Been a little busy lately, which is my excuse for the dearth of posts. But some quickies worth noting down:

The NY Post gives away something called “Page Six Magazine” on Sundays. As far as I can divine, much of the content therein is not available online. It’s an extension of their famous/notorious daily gossip page. On page 11 of last Sunday’s edition was an item headed “What about Bob?” which went like this:

Cate Blanchett may have an Oscar nomination in I’m Not There, but she and the rest of the cast already received something better — a handwritten thank-you note from Bob Dylan. “Bob was really touched by the film,” says a source at the production company. “Since he felt that Hayden Christensen misrepresented him in Factory Girl, he wrote a thank-you note to everyone involved in this movie, letting them know he approved.” We wonder if it’ll carry any weight with the Academy …

An unnamed “source at the production company,” so make of it what you will. While I’d be surprised if Bob Dylan really much enjoyed the film, I wouldn’t be too surprised at the gracious gesture. He did, after all, grant all-encompassing permission for the film to be made, and, while you can say many things about the finished product, I don’t think you could call it mean-spirited, and that counts for a great deal.

…

Is Suze Rotolo’s forthcoming book, “A Freewheelin’ Time,” going to be a poisoned Valentine? Well, I previously mentioned the negative kinds of excerpts that have been leaked. I really don’t know what overall impression the book will leave, because I haven’t read it, and in all probability I never will. Other people’s love lives don’t particularly interest me. (I mean, this is about two people who dated for a little while about 45 years ago!) But the excerpts alone have been spun by some in an even more negative manner than they originally sounded, and that interests me a little more. Like this piece:

Rock legend Bob Dylan’s ex-girlfriend Suze Roloto [sic] has criticised him heavily in her biography, calling him vain and a liar.

[...]

The 64-year-old Roloto[sic] writes: “Much time was spent in front of the mirror trying on one wrinkled article of clothing after another, until it all came together to look as if Bob had just gotten up and thrown something on. Image was all.”

She also revealed that he lied about his childhood including “the sad story he told of being abandoned at a young age in New Mexico and then going to live with a travelling circus”.

“Vain and a liar.” Well, number one, the revelation that he made up stories about his past is no revelation at this point — I think it’s been widely known for over 40 years — and, really, does this stuff actually interest or matter to anyone? Dylan ran away to New York and reinvented himself. We know it. So what?

As for him being “vain” (a word which “Roloto” doesn’t use in the quoted text): Are the people who made this characterization aware that Bob Dylan was and is a performer? Yes, image matters, whether you’re playing for quarters on a street corner or headlining at Madison Square Garden. Dylan has always — very conspicuously, I think — dressed and presented himself in a quite deliberate way which has regularly changed as the years have gone by. It’s part of his thing. You can say a lot about it, if you care to, but I really don’t think you can call it vanity.

…

No Dylan content, as they say: The pseudonymous Spengler has a hard-hitting column prompted largely by the recent remarkable remarks of the Archbishop of Canterbury welcoming the idea of sharia law in Britain. It is headlined as “Europe in the house of war.”

Violence is oozing through the cracks of European society like pus out of a broken scab. Just when liberal opinion congratulated itself that Europe had forsaken its violent past, the specter of civil violence has the continent terrified. That is the source of the uproar over a February 7 speech by Archbishop Rowan Williams, predicting the inevitable acceptance of Muslim sharia law in Great Britain.

Not since World War II has British opinion been provoked to the present level of outrage. Writing in the Times of London, the editor of the London Spectator, Matthew d’Ancona, quoted former British Conservative parliamentarian Enoch Powell’s warning that concessions to alien cultures would cause “rivers of blood” to flow in the streets of England. Times columnist Minette Marin accuses the archbishop of treason.

[...]

Williams’ exercise in what might be termed the Higher Hypocrisy shows how deeply Europe has descended into the Dar al-Harb, or the “House of War” in the Muslim terms for all that lies outside the “house of submission”, or Dar al-Islam. Europe’s governments refuse to rule, that is, refuse to enforce their own laws because they fear violence on the part of Muslim immigrant communities who refuse to accept these laws. “No-go” zones proliferate that non-Muslims dare not enter. In the United Kingdom, according to evidence presented by respected journalists and public-interest organizations, Muslim community organizations, Muslim police officers and medical personnel collaborate to stop women from escaping domestic violence.

The erring spiritual leader of the Church of England persuades me that Europe’s Man of Destiny is the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who for two years has lived in hiding under constant police protection for the crime of criticizing Islam. It is a measure of the degradation of Europe’s body politic that is only one means to expose the motives of Williams and his ilk, namely to draw fire from Muslims who overtly threaten violence against any public figure who questions the authority of Islam.

Contrary to his critics, Wilders is not provoking violence. The violence is already there, a matter of workaday fact in Muslim enclaves throughout Europe. In an act of great personal courage, Wilders is enticing violent elements out of the tall grass in order to expose them to public opprobrium.

Worth a complete read.

…

And continuing the Valentine’s week theme, thanks to Rich for the tip to read Mark Steyn’s latest “Song of the Week” column: My Funny Valentine. It’s a superb piece, standing as an informative and poignant tribute to the song, to the art of song, and to the genuinely brilliant and tragic lyricist Lorenz Hart.

…

Left wing, right wing, up wing and down wing: how to define these terms is a never-ending and ultimately futile chore. But I think it’s worth reading a reflection by Richard John Neuhaus on the subject, taking as his launching point a recent essay by Jon A. Shields. Neuhaus’s piece is called Ironies in the Fire.

What is left and what is right? What conservative and liberal? How odd that more than two hundred years later we still use the terminology of the battling factions of the French Revolution. In the last few years, the terminology has been challenged by the distinction between red states and blue states, but this is almost certainly an ephemeral fashion. As is the substitution of “progressive” for “liberal.”

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• Europe During the War
• Or not?
• Speaking of Frank