched, never a false move or gesture. The warmth, the style, the vulnerability, the humanness is all there in spades. Which is not to diminish Robert Pattison's performance as Dennis Stock, an expert foil, an intensely serious, troubled and determined character, full of compressed passion, searching for that image that will get him on the cover of Life magazine.

There is tiny window of opportunity which Dean grabs and pulls Stock along with him: just in time to catch the night train to Indiana, to his aunt and uncle's farm, where he lived until he was eighteen. When his mum died(aged 29), he was 9, He was sent there on the train with his mother's coffin. His dad was drafted and never turned up for the funeral.The night they arrive and the following days are the last quiet moments for Dean.It's touchingly handled in the film without being either cheesy or saccharine.

Remember here, our director is Anton Corbijn: legendary music photographer for the NME originally I believe, stunning avatar of those U2 desert portfolio pics and now the veteran of a string of movies. 'Closer' was difficult for me as I'd just seen the Grant Gee/Jon Savage Joy Division doc which blew me away; his espionage thriller allowed us, for the last time as it turned out, to focus on the performance of the late great Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

'Life', for me, wins the crown (to date); his career obviously in still in progress). Because Corbjin is a photographer himself, the whole handling of the photography aspect of the film is right on the button. Framing and editing lyrical. And back to Dane DeHaan and Dean. So brilliant. he must I guess have watched lots of news footage and test reels and so on and absorbed Dean's gay spirit (oft denied or camouflaged) lightly, softly. I felt for this first time, this was the real Dean. Like him, I always have a set of bongos to hand.

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FROM THE GENERALIST ARCHIVE

Clips from 1965 copies of Film & Filming, the 10th Anniversary of his death

Dean idolised Brando who had preceded him at the Actor's Studio. They only met once (below) on the set of East of Eden. According to one account, Dean was so in awe of his idol that this encounter was almost embarrassing.


'The image that Dean created on screen has survived more strongly than that of any other actor up to that time and both East of Eden and Giant have been continually re-issued in practically every country since they first appeared. Rebel Without A Cause was withdrawn from circulation some while ago, which, from the point of view of understanding Dean's appeal to youngsters in the mid 'fifties, is the key film.'

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'Rebel Without a Cause was written by Stewart Stern, based on records from juvenile courts, in an attempt to find out just where the blame lay for the alarming increase in the number of arrests of minors. To the teenagers satisfaction, it was placed on the parents. 

'The opening sequence had Dean being arrested for drunkenness, having found him curled up in a street with a toy mon-key. He greets the sight of his irate mother and weak-willed, but concerned, father with a dazed 'Happy Easter, Happy Easter'. The parents start bickering at each other, which builds until Jim screams 'You're tearing me apart! You say one thing, he says another, and everybody changes back again'.  

Juvenile officer to the rescue, and he takes Jim into his office for a quiet chat; though this doesn't start until Jim has had a futile swing at the law in protest for being talked at as though he is a 'delinquent'. 

 'It's like a zoo', he explains. 'He always wants to be my pal, you know, but how can I give him anything? I mean I love him, and all that type of stuff, an' I don't want to hurt him, but I don't know what to do, except maybe die. Now, if he had the guts to knock mum cold, then maybe she'd be happy, and she'd stop picking on him. Be-cause they make mush out of him, you know ... just ... mush: I'll tell you one thing, I don't ever want to be like him' ... 'How can a guy grow up in a circus like that?' ... 'Boy, if ... if I had one day when ... when I didn't have to be all confused and different, and feel ashamed, you know, and felt that I belonged some place ...' 

 

'So it has established that the 'rebel' does have a cause, that he really would like to fit into a happy family, that the parents are one step away from the divorce court, and that the law is sympathetic but powerless.  

'The whole social attitude has changed a lot since 1955. Teenage independence is accepted: most do not have to depend on grants from their family, they can go straight into a job and earn almost as much as their father. Responsibility for their actions is considered to be their own.  

'Psychology has become as tired as its theories. Psychologists still busy themselves with deciding why there were teddy-boys, beatniks and mods and rockers; why there is group hysteria for pop groups. But no one really seems to care, apart from seaside shop owners, because teenagers are spending their own money and it is their own responsibility what they do with their lives.  

 'There is no contemporary feeling in youth that can be expressed in one individual characterisation; no one seems to concern themselves so intently with their own relationship with other people. The real social problems of today are either impersonal or out of the control of the individual: nuclear menace, warfare in border states, space research, science and racial equality—they cannot provide the hero figure that would involve an audience to a point where they could feel they could do anything about it. 

'The subjects have become clinical and unemotional, the immediacy of their importance has been lost in argument and counter-argument, a series of half measures and bungling. The teenage identity is also obscure, they feel independent enough to handle their own problems without looking for an epitome of them. But this is not to say that they have fixed ideas on what they want to achieve in life, quite the reverse. It is more a playing for time, an acute awareness that they are young and that they 'have plenty of time' before they worry about the future. '

Source: 'Dean - Ten Years After' by Robin Bean. [Film and Filming October 1965]

'In James Dean, today's youth discovers itself. Less for the reasons usually advanced : violence, sadism, hysteria, pessimism, cruelty, and filth, than for others infinitely more simple and commonplace : modesty of feeling, continual fantasy life, moral purity without relation to every-day morality but all the more rigorous, eternal adolescent love of tests and trials, intoxication, pride, and regret at feeling oneself "outside" society, refusal and desire to become integrated and, finally, acceptance—or ref usal—of the world as it is'

Francois Truffaut in Arts (26.9.56) 

GIANT

'Had another actor played the part, Jett's story might have borne different implications: in Dean's hands, though, it became a passionate expression of the search for identity which he above all other actors could convey.'

Douglas McVay [Films and Filming. May 1965]

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25th Anniversary of Dean's death. 1980

'Every September 30, with the predictability of Capristrano swallows, the fans of James Dean descend on rural Fairmount, Ind. (pop 3500). This year is the 25th anniversary and last week the only tribute ever formally organised ib the occasion drew 1,000 admirers including actor Martin Sheen. He dedicated a bronze star at the site of Dean's birthplace in nearby Marion and a $1000 bronze plaque that he bought for the wall of Dean's high school auditorium. "Jim Dean and Elvis were the spokesman for an entire generation", says Sheene, 40'.

2005 was the 50th anniversary of Dean's death

*  Release of DVD doc 'James Dean: Forever Young' narrated by Martin Sheen.

"I was profoundly affected by his performance in East of Eden" says Sheen, who saw the flm when he was still at high school in Ohio in 1955." All three of his films had a profound affect on my life and on my work and on my generation. He transcended cinema acting. It was no longer acting it was behaving and it was deeply, deeply personal. I think it led those of his who went into the profession that if it's not personal then you shouldn't waste your time doing it.

* Germaine Greer's essay 'Mad About the Boy' was published on the 14th May 2005. The subtitle read: 'James Dean was the embodiment of young male vulnerability, heroism and torment. Who would have guessed he was gay? Fifty years after his death, it's all too obvious, argues Germaine Greer.'

'In the 1950s homosexuality was so far off the suburban radar that Jimmy Dean could give us all the visual clues, and we would see nothing. He could flirt outrageously with the camera, and get away with it. There was no gay establishment; young men growing up "different" had no easy way of identifying what it was that troubled them or why it was that they couldn't fit in with teen culture of dating and necking and boasting.'

* In 2005, Paul Alexander's book 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams: The Life, Times and Legend of James Dean', revealed for the first time that Dean had had a secret affair with the actress Geraldine Page. They had both received training at the Actor's Studio as did Montgomery Clift and Brando. The affair was, Alexander claims, Dean's only authentic relationship with a woman; other heterosexual activity was the invention of studio publicists. 'Before and after Page, Dean's major relationships were with men.

* Other accounts disagree. George Perry's book 'James Dean' (also published in 2005) which contains a lot of family memorabilia claims he had 'an impressive number of girlfriends including Ursula Andress and Pier Angeli. Dean had taken up photography himself, using a Rolliflex and took hours photographing Angeli.

* 'James Dean: 50 years ago' by Dennis Stock is all the pictures he took when they went to Indiana. In a piece in The Times magazine by Joe Hyams (16th april 2005) it seems some details of the real story differ from the film.

Stock and Dean first met at a Sunday soiree at director Nicholas Ray's bungalow in the garden of he Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. They discovered they both knew the eminent Life photographer Gjon Mili. He had directed Dean's screen test for Kazan for 'East of Eden'. Dean mentioned he'd just worked with Kazan and invited him to a sneak preview at a Santa Monica theatre. Stunned by what he saw, he arranged to meet Dean for breakfast the next dy. Dean started waxing lyrica about his childhoos in Indiana and Stock sad he wanted to do a visual biography of those times, the origin of the actor. Jimmy said he was flying to New York to tidy up some loose ends and was then planning to send a few days at the farm. He invited Stock. 

Feb 1955 they flew together to New York. They hung out and Stock started taking pictures, including the iconic shot in the rain with the long coat and the cigarette in Times Square. They then flew from New York to Indianapolis and then tok a bus to Fairmount

I'm presuming Joe Hyman interviewed Dennis Stock: he quotes him saying at the end: 'Dennis is still pained by the loss of his friend'

" We were both saddened by the end of the week in Fairmont. I think we both knew that Jimmy would never come back home again and that life would never be the same for him there. The trip was really a nostalgic farewell to his origins, his ay of saying goodbye to the past. I don't mean to imply that he felt he was going to die, but I believe that he felt that he was truly on the way to a different life.'

*

NICHOLAS RAY

DANGEROUS TALENTS

When James Dean’s Porsche Spyder crashed 50 years ago, killing the actor just before the premiere ofRebel Without a Cause, his legend was sealed. But the director who gave Dean that immortal role, Nicholas Ray, has been virtually forgotten. Examining Ray’s genius, his loves (including Natalie Wood and, perhaps, Sal Mineo), and the addictions that ruined him, the author recaptures the dramas behind Rebel Without a Cause, as well as the bond shattered by Dean’s death.

Fabulous article by Sam Kashner in Vanity Fair  [March 2005]. I got to know something about Ray through Wim Wender's film 'The American Friend' and the subsequent doc he did about Ray's last months on earth. This article opens many interesting ideas and avenues for further investigation. One of my favourite bits is this:

'Elvis Presley was obsessed with the movie, and he worshipped James Dean. “I was sitting in the cafeteria at MGM one day,” Ray recalled, “and Elvis Presley came over. He knew I was a friend of Jimmy’s and had directed Rebel, so he got down on his knees before me and began to recite whole passages of dialogue from the script. Elvis must have seen Rebel a dozen times by then and remembered every one of Jimmy’s lines.” Martin Sheen—who played the Dean look-alike inspired by spree killer Charlie Starkweather in Terrence Malick’s 1973 Badlands—once wrote, “There were only two people in the fifties: Elvis Presley who changed the music, and James Dean who changed our lives.”

*

SAL MINEO

Daily Mirror. 14th Feb 1976

On the night of February 12, 1976, actor Sal Mineo returned home following a rehearsal for the play P.S. Your Cat Is Dead. After parking his car in the carport below his West Hollywood apartment, the 37-year-old actor was stabbed in the heart by a mugger who quickly fled the scene. Police pursued all kinds of leads but assumed the crime to be the result of some sort of “homosexual motivation.” 

Three years later, pizza deliveryman Lionel Ray Williams was convicted of the murder, in addition to a number of local robberies. Williams, who claimed he had no idea who the actor was at the time of the stabbing, had bragged about the murder and his wife later confirmed that on the night Mineo died, Williams had come home with blood on his shirt. He was paroled in the early 1990s.

Mineo made his initial mark in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, as Plato, a bullied teen, understandably lovestruck at the first sight of James Dean’s character. The role would earn him an Academy Award nomination as best supporting actor and establish him as a major heartthrob to teenagers of the era. The next year he appeared in a small role in another Dean film, Giant. He launched a briefly successful recording career, headlined several motion pictures that played up his status as a rebel icon, and would garner another Oscar nod for 1960’s epic Exodus.  

Source: Queerty.com