Here's Barack Obama getting it wrong about Bob Dylan's place of birth, and being tacky enough to mention U2, but being a genuine enthusiast. And here's Bob, wearing dark glasses indoors, and being minimalist:
KURT VONNEGUT ON CINDERELLA & WRITING
This chart, devised by Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), is his stripdown of the ideal story plot, shown by deconstructing Cinderella. And much more useful than the advice he offered in his 2005 memoir A Man Without A Country:
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
But he's a very quotable writer, and this is one sample bite from among the hundreds you'll find online to save you the trouble of reading his books. It comes from his 1990 novel Hocus Pocus :
“Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."
NOT SAVING BUT DRONING
While western leaders pretend to debate whether economies should cut back or spend to achieve growth, it's worth remembering how much they spend on “defence" (ie. arms) regardless.
And when the complaint is that much of this phenomenal expenditure is wasted on projects that come to nothing (as if the rest is value for money) there are always a happy few who don't complain. Naturally, these people tend to be close to the politicians responsible for the budgets.
And when the complaint is that much of this phenomenal expenditure is wasted on projects that come to nothing (as if the rest is value for money) there are always a happy few who don't complain. Naturally, these people tend to be close to the politicians responsible for the budgets.
Here's an excerpt from Andrew Cockburn's
excellent and painstaking piece on Obama’s remote-controlled wars - in this section tracking how one three-star general came to rake it in thanks to drones that don't work properly. It comes from the London Review of Books (Vol. 34, no.5; March 8, 2012)
“In the first Gulf War, US military technology was more successful, indeed it seemed to function flawlessly. TV images relayed from cameras mounted on bombs as they homed in on their targets turned the war into a spectator sport, and the swift victory did much to dispel memories of Vietnam. A coterie of airforce officers who’d helped plan the bombing campaign – notably an ambitious lieutenant colonel called David Deptula – saw the victory as proof of the virtues of what they called ‘Effects Based Operations’. Advances in technology, they reported, meant that the US could locate strategic targets and destroy them with absolute precision.
“... Deptula made no secret of his desire to turn the entire business over to remote control as soon as possible. The technicians operating drones from US soil, he told an interviewer, were ‘very comfortable with the responsibilities of finishing the kill chain when called upon to do so’. He retired from the air force as a three-star general in 2010 and became chief executive of MAV 6, a company describing itself as a provider of ‘enhanced situational understanding’ of battlefields. MAV 6 now has a $211 million contract to develop Blue Devil Block 2, an unmanned airship 350 feet long that will carry automated intelligence collection systems capable of intercepting and tracing a high-value target’s mobile phone, recording video of his location, and relaying that information to drone operators. Hovering four miles above Afghanistan for days at a time, Blue Devils will cover huge areas and transmit enormous quantities of digitised images back to the US – the daily equivalent, according to Deptula’s airforce successor, of ‘53,000 full-length feature movies’.
“The Gorgon Stare surveillance system, which is destined to be carried by the Blue Devils, was developed at a cost of $500 million and can supposedly keep cars and people across an entire city under constant video surveillance. Civil libertarians, apprehensive about the expansion of the ‘surveillance state’, have objected to its being deployed inside the US. But a December 2010 report by a specialised airforce testing unit in Florida suggests they have little cause for worry. Gorgon Stare’s camera images could not distinguish humans from bushes, or one vehicle from another. It had severe problems working out where it was. It broke down, on average, 3.7 times per sortie. The testing unit recommended that it shouldn’t be deployed, advice rejected by higher authorities, who quickly dispatched it to Afghanistan."
“In the first Gulf War, US military technology was more successful, indeed it seemed to function flawlessly. TV images relayed from cameras mounted on bombs as they homed in on their targets turned the war into a spectator sport, and the swift victory did much to dispel memories of Vietnam. A coterie of airforce officers who’d helped plan the bombing campaign – notably an ambitious lieutenant colonel called David Deptula – saw the victory as proof of the virtues of what they called ‘Effects Based Operations’. Advances in technology, they reported, meant that the US could locate strategic targets and destroy them with absolute precision.
“... Deptula made no secret of his desire to turn the entire business over to remote control as soon as possible. The technicians operating drones from US soil, he told an interviewer, were ‘very comfortable with the responsibilities of finishing the kill chain when called upon to do so’. He retired from the air force as a three-star general in 2010 and became chief executive of MAV 6, a company describing itself as a provider of ‘enhanced situational understanding’ of battlefields. MAV 6 now has a $211 million contract to develop Blue Devil Block 2, an unmanned airship 350 feet long that will carry automated intelligence collection systems capable of intercepting and tracing a high-value target’s mobile phone, recording video of his location, and relaying that information to drone operators. Hovering four miles above Afghanistan for days at a time, Blue Devils will cover huge areas and transmit enormous quantities of digitised images back to the US – the daily equivalent, according to Deptula’s airforce successor, of ‘53,000 full-length feature movies’.
“The Gorgon Stare surveillance system, which is destined to be carried by the Blue Devils, was developed at a cost of $500 million and can supposedly keep cars and people across an entire city under constant video surveillance. Civil libertarians, apprehensive about the expansion of the ‘surveillance state’, have objected to its being deployed inside the US. But a December 2010 report by a specialised airforce testing unit in Florida suggests they have little cause for worry. Gorgon Stare’s camera images could not distinguish humans from bushes, or one vehicle from another. It had severe problems working out where it was. It broke down, on average, 3.7 times per sortie. The testing unit recommended that it shouldn’t be deployed, advice rejected by higher authorities, who quickly dispatched it to Afghanistan."
Oh you masters of war...
BOB DYLAN & THE TITANIC: A RUMOUR
My sources suggest that the forthcoming Bob Dylan album may well include a song about the Titanic: a song that is about 14 minutes long. I know no more - and I can't really “know" even that much. But if it turns out to be true, it's surely a very rare example of his releasing something to tie in so handily with the centenary of a famous event.
Not that it would be Dylan's first allusion to this maritime disaster. As I wrote in Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan, he first mentions the Titanic in ‘Desolation Row':
“The most striking evocation of impending catastrophe [in the song is] achieved very simply - in the one arresting line ‘The Titanic sails at dawn'. That summarises concisely the tone and colouring of the whole song."
Then there is Dylan's evocation of this same sense of foreboding in a rather later song. Quoting again from Song & Dance Man III:
“In 1981’s ‘Caribbean Wind’ (issued on Biograph, 1985)...the ‘Street band playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’' is not only an allusion to the meaning-loaded event of the sinking of the Titanic... but to the group of blues songs that arose to express it decades before Dylan first uses its symbolic clout himself in 1965’s ‘Desolation Row’: a group of songs which includes Hi Henry Brown’s ‘Titanic Blues’: ‘Titanic sinking in the deep blue sea / And the band all playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’.' "
The footnote attached to that paragraph includes this: “The clutch of such songs reflected African-American delight at the sinking of the Titanic, because it signified whitey’s come-uppance, pride coming before a fall and so on. This feeling, however, was not restricted to black Americans. The Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok wrote: ‘The sinking of the Titanic has made me indescribably happy; there is, after all, an ocean.' "
Hi Henry recorded his song 20 years after the sinking of the ship. I'm interested to know, 80 years further on, whether Bob's forthcoming Titanic track (if it exists, and if it is forthcoming) will draw upon any of these old blues songs, perhaps interweaving some of their lines of blues lyric poetry into his own 2012 text.
Not that it would be Dylan's first allusion to this maritime disaster. As I wrote in Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan, he first mentions the Titanic in ‘Desolation Row':
“The most striking evocation of impending catastrophe [in the song is] achieved very simply - in the one arresting line ‘The Titanic sails at dawn'. That summarises concisely the tone and colouring of the whole song."
Then there is Dylan's evocation of this same sense of foreboding in a rather later song. Quoting again from Song & Dance Man III:
“In 1981’s ‘Caribbean Wind’ (issued on Biograph, 1985)...the ‘Street band playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’' is not only an allusion to the meaning-loaded event of the sinking of the Titanic... but to the group of blues songs that arose to express it decades before Dylan first uses its symbolic clout himself in 1965’s ‘Desolation Row’: a group of songs which includes Hi Henry Brown’s ‘Titanic Blues’: ‘Titanic sinking in the deep blue sea / And the band all playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’.' "
The footnote attached to that paragraph includes this: “The clutch of such songs reflected African-American delight at the sinking of the Titanic, because it signified whitey’s come-uppance, pride coming before a fall and so on. This feeling, however, was not restricted to black Americans. The Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok wrote: ‘The sinking of the Titanic has made me indescribably happy; there is, after all, an ocean.' "
Hi Henry recorded his song 20 years after the sinking of the ship. I'm interested to know, 80 years further on, whether Bob's forthcoming Titanic track (if it exists, and if it is forthcoming) will draw upon any of these old blues songs, perhaps interweaving some of their lines of blues lyric poetry into his own 2012 text.
QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST No. 9
Elvis Presley listening to his portable record-player while taking the train home from New York City, 1956:
photograph by Alfred Wertheimer
AND AFTER VINYL - THE 78?
Anyone old enough to have, or even to have seen, 78rpm records thinks of them as hopelessly impractical: heavy, far too breakable - they're made of shellac - and offering poor sound quality. Here's a man who thinks differently:
“Actually, the material that was used to make 78’s is much harder, more inert and holds up better than materials used to make subsequent media.”
This claim comes from the dialogue in the comments under this video created on YouTube by “merrihew" - and it is so interesting, despite the narrator's somewhat inexpressive delivery - and perhaps especially to anyone concerned with the question of how to hear old blues or hillbilly records via the best possible medium:
“Actually, the material that was used to make 78’s is much harder, more inert and holds up better than materials used to make subsequent media.”
This claim comes from the dialogue in the comments under this video created on YouTube by “merrihew" - and it is so interesting, despite the narrator's somewhat inexpressive delivery - and perhaps especially to anyone concerned with the question of how to hear old blues or hillbilly records via the best possible medium:
QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST No. 8
This is the “flying pulpit", which the pilot/driver controls much like an aerial version of a Segway machine. It seems a great pity they haven't become a readily-available and cheap form of personal transport. For me, that is. Obviously it wouldn't be so great if all you other people had one too. They'd be noisy and intrusive and a worse threat to privacy than Google Street-View. But aren't they great?!:
(The photographs come from the excellent website Retronaut. You can see a video of these magnificent flying machines here, and read the Wikipedia entry here.)
UPDATE: 1000-YEAR TIME-LAPSE MAP
This blog entry offered a terrific moving map that swept forward through the turmoil of Europe's history/geography from 1000 AD until 2005. Unfortunately, the video of it had only been up here a couple of days when YouTube withdrew it from its website (and therefore from everywhere online), because of a disputed copyright claim. Apologies to readers who hadn't yet caught up with it here.
DOWN ON GINSBERG'S FARM
It would be hard to take much of an interest in the poetry of the 20th Century without taking an interest in Allen Ginsberg - and having devoured his Collected Poems, his terrific exchange of letters with his father, and Barry Miles' fine biography, I've now been able to read Gordon Ball's book East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg (published in US hardback by Counterpoint, and in a Kindle edition).
One of the reader reviews said this: “A fascinating and disturbing time in U.S. history is echoed in Gordon Ball's riveting memoir of a period in Allen Ginsberg's life that was pivotal in Ginsberg's move to a truly serious Buddhist practice. The Cherry Valley farm commune of upstate New York is breezed over even in Ginsberg's own poetry. But here, Ball's training as a filmmaker gives us a slowed down gander at the often hilarious interactions of visitors Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Ray Bremser, Charles Plymell and Andy Clausen with Allen and longtime companion Peter Orlovsky. At the same time, Ginsberg's voluminous correspondence and exhaustive traveling, as well as Ball's own adventures with Harry Smith, Bob Dylan and John Giorno in NYC, serve up a truly satisfying feast of well-documented detail. A book I didn't want to end."
That's a pretty fair summary (except that Bob Dylan barely comes into it). I enjoyed it immensely. Gordon Ball is by no means a great writer, and the parts of the book that deal with his own 1960s-70s sex life never quite shake off an uncomfortable retrospective mix of embarrassment and a slight salacious pride, but all the same his book is invaluable. It places Ginsberg's East Hill Farm commune experiment within both Ginsberg's own life & career and the ferocious anti-longhairs-anti-war-anti-peaceniks turmoil of the American society of the time.
What makes this so useful is the detail. The account we have here, of police violence and political trials, of Ginsberg's non-violent campaigning, of the level of readings he was forced to undertake in order to keep on financing the campaigns and the farm . . . all this puts us right back in the dark days of Nixon and the Vietnam War and the fragmenting forms of the “underground" opposition. But it also gives a virtually day-by-day account of life on the farm (and it was a farm as much as a commune): of neighbours helping with tractors, the struggles against the cold, the seasonal plantings, the daily chores of feeding animals, milking cows, keeping newborn goats warm, digging long channels for waterpipes... and interwoven with this, the dramas of East Hill Farm's often demanding communards and their guests (invited and uninvited.
Peter Orlovsky, a manic speed-freak prone to violence, of whom everyone else was at least a little afraid, comes out of this sustained and intimate portrait very badly: as someone so unpleasant and self-centred that it's hard to comprehend Ginsberg continuing to suffer him. This is not the view Gordon Ball intends to convey: clearly he feels that there is some kind of magnetism about the guy. He never conveys it. But if Orlovsky is at the crazy end of this spartan, hard-working commune's spectrum, Allen Ginsberg is at the other. Far from fitting the media's picture of him as a self-indulgent egomaniac, he emerges from this remarkably close, prolonged inspection as immensely patient, unfailingly courteous to others (often in the face of great crassness and oblivious discourtesy), thoughtful, modest, deeply self-disciplined, hard-working, rigorously conscientious and warmly likeable.
East Hill Farm is a fine vindication of the insistent note-taker and diary-writer and let's-film-everythinger. Such people are often seen as merely writing things down while those around them get on and live - but Gordon Ball worked at least as hard as anyone else on the farm (he was, in effect, its manager but did more than his share of the hoeing planting and weeding and carrying and storing and animal husbandry). And at the same time he was preserving what went down. His book hands it back to us, and without any detectable wish to rewrite history in the telling. It's richly detailed. It illuminates an era in recent American history few people attend to or know much about today. It's essential reading.
(Gordon Ball is the man who proposes Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize for Literature every year. There is an entry on him in my Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.)
QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST No. 7
Never mind the general nastiness of Mary Harron's film of American Psycho, based on the book by Bret Easton Ellis. Looked back on, the really, er, striking thing the main character is wielding in the film is not the murderous weaponry but the cell phone. When I posted this yesterday I mistakenly wrote that this was what rich people had as new mobile tech in 2000: but the film was set in the 1980s, so the large plastic housebrick Christian Bale is holding to his ear is in fact quaintness from the 80s:
whereas in 2000 the groovy thing to have was the Nokia 9210 Communicator:
though most people were excited enough at the prospect of acquiring something like this Nokia 3310:
for which the press release from that September is now rather more quaint than the phone (which is pretty much the one I still use). The blurb began like this:
Nokia has today announced a new mobile phone, the Nokia 3310, with a
unique chat function, allowing users to chat with text messages on their
phones while on the move. With this innovation, Internet chat groups
will no longer be confined to the desktop. The Nokia 3310 has been
designed particularly for young people and the young at heart, for whom
the mobile phone is an important lifestyle accessory and who are already
extensively using various messaging services.
OBSERVATIONS cf THINGS HAVE CHANGED
Thanks, not for the first time, to Scott Warmuth, for reporting (on Twitter) an exchange between Marty Stuart and Bob Dylan about Stuart's song 'The Observations of a Crow' - an exchange that included Dylan singing a bit of the song to Stuart to show that he had listened to it. As Warmuth suggests, isn't Dylan's own song 'Things Have Changed', er, reminiscent of this?:
Marty Stuart's song was released on his hugely influential, widely admired (within the industry) album The Pilgrim; Bob Dylan's song was released in 2000 and given both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for the year's Best Original Song. Uh huh?
TURNING VINYL INTO WRITINGS & DRAWINGS
I don't go in for endorsing products but I make no apology for passing on my enthusiasm for an outfit named Vintage Vinyl Journals. They have had the good idea of making rather beautiful big journals/notebooks by bookbinding substantial numbers of blank pages inside hard covers made from real old American LPs. I have one made from an old copy of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II. The front, as you see, is made from Side 4 of the 1971 double-album, and the back from a key part of the album cover:
The outside cloth binding on mine is a darkish blue but I see from their website that you can get a journal made from another copy of the same Dylan album with a different back cover and with the cloth binding in bright red. Others available include one from the Rolling Stones' Aftermath and this rather lovely one using The Band's Music From Big Pink, which features much of Dylan's cover painting on the back:
To be specific, each journal is handmade from a real vinyl album and contains 220 unlined pages on 7-7/8″ x 7-1/2″ acid-free paper (70lb weight). The paper colour is Cool White and the case binding is sewn and glued.
I asked Katie Pietrak, who makes these journals, whether it worried her that she was in effect destroying a lot of terrific old records. Her reply seemed fair enough:
“95% of what we used is damaged and unplayable or at the very least uncollectable... some albums have peoples name written on the label, album covers have water damage (a lot of people store/stored their old records in their basements), most are scratched, promo copies where the album cover has a hole in the cover or a cut slit in it.. As you know there are millions of millions of records out there being destroyed and sent to landfills... I have boxes and boxes of vinyl that people have given to me (mostly “crap” that nobody wants) which most people were about to throw in the trash and I saved them hoping that I can bring new life to them by repurposing. (I’m working on pitching some private label journals, eg. Hard Rock, and then I can use these as I would cover the label).
I’m a vinyl collector -- I have boxes of vintage albums I would never cut (eg a sealed White Album) and boxes of new stuff that I won’t even take the plastic off of (for music I listen to now and I love I buy 2 vinyl copies - one to listen to, one to keep sealed and collect)... I wouldn’t lie, we do produce some (5%) journals out of new vinyl -- for example, Radiohead, Bon Iver, Taylor Swift -- it’s not our “core” business but we do offer that service. In this case we are taking new vinyl and cutting it.”
I admit I'm a stationery freak - I loathe other forms of shopping but take me to a classy stationery shop and I'm calm and happy - so it isn't surprising that I appreciate a decent journal when I find one. The promise dancing from all those clean, blank pages.The alluring smell. As writer and actor John Turturro (so great in O Brother, Where Art Thou?) said: "If I was a criminal, stationery stores and bakeries would be the two kinds of places I would concentrate on."
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