It’s an honor just to be nominated ...1:31 pm
And I know that’s as far as I’ll get, in the 2006 Weblog Awards, under the category “Best Music Blog.” Thank you to the nominator.
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In other news ...10:39 am
Adult stem cells (canine ones) are found to dramatically aid dogs with muscular dystrophy, although the people who only absorb the headlines will just think, “hmm, those stem cells are so good, and those darned Republicans are against them.”
…
Kim Jong Il, the dear leader of North Korea, sent this greeting to President Assad of Syria on the occasion of the anniverary of the Baath party’s “corrective movement”:
The corrective movement marked a historic event as it brought about a turning point in the efforts to achieve independent development and prosperity in Syria.
Availing myself of this opportunity, I extend firm solidarity to the friendly Syrian government and people in their just struggle for protecting the sovereignty of the country and the dignity of the nation and achieving regional peace and stability, while resolutely standing against the ceaseless pressure and challenges of the hostile forces, and sincerely wish your people new progress and prosperity.
Plenty of progress and prosperity coming for everyone, no doubt.
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Richard Wells, who is one of those bloggers who really writes, has an amusing ex-Catholic’s meditation on the feasts of All Saints and All Souls (recently passed along with Halloween).
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Drudge has this today, but support the little guy by buying it here: Larry King Admits He’s Never Used The Internet: ‘Do You Punch Little Buttons and Things?’ Roseanne Barr offers to teach him how to use it, but he just says, “No, thanks.” Well, I guess he’s the one with the nightly TV show and the bursting bank account — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (And sometimes even if it is broke.)
…
Clive Davis blogged on the notion — not new, but recently revived by Tony Blair — that the Israeli/Palestinian/Arab conflict needs resolution before other serious problems in the Middle East can be fixed. Do Arabs have a “genuine grievance”? He received a couple of responses from Israeli readers to that point.
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Also from the blog roll, Charlie Daniels says that America is at a crossroads, with critical decisions coming up, and “It’s time for Washington to stop resembling a kindergarten and to start dealing with the danger facing America and the free world.”
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From Baghdad, Omar says that the mass abduction of Sunnis the other day was directed by the Iranians, who are extremely confident due to the results of the U.S. mid-term elections.
Did Iran misunderstand the American democracy?
Absolutely yes and Tehran is planning and working according to this faulty impression.Iran now considers itself the victor and it will not negotiate for peace but instead will try to impose conditions to accept America’s surrender.
…
On the Dylan front: In a story about a new album of what are apparently remixes of Beatles tracks, Beatle biographer Bob Spitz draws a comparison to something else.
“Once you meddle with something so fixed in the public’s mind you will risk having a failure on the proportion to Twyla Tharp doing Bob Dylan,” Spitz said, in a reference to the musical that is closing Sunday after less than a month on Broadway.
Hmm. So The Times They Are A-Changin’ is now a whole new notch on the yardstick for failure? “Thou shalt not meddle” must be the new commandment.
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Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Google search victories ...7:40 pm
Today someone searched Google for “Bob Dylan John Brown anti war” and found RWB, ranked at number one (this post, naturally). Whether that person found any enlightenment or diversion, I can’t say. But such are the small sources of satisfaction a blogger must gather and jealously hoard.
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YouTube interview — Bob Dylan in 1984 ...10:03 am
Amidst the glut of Dylan-related material on YouTube is a lengthy interview that Bob did with someone named Martha Quinn, just before a concert at London’s Wembley Stadium in July of 1984. That also puts it (… continue reading …)
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Monday, November 13, 2006
Gloomy Monday ...9:33 pm
Steyn’s latest:
For the rest of the world (… continue reading …)
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- Portents
- Leaning forward
- The Bob Dylan we DO know? A different characterization of what Dylan said on election night in Minnesota
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Cookin’ ...10:42 am
Dylan and his current band seem to have really shifted into a higher gear with this fall 2006 tour. That’s borne out by reading the fan reviews at Bill Pagel’s site, and by the majority of the mainstream media reviews too (there are always exceptions in both areas, but the balance has been overwhelmingly positive). It’s also borne out by listening to clips like this one: ’Til I Fell In Love With You, from Auburn Hills, Michigan on November 2nd.
Dylan’s organ sound has come a long way from the auditory oddity that it seemed when he began playing it earlier this year. It’s a driving part of the overall groove here, and he’s playing with a definite panache. He’s also singing with great gusto, and the whole band is oozing confidence, it seems to me. Great stuff.
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Saturday, November 11, 2006
One more Broadway note ...4:10 pm
From yesterday’s New York Post:
November 10, 2006 — PANIC is starting to set in at “High Fidelity,” (… continue reading …)
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The show must go on! ...12:20 pm
But it won’t. After being put down by all the major (… continue reading …)
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Friday, November 10, 2006
Relief ...1:13 pm
All those forecasts about how 2006 was going to be a year of terrible hurricanes turn out to have been not entirely wrong after all. From the BBC: Huge ‘hurricane’ rages on Saturn.
Whew. Now I can go back to trusting experts.
Speaking of which, next time you hear doctors making confident assertions about persistent vegetative states — or anything else — remember this figure: one out of five. That’s how often doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses, according to studies of autopsy results as reported here. Based on my experience of my own (as yet) non-fatal illnesses, I’d peg that number as being about right.
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Thursday, November 9, 2006
Box office gold ...9:45 am
If the paying public couldn’t handle the weirdness of Twyla Tharp making a Broadway musical out of Dylan’s songs, how are they going to react to this: Cate Blanchett “walks, talks, sings, smells like Bob Dylan.”
Blanchett is one of a handful of actors, including [Heath] Ledger, taking on Dylan’s persona for the quirky new film, but the actor insists hers is the most stunning of all.
“The footage I’ve seen of this film is beyond astounding,” Contactmusic quoted Ledger, as saying.
“Cate Blanchett has done such an incredible transformation in this movie, it’s gonna blow you away. “She walks, talks, sings, smells like Bob Dylan,” he added.
As to how Ledger has such familiarity in the olfactory context with Bob himself, it’s probably best not to ask.
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Wednesday, November 8, 2006
Times running out ...6:14 pm
The Twyla Tharp/Bob Dylan musical, The Times They Are A-Changin’, will end its brief run on Broadway on November 19th.
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Godspeed, Rummy ...2:52 pm
He will be missed. It’s been a boon, I think, having a Secretary of Defense in this time of war who harbored no future political ambitions, and so could concentrate on doing the best job he knew how to do.
Here’s one of his greatest hits — this from a press conference in June of 2002:
All of us in this business read intelligence information. And we read it daily and we think about it and it becomes, in our minds, essentially what exists. And that’s wrong. It is not what exists ….
The message is that there are no “knowns.” There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.
It sounds like a riddle. It isn’t a riddle. It is a very serious, important matter.
Indeed.
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Treason ...11:55 am
I’m drawing no conclusions from it, but today, on his “Theme Time Radio Hour,” Bob Dylan made a reference to Ann Coulter. The theme today was “SLEEP,” and after playing a Peter Wolf song called Sleepless, Dylan provided us with a list of famous people who are known to stay up into the wee hours (like Wolf):
Some other famous night-owls include Fran Leibowitz, Winston Churchill, Marcel Proust, Ludwig the Second of Bavaria, and Ann Coulter.
But maybe the most famous are the nighthawks at the diner; the characters in a painting by Edward Hopper.
That’s what you’d call a “neutral reference.”
And any time someone makes a neutral reference to Ann Coulter, I’d say it’s notable. One thing the bold Ann does not inspire is neutrality.
While I’m at it, a couple of people have asked me if I caught Dylan’s “slam” against socialized medicine on last week’s show. I did, but wasn’t going to mention it until I wrote up the show properly, and I’m determined to catch up with doing that for the shows one of these months. But a reader named Mike wrote to me about it today, and so I’ll just quote him:
I was wondering if you caught Dylan’s comment on his radio show last week. He played a song called “Dance the Slurp” that was released by 7-11 to promote their Slurpees He talked about the introduction of the 32 oz. Big Gulp and the 64 oz. Double Gulp. He then said “That’s a lot of soda. Good thing taxpayers don’t have to pay for your health care.“
Mike perceives it as Dylan going out of his way to make a statement, rather than just a casual joke. (Hey, maybe you could call it a botched joke!) Personally, I wouldn’t draw big conclusions from it — I think it was just a gag. The whole 7-11 bit was hilarious to me. A gratifying gag for us anti-socialized medicine types, by all means, but still a gag.
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Post election post ...11:23 am
So, it’s disappointing, but that’s politics. During Bush’s presidency, the Republicans had defied historical custom by gaining ground in the House and Senate (the party in power in the White House always tends to lose ground in the legislative branch). Now there’s been a signficant slippage back towards the way things usually are. The odds can only be defied for so long. Nevertheless, there are certainly some reasons why it happened now, beyond just the “six-year itch,” and everyone will be debating them.
A friend and a New Yorker who had been optimistic that the Republicans would keep the House says this in relation to 2008:
Haven’t heard it mentioned yet, but I think tonight was a good night for Rudy.
Allen’s no longer viable, Romney’s successor got smoked, and the base
will never get behind McCain.To my chagrin, we’re a centrist national electorate and if he can ward
off the slime that’s inevitably coming his way I think the presidency
is Rudy’s.
That’s a persuasive nutshell analysis … but it doesn’t quite persuade me. I don’t think it would be wise to draw conclusions about the 2008 presidential race from the results of this mid-term — though of-course many people will and it will affect the candidates (and I like Giuliani but he has a real mountain to climb). As for the electorate having proved itself “centrist,” well, I disagree. The term would need to be defined, which I don’t have time for — but I think by most people’s definition the majority of the American electorate remains conservative. They simply didn’t have a satisfactory conservative option to vote for this time around, in their perception. It also amazed me the degree to which the Republican congress started running away from Bush almost immediately after the big 2004 win. If the Republicans generally had shown more unity and principle over the last two years, I think yesterday’s results would have been quite different.
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Tuesday, November 7, 2006
Election ...5:44 pm
I hope everyone has gotten the actual voting out of the way before settling down to read blog posts about the election.
If I felt like making predictions about this election, I would have. This time around, I’m just crossing my fingers.
…
Addendum 8:19 pm:
And I’m reading Geraghty.
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