http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c
How 'bout that one I keep raving about? 'Fearful Symmetry' by Northrup Frye? That's one for your songwriters.
The doors are open, it's cooling off. The Beefheart film was good, except for all the rock journalists. They spoke more than the players. The journalists were much more puffed up. Blah blah blah... I mean, Clinton Heylin actually was intersting for a sentence or two. But I dunno if he knew what he was saying, really.
Jef Morris Tepper, he knows what he's talking about. Gary Lucas. Eric Drew Feldman. Drumbo, even though he was filmed doing his interview in a tree, talking into a telephone. I guess that was supposed to be weird.
Trout Mask. Clear Spot. Bat Chain Puller. Ice Cream For Crow. There's some weird, or whatever you want to call it. One of the most completely original approaches in the history of music. (nothings COMPLETELY original, Beefheart leans on Blues and Free Jazz and maybe Shakespeare, Lear on the heath.)
Starting to get interested in touring again, here it comes, in a couple more weeks. Its been a great time for me to write songs and get my health together. My youngest kid turns 14 this week.
Wish this election would wrap up. Its agony, don't you think? McCain is a baldfaced liar. Not to mention Klondike. If you don't think so, check out the AP fact checking of the speech delivered Wednesday. What a load.
Beefheart, Robert Johnson, Charlie Parker, The Nerves! That's right, the Nerves: coming soon, on Alive/Naturalsound Records, their first full length. Hmmm... and my first, soon to be rereleased with a ton of new tracks, on Geffen.
(I almost said 'Soon to rereleased, under a ton of bricks!' This one was a long time comin'.)
Hmmm.... just rambling... and there's a draft of my book sitting out there on the piano, and I gotta read that, with a red pencil in my hand. Good night.
Sure is quiet around here.
Walking in, the first thing that hits you is how intimate the place is. It seems very small. We walked up and joined the crowd forming around the stage, and were pretty close.
Bob came on at 8:22 and was quite energetic. He stayed at the organ for the whole show, only leaving once in a while after songs to take a little tour of the stage, using that funny little bouncy traipsing walk of his, that he debuted in 'Masked And Anonymous.' The stage was simply lit, and the band was dressed in matching grey suits and black fedoras, which Bob dapperly stood out against, in his black tuxedo trousers with the white stripe, long coat, and his oversized Bolero hat.
I predicted before the show that he'd play Ballad Of A Thin Man, and Memphis Blues Again and he did. I don't know how rare that is, I don't look at the setlists, but it seemed appropriate given the socio-political dramas unfolding around the US right now. He was in good voice, for him, anyway. He played It Ain't Me Babe, and Trying To Get To Heaven as well as the other standards ( Rainy Day Women,HW 61, boogie style, Watchtower, Rolling Stone).
Sometimes his shows are wildly exciting (the last one I saw, 5 years ago) or soporific (opening for Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison at UCLA,) and other times it been like a trip to the museum, but there's something soothing, as well as bracing, about hearing Bob tonight.
It's the reminder, I guess, in a good number of those songs, of how long the world has been tipping above total chaos, and the space has Dylan created in the face of that, to be himself, to live free on his own terms (I'm not talking about stardom here, but the songs.) Albert King idea of the 'blues is to soothe' seemed to be the operative principle in this show.
The crowd was an age mix, half geezers and half under thirty. There were three 20 something girls in front of me, with their Dad, who looked about 40.
Two complaints, related.
The 'Bing Crosby' type material from Modern Times isn't working with this band.The rhythm guitar on that type of thing needs to be a big Gibson jazz guitar, or an archtop like Benny Green layed with Count Basie. That type of 'comping' doesn't work on electric tele, but comes off horribly stiff. It needs to be fluid, part of the rhythm section.
I miss Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton on guitars, and harmonies. That was the best band Bob ever carried. The possibilities were endless. The arrangements aren't as good with these new guitarists, they just aren't getting inside of it.
Tony Garnier and the drummer (who's name I need to get, after all this time) are wonderful. The drumming is big and powerful but swings...
Overall, it was fantastic, 'cause it was Dylan. The songs are brilliant, ring deep, deeper than anything else out there in the last 50 years. What a great artist!
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her Republican supporters held back little Wednesday as they issued dismissive attacks on Barack Obama and flattering praise on her credentials to be vice president. In some cases, the reproach and the praise stretched the truth.
Some examples:
PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."
THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."
PALIN: "There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform _ not even in the state senate."
THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does have a more meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.
PALIN: "The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."
THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama's plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain's plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.
Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families.
He also would raise income taxes, capital gains and dividend taxes on the wealthiest. He would raise payroll taxes on taxpayers with incomes above $250,000, and he would raise corporate taxes. Small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year would see taxes rise.
MCCAIN: "She's been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America's energy supply ... She's responsible for 20 percent of the nation's energy supply. I'm entertained by the comparison and I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America," he said in an interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson.
THE FACTS: McCain's phrasing exaggerates both claims. Palin is governor of a state that ranks second nationally in crude oil production, but she's no more "responsible" for that resource than President Bush was when he was governor of Texas, another oil-producing state. In fact, her primary power is the ability to tax oil, which she did in concert with the Alaska Legislature. And where Alaska is the largest state in America, McCain could as easily have called it the 47th largest state _ by population.
MCCAIN: "She's the commander of the Alaska National Guard. ... She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities," he said on ABC.
THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their state guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual military service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, they assume those duties under "federal status," which means they report to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska's national guard units have a total of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.
FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States."
THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.
FORMER MASSACHUSETTS GOV. MITT ROMNEY: "We need change, all right _ change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington _ throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin."
THE FACTS: A Back-to-the-Future moment. George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, has been president for nearly eight years. And until last year, Republicans controlled Congress. Only since January 2007 have Democrats have been in charge of the House and Senate.
Associated Press Writer Jim Drinkard in Washington contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS wording in facts section of second Palin item to "does have.")
The Deal Breakers are electric, 4 piece, and playing numbers from my songbook, as well as big beat covers of Sleepy John Estes, Hank Williams, Fred Neil and the Nerves.
I'm playing lead, so watch out!
She visits graves of poets, and thats okay, she is standing at the threshold of the invisible world, and trying to talk back... Blake and Rimbaud in a New Jersey, rock and roll accent. (BTW, the little paperback selection of Blake that PS edited is a great introduction to Blake's writing.)
Sam Shepherd makes an appearance, and he sure does have a nice way with a guitar, nothing too fancy, just a swingin' and authentic hillbilly feel.
She puts people in their place, gently at times (the scenes with Flea, and her then boyfriend Oliver Ray), dont fuck with her is the vibe I get, though she's peaceful, and funny, shes also serious as fuck.
The band sounds fantastic, especially on one of the tracks midway through, a song from Gung Ho, I think... just really rockin'.
This was a lot better than I thought it might be. I don't know, I just dug it. It's inspiring. I want to see it again, let me put it like that.
Once upon a time, Hollyway said 'the thing I like about Davido is he does what he wants. He surfs, he fights, he makes it with girls, he drinks, he doesn't give a shit what anybody says or thinks.'
You got a problem with that?
Eddie, also, in his own way, cares not for the reviews of man.
i don't care what you say, don't care what you think, don't care what you try to do about me.
The only one who ever cared was me, but most of the time, for various reasons, I didn't give a fuck either. I was at war with the world, and the whole gang followed. To make a million dollars?To rock the place. To see what would happen.
In the face of that, the songs were not flippant, or nonsense, or trying to be funny. There was humor, in Zero Hour, in some of the word's playfulness. But it wasn't the main event. The songs were desperate, on edge, driven, ecstatic.
Simple. Dumb? Maybe...
' I wish I had a way to tell you/ but I'm boxed in/ busting out/ its a long way back to Buffalo'
So the songs: 'some one to reach you! making up for lost time!' now!" everything's in exclamation points.
The plot thickened on the second one, but it was still exclamations : '3's 7's and 9's!' 'gotta find a magic touch', 'everywhere at once!' ... the oldest story, a million and shaky were a little more conversational.: things are falling apart, I'm a million miles away, that's the oldest story in he world', etc.
In '95 some of 'em still bore the stamp: 'you've got to get away!' 'we're gonna be late!' even 'It's a dangerous book!' 'must of got lost/ halfway home', may be more conversational, tho' its grief adds the point.
I felt trapped in he plimsouls song world, it was very difficult to write them, so many options seemed closed, if I wanted to remain in the style. I felt stymied, blocked, and do now. I need to find some keys to open this door in a big way, as i did when I wrote full service etc.
The inventiveness of other rock and roll songwriters was something I really looked up to. The Fleshtones, the Small Faces, the Stones... some of the work by Vanda and Young. Lou Reed and the Velvets... Not so much REM's words, but Beck I thought was great. Of course, Ray Davies, maybe the best of 'em all, the most constantly inventive. And Joe Strummer, a genius of the genre.
I wish I had a way to tell you a gimmick that could make you hear but living like this I've been buried alive everyday is like the end is near
boxed in/ or busting out? its a long way back to zero boxed in/ or bustin out? as long as i'm living & the lights are still on
You got a way about you and I got myself a lucky dime come with me/ we'll both run free they can chase us 'til the end of time
boxed in/ busting out? you can count the days I'm gone its a long way back to zero boxed in/ bustin out? there's a long way out of town as long as i'm living & the lights are still on
I don't need a destination Once you know you can't sit still keep running an' don't look back their pickin' up the beans that you spill
Beach Town Confidential
I borrowed Jill's Chevy/ said I'd be right back got down to the bay and saw my good man Jack Jack was beggin' lift up to the liquor store up on PCH : we drove down to mexico
Redondo Beach is a fine place to live three hours from the border/ Let me give you a lift when the waves are blown out there ain't nothin to do cept bangin on this guitar and smokin some bu
the federales jumped out and they jacked us all up they took our dope and money and they wanted to fuck down in tiajuana gary vanished from sight the ensenada police came and broke up the fight
three days later we were stragglin left Jill called the peelers and reported the theft Met some bettys on the jetty so we came back and danced once they saw the glory they went into a trance
I Dig What Yr Puttin Down I like what yr doin with that you aint got a clue but you know what to do a leopard skin coat and a rabbit fur hat/ a pearl handled gat/ louisville bat/
come a little closer let me see what you got
when yr old and grey and yr sorting it out.
the cops came in the window/ the gang kicked down the door Gonna have a good time and Friday on my mind...
its all gonna happen tonight: get laid, get paid, a big fight, it'll happen tonight: its all happening! it's all happening! get high, say bye...
I got a feelin' that somethings round the corner/ my numbers comin up/ gonna snap that losing streak... sure 'nuff.
Paul Krugman Go to Columnist Page » Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal Mr. Obama answered the question seriously, defining middle class as meaning an income below $150,000. Mr. McCain, at first, made it into a joke, saying “how about $5 million?” Then he declared that it didn’t matter because he wouldn’t raise anyone’s taxes. That wasn’t just an evasion, it was a falsehood: Mr. McCain’s health care plan, by limiting the deductibility of employer-paid insurance premiums, would effectively raise taxes on a number of people.
The real problem, however, was with the question itself.
When we think about the middle class, we tend to think of Americans whose lives are decent but not luxurious: they have houses, cars and health insurance, but they still worry about making ends meet, especially when the time comes to send the kids to college.
Meanwhile, when we think about the rich, we tend to think about the handful of people who are really, really rich — people with servants, people with so much money that, like Mr. McCain, they don’t know how many houses they own. (Remember how Republicans jeered at John Kerry for being too rich?)
The trouble with Mr. Warren’s question was that it seemed to imply that everyone except the poor belongs to one of these two categories: either you’re clearly rich, or you’re an ordinary member of the middle class. And that’s just wrong.
In his entertaining book “Richistan,” Robert Frank of The Wall Street Journal declares that the rich aren’t just different from you and me, they live in a different, parallel country. But that country is divided into levels, and only the inhabitants of upper Richistan live like aristocrats; the inhabitants of middle Richistan lead ample but not gilded lives; and lower Richistanis live in McMansions, drive around in S.U.V.’s, and are likely to think of themselves as “affluent” rather than rich.
Even these arguably not-rich, however, live in a different financial universe from that inhabited by ordinary members of the middle class: they have lots of disposable income after paying for the essentials, and they don’t lose sleep over expenses, like insurance co-pays and tuition bills, that can seem daunting to many working American families.
Which brings us to the dispute about tax policy.
Mr. McCain wants to preserve almost all the Bush tax cuts, and add to them by cutting taxes on corporations. Mr. Obama wants to roll back the high-end Bush tax cuts — the cuts in tax rates on the top two income brackets and the cuts in tax rates on income from dividends and capital gains — and use some of that money to reduce taxes lower down the scale.
According to estimates prepared by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, those Obama tax increases would fall overwhelmingly on people with incomes of more than $200,000 a year. Are such people rich? Well, maybe not: some of those Mr. Obama proposes taxing are only denizens of lower Richistan, although the really big tax increases would fall on upper Richistan. But one thing’s for sure: Mr. Obama isn’t planning to raise taxes on the middle class, by any reasonable definition — even that of the Bush administration.
O.K., the Bush administration hasn’t actually offered a definition of “middle class.” But in May, the Treasury Department — which used to do serious tax studies, but these days just churns out Bush administration propaganda — released a report purporting to show, by looking at the tax bills of four hypothetical families, how the middle and working class would be hurt if the Bush tax cuts aren’t made permanent.
And when the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looked at the report, it made an interesting catch. It turns out that Treasury’s hypothetical families got all their gains from the so-called middle-class provisions of the Bush tax cuts: the Child Tax Credit, the reduced tax bracket for lower incomes and marriage penalty relief.
These all happen to be provisions that Mr. Obama proposes leaving in place. In other words, the Bush administration itself implicitly defines the middle class as consisting of people making too little to end up paying additional taxes under the Obama plan.
Of course, all the evidence in the world won’t stop Republicans from claiming, as they always do, that Democrats are going to impose a crippling tax burden on ordinary hard-working Americans. But it just ain’t so.
One of my favorite sub-subplots of the presidential campaign is John McCain's continuing exploitation of Representative John Lewis, the civil rights icon and hero. This has been such a strange episode, and I wonder what it means about the GOP presidential candidate.
First, in April, McCain went to Selma, Alabama, to deliver a speech about patriotism and courage--and expropriated the patriotism and courage of Lewis. Speaking at the site of a historic civil rights clash, McCain recounted how hundreds of civil rights activists, led by Lewis, had marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and peacefully confronted state troopers who brutally attacked them. McCain hailed Lewis and quoted him. ("When I care about something, I'm prepared to take the long, hard road.") McCain did not cite any action he himself had ever taken to advance the civil rights cause--presumably because there were none to cite. (McCain had even opposed establishing the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. as a holiday.) McCain, as I noted at the time, was trying to wrap himself in the bloody shirt of John Lewis. Moreover, a Lewis associate told me that McCain had never been close to Lewis, that McCain did not invite Lewis to attend this event, and that McCain had not even informed Lewis he would be making this speech.
McCain had served in the U.S. Congress with Lewis for 21 years. But in all that time, McCain had not established any relationship with Lewis. If McCain really was so impressed with Lewis, why had he not reached out to him? Yet McCain, looking to grab a piece of civil rights history, was claiming Lewis was a leader to emulate. And in the same speech, McCain bashed Barack Obama, who had been endorsed by Lewis, as a panderer and peddler of "false promises."
This was odd; McCain was attempting to sell himself by praising a fellow who was campaigning for Obama. Then the story got more bizarre. At the presidential forum hosted by best-selling mega-pastor Rick Warren on Saturday, McCain was asked to name the "three wisest people" he would call on were he to become president. His list: General David Petraeus, Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, and, yes, John Lewis.
The following day, we at Mother Jones asked Lewis for a comment, and the Georgia congressman said, "I cannot stop one human being, even a presidential candidate, from admiring the courage and sacrifice of peaceful protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge or making comments about it." But Lewis added, "Sen. McCain and I are colleagues in the US Congress, not confidantes. He does not consult me. And I do not consult him."
Think about this. McCain said Lewis would be one of the three wisest people he would rely upon for advice in the White House. But McCain has not asked Lewis for any advice in the two decades he has been in Congress with him. How else then to read McCain's references to Lewis other than as crass pandering and exploitation? After all, since Lewis entered the House in 1987--and even before that--McCain has had the opportunity to pick up the phone and say, "Hey, John, can you help me out with some advice." But he has not done so.
McCain is lucky that Lewis is a class act. He could make an issue out of this and cause McCain to look like a fool. Lewis has chosen not to. But for voters looking for authenticity, this is an indicator that McCain can be as phony as any non-maverick politician.
The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news, like reports of the 10 French soldiers killed by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan and the U.S. government’s imminent nationalization of much of the American mortgage-lending industry, would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
There you have it encapsulated, the McCain campaign for president, an irrational mélange of patriotic swagger and blindness to reality that is proving disturbingly successful with uninformed voters. How else to explain the many millions of Americans who tell pollsters they prefer a continuation of Republican rule when so many of them are losing their homes to foreclosure and the nation is devastated by out-of-control military spending?
The economy is in a downward spiral, the national debt is at an all-time high, the dollar is an international disgrace and inflation in July had the steepest rise in 27 years, driven by oil prices fivefold higher than when George W. Bush invaded the nation with the world’s second-largest petroleum reserves.
While the oil-rich Mideast nations we protect refuse to fully open the oil spigots as payback for our military efforts, McCain celebrates Gen. David Petraeus as his No. 1 hero for “victory” in Iraq. Aside from the reality that victory there is now defined as returning to the level of stability provided by Saddam Hussein, who the Bush administration admits had nothing to do with the bin Laden-led terrorists, even that goal requires the cooperation of our former sworn enemies, Iran’s ayatollahs.
Presumably McCain envisions a more favorable outcome for Georgia, to which he would commit the unqualified support of the United States with his outrageously overreaching statement that “we are all Georgians.” If Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had been in contact with the leader of a nation before and after that nation provoked a war, his campaign would be a shambles. Not so McCain, who is acting as if he is already the elected commander in chief ensconced in a reconstituted neoconservative-dominated White House. By contrast, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been reduced to a blustering bystander.
That military victory in Iraq and any other trouble spot is the key selling point of the McCain campaign is odd, because McCain’s credentials derive from participation in a war that resulted in the most ignominious defeat in U.S. history. How else to think of the loss of almost 59,000 Americans and 3.4 million Indochinese in a war that even McCain has long since not seriously tried to defend. Surely McCain accepted the notion that a Communist Party-run Vietnam was compatible with U.S. security interests when he, along with Sen. John Kerry, led the fight for U.S. recognition of Vietnam.
Wouldn’t it have been grand if McCain, who made his own pilgrimage of reconciliation to Hanoi, would have drawn the proper lesson from that sad chapter in American history—that victory isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be? Or, by extension, from the recent Olympic festivities in still-Red China, where Bush was photographed quite happily near portraits of the once-dreaded Chairman Mao, whom U.S. propaganda had long described, quite erroneously, as chief sponsor of the Vietnamese communists.
We are reminded of how brilliant Republican Richard Nixon was in rejecting the neoconservative addiction to the Cold War that McCain embraces when the late president traveled to Beijing to make peace with the man previously depicted as the bloodiest of communist dictators. It turns out that the various communist movements were nationalist above all else, and when we “lost” in Vietnam, the result was not attacks on the United States, but a war between China and Vietnam.
The lesson McCain should have learned is that the world is a complex place, that today’s enemies may be tomorrow’s negotiating partners—as Obama has at times dared to suggest—and that the neoconservative idea of a Pax Americana is a dangerous fantasy. And a costly one at that, not only in lost lives and blowback from the regions we destabilize, but also in the dollars that American taxpayers must waste.
Thanks to the absurdly misdirected war on terrorism that McCain so enthusiastically supports, we spend more annually in inflation-adjusted dollars on the military than at any time since World War II, even more than during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Vote for McCain and forget about funding to solve the Social Security, Medicare and subprime mortgage disasters or for anything else that truly would make America stronger.
I was feeling just as broke as the ten commandments/ when the earth started shaking like wash on the line/ everything went wrong and it felt like Christmas/ When the power fails the poor will shine.
C'mon darlin' let's go downtown/ I'm all shook up and I can't sit down/ I can't read and I can't write/ but this town's a riot on a Saturday Night/ This Town's A Riot/ This Town...
There's people sick with hunger on the corner of Hope Street/ near a store sellin' x-rated wedding cake/ the Pope drove by and the bums got the bum's rush/ coyotes chased a horseback man in the lake.
The town ain't no cheap hotel/ there's no room to live or let/ this town's a riot it's a jumble/ it's a ride on a mumbo jumbo jet/ This Town's A Riot/ This Town...
Amazed by what you see on Main Street/ linin' up for the goof de jour/ This town's a riot its a jungle/ from the jailhouse steps to your own front door.
In a room with a view of channel two/ wonderin' how much the lottery pays/ watch the miracle workers cleanin' up the wreckage/ like you're waitin' on a month of judgement days.
C'mon darlin' let's go downtown/ I'm all shook up and I can't sit down/ I can't read and I can't write/ but this town's a riot on a Saturday Night/ This Town's A Riot/ This Town...
This Town's A Riot/ This Town...
McCain nearly cried on about 6 or so of his answers. He runs so damn HOT! That's his substitute for well considered answers: just up the emotional ante. This will work with many americans, but Woody G said that thing about 'you can't fool all of the people all of the time.' We'll see.
Obama sounded pretty good. Can a brilliant black man sound reasonable and beat an old white hothead military Republican?
Hmmm...
Record of the week. The 1921a's. Check out their myspace. Really good young band, part of the McCabes youth contingent. It's very cool (to listen google 'the 1921a's' and go to the myspace link.)
"Dylan? He's the best living American poet there is, man!" --Andrei Codrescu.
For the most part, critics and reviewers have always stigmatized Bob Dylan as a lousy poet, advising the public to buy his music instead. When his book Tarantula was published by Macmillan in 1971, the reaction was predictable, and has been ever since--keeping in league with what is expected from that failed-artist class bent on bashing the bards they secretly aspire to be, but can't, for lack of imagination.
That common thought restated for the millionth time, I'll take another unpopular stance: I have never felt a connection with Dylan's music, nor have I felt the urge to worship him like so many fanatics from so many different generations all over the world. Still, there is something about him that I feel is worth appreciating.
Growing up in Minnesota, then going to the U of M (and living under "the watchtower"), I studied the same books Dylan did. I know this because, back in those days at the University Library, you had to sign a slip of paper inside the back cover whenever you checked out a book. And in the books by Arthur Rimbaud, the mythic name of Zimmerman was always there, scrawled in the same ink in which passages were underlined in French as well as English.
Meanwhile, Dylan's popular songs were being played daily (as they are today) on KQ92, and were just as overplayed as the Beatles--because America loves repetition and rhyming just as much as it loves a parade of clichés. The measure of mainstream mediocrity has always been reflected in the most commercial music; ie., the bubble-gum aesthetics of Brittany and the Backstreet Boys, the pop poetics of country western, etc.
But back to those whose job it is to maintain the standard standards of a mass market thriving on lyrical lard: their jargonistic journalism seeks not literary genius, but rather simple rhythms to secretly pledge allegiance to, since we all go la la la in our heads when we walk down the street denying the silence of our minds. Reviewers rarely being poets, though, and hardly ever scholars, it's no surprise they're out of touch with the history of cutting-edge verse.
Robert Christgau was the worst. He reamed Dylan in a New York Times interview when Tarantula first came out, stating that the book "is not a literary event because Dylan is not a literary figure."1 But the thing is, Dylan would be more of a literary figure if Christgau hadn't set the stage for the book's critical reception--which a herd of poetically illiterate reviewers repeated the sentiments of for over thirty years, essentially echoing Christgau's final damning words: "it is a throwback. Buy his records."2
Plus, the publisher's dismissive introduction (in which the editor refuses to identify himself) didn't help Tarantula become recognized as an avant-garde work of postmodern poetics. By explaining that the editors "weren't quite sure what to make of the book--except money," then employing the disclaimer "This is Bob Dylan's first book... the way he wrote it,"3 it's no wonder readers had trouble understanding Dylan's innovation.
Blundering reviewers like Steve Collins then came along and confused Dylan's readership even more by poorly explaining the literary tradition the poetry sprang from:
Tarantula came about after poet Allen Ginsberg urged Dylan to read Maldoror by the Comte de Lautreamont (pseudonym of Isodore Lucien Ducasse) and A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud, both of them nineteenth-century French surrealist poets and writers. Surrealism is a modern movement in art and literature in which an attempt is made to portray or interpret the workings of the artist's or writer's subconscious mind as manifested in dreams. It is characterized by an irrational, non-contextual arrangement of material. Some describe it as automatic writing, that is when a writer quickly puts his random thoughts on paper without organizing them, allowing interpretation on the basis of the writer's total creative output, whether for a day or a lifetime of effort. Others call it art that is anti-art.4
Thus, we now have tons of misinformation informing readers about what Dylan was trying to accomplish. For one thing, Rimbaud and Lautreamont were never "nineteenth-century surrealists," because they predated that movement by half a century (Hey Collins, look up André Breton, 1928, and see if there's a manifesto; Rimbaud and Lautreamont inspired the Symbolists, who in turn inspired the Surrealists, but they never belonged to anyone's club). Also, Surrealism may have been a Modernist movement, but it hasn't been a "modern movement" for sixty years. One can only conclude that Collins' malarkey about "irrational... arrangement of material" must've come from the same place he got that baloney about a "writer's total creative output" allowing for interpretation.
I am embarrassed for the reviewers of Dylan, who note his poetic influences but don't have the foresight to look into these connections. Sloppy research, though, is better than no research at all when it comes to reporters trying to understand the purpose of Dylan's poetics. After all, to fully perceive the fine web of music and meter strung throughout Tarantula, it takes a "seer"--a term Rimbaud used in defining the voyant: someone who approaches the ideal of the impossible through a systematic derangement of the senses--which Tarantula does in conscious dreamlike windings.5
Such perspectives on seeing are alien to most people who have never studied the poetics of Rimbaud, but such lyrical language techniques were definitely visible to the visionary Dylan. He practiced these techniques with a skill and ambition that rivaled Rimbaud's. In fact, no other poet in the Am Po scene has demonstrated such mastery in this department since Walt Whitman.
The evidence for this, however, isn't in the fact that I say so; it's in the assonance and alliteration which Dylan saw Rimbaud applying to his already super-imagistic verse, making it more musically dimensional than anything that came before--thus, putting an end to centuries of rhyming in France by slaughtering sonnets, killing quatrains, and foreshadowing the future of free verse.
Dylan, though, didn't just imitate Rimbaud's syllabic acrobatics; he observed how Rimbaud placed similar sounds together to create melodic waves, then did it himself in a way that is hauntingly reminiscent of Rimbaud's poetic prose. Note the repetition of "u" and "a" sounds in the Rimbaud excerpt below, followed by the same sounds in the Dylan excerpt following that. Also note the "c" and "g" combinations in Rimbaud, as compared to the "l" and "d" combinations in Dylan:
From Rimbaud's "Bottom"
Je fus, au pied du baldaquin supportant ses bijoux adores et ses chefs-d'œvre physiques, un gros ours aux gencives violettes et au poil chenu de chagrin, les yeux aux cristaux et aux argents des consoles.6
From Dylan's "Black Nite Crash"
aretha in the blues dunes--Pluto with the high crack laugh & rambling aretha--a menace to president as he was jokingly called--go--yea! & the seniority complex disowning you . . . Lear looking in the window dangerous & dragging a mountain.7
Language aside, this Dylan passage hardly represents an "irrational... arrangement of material;" it is part of a high-art symphony of allegoric metaphor, fertile with commentary on Civil Rights and twentieth-century politics through the ghosts of Kerouac and Shakespeare via Greek mythology. And any reviewer who can't see this is either ignorant or lazy, like those who fail to notice the same (but less pretentious) intention in Dylan that is automatically glorified in the canonized antics of James Joyce, a "crooner born with sweet wail of evoker, healing music, ay, and heart in hand of Shamrogueshire... googoos of the suckabolly in the rockabeddy... copiosity of wiseableness of the friarlayman in the pulpitbarrel... wideheaded boy!"8
"Inaccessibility" is expected from Joyce, but not Dylan, who chose his name for a reason that his sophomoric followers--who view rhyming clichés as poetry--refuse to acknowledge. The Tarantula's web is therefore labeled "jibberish," as demonstrated by a recent listing of the "Top Five Unintelligible Sentences From Books Written by Rock Stars" in Spin Magazine. Dylan made the top of the list with "Now's not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns."9
It's ironic, of course, that those who claim Dylan is unintelligible assume that his words have no meaning, but it's pathetic that they fail to notice who the "garbage clowns" are. If such bumbling media-mongers juggling rubbish took a moment to consider that the poet might actually be a poet and have some insight into human nature, they might decode the metaphor.
Meanwhile, there's an undiscovered continent of sense to be made from the seemingly nonsensical pages of Tarantula. Because reviewers of music are not authorities on poetry, there's a whole poetic "novel" by Dylan here waiting to be praised for cryptic brilliance. So get past the music, Garbage Clowns, and read the book--but slowly, and out loud, pausing with reflection.
End Notes
1. Christgau, Robert. "Tarantula," Bob Dylan: A Retrospective, Craig McGregor, ed. William Morrow & Co., New York, 1972, p. 390. 2. Ibid., p. 394. 3. The Publisher. "Here Lies Tarantula," Tarantula, Bantam, New York, 1972, pp. v,vi,viii. 4. Collins, Steve. "Tarantula: Poems," Book Reviews, http://poeticvoices.com/0006BDylan.htm (accessed 2/19/2003), 2000. 5. For more on Rimbaud's visionary aesthetics and the impossible, see "Introduction," The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille, Dufour Editions, 1998 (2nd ed), pp. xii,xiii; or Bataille, Georges. "The Malady/Greatness of Rimbaud," translated by Emmanuelle Pourroy, Exquisite Corpse 7, http://www.corpse.org/issue_7/ critical_urgencies/batail.htm (accessed 2/21/2003), 2000. 6. Rimbaud, Arthur. "Bottom" (from Illuminations), Œuvres de Arthur Rimbaud, Mercure de France, Paris, 1952, p. 261. 7. Dylan, Bob. "Black Nite Crash," Tarantula, Bantam, New York, 1972, p. 76. 8. Joyce, James. Finnegan's Wake, Penguin, New York, 1976, p. 472. 9. Compiled by Dave Itzkoff et al. "Top Five Unintelligible Sentences From [sic] Books Written by Rock Stars," Spin, vol. 19, no. 4, April 2003, p. 86.
The media goes along with it all, the idiocy seems to appeal in some big way.
He's got to turn it around. It should be easy: what's he waiting for? I remember wondering when Gore was gonna 'turn up the heat' in 2000. Never happened...
C'mon Barack, time to kick some ass!
About halfway down the Page: a four-hour podcast bio of Mike Bloomfield. Listen in iTunes if you can. There's a ton of great things I'd never heard before, and I thought you might dig it.
Go ahead and post your random shots this week. I'm not on shuffle.
Been listening to Bloomfield, Skip James, and Buddy Holly.
...and Dave Pahoa, w/ Crosby Tyler!