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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

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Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000 years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” , episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” ,  episode 4 “The Reformation”,  episode 3 “The Renaissance”, episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and  episode 1 “The Roman Age,” . My favorite episodes are number 7 and 8 since they deal with modern art and culture primarily.(Joe Carter rightly noted, “Schaeffer—who always claimed to be an evangelist and not a philosopher—was often criticized for the way his work oversimplified intellectual history and philosophy.” To those critics I say take a chill pill because Schaeffer was introducing millions into the fields of art and culture!!!! !!! More people need to read his works and blog about them because they show how people’s worldviews affect their lives!

J.I.PACKER WROTE OF SCHAEFFER, “His communicative style was not that of a cautious academic who labors for exhaustive coverage and dispassionate objectivity. It was rather that of an impassioned thinker who paints his vision of eternal truth in bold strokes and stark contrasts.Yet it is a fact that MANY YOUNG THINKERS AND ARTISTS…HAVE FOUND SCHAEFFER’S ANALYSES A LIFELINE TO SANITY WITHOUT WHICH THEY COULD NOT HAVE GONE ON LIVING.”

Francis Schaeffer’s works  are the basis for a large portion of my blog posts and they have stood the test of time. In fact, many people would say that many of the things he wrote in the 1960’s  were right on  in the sense he saw where our western society was heading and he knew that abortion, infanticide and youth enthansia were  moral boundaries we would be crossing  in the coming decades because of humanism and these are the discussions we are having now!)

There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true as Schaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This link shows how to do that.

Francis Schaeffer in Art and the Bible noted, “Many modern artists, it seems to me, have forgotten the value that art has in itself. Much modern art is far too intellectual to be great art. Many modern artists seem not to see the distinction between man and non-man, and it is a part of the lostness of modern man that they no longer see value in the work of art as a work of art.” 

Many modern artists are left in this point of desperation that Schaeffer points out and it reminds me of the despair that Solomon speaks of in Ecclesiastes.  Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chance plus matter.” THIS IS EXACT POINT SCHAEFFER SAYS SECULAR ARTISTS ARE PAINTING FROM TODAY BECAUSE THEY BELIEVED ARE A RESULT OF MINDLESS CHANCE.

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Francis Schaeffer with his son Franky pictured below. Francis and Edith (who passed away in 2013) opened L’ Abri in 1955 in Switzerland.

Ballad Of A Thin Man

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Bob Dylan looked into the modern thought  of the 1960’s and he saw that the educated class did not have the answers and he was looking for the answers to the big questions of life in his writings. Over and over again back then reporters were asking him what his songs meant. Actually his songs were an effort to bring up the big questions but he did not have the answers. In the song “A Ballad of a Thin Man” Dylan ridicules the reporter “Mr. Jones” throughout the song for his lack of understanding of this new generation.  “Oh my God, am I here all alone?” is the feeling that Mr. Jones has after following around Dylan because he doesn’t even to begin to understand the deep seated dissatisfaction of this new generation with the status quo. Every person that ever lived has had this feeling at one time or another and Romans chapter one discusses the inner conscience that everyone has that points them to the God of the Bible that created the world and put them on this earth for a purpose. 

Francis Schaeffer in his film series THE AGE OF PERSONAL PEACE AND AFFLUENCE  made the following points concerning the young people of the 1960’s:

I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought

II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads to Pessimism

Regarding a Meaning for Life and for Fixed Values

A. General acceptance of selfish values (personal peace and affluence) accompanied rejection of Christian consensus.

1. Personal peace means: I want to be left alone, and I don’t care what happens to the man across the street or across the world. I want my own life-style to be undisturbed regardless of what it will mean — even to my own children and grandchildren.

2. Affluence means things, things, things, always more things — and success is seen as an abundance of things.

B. Students wish to escape meaninglessness of much of adult society.

1. Watershed was Berkeley in 1964.

Bob Dylan also was writing in his music about the disconnect between the young generation of the 1960’s and their parents’ generation. Francis Schaeffer noted: It is called “A Ballad of a a Thin Man” and it apparently was written by Bob Dylan himself. Last time I read you the back cover of the album and I pointed out that when you go to the museums and also in the Theater and  in the pop records you see this same message. This is far from nothing. The very music is tremendous. It is great communication. It is like pop art. It is very destructive and just like the Theatre of the absurd although it destroys everything and leaves you with nonsense seemingly yet when you listen to the words with great care it has made a very selective destruction. Let me read the words.

You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say who is that man?
You try so hard
But you don’t understand
Just what you would’ve said
When you get home

Something is happening
But you don’t know what it is
Do you Mister Jones?

You sneak into the window
And you say, “Is this where it is?”
Somebody points his finger at you
And says, “It’s his”
And you say, “What’s mine?”
Someone else says, “Where what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”

Something is happening
But you don’t know what it is
Do you Mister Jones?

You hand in your ticket
And you go see the geek
Who walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, “How does it feel
To be such a freak?”
And you say, “Impossible”
As he hands you a bone

Something is happening
And you don’t know what it is
Do you Mister Jones?

You have many contacts
Out there among the lumberjacks
To get you facts
When someone attacks your imagination
But no one has any respect
Anyway they just expect
You to hand over your check
To tax deductible charity organizations

The sword swallower walks up to you
And he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
Asks you how it feels
And says, “Here’s your throat back
Thanks for the loan”

Something is happening
And you don’t know what it is
Do you Mister Jones?

You crawl into the room
Like a camel and you frown
You put your eyes in your pocket
And you put your nose into the ground
There ought to be a law
Against you comin’ around
You got to be made
To be wearing a telephone

But something is happening
And you don’t know what it is
Do you Mister Jones?

Something is happening here
And you don’t know what it is
Do you Mister Jones?

Songwriters
Bob Dylan

Francis Schaeffer observed:

In the June 28, 1966 issue of Look Magazine in the article on California the writer concludes, “It may seem ironical that a highly technical society demands a means for mystically exploration and this is LSD.” All of these may sound different. LSD and Bob Dylan may sounds miles apart. A tremendous art work in one of our great museums and the kids in a concert listening to Bob Dylan but in reality the message is the same. The tension is that according to all logic and rationality ALL IS ABSURD, yet man at the same time can not live with this and he is in this tremendous tension. He just can’t get away from being human. This is exactly what Paul was talking about in the Book of Romans and that man really knows about God and he knows about God in his conscience and from God’s external [creative] works.

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At one point in his life Bob Dylan did come to the same final conclusion that Solomon did so long ago in the Book of Ecclesiastes  when he observed the world around him and Dylan expressed this same conclusion in his song “Gotta Serve Somebody” back in the early 1980’s.

Ecclesiastes 12:13-14:
13 Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.

14 For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.

Published on Feb 15, 2014

I have a good friend who is a street preacher who preaches on the Santa Monica Promenade in California and during the Q/A sessions he does have lots of atheists that enjoy their time at the mic. When this happens he  always quotes Romans 1:18-19 (Amplified Bible) ” For God’s wrath and indignation are revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who in their wickedness REPRESS and HINDER the truth and make it inoperative. For that which is KNOWN about God is EVIDENT to them and MADE PLAIN IN THEIR INNER CONSCIOUSNESS, because God  has SHOWN IT TO THEM,”(emphasis mine). Then he  tells the atheist that the atheist already knows that God exists but he has been suppressing that knowledge in unrighteousness. This usually infuriates the atheist.

My friend draws some large crowds at times and was thinking about setting up a lie detector test and see if atheists actually secretly believe in God. He discussed this project with me since he knew that I had done a lot of research on the idea about 20 years ago.

Nelson Price in THE EMMANUEL FACTOR (1987) tells the story about Brown Trucking Company in Georgia who used to give polygraph tests to their job applicants. However, in part of the test the operator asked, “Do you believe in God?” In every instance when a professing atheist answered “No,” the test showed the person to be lying. My pastor Adrian Rogers used to tell this same story to illustrate Romans 1:19 and it was his conclusion that “there is no such thing anywhere on earth as a true atheist. If a man says he doesn’t believe in God, then he is lying. God has put his moral consciousness into every man’s heart, and a man has to try to kick his conscience to death to say he doesn’t believe in God.”

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Ballad of a Thin Man

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“Ballad of a Thin Man”
Song by Bob Dylan from the album Highway 61 Revisited
Released	August 30, 1965
Recorded	Columbia Studios, New York, August 2, 1965
Genre	Blues rock
Length	5:58
Label	Columbia
Writer	Bob Dylan
Producer	Bob Johnston
Highway 61 Revisited track listing
[show]9 tracks

“Ballad of a Thin Man” is a song written and recorded by Bob Dylan, and released as the final track on Side One of his sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited in 1965.

Contents

• 1 Recording
• 2 Meaning
• 3 Interpretation
• 4 Releases
• 5 Covers
• 6 Notes
• 7 References
• 8 External links

Recording

Dylan recorded “Ballad of a Thin Man” in Studio A of Columbia Records in New York City, located at 799 Seventh Avenue, just north of West 52nd Street.^[1] on August 2, 1965.^[2] Record producer Bob Johnston was in charge of the session, and the backing musicians were Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar, Bobby Gregg on drums, Harvey Goldstein on bass, Al Kooper on organ,^[3] and Dylan himself playing piano.^[4] Driven by Dylan’s sombre piano chords, which contrast with a horror movie organ part played by Al Kooper, this track was described by Kooper as “musically more sophisticated than anything else on the [Highway 61 Revisited] album.”^[5]

Kooper has recalled that at the end of the session, when the musicians listened to the playback of the song, drummer Bobby Gregg said, “That is a nasty song, Bob.” Kooper adds, “Dylan was the King of the Nasty Song at that time.”^[6]

Meaning

Dylan’s song revolves around the mishaps of a Mr. Jones, who keeps blundering into strange situations, and the more questions he asks, the less the world makes sense to him. Critic Andy Gill called the song “one of Dylan’s most unrelenting inquisitions, a furious, sneering, dressing-down of a hapless bourgeois intruder into the hipster world of freaks and weirdoes which Dylan now inhabited.^[6]

In August 1965, soon after recording the song, when questioned by Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston about the identity of Mr. Jones, Dylan was deadpan: “He’s a real person. You know him, but not by that name… I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, ‘That’s Mr. Jones.’ Then I asked this cat, ‘Doesn’t he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?’ And he told me, ‘He puts his nose on the ground.’ It’s all there, it’s a true story.”^[7] At a press conference in San Francisco in December 1965, Dylan supplied more information about Mr. Jones: “He’s a pinboy. He also wears suspenders.”^[8]

In March 1986, Dylan told his audience in Japan: “This is a song I wrote a while back in response to people who ask me questions all the time. You just get tired of that every once in a while. You just don’t want to answer no more questions. I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right? So, every once in a while you got to do this kind of thing, you got to put somebody in their place… So this is my response to something that happened over in England. I think it was about ’63, ’64. [sic] Anyway the song still holds up. Seems to be people around still like that. So I still sing it. It’s called ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’.”^[9]

There has been speculation whether Mr. Jones was based on a specific journalist.^[6] In 1975, reporter Jeffrey Jones “outed” himself in a Rolling Stone article, describing how he had attempted to interview Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. When Dylan and his entourage later chanced on the hapless reporter in the hotel dining room, Dylan shouted mockingly, “Mr. Jones! Gettin’ it all down, Mr. Jones?”^[10] When Bill Flanagan asked Dylan, in 1990, whether one reporter could claim all the credit for Mr. Jones, Dylan replied: “There were a lot of Mister Joneses at that time. Obviously there must have been a tremendous amount of them for me to write that particular song. It was like, ‘Oh man, here’s the thousandth Mister Jones’.”^[11]

Interpretation

Dylan critic Mike Marqusee writes that “Ballad of a Thin Man” can be read as “one of the purest songs of protest ever sung”, with its scathing take on “the media, its interest in and inability to comprehend [Dylan] and his music.” For Marqusee, the song became the anthem of an in-group, “disgusted by the old, excited by the new… elated by their discovery of others who shared their feelings”, with its central refrain “Something is happening here/ But you don’t know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?” epitomizing the hip exclusivity of the burgeoning counterculture.^[12] Dylan biographer Robert Shelton describes the song’s central character, Mr. Jones, as “one of Dylan’s greatest archetypes”, characterizing him as “a Philistine, a person who does not see… superficially educated and well bred but not very smart about the things that count.”^[13]

Releases

The song was originally released in 1965 on the album Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan released live recordings of the song on Before the Flood (1974), Bob Dylan at Budokan (1979), Real Live (1984), Hard to Handle (video, 1986), Live 1966, The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert (1998) and on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (2005).

Covers

This article contains embedded lists that may be poorly defined, unverified or indiscriminate. Please help to clean it up to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards. Where appropriate, incorporate items into the main body of the article. (August 2010)

• The Grass Roots: Where Were You When I Needed You (1966)
• The Sports: The Sports Play Dylan & Donovan (1981)
• Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs: Pigus Drunkus Maximus (1987)
• Paul Ubana Jones: The Things Which Touch Me So (1992)
• Uncle Green: Tribute to Bob Dylan, Volume 2 (1995)
• Calamity Jane: Outlaw Blues, Volume 2 (1995)
• Golden Earring: Love Sweat (1995)
• Elliott Smith played the song live on occasion, and bootlegs of his cover exist
• The Grateful Dead: Postcards of the Hanging: Grateful Dead Perform the Songs of Bob Dylan (2002)
• Robyn Hitchcock: Robyn Sings (2002)
• Kula Shaker: Kollected (2003)
• Willard Grant Conspiracy: Let It roll (2006)
• Jamie Saft Trio with Mike Patton: Trouble: The Jamie Saft Trio Plays Bob Dylan (2006)
• Enrique Bunbury
• Stephen Malkmus And The Million Dollar Bashers: I’m Not There Soundtrack (2007)
• Laibach, cover CD released by USA Embassy in Ljubljana, Slovenia Projekt Bob Dylan: Postani prostovoljec (2011)^[14][15]
• Deep Schrott: Deep Schrott Plays Dylan and Eisler (2011)
• Triggerfinger: Faders up 2 – Live in Amsterdam (2012) Live at Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium, for Radio 1 (Belgium)

Notes

1. Jump up ^ Polizzotti 2006, p. 45
2. Jump up ^ Polizzotti 2006, p. 145
3. Jump up ^ Bjorner 2010
4. Jump up ^ Polizotti 2006, p. 106
5. Jump up ^ Egan 2010, pp. 64–66
6. ^ Jump up to: ^{a b c d} Gill 1998, pp. 86–87
7. Jump up ^ Interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, August 1965, reprinted in Cott 2006, p. 48
8. Jump up ^ KQES Press conference, December 3, 1965, reprinted in Cott 2006, p. 66
9. Jump up ^ Bjorner 2004
10. Jump up ^ Jones 1975, p. 12
11. Jump up ^ Flanagan 1990, p. 106
12. Jump up ^ Marqusee 2005, pp. 169–171
13. Jump up ^ Shelton 1986, p. 280
14. Jump up ^ US Embassy, Ljubljana & Slovenia, U.S. Department of State. “Projekt Bob Dylan: Postani prostovoljec”
15. Jump up ^ “Laibach has contributed to a project, dedicated to American music icon Bob Dylan”, laibach.org

References

• Björner, Olof (2004-05-08). “Gymnasium, Nagoya, Japan, March 8, 1986”. Bjorner.com. Retrieved 2012-05-10.
• Björner, Olof (2010-11-17). “Studio A Columbia Recording Studios New York City, New York 2 August 1965”. Bjorner.com. Retrieved 2012-05-10.
• Cott, Jonathan (ed.) (2006). Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews. Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-92312-1
• Egan, Sean (2010-11-01). “The Making of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited”. Record Collector (Diamond Publishing Ltd)
• Flanagan, Bill (1990). Written In My Soul. Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-7119-2224-1
• Gill, Andy (1998). Classic Bob Dylan: My Back Pages. Carlton. ISBN 1-85868-599-0
• Jones, Jeffrey (1975-12-18). “The Ballad Of Mister Jones…by Mister Jones”. Rolling Stone (Straight Arrow Publishing)
• Marqusee, Mike (2005). Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s. Seven Stories Press. ISBN 1-58322-686-9
• Polizzotti, Mark (2006). Highway 61 Revisited. Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-1775-2

External links

• Lyrics to “Ballad of a Thin Man”

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Artist featured today is Fred Wilson

EXHIBITIONS

Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979–2000 October 11, 2001–January 12, 2002 Venues: Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, Houston, TX; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Anta Monica Museum, Santa Monica, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL Curator: Maurice Berger, Curator of the Center for Art and Visual Culture, UMBC Organized by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979–2000 is the first major retrospective of the African-American artist and explores his sustained aesthetic inquiry into the relationship between art and the museum. Wilson’s “mock” museum installations, into which he places provocative and beautifully rendered objects, explore the question of how the museum consciously or unconsciously perpetuates prejudice. The exhibition Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979–2000 consists of more than 100 objects, each configured to recreate sections of Wilson’s original installations. Supported by the Norton Family Foundation; Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation; Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts; Maryland State Arts Council.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Grey Area (Brown Version) by Fred Wilson on View at the Brooklyn Museum

Fred Wilson’s “Grey Area (Brown Version)” is part of the Contemporary Art Collection of the Brooklyn Museum. This piece is comprised of five busts of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, each bust measuring 8 3/4 x 9 x 13 in. (47.6 x 22.9 x 33 cm) made of plaster. The artist purchased and painted the busts, illustrating a value scale ranging in color from oatmeal to dark chocolate, raising controversial questions about the racial identity of ancient Egyptians. He has said of his practice, “I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one’s own perceptual shift—which is the real thrill.” Wilson is an American artist born in 1954. This artwork is on view in the Contemporary Art Galleries, 4th Floor of the museum.

Fred Wilson | Art21 | Preview from Season 3 of “Art in the Twenty-First Century” (2005)

Uploaded on May 7, 2008

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