Category Archives: Music

Bob Dylan Saves Christmas

by Editor | 5 Comments

Three great things have happened in American music: the blues, jazz and Bob Dylan.  I just spent my morning listening to Dylan’s new album of Christmas songs, Christmas in the Heart. Christmas is here now. Mr. Dylan has given the world a present. He and his band play these songs like they mean something. They sound like they are having so much fun, like Christmas came early for them this year. Dylan is not afraid to throw choruses in that sound just the way they might have sounded in the forties or fifties. His music is blending folk, blues, rock, pop, big band and country all in a great happy jumping celebration of Christmas and all its familiar symbols. Dylan’s voice is more expressive than any other in music today. Not a word slips by without getting his twist, his little humor, his wry idea about why the word is even there in the first place. This is my very favorite Christmas album of all time. I will play this thing in August when it’s 106 degrees under my pear tree. Simply magnificent. Mr. Dylan has brought Christmas in, shining and dancing in the snow.

Dylan is giving all his royalties from the album to Feeding America, an organization that supports food banks across the U.S.

Now you’ve got to look at this wonderful video for Dylan’s version of Must be Santa. I’d go to his party any night of any week. Look at Dylan popping up all over the house like a slightly bad Santa. And if you look carefully, you will notice that about two-thirds of the way through, the party-goers chase out a Wall Street guy in a suit. Santa and his people kick the crap out of a Wall Street suit. Looks like fun, doesn’t it?

Animation: I Got Opinions

by Editor | 1 Comment

Collaborative animation from Watermark for the Greg Johnson single, ‘I Got Opinions.’ I don’t usually post music videos, but this was just kind of cute. Very colorful and full of imagination. It features the work of eight illustrators.  I like the clever ways it finds to move from one illustration style to another.

I found this at Cartoon Brew.

Bob Dylan Drives a Big Stinky SUV

by Editor

I didn’t realize that Bob Dylan meant his exhaust fumes were blowin’ in the wind. Check out this ridiculous Cadillac commercial featuring a leather-fetishist ersatz-cowboy Bob Dylan driving a huge honking stinky earth-eating Cadillac Escalade right through the big red heart of America. Sometimes a guy does something so damned dumb that you just have to say a few words about it. Look, if you need ten bucks for a cab ride, Mr. Dylan, come on over to the house and I’ll give it to you. Get out of the bloody Escalade and drop the silly cowboy costume. Escalades are for short people who can’t read.

Honestly, I really can’t stand finding out how dumb famous people are.

Isis

by Editor

Listen to this.  Why the mask?  Well, a performer is never who you think he is.  He is who he thinks he is.

Via the very interesting site, Daily Dose Of Dylan

Bob Dylan Needs a Blog

by Editor

This is Bob Dylan with his typewriter.  I got the image from a nice blog called Daily Dose of Dylan.  I know Mr. Dylan really likes playing his music everywhere and I sure like listening to him when he does it.  But I have a message for him too: Hey, you with the boots, you really should make a blog and write in it.  Not a fake one.  A real one that you write for on a laptop in airports and stuff like that.  Or on long bus rides.  That would be something I’d read.  I always wonder what a blog by Jack Kerouac might have been like had he been around to write one.  I don’t want to die without knowing what a Bob Dylan blog would be like.

French Navy: Video from Camera Obscura

by Editor

This video is from the album My Maudlin Career, by Camera Obscura.  The song is good and bears repeated listens.  The video is sort of an homage to films about love, or about couples anyway.  There’s a little French New Wave in it.  A little Fellini too.  It works.  We should all dance down the sidewalks and jump over things and climb lampposts when we’re out on dates, shouldn’t we?

ApSci Makes Music Video from Still Photos

by Editor

Electro-hop husband and wife duo ApSci have made a music video for their upcoming album Best Crisis Ever consisting entirely of still photos with no post-production effects at all.  It’s a great idea and makes for an excellent little film.  I like the music too.  They shot the black and white photos that you see held up by a hand with an iPhone and then printed out all the shots in sequence.  Then they travelled around the world and took more still photos while holding each black and white photo up in the original sequence.  So you get the odd effect of two still photo animation tracks going on at the same time.  It’s very clever and very simple.  Of course, it makes no difference whatsoever that it was all shot with an iPhone.  It could have been any camera.

Bob Dylan Walks with Ghosts

by Editor

Bill Flanagan at Times Online has an interview with Bob Dylan.  They talk about Dylan’s impressions of Barack Obama’s writing in Dreams of My Father.  It seems that Dylan considers the president to be a pretty good writer, capable of making readers think and feel at the same time.  He thinks Obama says some ‘profoundly outrageous things.’  I always enjoy the slightly argumentative way Bob Dylan answers questions.  So often, when an interviewer thinks something is obvious, Dylan says, ‘not exactly,’ and goes on to carefully explain how the interviewer is wrong.

Dylan talks about ghosts in the American South:

It must be the Southern air. It’s filled with rambling ghosts and disturbed spirits. They’re all screaming and forlorning. It’s like they are caught in some weird web – some purgatory between heaven and hell and they can’t rest.

Then this:

BF: Are you a mystical person?

BD: Absolutely.

BF: Any thoughts about why?

BD: I think it’s the land. The streams, the forests, the vast emptiness. The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I‘m more at home in the vacant lots. But I have a love for humankind, a love of truth, and a love of justice. I think I have a dualistic nature. I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

BF: But the album is all about love – love found, love lost, love remembered, love denied.

BD: Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

Anyone who talks that way is definitely going to be able to sell me some music.  I will be all ears and I will walk around for months trying to find those ghosts.  If he says they’re there, then they are.