The Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet, focuses on Dylan’s early 1960s transition from idiosyncratic singer of folk songs to internationally renowned singer-songwriter.

As a music historian, I’ve always respected one decision of Dylan’s in particular – one that kicked off the young artist’s most turbulent and significant period of creative activity.

Sixty years ago, on Halloween Night 1964, a 23-year-old Dylan took the stage at New York City’s Philharmonic Hall. He had become a star within the niche genre of revivalist folk music. But by 1964 Dylan was building a much larger fanbase through performing and recording his own songs.

Dylan presented a solo set, mixing material he had previously recorded with some new songs. Representatives from his label, Columbia Records, were on hand to record the concert, with the intent to release the live show as his fifth official album.

It would have been a logical successor to Dylan’s four other Columbia albums. With the exception of one track, “Corrina, Corrina,” those albums, taken together, featured exclusively solo acoustic performances.

But at the end of 1964, Columbia shelved the recording of the Philharmonic Hall concert. Dylan had decided that he wanted to make a different kind of music.

From Minnesota to Manhattan

Two-and-a-half years earlier, Dylan, then just 20 years old, started earning acclaim within New York City’s folk music community. At the time, the folk music revival was taking place in cities across the country, but Manhattan’s Greenwich Village was the movement’s beating heart.

Mingling with and drawing inspiration from other folk musicians, Dylan, who had recently moved to Manhattan from Minnesota, secured his first gig at Gerde’s Folk City on April 11, 1961. Dylan appeared in various other Greenwich Village music clubs, performing folk songs, ballads and blues. He aspired to become, like his hero Woody Guthrie, a self-contained artist who could employ vocals, guitar and harmonica to interpret the musical heritage of “the old, weird America,” an adage coined by critic Greil Marcus to describe Dylan’s early repertoire, which was composed of material learned from prewar songbooks, records and musicians.

While Dylan’s versions of older songs were undeniably captivating, he later acknowledged that some of his peers in the early 1960s folk music scene – specifically, Mike Seeger – were better at replicating traditional instrumental and vocal styles.

Dylan, however, realized he had an unrivaled facility for writing and performing new songs.

In October 1961, veteran talent scout John Hammond signed Dylan to record for Columbia. His eponymous debut, released in March 1962, featured interpretations of traditional ballads and blues, with just two original compositions. That album sold only 5,000 copies, leading some Columbia officials to refer to the Dylan contract as “Hammond’s Folly.”

Full steam ahead

Flipping the formula of its predecessor, Dylan’s 1963 follow-up album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” offered 11 originals by Dylan and just two traditional songs. The powerful collection combined songs about relationships with original protest songs, including his breakthrough “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

“The Times They Are A-Changin’,” his third release, exclusively showcased Dylan’s own compositions.

Dylan’s creative output continued. As he testified in “Restless Farewell,” the closing track for “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “My feet are now fast / and point away from the past.”

Released just six months after “The Times,” Dylan’s fourth Columbia album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” featured solo acoustic recordings of original songs that were lyrically adventurous and less focused on current events. As suggested in his song “My Back Pages,” he was now rejecting the notion that he could – or should – speak for his generation.

Bringing it all together

By the end of 1964, Dylan yearned to break away permanently from the constraints of the folk genre – and from the notion of “genre” altogether. He wanted to subvert the expectations of audiences and to rebel against music industry forces intent on pigeonholing him and his work.

The Philharmonic Hall concert went off without a hitch, but Dylan refused to let Columbia turn it into an album. The recording wouldn’t generate an official release for another four decades.

Instead, in January 1965, Dylan entered Columbia’s Studio A to record his fifth album, “Bringing It All Back Home.” But this time, he embraced the electric rock sound that had energized America in the wake of Beatlemania. That album introduced songs with stream-of-consciousness lyrics featuring surreal imagery, and on many of the songs Dylan performed with the accompaniment of a rock band.

“Bringing It All Back Home,” released in March 1965, set the tone for Dylan’s next two albums: “Highway 61 Revisited,” in August 1965, and “Blonde on Blonde,” in June 1966. Critics and fans have long considered these latter three albums – pulsing with what the singer-songwriter himself called “that thin, that wild mercury sound” – as among the greatest albums of the rock era.

On July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan invited members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band on stage to accompany three songs. Since the genre expectations for folk music during that era involved acoustic instrumentation, the audience was unprepared for Dylan’s loud performances. Some critics deemed the set an act of heresy, an affront to folk music propriety. The next year, Dylan embarked on a tour of the U.K., and an audience member at the Manchester stop infamously heckled him for abandoning folk music, crying out, “Judas!”

Yet the creative risks undertaken by Dylan during this period inspired countless other musicians: rock acts such as the Beatles, the Animals and the Byrds; pop acts such as Stevie Wonder, Johnny Rivers and Sonny and Cher; and country singers such as Johnny Cash.

Acknowledging the bar that Dylan’s songwriting set, Cash, in his liner notes to Dylan’s 1969 album “Nashville Skyline,” wrote, “Here-in is a hell of a poet.”

Enlivened by Dylan’s example, many musicians went on to experiment with their own sound and style, while artists across a range of genres would pay homage to Dylan through performing and recording his songs.

In 2016, Dylan received the Nobel Prize in literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” His early exploration of this tradition can be heard on his first four Columbia albums – records that laid the groundwork for Dylan’s august career.

Back in 1964, Dylan was the talk of Greenwich Village.

But now, because he never rested on his laurels, he’s the toast of the world.

This article was updated to correct the name of album “Blonde on Blonde.”

Ted Olson, Professor of Appalachian Studies and Bluegrass, Old-Time and Roots Music Studies, East Tennessee State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Pompeii: Inside a Lost City at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra depicts life in the flourishing Roman city of Pompeii before it was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.

It pictures an ancient city frozen in time, eerily preserved by volcanic ash. It also tells the story of the city’s rediscovery in the late 16th century and the archaeological excavations that have been underway ever since.

The exhibition’s representation of a natural disaster that has reached timeless proportions has the potential to say a lot about the risks and costs of the urgent environmental crises facing humans today.

It offers a crucial opportunity for contemporary audiences to look at a lost city from the perspective of a world on the verge of collapse, but could have done more to consider what this level of destruction might mean now.

Ancient artifacts and technical precision

The exhibition’s main intention is to create human understanding across millennia. “Beauty and fashion were no less important in the 1st century CE than they are today”, says one wall-text.

A highlight for many visitors will be the authentic, vividly coloured frescoes recovered from the site. A wide curved screen plays a montage of digital images in situ near a selection of tiny clay pots holding the remains of pigments the painters used immediately before the eruption.

The exhibition is split into three parts. The first emphasises domestic life before the eruption. The second explores the remains of Pompeii and documents the work of researchers bringing the site and its fragments back to life.

These “before” and “after” sections are connected by a wide central corso (thoroughfare) reflecting the urban plan and textures of the ancient city. It provides a space of civic engagement and interaction between exhibition visitors and the residents of Pompeii.

The thoroughfare leads to a vast projection of Vesuvius that erupts every 15 minutes, giving the impression volcanic rain is falling across the exhibition. The panoramic area relies heavily on large-scale digital reconstructions and soundscapes to bring a contemporary treatment to an ancient story.

But it is more than a space of technical precision. Walking around in the crowd, the heat of visitors’ bodies moving around each other offers a nod to the unsettling and perhaps unspeakable experience faced by the 20,000 people estimated to live in Pompeii at the time of the eruption.

A small alcove to the side of the exhibition holds historical copies of faceless casts of four people and a dog in their moments of death.

Most Pompeiians survived by fleeing the city when the early tremors hit, but many did not. Over a thousand victims have been excavated. In 1863, a technique was developed to inject plaster into the ash cavities left by the eruption to create casts from those who perished. This process has been extensively developed and analysed in the centuries since, and laser scanners and 3D printers now make more accurate casts.

Beautiful, often ordinary

Exhibition designers and curators have relied as much on spectacle as they have on information to create an emotive atmosphere to accentuate the feeling of travelling through time and space.

This effect is not solely produced through media supplementation but by the objects on display – including the terrible casts but also by the decayed frescoes, from which ever-young faces return our gaze.

The excavated artifacts are beautiful, often ordinary: things like tweezers, cups, storage containers and lamps. Other everyday but less familiar items include small, mass-produced figurines of deities included in small shrines in a kitchen space or atrium.

Visitors can lean into displays to consider how similar – or different – the objects and the lifestyles they represent are from our own.

They complement the only existing eyewitness account of the eruption, written by Pliny the Younger:

People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.

This description is presented in large text in a small anteroom that has the purpose of helping visitors suspend disbelief as they enter the exhibition. There are no objects in this room.

The moment of pause it demands prepares visitors to:

Walk the city streets and immerse yourself in both the ancient city and the archaeological site – but beware the ever-present volcano.

Our own at-risk planet

There is a certain irony in being encouraged to step out of our everyday life to enter a past world in which we are directed to find common experiences. This is more a function of immersive blockbuster exhibitions in general than it is a complaint of Pompeii.

Pompeii is a polished, beautiful exhibition about an endlessly fascinating topic that will draw, enthral and enlighten crowds.

And yet, Pompeii misses an opportunity to demonstrate connections between a long dead civilisation and our own at-risk planet. Its approach to building human understanding across time could have been extended to ask visitors to consider how they would react to an equivalent catastrophe or what it might mean today.

We do not need to look far to generate a conversation about crises in different eras: last month, we saw the 50th anniversary of Cyclone Tracy; we are now five years on from the Black Summer bushfires.

These events are featured in the museum’s Great Southern Land exhibition, which shows the damage they caused to communities as well as their legacies. It also features salvaged artifacts with similar everyday characteristics to those included in Pompeii.

This exhibition makes the case that distant civilisations are not too far from our own. But by placing us in a highly immersive exhibition we are – despite its opposite intention – disconnected from our own daily lives, and the true connection we have to the past. This can weaken society’s collective will to take the urgent action required if we are to survive the next 2,000 years.

Pompeii: Inside A Lost City Package is at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, until May 4.

Kylie Message, Professor of Public Humanities and Director of the ANU Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Elder abuse is prevalent in New Zealand, with one in ten people aged 65 and older experiencing some form of it and only one in 14 abuse cases brought to the attention of a service agency that can intervene.

Last year alone there were numerous media reports featuring accounts of neglect, financial exploitation and physical or verbal abuse of older people.

However, elder abuse is notoriously difficult to study. Those experiencing abuse often avoid disclosing these experiences for a variety of complex reasons. It is often friends, other family members, neighbours or practitioners who realise that something harmful is happening to the older person.

Some forms of ill treatment are immediately identifiable as abuse. But elder abuse can also be very subtle, which makes it difficult for older people to pinpoint when it happens and for others in the community to recognise it.

Our recent study explores a poorly understood form of elder abuse known as “cold violence” within the Chinese community in Aotearoa New Zealand. We interviewed older Chinese migrants, midlife Chinese migrants caring for older parents and practitioners supporting Chinese migrant families.

Although participants saw similarities in types of elder abuse across cultural groups, they described cold violence as particularly common.

What is ‘cold violence’

Cold violence is a form of emotional abuse that occurs within care relationships. It happens when the person with more power and resources in the relationship completely and intentionally withdraws communication and emotional support for a sustained period. Cold violence is used to punish people for particular conduct or to limit their independence and freedom.

This form of abuse is incredibly difficult to detect. Other forms of abuse have clear signs. Physical abuse may leave telltale marks. Suspicious bank transactions can be monitored and traced. Signs of neglect may be seen in malnutrition and poor hygiene. They are materially evident.

Cold violence, on the other hand, is open to interpretation. By strategically withdrawing emotional support and care, people can powerfully punish the older person without leaving any evidence, thus maintaining plausible deniability.

This makes cold violence difficult for older people to identify and for service providers or authorities to challenge. Family members and carers can argue they didn’t do anything wrong. This failure to respond to need is what makes cold violence a form of abuse.

Understanding the context

Participants in our study commonly mentioned refusal to engage with older family members.

It’s like they see you but act as if they don’t.

Chinese culture values filial reverence and there is an expectation that the concerns and needs of older generations are prioritised. Being rejected by family is very damaging.

Consequently, older Chinese people in our study considered cold violence as the most unacceptable form of abuse that can happen to an older person. They told us that withdrawal of verbal communication and emotional care was made worse by demeaning nonverbal behaviours, such as looks of “disdain” or “disgust”.

They agreed that being treated this way had a “negative impact on their mental health”, making them “feel heartbroken”. One participant likened it to mental torture.

Experiencing cold violence can also leave older people unable to meet their basic needs. In the context of Chinese family arrangements, older parents who migrated in later life are often highly dependent on younger family members.

They might lack language skills, the ability to drive and knowledge of institutional systems necessary to independently navigate everyday life. In these situations, the withdrawal by family members is a highly destabilising experience, leaving older people unsure how to act and often without alternative sources of support.

Making sense of cold violence

Family carers are commonly under significant financial, emotional and time pressure and receive relatively little formal support for care. However, there was a clear mismatch between how practitioners and family carers framed emotional withdrawal as carer stress and the way it was experienced by older people as cold violence.

Chinese migrants providing care for older parents agreed that cold violence was concerning. However, they saw it as the unintentional outcome of limited time and resources. As one participant explained:

There are old people above and young children below, and their energy is limited […] They have tried their best.

Practitioners also attributed neglectful behaviour to carer stress.

This mismatch highlights the need to understand older people’s perspectives and to provide continuous education about less obvious forms of elder abuse. Awareness raising should extend beyond older people to include family members, practitioners and the wider community.

Cold violence is not unique to the Chinese community, but it may be experienced differently across cultural groups. Regardless of the cultural context, being treated in this way is an unsettling and undermining experience for older people.

We have a collective responsibility to create safe environments for people to be able to age with dignity. This starts with understanding how our actions can intentionally or unintentionally cause harm to older people in our families and communities.

Ágnes Szabó, Senior Lecturer, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington; Mary Breheny, Research associate, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University, and Polly Yeung, Associate Professor, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.