Uplands Hotel and Uplands Cinema

The Uplands Hotel (now the Uplands Tavern) was Dylan’s local, where he first grew to love the conviviality of the bar-room.

He writes of how his visits to the pub are part of his ‘provisional rhythm’. It was here that Dylan first experienced beer, which he later described with real passion.

…”I liked the taste of beer, its live white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners.”

Uplands Cinema
In ‘Return Journey’ Dylan writes,
“here was once was the flea-pit picture house where he whooped for the scalping Indians and banged for the rustlers’ guns”.

Dylan’s old “flea-pit” was long ago demolished to make way for Lloyd’s Bank, but in his youth it was one of his favourite places. Dylan loved the cinema for its sheer escapist pleasure, and as a new and interesting art form. He wrote a very accomplished essay on the cinema for his school magazine which displays his love of, and quite precocious knowledge of film, commenting on the films such as Griffith’s, Birth of a Nation, and Zukor’s Queen Elizabeth.

He was later to work as a scriptwriter and originator of wartime documentaries and then on numerous feature film scripts, and one of his last engagements in November of 1953 was to speak at a symposium on film in New York.

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