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.
Category Archives: Music
French Navy: Video from Camera Obscura
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
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
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.
