Stein in the Times ...10:18 am
Writer, actor, economist (and conservative) Ben Stein has a column in the New York Times this morning, contemplating the mystery of inflation, during the course of which he twice quotes Bob Dylan. This isn’t unusual: he often quotes Dylan, whom he has described as his hero. A few days ago I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to talk to him a little bit about his affection for Dylan’s work, and extracts from that conversation will appear in this space later this week.
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Saturday, September 22, 2007
Nashville, 13 years ago ...9:31 am
This past week wasn’t the first time Bob Dylan has played at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. On YouTube, there are a number of great clips of Bob and the band performing at the same venue in 1994. Maybe foremost among them is this spectacular version of It Ain’t Me, Babe.
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Friday, September 21, 2007
Ugh ...9:02 pm
I posted before about the upcoming National Poetry Day in Britain, and how Bob Dylan’s lyrics are being introduced into the classroom for secondary school students across the pond.
Today, the U.K.’s Times has two startlingly dull articles heralding the occasion:
Andrew Motion explains why Bob Dylan’s lyrics should be studied in schools.
and
Michael Gray on the literary Bob Dylan.
Don’t read them.
Much better to look at is this, if you haven’t seen it yet: Bob Dylan turning Mr. Tambourine Man into a miniature dark symphony, live in Tel Aviv in 1993. Click here to go to YouTube or play below.
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A critic’s choice ...3:16 pm
Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, lists the Dylan songs he has on his iPod (thanks to Lyle for the link):
1. Tangled Up in Blue (original version)
2. Simple Twist of Fate
3. You’re a Big Girl Now (original version)
4. Idiot Wind (original verson)
5. Freeze Out (original version of “Visions of Johanna” w/ The Hawks)
6. Million Dollar Bash (unreleased Basement Tapes version)
7. Abandoned Love (live at the Other End, 1974)
8. The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar (live at the Fox Warfield, 1980, w/ Michael Bloomfield)
9. Sign on the Cross
10. Most Of The Time
11. Angelina
12. Blind Willie McTell
13. Series Of Dreams
14. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (live at the El Rey Theater, 1997)
That’s an offbeat (although very good) list, considering that all but two of the recordings (Simple Twist of Fate and Most Of The Time) either are now or once were only available as bootlegs. But then what you pick to listen to on your iPod is not the same as an official list of favorites, I suppose. It’s what is interesting to your ear at the moment. If I owned an iPod I’d understand this all much better, I’m sure.
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More rhymin’ at the Ryman ...11:23 am
Another Bob Dylan gig at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium last night, another guest appearance by Jack White, and another first ever live performance of a Dylan song: Outlaw Blues, in this case.
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“I’ve made footbaths for everyone” ...10:05 am
At the Indianapolis airport, footbaths have been installed. Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, in a video at Hot Air, considers the great boon that this will no doubt be to harried travelers:
“Now they have a chance, as the cool water massages their feet, to dream of better things, better days, of moonlit streams where righteous kings paused a moment to compose psalms.”
The bolded portion is a reference to Bob Dylan’s song I And I:
(H/t to Ronnie; I had somehow missed this.)
Of-course, as Mr. Spencer elucidates, the footbaths aren’t there due to some sudden demand from calloused air passengers. They are there so Muslims can wash their feet in preparation for prayer.
The point, in Mr. Spencer’s words, is just this:
“Accomodation of Muslim demands is the order of the day, and the one certain thing is that we will be seeing plenty more of it.”
By the way, Robert Spencer’s latest book — which I’m in the middle of reading myself, and which I’d highly recommend — is called “Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t
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Thursday, September 20, 2007
More on the Ryman show ...9:15 pm
From Peter Cooper in The Tennessean:
In the first show of his sold-out, two-night run at the Ryman Auditorium, Dylan gave us a sprawling, open-hearted and generous performance. This was his 70th show of 2007, and 2007 is his 45th year as a recording artist. And it´s the year he turned 66. Yet this was anything but just another night on the boards.
There was the startlingly emotional version of “You´re A Big Girl Now,’ in which he´d deliver a line, and quickly cut his eyes to the audience before delivering the next: “I can change, I swear,’ he sang, then he stared us down and growled, “See what you can do.’
There was a thrilling guest turn from Jack White of The White Stripes. White strode onstage, guitar in hand, and he, Dylan and the band launched into “Meet Me In The Morning.’ The crowd stood immediately, as an audience´s polite reverence morphed into spontaneous, fist-pumping giddiness. Two songs earlier, “Working Man´s Blues #2’ felt like Sunday church, but this was a prize fight. There was an epic intensity to the moment, heightened by the knowledge that Dylan had never before performed that song in a live setting.
And there was so much more. Tousle-haired and wired in the ´60s, earthy in the ´70s and rumpled in the ´80s and ´90s, Dylan is now spry and dapper. He wore a black suit, a sparkling black shirt and a yellow scarf, and his legs were in constant motion whether he was playing guitar (for five songs) or keyboard. He led the band – a group that included Nashville multi-instrumentalist Don Herron, a guy who logged thousands of hours playing across the alley at Robert´s Western World – with glances, shrugs and the occasional hand motion, signaling for solos to begin or songs to end.
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Would-be Commander-in-Chief nails her colors to the (wrong) mast ...3:34 pm
Twenty-three Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, have just voted against a “sense of the Senate” resolution that expresses general support for General David Petraeus and the U.S. military, and repudiates the well-known “General Betray-Us” ad from MoveOn.org. Biden and Obama had the good sense not to vote on it (or not to be there at all). Text of the resolution and more on the story at Hot Air.
This is clearly a gift that will keep on giving to whoever the Republican nominee for president turns out to be, and an astonishing mis-step by Hillary. Could it be that she is not as devastatingly intelligent as we have been led to believe?
And the fact that those other twenty-two Democrat U.S. Senators voted the same way is, in my view, genuinely sad and atrocious. Note that they were not being asked to condemn MoveOn.org across-the-board, or to return any donations they’ve received from that organization. They were merely being asked to repudiate one advertisement that directly (and ham-handedly) impugned the character of a general who is currently leading U.S. soldiers in combat. Sure, the resolution can be called a piece of “gotcha politics” by the Republicans. But the results are considerably more stark and revelatory than I would have predicted.
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Interview with the Donald ...2:00 pm
Lisa DePaulo has an interview with Donald Rumsfeld in GQ magazine. The article has a decidedly smarmy tone, and I think that there’s nothing in it that will change anyone’s previously fixed view of Rumsfeld. I did find the following passage to be one of the more interesting ones:
At one point I ask him what the hardest time in his life was. “The hardest time, without question, was being chief of staff to President Ford,” he says. “Because [Ford] stepped into a flying airplane, with no crew! And to come in and be his chief of staff was just a terribly difficult assignment.” It was brutal being in charge, he says, “in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, when the reservoir of trust in this country had been drained,” where “you’d go out and give a press conference in the White House, and if I said, ‘That’s the ceiling,’ they would wonder why; they’d say, ‘Why is he saying that’s the ceiling?’ I mean, there was no trust in anyone for any reason. The environment was just polluted. It was just rotten in our country.”
Harder than the past six years, though?
“Oh yeah. You know, people think now, Gee, isn’t everything horrible and isn’t it terrible? ” But look at the other times in history, in his own lifetime, he says. “I mean, Lyndon Johnson couldn’t leave the White House during the Vietnam War, they were throwing blood on the Pentagon… They were digging graves in my front lawn the last time I was secretary of defense! So you know, everything’s new and everything changes, and nothing changes.”
There are a lot of people who think that you guys are cold and callous, I say, that you don’t hear criticism, that it doesn’t seem to affect you when you see the death toll every day coming out of Iraq.
“Oh.” It’s more of a moan than an “oh.”
Why is that?
“Probably ignorance.”
But it has to affect you.
“Oh.” The moan again. “Off the record … ” And he tells a story that, frankly, should be on the record. It’s personal and pretty heart-wrenching, the kind of thing that people who despise Donald Rumsfeld might be surprised to hear.
Why do you want this off the record?
“I just do. I don’t like to talk about myself.”
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A gem at the Ryman ...10:50 am
Last night’s gig at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville is said to have been a great one. It featured what is apparently the first ever live performance of Meet Me in the Morning, with the White Stripes’ Jack White guesting on guitar and vocals.
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Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Love songs ...4:18 pm
At First Things, there’s an interesting piece by Matthew J. Milliner which takes stock of recent scholarship on the subject of sexual imagery used by medieval mystics.
…
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HELLO ...11:23 am
Bob Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” returned to XM Satellite Radio today, with a show organized around the theme of “Hello.” (… continue reading …)
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Bob Dylan: “A sort of rallying point” ...9:26 am
At Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, they’re looking forward to Dylan’s October 16th gig (backed by Elvis Costello and Amos Lee) at the Nutter Center, according to student newspaper, The Guardian Online.
The event presents more than an opportunity for members of the community to see a concert; it will bring artists of “iconic” status who have produced music that has impacted society and culture to the Dayton area, according to David Baxter, communication professor.
Bob Dylan was “at the vanguard of folk music’s protest genre” during a time when the U.S. was teeming with political turmoil as an anti-establishment movement rallied around the civil rights movement and American involvement in Vietnam, according to Baxter.
Songs such as “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Times are A-Changing” [sic] were among the first to address these issues, forever making the name Bob Dylan synonymous with the social movement and controversy that swirled around the 60’s.
“Bob Dylan’s music came at a time when there was a lot going on in America. He was at the forefront of writing songs with a social conscious [sic] that were used as a sort of rallying point for several causes and movements,” said Baxter.
Oh well. Leaving all that aside, what about the following? Lines like this appear in a lot of articles on Dylan’s upcoming tour:
Dylan is touring to support the October release of a three-disc, 51 track career retrospective bearing the simple title, “Dylan,” the 45th album of his career, which spans five decades.
Why do people keep insisting that Dylan is touring to promote Sony’s newest “best of” collection of his music? The guy has been doing over a hundred gigs a year for the better part of the last twenty years. The current tour is, self-evidently, business-as-usual.
He just has to get himself out there, or else all those rallies will have no point.
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Tuesday, September 18, 2007
AfghaniVan ...7:40 pm
Thanks to Justin for the link to this video of “American soldiers and Afghan locals singing Brown-Eyed Girl” (the Van Morrison song).
Well, sort-of!
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Dummies ...5:12 pm
Thanks to Greg for the link to an article in Slate, looking at a recent study which supposedly demonstrates that political conservatives have brains which are less able to effectively process new information as compared with liberals (at least that’s my summation, based on Slate’s summation). This apparently argues in favor of liberals being smarter people.
The logical next step would be to come up with a drug to compensate for this odd inadequacy in the cerebrums of conservatives. All in all, it would surely be best to diagnose the condition as early as possible and start administering the corrective medication in kindergarten or in the lower grades. Do I sound paranoid? I guess. It probably goes hand in hand with my other brain dysfunctions. Yet, with the way in which we’ve seen a lot of early childhood behavior become clinicized and pharmacologized in recent years, maybe it’s not so far-fetched. At least we know which way Barry Manilow would come down on the issue. “Drug ’em up before they get dangerous, like that Elisabeth Hasselbeck chick! She terrifies me!”
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