More lazy programming from the BBC with its 'tributes' to Bob around his 80th birthday with two items late last night the ever fascinating but maybe for fans only, film of 'Masked & Anonymous' what 'Tarantula' is to literature M&A is to film! but this time is really dragging the bottom of the barrel in exploring the delusional sociopath Alan Jules Weberman and his pointless obsession
Devoting a documentary to this one man is like interviewing Wordsworth's postman or Philip Larkin's grocer! Actually that is flattering to Weberman, he is merely yet another irrelevant fan with a level of social dysfunction the only notable unique aspect that separates him from the rest of us. If it weren't so staggeringly sad it would be funny and sort of is between the takes, not least with Aaron 'Pieman' Kay and David Peel and A.J hisself and his staggering elephantine ego. All indicative as to what a lifelong commitment to drug use and fandom combined leads to the road of delusional madness! Weberman seriously believes he has influenced Dylan and operates as his Verlaine to Dylan's Rimbaud (sic) which is as about as delusional as fandom is possible to get! You nearly feel sorry for him.
Closing quotations at the end of this useless exploration and his ahem, somewhat unique take on song interpretation, leads Weberman to reveal that Bob's use of a reference in a discarded lyric of the phrase 'sack time' as a reference to heroin! Common parlance idioms become transformed into one man's deluded hallucination, he cites John Wesley Harding's 'Down Along The Cove' as proof of this reference as it is well known (sic) that 'my little bundle of joy' is a drug reference also as a "'bundle' is 12 bags of heroin" reference!!! You couldn't make this stuff up . . . . . oh wait!
If you spend any time with Weberman's printed output on Dylan you truly realise how delusion becomes quasi-rational in that it only contains some internal logic if you are familiar with drug use and hallucination. It all means less than nothing
As documentaries go chronicling the life, pathetic times and criminal behaviour (he is a convicted drug dealer) of notorious Bob Dylan obsessive and 'garbology' inventor AJ Weberman. the Beeb say "It's an irreverent and witty exploration into one man's obsessions" [no it really isn't!], the boho life lived in squalor on the Lower East Side with David Peel et al the dregs of New York fringes and a uniquely twisted take on the American dream turned indigestible nightmare. It is as close to pointless as it is possible to get while somehow retaining a smidgeon of car crash TV tantalisation that anyone could be quite that stupid.
Bob Dylan once said 'I don't think I'm gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now'. You could see how Dylan might have ended up thinking this after his torrent of idiotic brushes with the media after endless interviews with 'Mr Jones' but Bob we get it. Most fans who spare any time understand full well that you are singing about the human condition and of course we love your poetic exlorations of the human clay in all its wonder.
Weberman however is author of the 'Dylan To English Dictionary', a 'Dylanologist' so called and originator of 'garbology' (the practice of rooting through people's discarded rubbish in order to gain insight into prominent people's lives), Weberman has made it his life's work to try to understand Dylan.
At times both hilarious and disturbing, the film is not only a bizarre companion piece to Scorsese's 'No Direction Home' but an interesting observation on our collective unbalanced desires to know more about celebrities and how far we are willing to go to get that information or even become a part of their lives. Mark Chapman isn't far from our thoughts here
Weberman does not see himself as a stalker (he is!) and insists that Dylan should be grateful that he is around: 'how was I to know I would have become to Dylan what Verlaine was to Rimbaud'. It's hard to see this as a tale of poet and critic, but rather a look at the bizarre relationship between the obsessed and the object of his obsession and how it can completely take over a man's life with nothing better to do as he and his cohorts are largely unemployable in any other productive walk of life
Beginning in the 1960s when Dylan was at the height of his early fame and regarded as something close to a prophet or a seer by the American counter-culture, Weberman has sought to try and climb inside Dylan's head by going through his rubbish. Back then he pursued his obsession relentlessly.There is the truly saddest moment in the film where he goes to his brother-in-laws house where his "secret archive" collection of Dylan garbage is 'housed' under lock and key when he finds a file in a small card box of the remnants containing such little of scant interest the pathos is truly revealed with a collection of shopping receipts from Sara Dylan a couple of meaningless and literally throw away typed lyric remnants which signify well, if not quite nothing, then certainly next to!
A semi-amusing telephone conversation between Weberman and Dylan, recorded in the 1970s, punctuates the film in the form of animations, creating connections between Weberman's past and present.
The film also features an unforgettable cast of supporting characters close to Weberman, including New York street singer David Peel, former child dancer Jay Byrd and former Yippie Aaron Kay aka 'The Pieman', and enjoys a vividly amateurish Americana soundtrack performed by cast members, adding an extra thin veneer of strangeness to Weberman and his exsanguinated and meaningless universe.
"I got a mixed up confusion and man, it's a killing me!"
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