Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 73: making an entrance, fellow travellers, taps

Happy end of the week, y’all. Auntie Shelagh and I are back from a short holiday to Oklahoma. The things from a good vacation come back with you. I remain grateful for the chance to have passed through the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa. And, so, this week, it’s Bob Week:

                        

1. Making an entrance

I walked in the door of the Bob Dylan Center and was met by a giant, wall-mounted photo of the artist as a young man that stands next to a 16-foot, floor-to-ceiling metal gate welded by Dylan an old man. I was greeted by a security guard. I was aware of being at a border. It was worth lingering there. Borders are where gates open and close and where officers stand and scan. Borders are in-between places where traffic flows back and forth. Besides guards, borders have long attracted other characters. The cultural critic Lewis Hyde calls them tricksters. Tricksters, Hyde says, love to hang around doorways. It’s where opportunity knocks. Doorways, borders, gates and loopholes are openings for what is new to sneak into the world, sometimes under the noses of the uniformed cultural guardians on watch to prevent their passage. 

These portal places can crackle with excitement and electricity, like a highway of traffic at night. Like the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when, infamously, Dylan plugged his guitar into an amplifier and left behind his pure acoustic sound and self-righteous fans. “Gates appeal to me,” reads a quotation from Dylan on a label next to the gate sculpture. “They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow.” Gates, Dylan appears to be saying, deal in renewal and refreshment. They themselves are places where times change. 

“Take a look at the bottom of the sculpture,” the security guard said, “it’s signed by Dylan himself.” The sculpture is a self-portrait, I thought. Dylan is a tradesman who has crafted himself as a gate for us. I know through him I have passed into different worlds. 

2. Fellow travellers 

The main room on the main floor of the Bob Dylan Center is ringed by a timeline of his career highlights.There’s a jukebox programmed by Elvis Costello. There are videos that celebrate the folk and blues influences on Dylan’s music. There’s a re-created music studio that let me and Auntie Shelagh listen to how different Dylan songs took shape in the recordings, including Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door. “This one we might think of something different on,”  Dylan is heard to say to who? a producer? himself? as the studio tape rolled. 

Most of the main floor is devoted to six of his iconic songs: Chimes of Freedom, Like a Rolling Stone, The Man in Me, Not Dark Yet, Tangled Up In Blue and Jokerman. We could hear the songs, hear different versions of the songs, watch the pen-and-paper lyrics on their way to the final, for now, versions. 

There are production notes and memorabilia tied to each song. I’ve never been particularly moved by textiles, but his leather jacket from the 1965 New-port folk festival was pretty cool. Hermes would have worn it to Greek mythology class. The joint in “heading for another joint” from Tangled Up in Blue struck me for the first time as the device that gives a gate its flexibility, like a hinge. There’s some connection between the laughter in I Pity The Poor Immigrant, 1967, and the laughter in Jokerman, 1984. And so on. 

It’s easy to get drawn into the artifice and artifacts of each song, there under glass. What I found most moving, though, was the view of the main room from the entranceway, back a few steps where the pillars marking each song could be taken in as a group. I saw them as road signs for travellers—arrival signs, departure signs.

3. Taps 

Thanks to our Tulsa friend David, who is good at making these things happen, we met Steven Jenkins, who is the executive director of the Bob Dylan Center, over lunch at The Tavern in the city’s arts district. I had the tomato bisque and grilled cheese for a touch of lunch at home while watching The Flintstones. The road makes you nostalgic. Which is not the item. 

Steven said that artists register their unique perceptions of the world through their own media—dance, film, visual art, poetry, music. (That word itself—media—is from the modern Latin phrase tunica (or membrana) media, which means middle sheath or layer, which returns us to things in between, like gates and leather jackets. The media of giants like Dylan operate at an extraordinarily high level, he said, but we all carry residue of the pulverized creative instinct. 

“Without being condescending about it or cheapening the rigor that goes into it, I do hope that visitors come in, see Dylan, learn more about his life and work and appreciate his creative instinct and, perhaps, tap into their own,” he said.

“I don’t think I’m capable of writing Series of Dreams or Murder Most Foul, but, you know, in my own way, I’ve struggled to find a way to say things that I am thinking and feeling, to express thanks, and I would like the Dylan Center to instill in visitors that it’s worthwhile to take the time to do that, to make space and to make room in our complex world to think about one’s own self-expression.”

I feel this is what the Bob Dylan Center on Reconciliation Way in Tulsa, Oklahoma, does. It tells the story of the generation of a voice. That’s a lesson worth letting in.
 
The highlight of Three Things, episode 73 [5:59] is the voice of Steven Jenkins at The Tavern. The original music is by Edmonton composer Brendan McGrath. The end bells are courtesy of Slavo Cech, Edmonton’s metal sculptor, who knows about making an entrance back home.