I am so having my Bob Dylan moment right now, as an over-excited Californian might say. I watched the first part of the Scorsese documentary the night before last, and for the second half of it I was joined by my significant other who, shall we say, can take Sir Robert or leave him. She realised I was beginning to lose it when there was a shot of Dylan in the back of a cab as it drove through the English countryside in 1966, the singer asleep in a skintight velvet suit and black shades. This immediately following a shot from the night before of Dylan onstage in the same suit, the light shining through his artfully tousled hair. I started exclaiming that Dylan had invented everything that mattered in rock music, the diction, the attitude, even the way you were supposed to look. At this point she got up to make a cup of tea, wondering perhaps where I’d mislaid my sense of perspective.
The thing that freaked me out (to continue in Californian mode) was Dylan himself, the way he saw himself as a blank piece of paper, a person without history, on which the person “Bob Dylan” was self-created. The interview to camera kept coming back to this: how he’d watch people, learn from them, absorb them and synthesise them. He was like some kind of cross-cultural vampire, taking in everything America had to offer in 1960 - blues, folk, r&b, country, poetry, beat counter-culture - and presenting it back in this coherent, mesmerising package. People kept alluding to how he’d “stolen” things from them - real things as well as ideas - but each and every one of them admitted that Dylan had done more with those things than they could have done. I don’t think there’s ever been a human being quite like him; the only other artist I can think of who so comprehensively channeled his cultural environment into something new and strange was Shakespeare (ooh, get him, he’s come over all FR Leavis now).
Anyway, this splendour was made all the more apparent by the suburban English buffoons booing Dylan from the audience as he rewrote the rock template in front of them. These idiots, with their talk of “selling out” and “commercial betrayal”, are now presumably either retired or running major institutions. Their children (my generation) spawned the 80s musical taste pogroms in the NME and the Melody Maker. But even those idiotic music journalists were as nothing to the smug ridiculousness of the men shouting “Judas” at Dylan in 1966. I hope they’re squirming now.
Michievous, but in a good way, this academic report states that countries with high levels of religious belief are socially more dysfunctional than more secular states:
In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.
Of course, what it’s really saying is that America is socially dysfunctional and Europe isn’t. But that’s probably more about the way in which liberal capitalism has panned out in the two regions. However, anything which says religion is bad for you is fine down my street.
Oh yeah. If like me you’re kind of obsessed with New Orleans and Louisiana culture but know next to nothing about it, check out aurgasm’s guide to The Music of New Orleans. Beautiful idea, nicely put together. Let’s hope it’s a celebration and not a wake.
And while we’re on the subject, I did find something by James Lee Burke on Katrina, on his own blog. Here’s an excerpt:
New Orleans isn’t a city. It’s a Petrarchan sonnet. There’s no other place on the planet like it. I think it was sawed loose from South America and blown by trade winds across the Caribbean until it affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States.
Its first denizens were convicts and whores, followed by slaves, mystics, pirates and environmental idealists such as James Audubon and chivalric soldiers such as John Bell Hood. The architecture of the Garden District and the Vieux Carre had no peer in the Western world. Every antithetical element in the New and Old Worlds somehow found a home in New Orleans. For a writer, the city was a gift from God. Jackson Square was a re-creation of the medieval era in the best sense. Between the facade of St. Louis Cathedral and the Cafe du Monde across Decatur, string and brass bands played for coins flipped into a hat, bizarre people rode unicycles without apparent destination, jugglers tossed wooden balls, and sidewalk artists under a canopy of live oaks and palm fronds sketched portraits for tourists.
Read the whole thing. It’s enchanting and informative.
Cliff Richard is, I realise, an easy target. Most of us would have been content with leveraging a very small amount of talent and an even smaller amount of sex appeal into one of the most successful careers in popular music. We’d probably think we were lucky not to get found out. But not Cliff. Oh no. Cliff wants to carry on and on and on, despite changes in taste, despite the fact that his audience is literally dying around him. Cliff, like his God, knows no ending.
So the announcement that he was ending his recording career took me by surprise at first. Was this a cold, hard dose of reality, a cheery wave to his fans and a chuckle of “thanks for everything, you’ve made me a very rich, very happy man”? Not at all. Cliff’s chucking it in because unnamed men in suits in radio stations don’t like him very much:
“I just don’t have the time to waste making a record that no one will play,” he told the Daily Mail. “As a musician you make a record for the radio so that the public can hear it, but my songs don’t get played. It’s not that DJs don’t like them, it’s that the stations have a policy that says, ‘We don’t play him’.” By way of a concession, he added: “I will be playing concerts until the day I die because I love the atmosphere - but I’ll never make another record.”
Pure, classic Cliff, combining bizarre logic with hauteur and a slight annoying whine. But the purest Cliffness about the whole thing is the fact that he announced it to the Daily Mail, which also often features bizarre logic, hauteur and a slight annoying whine.
Now if we could only get him to give up concerts, wine, Hello magazine and any kind of public appearance whatsoever, maybe we’d be getting somewhere.
Earlier this week, I posted about the US family planning clinic that has come up with a genius way of getting their own backs on the morons who picket them - by opening a “sponsor a picket” scheme. I said then that what they needed was an online form so non-US supporters could pledge. And guess what? Emma from PSPP left a comment today to say they’ve done exactly that. So go and make a pledge to show your support for a woman’s right to choose, and your abhorrence of fat male fundamentalists with too much time on their hands.
No matter what you think about the Trafalgar Statue of Alison Lapper, you must agree (if you’re a reasonable person) that Lapper herself is an amazing individual, and that there is something rather grand about the fact that London is prepared to confront its citizens with such a bold, arresting image of non-conformity.
Or so I thought, until I noticed an Evening Standard headline over someone’s shoulder on the train last night, which described the statue as “repellent.”
Repellent? As in “hateful” and “inspiring aversion”? What an interesting moral position to take. The statue is a perfectly naturalistic representation of a human being. So is Lapper “repellent” to the people at the Standard? Would she be less repellent with, say, one more leg, or a longer arm? When does she stop becoming repellent? And would she be more repellent if she was, say, black?
The Standard is the sister publication to the Daily Mail. Last week, I saw a beautiful Asian woman walking down Gray’s Inn Road wearing a T-shirt saying “Hated by the Daily Mail”. I just hope the person who wrote that article and the sub that wrote that headline lose an arm one day.
From Guardian Unlimited, on the debate in New York between Christopher Hitchens and Adolf Galloway:
Galloway and Hitchens rouse New York crowd: After the debate, Mr Galloway told Radio 4’s James Naughtie: “I think it’s amazing that so many people came and so many people were turned away, so much interest in two British guys debating Iraq in New York. There don’t appear to be figures in the American anti-war movement and in the American pro-war movement that are able to draw an audience, so maybe we’ll have to take this show to the west coast, I don’t know.”
But Mr Hitchens said he was “depressed by the ease with which a cheap point can get applause in the mouth of a really unscrupulous person. When I turned my head - which I tried not to do - it was like looking straight into the piggy eyes of fascism.”
Yet to see a better description of Galloway and his unscrupulous demagoguery - and, really, those people who cheer him. What are you thinking? Are you really going to associate your principled, considered opposition to a massively controversial and bloody conflict with this clown?
This is genius:
Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania: Every time protesters gather outside of our Locust Street health center, our patients face verbal attacks from them. They see graphic signs meant to confuse and intimidate. They are sometimes blocked from entering the building and occasionally they are videotaped. They are offered anti-choice propaganda and free rides to the closest “crisis pregnancy center.”
Staff and volunteers are also seen as targets. We are all called murderers, are lectured to about committing sins, and are told we will pay the “ultimate price” for our actions.
You can stand with others in the community against these acts of intimidation and harassment
Here’s how it works: You decide on the amount you would like to pledge for each
protester (minimum 10 cents). When protesters show up on our sidewalks, Planned
Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania will count and record their number each day from October 1 through November 30, 2005. We will place a signoutside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP. At the end of the two-month campaign, we will send you an update on protest activities and a pledge reminder.
Example: If you pledge 30 cents per protester, and PPSP has 100 protesters in October and 160 protesters in November, your donation would be 78 dollars for the entire two-month campaign.
Similar to sponsoring a runner in a charity marathon, your pledge total can be capped at a pre-set amount, if desired.
Come out fighting, guys. Now where’s the nice web developer who’s going to turn their clunkly, US-only PDF application form into an online process the whole world can use? That way we can all fight those placard-carrying superstitious bullies.
LibraryThing is very nice: a place to catalogue and tag all your books, and then see other users who have catalogues and tagged books you have read. Think of it as last.fm for books, a way of seeing who likes the same things as you and maybe reading what they like as well. Here’s my emerging library. Only three things in it so far, but even Alexandria had to start somewhere.
The full rundown on the redesigned Guardian, hitting a newsagent near you this Monday. And there’s a pull-out sample copy in tomorrow’s edition - which will be the last broadsheet Guardian ever, and will be appearing on eBay before you can say “the resurgence of quality journalism”…..
