Throwback Thursday: The 50 Most Interesting Places in the Space-Time Continuum

Five years ago today here at Ennyman's Territory. 

The other day I wrote about a stimulating magazine called Mental Floss. At the risk of being redundant I will share further on the same lines. Two days ago I wrote about The Ten Issue. This morning, the publication's "Spectacular 50th Issue" was just begging to be written about and I share it here.

Tucked up into the masthead is an interesting little phrase: feel smart again. There is no promise that reading it will make you smart, but by knowing all this stuff the publisher suggests that you will feel smart. And that five letter word "again" has a sexy suggestive quality as well, implying that you used to feel smart, but somehow lost it along the way. Feel smart, and feel confident, the way you were in your youth, robustly ready to tackle any obstacle.

So, the cover story for their Spectacular 50th Issue is, The 50 Most Interesting Places in the Space-Time Continuum.

Teaser copy is stuffed around the edges of the big 5-0....

Inside Houdini's Barrel

The Center of a Black Hole

Warren Buffet's Desk

Inside a Tornado

The Supreme Court's Doomsday Shelter

Mob Boss Cemeteries

Catherine the Great's Backyard Amusement Park

The Tiniest Town in America

Where Antimatter Exists

An Island of Wingless Butterflies

America's Greatest Idea Factory

3 Hilarious Misfires in Propaganda

Interestingly, the cover story begins on page 39, so there's still plenty of other blather to soak up before hitting the big story. I did peek and found that the world's smallest town in terms of population is located in Nebraska, and even has a sign that lists that population as 2. One is the mayor. Evidently when the kids grew up they had to go somewhere else to find a job.

ON ANOTHER NOTE: Tonight I will be doing some Live Painting at Norm's Beer & Brats, from 9:00 till midnight, at which time I'll turn into a pumpkin and someone will have to carve me back into a person.

* * * *

Thinking about this blog post today made me marvel a bit at the creativity of the Mental Floss editorial staff. I mean, what would your list look like if you decided to list the most interesting places in the universe? My list began like this: Inside Einstein's Brain, Inside Dali's Imagination.... You can take it from there.  

Wordless Wednesday: Assorted Images from the 9th Goin' Postal Group Show Last Friday

Steve Jobs Film Leads To Dylan Insights for CEOs in New Forbes Article

Walter Isaacson's book Steve Jobs was a compelling read when it came out in 2011. I wrote at the time, "Just when you thought you knew everything important that there was to know about the passionate founder of Apple, you discover through this incredible biography how little you really knew." But it's the silver screen that reaches the masses, hence the new film about Steve Jobs is creating more than just a ripple effect.

Dylan receiving the Medal of Freedom.

This past week Forbes published a contribution by Grant Feller* titled Bob Dylan's Guide To Being A Better CEO. Feller opens the piece with a great opening line that will magnetize any Dylan fan: The best reason for going to see Danny Boyle’s new film on Steve Jobs is, as far as I can see, not to indulge in some Apple gadgetry porn but to understand the influence Bob Dylan had on him. 

He immediately follows with this disclaimer:
I’m a huge fan of the latter and have, at various moments, felt just as inspired by Dylan’s moving, incisive and often unique lyrics. By all accounts, so was Jobs.

It's a perfect setup.

According to Isaacson, Steve Jobs was indeed a huge fan of both Dylan and the Beatles. In fact, he was so much of a Dylan fan he pursued and maintained a two year romantic relationship with Joan Baez who had herself been romantically entwined with Bob. Jobs gave it up when he came to realize he didn't really love her but loved the idea of being involved with his idol's woman.

When the iPod came out, a brilliant Steve Jobs concept that revolutionized the way we listen to music, Jobs was asked the question that Apple's TV commercials were asking: "What's on your iPod?" The interviewer then asked, if you had to choose between the Beatles and the Stones, who would you keep? Jobs replied that that was easy, The Beatles. "But if you asked me to decide between the Beatles and Bob Dylan, that would be a much harder question."

* * * *

Feller's article is an good example of a basic article structure. If you picture of line of railroad cars, the intro is your engine. It's aim is to hook the reader, and Feller does this effectively. The transition must follow. Like a highway billboard it has to be quick and clear. The writer offers up this:

After all, if CEOs can be inspired by lines from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, why can’t content marketers find similar truth in the lyrics of Dylan…

From here we get a string of boxcars which stretch out to the end of the story. No time to argue or to judge the merits of his premise. If the reader has travelled this far he or she will just go with the flow. It's an easy, breezy ride. Here's that link again.

* * * *
I can't leave off without commenting on the author's name. Grant Feller. Grant is a family name that one of my brothers, an uncle and a grandfather carried, among others. I've personally found U.S. Grant to be an inspirational hero for my own life and maintain a photo of him on my office wall.

But I've also found strong inspiration in a man named Feller, specifically the Hall of Fame Cleveland Indians pitcher of the 40's and 50's. When I was born my teddy bears were named after the starting rotation of the Cleveland Indians, and for some reason Feller became my favorite. (I carried Lemon around with me for a long time, too, though.)

Thank you, Mr. Feller, for this fun little excursion through the Dylan catalogue.

* * * *
Meantime, life goes on all around you, within you and without you. Get into it.

Joan Miró's Spanish Playing Cards

Joan Miró was a Barcelona-born Spaniard who studied business and art as a teen, ultimately going in the direction of a business career. After a nervous breakdown he pursued a life in art. An art dealer, José Dalmau, helped him get his first solo exhibition in Barcelona.

The Spanish Playing Cards, on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, was produced in 1920 after a trip to Paris where he met Picasso for the first time. The painting shows the clear influence of the cubism in vogue at the time.

In Paris Miró took an interest in the influential Dada movement and also absorbed the ideas of the emerging Surrealists. Travels to the Netherlands resulted in influence by the Dutch Masters. By the late 1930's his work was included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York which later held his first major retrospective in 1941.

What's interesting to me is how varied the compositional elements are in this painting, especially when you zoom in on the details. Yet, in stepping back the fragmented scene hangs together and produces an effect as a whole. Here's a snippet from the museum website where this painting is briefly discussed.

EdNote: An exhibition titled Miró: The Experience of Seeing is now on display at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio featuring 50 of the artist's later paintings and sculptures.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it.

Local Art Seen: Sharon Louden's Windows

Thursday, October 22, the Tweed Museum hosted its opening reception for two totally disparate shows, Robert Miniciello's Spontaneous Acts and Sharon Louden's Windows. Louden, who has participated in group exhibitions since 1985 and has been featured in solo exhibitions since 1997, is known internationally for her drawings, paintings, prints and installations.

The current exhibit assembled sculpture and paintings, plus two performances of music with a small ensemble and theater lighting. The Star-Trekkish musical component was composed by Washington D.C.-based pianist and organist Andrew Simpson, who is the classical composer who produced this special score that was performed live by UMD students. By means of Arden Weaver's lighting, a measure of drama was added to the two performances.

The installation itself has that space age feel, with rolls of reflective mylar-like material draped all about the Sax Gallery as if a futuristic tapestry. The mirror-like sheets of aluminum had been draped from the ceiling, over the banisters and fastened to walls. The effect on the sensations was such that a visitor might fail to notice that there are a number of small paintings adorning the walls in various locations.

The paintings themselves were small in contrast to the expansive installation, and unremarkable -- shapes of color on white backgrounds. The use of primary colors as such gave reminders of Joan Miro at a certain phase, or Mondrian's later period.

Louden's Windows installation will be on display through May 26. If you're near the campus, take a little time to check it out.

Artist Asks: "What could you reclaim from removing your biggest distraction?"

Last night the Tweed Museum of Art held an opening reception for Robert Miniciello's Spontaneous Acts and Sharon Louden's Windows. In the student gallery, always a place of interest to me, Shane Pehrson had a stimulating exhibit titled Reclaim, a clever variation on an idea I once had for a book concept when I was in college called 100 Things To Do with a Television Set. (I dropped one off the Hocking River bridge in Athens as a start.) At the time I saw TVs as a time trap that keep people from other things. And this is Pehrson's premise, except today's time thief is smart phone.

At 25, Pehrson has grown up in this new era of instant communication and the ubiquitous, portable screen interface. He notes in his statement that he got his first flip phone at age 16, but now little children are walking around with $400 smart phones. Instead of human interaction, we see a new generation of people zoned out on their devices, ignoring everything around them.

Inside the small gallery space one encounters animated movies portraying the manner in which smart phones consume time. One is a humorous guy on a toilet, from the point of view of the guy, his smart phone central. Another features a guy walking, oblivious to all around him as he strolls along looking down at the screen in his hand.  On shelves we see smart phones smashed by rocks, spilling their electronic guts.

My concept of smashing televisions gets derided by people who remind me that there is a lot of good stuff on television. I can accept that, and yet I hear defenders of smart phones saying the same thing today to young Shane.

What does your gut tell you? Have you become a slave to your devices? Or as Shane asks, what could you reclaim by removing your biggest distraction?  

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Reclaim it.

Interior Sound Tracks -- Redux

The word redux means "brought back, revived." And this blog post is titled thus because this morning I accidentally deleted the post, which originally was published on Tuesday. Unintentional deleting in a Word document can be repaired using the shortcut CTRL-Z (or Command-Z on a Mac.) But how does one retrieve a deleted blog post? Well, Google has the answer for everything. One solution (and there may be others but this is what worked for me) is to go into your History and scroll back in time till you find the original page that you posted. In my case, I got lucky. And what follows is the good fortune of my retrieval efforts. If only all things lost could be found so easily.

* * * *

We live in a world swirling with sound. Depending on where we live those sounds vary, from breezes through trees and railroads rumbling in the distance (or across the street) to honking horns and the assorted sounds that make up the backdrop of city life. And then there are the manufactured sounds that we envelope ourselves in by means of radios, CD players and other devices. Finally, there's a third source of sound, the music or interior dialogues that play in our heads as we walk or drive or work in the yard.

This weekend under a blue sky while working on a project in the raspberry patches we have I decided to write down the songs that went through my head while I was working. I assume that most people have an inner playlist that accompanies them once in a while. Have you ever taken notes to see what you're listening to?

On Saturday I had a pen and paper with me to jot down songs as they swam by. You'll notice, assuming you're familiar with these, that I had recently been listening to Cream's Greatest Hits. And of course there is always Dylan. Here's how it went for a while:

Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather (Dylan)
Crossroads (Cream)
Long & Narrow Way (Dylan)
Tales of Brave Ulysses (Cream)
Those Were The Days (Cream)
Born Under A Bad Sign (Cream)
Everything Is Awesome (movie soundtrack)
American Woman (The Guess Who)
Sunshine of Your Love (Cream)
Passing the Time (Cream)
Visions of Johanna (Dylan) for about an hour, literally.

The interesting part in all this is how the music for "Everything Is Awesome" actually echoes the same riff as "American Woman."  If you do not know the two, you can find YouTube vids of these. Play the first six syllables for each. A-mer-i-can Wo-man. Even the energy is similar. Ev-ry-thing-Is-Awesome.

I draw attention to this because I've noticed this in other songs where one has a riff very similar to another. Compare "Victor Jara" from Arlo Guthrie's Amigo album to Dylan's "Desolation Row." And here's another. Compare John Prine's "The Glory of Your Love" with Lyle Lovett's "Farther Down the Line." The pace is different but when Lyle sings, "This time he sure took a bad one..." you can't help but hear Prine's "Oh the glory of your love..."

The Doors were famously sued for lift the tune for "Hello, I Love You" from the Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night." (My first .45 single.) And yes, George Harrison got into trouble for "My Sweet Lord" which echoes "He's So Fine."

But what's astonishing to me isn't that songs occasionally echo other songs. Rather, it's astounding how many different song melodies there can be with only a handful of notes to play with. Do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do. Music is a gift divine in its origins. And its power is undeniable, whatever form it takes.

What are you listening to today? 

Robert Rauschenberg Would Have Been 90 Today

In visiting galleries around the country it's always exciting to discover another Rauschenberg piece that I hadn't seen before. Some of his famous combines, like the bed or the one with the goat and the tire (Monogram), can be found in the MOMA and San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. But traveling through other galleries over the years one is likely to discover, as I did in Allentown last year, a couple Rauschenberg works. Tuesday at the Minneapolis Institute of Art was no exception. 

When I was an art student in college I found Rauschenberg's work stimulating. A pre-cursor to Pop, which I did not find interesting at the time, I enjoyed seeing what he was doing, noticed articles in ArtForum and took a book out on him from the library. 

It's strange to think of how many of these artists we alive while we were in school, and were one determined one could have tracked him down probably and talked to him or visited his studio. But all most of us did was look in the books and magazines and appreciate the occasional pieces we saw in the museums. 

Thanks to Google, you can see more examples of his work here. And thanks to Bill Shipley there's a signature of his on my wall.

Mr. Rauschenberg passed away in 2008. He would have been 90 today.

Barrel Up, acrylic paint and screen print. 1990

Wordless Wednesday: From a Recent Visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Art Openings This Week in the Twin Ports

Thursday is a major opening at the Tweed for New York artist Robert Miniciello's Spontaneous Acts in conjunction with Sharon Louden's Windows at the Tweed Museum of Art. The reception is slated for 6-8 p.m. There are some interesting features about the show which you can read about here.

Friday is the Fall Goin' Postal Show, the 9th semi-annual show here. Goin' Postal is a shipping store that has evolved into a gallery space featuring work by local artists. The openings have become something of an event with high caliber musicians capping off the evening in an after-party downstairs. Revolution Jones is slated to perform, along with Israel Malachi.

Perhaps we'll see you there?

On Exactitude in Science (The Quest for Perfection)

"Nothing unessential" is the rule for short story writers. One master of the form is Jorge Luis Borges. I first discovered this very short gem in the Fall-Winter 1970 edition of The Antioch Review, along with five other pearls. If a novel can be compared to the baggy clothes on a scrawny man, perhaps a tightly written story is spandex on a svelte, well-toned athlete.

All that to say I often find it sometimes feels like novelists write simply to fill available space, hence lengthy digressions and tiresome asides. In retrospect I see that I took a few too many such liberties in my first novel The Red Scorpion. Live and learn.

This probably isn't a "real" short story, per se. Falls more into the category of contemporary flash fiction. It's still sweet.

On Exactitude in Science

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. 

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Thank you, Swarthmore College, for making this manuscript available online.

Eleven Mark Twain Quotes To Start Your Day

No question Mark Twain was one of America's great wits. Do you think he would have hosted a television show had he lived in the latter part of the last century? When I read some of these quotes, especially the latter ones on this page, I can't help but think of Groucho. His advice for writers is as pointed and spot on as his observations about life. It's interesting how Twain's observations and witticisms never go out of style.

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”

“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.”

“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”

“A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't.”

“There is nothing so annoying as having two people talking when you're busy interrupting.”

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

You can read all the Mark Twain quotes you want here at Goodreads. I just wanted to help get you started, in the event that it's been a while. 

The Nose

"The Nose" is a short story I wrote in the early 90's about a guy who had a hard time dealing with crowds. We each experience anxieties of one kind or another and in turn develop personal coping mechanisms for dealing with them. I wrote this story about an anxious character who had developed a somewhat eccentric coping technique lest he come unglued.

Reactions to this story have varied from shrugs to curiosity to laughing out loud. Of "The Nose" one friend wrote, "I can't remember the last time I laughed so much with a story."

The Nose

The crammed little bar sizzled with so much energy that it began to unsettle him. He wondered why he ever said he would meet his friends here.

His friends were late, and Ted's brain started running on the hyperactive groove that, once out of control, often left him terrified and unsettled.

But Ted Krueger had a mind game he played to help him gain control of himself in these situations. He would focus on an object, enabling his thoughts -- which at this point were so numerous and random that he felt overwhelmed by them -- to narrow their scope. In this way he was able to harness them and feel he had some measure of control over himself.

He held the view that though feelings were nebulous and impossible to direct, with a great effort of will thoughts could be managed and coerced, and that one's feelings would eventually come into alignment with the thoughts that preceded, and stirred, one's emotions. His feelings of terror were often so immense that only a more immense distraction could deliver him from being tyranized by his fears. Hence the game.

The game would lead him into a place removed from himself, a mental space where epiphanies occurred. Ultimately, on many occasions, he had a direct encounter with God. This was his own interpretation. That is, the game produced profound illuminations at critical moments in his life, which he believed to be meyaphysical insights, powerful and humbling. It filled him with a sense of awe and gratitude.

He knew that he had created the game out of necessity as a means of holding on to reality, to keep from flipping. He took no credit for it. In fact, he knew that everyone played games of some kind or another to stave off boredom or reduce the intensity of disquieting anxieties, and that this was nothing more than his own way of keeping control. In this regard he was quite self-aware and not really so odd, or so he told himself.

He knew that he had created the game out of necessity as a means of holding on to reality, to keep from flipping. He took no credit for it. In fact, he knew that everyone played games of some kind or another to stave off boredom or reduce the intensity of disquieting anxieties, and that this was nothing more than his own way of keeping control. In this regard he was quite self-aware and not really so odd, or so he told himself.

You can find the rest of The Nose here.

Throwback Thursday: It Happens Every Fall (Baseball Memories)

It's that time of year again. The Major League Baseball playoffs are underway, and the hibernating fan in me begins to awaken. Congrats to the teams that have progressed thus far. The Cubs fans must surely be biting their nails with excitement as their team has passed another hurdle. Good luck! 

When you get to the end you will notice that this 2008 post was written at a different time of the year. 

As noted in a previous post, no man is an island. Nor any woman. From the moment we enter this world we not only have a connection to our personal families, and simultaneously connected to our extended family, the body of humanity.

Of course this is not something we immediately sense – and some never sense it at all. But as we enter this world, we do come to appreciate and understand that our grand appearance here takes place within a context, for some less fortunate than others.

I made my entry into the world as a firstborn to young parents in Cleveland, Ohio. (Feet first, for what it's worth.) My mom and dad each had rural roots, West Virginia and Kentucky respectively, but had taken up residence in a second floor apartment in a section of Cleveland known as Little Italy.

They were evidently avid baseball fans because the four teddy bears in my crib were named after the 1952 Cleveland Indians starting rotation: Mike Garcia, Bob Lemon, Early Wynn and fireballer Bob Feller. These guys were awesome pitchers in their prime but only handed Indians fans one pennant in the fifties due to the heartless dominance of the Yankees of that era.

I don’t recall what happened to Wynn and Garcia (the teddy bears), but Lemon and Feller accompanied me for many a year. So did the love of baseball.

One of my mom’s favorite players was the Indians’ second baseman Bobby Avila. Three times a candidate for the League’s Most Valuable Player, Avila hailed from Mexico, a fact which I learned many years later while living in Monterrey in 1981. My wife and I were walking through the Baseball Hall of Fame in that city whereupon I saw a Cleveland Indians baseball uniform. (I will try to find the photo I took and post it here.) It immediately made me think of my Mom.

In the fifties my grandfather and dad took my brothers and I to many a ball game at Cleveland Stadium. I can recall box seats behind the Indians dugout on a bright sunny afternoon. On another occasion I remember box seats just a little to the right of the backstop during a double header in which the Yankees’ Elston Howard hit home runs over the deep center field fence in each game.

Each spring, as the baseball season commenced, our family watched the movie It Happens Every Spring, starring Ray Milland, about a professor who discovers a way to juice a baseball so that it avoids being hit by wood. Like the annual airing of The Wizard of Oz, our family watched this Saturday Night at the Movies feature year in and year out.

Within this context, it’s hard to imagine not having an interest in baseball.

Maybe things would have been different if the Indians had not been contenders. And probably it would have been much different if I had been born and raised in a town with no team at all. But it is what it is. And for this reason, to some extent Fate has a hand in how we become who we are… though I must immediately add that I believe, too, that our decisions today help make us who we will become.

Besides my own appearance here, other significant events of 1952 include the publication of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Herman Wouk won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Caine Mutiny. Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower won the 1952 election for president of the United States. The Korean Conflict was happening across the Pacific, and McCarthyism was in full swing in the corridors of power here in the homeland.

Two other features of note. First, not that it matters much, 1952 was a Leap Year. And second, 1952 was a year in which a major wave of Baby Boomers entered the world. One of them was Bob Costas, a sports announcer who many Americans recognize and still welcome into their homes via television. Currently he is the anchor for this year’s Olympic Games. He is a passionate fan of baseball to such an extent that he has even been considered for the position of baseball commissioner.

Costas has certainly had a charmed life, being in a position where he not only gets to meet his heroes and the great sports figures of our time, he gets to ask them probing questions, to find out what makes them tick. Hopefully he still gets a thrill from this privileged position. He certainly excels at projecting the kind of educated passion that makes people (and by this, I mean viewers) want to spend time in his presence.

If I were interviewing Mr. Costas, I would like to know…
Did your parents name your teddy bears after the New York Yankees starting rotation? (He grew up in the Queens, New York.)
How many Yankees vs. Indians double headers did you see in the fifties?
When did you see your first All Star Game? (I saw mine in Cleveland, 1963.)

What would you consider the three greatest sports moments of the past thirty years?
And finally, what makes you tick? It has to be more than the money, which can’t be half bad. What do you love most in life and what are your goals for the next thirty years?

And, if you could ask Mr. Costas a couple questions, what would they be?

Bob Costas Trivia: Costas was a huge Mickey Mantle fan and purportedly carried a 1958 Mickey Mantle baseball card in his wallet. Here's a picture of my own 1958 Mickey Mantle card, one of baseball's legendary heroes when we were both young fans.

And now, back to the Olympics. Go, team.

The Eyes Have It

About twenty years ago I wrote a short story comprised of homonyms. That is, I packed it as densely as possible with words that sound like other words, about one-third of the 600 word story. If someone were to read it aloud to you, you'd not notice a thing. It was fun to create as well as to share. Eventually I sold the story, How Eye One the Wore, to Games Magazine for a modest check and a measure of gratification.

This incident came to mind when I read a very short entertainment by Philip K. Dick this week. I've been reading a collection of his early short stories and this one deals with the manner in which many of our metaphorical expressions become comical when taken literally. In football an announcer might say "Aaron Rodgers threw a bomb" and every fan knows he did not literally throw a bomb. What happens when people take these words literally? Hail Marys and chip shots are not what you'd expect. Why do announcers talk about the Red Zone when the grass is green all over the playing field?

All this to say I think you might enjoy P.K. Dick's very short story, The Eyes Have It.

Meantime, life goes on all around you, eh?

Two Dylan Covers By Chris Cornell, Sort Of

Saturday night the Bluegrass Review, a radio show that airs on KUMD just before John Bushey's Highway 61 Revisited program here in the Northland, did something interesting. They played a number of early Dylan songs and covers in the bluegrass style by various musicians. The program's host showed the interplay of genres, how songs bleed into new forms when a bluegrass musician re-interprets folk or even rock.

Two day later someone called to share that at a Chris Cornell concert he'd been to, Cornell played two Dylan covers. Or rather, he played one cover and re-wrote more contemporary lyrics for another, the Sixties anthem "The Times They Are A-Changing."

Cornell is a singer-songwriter whose been around for some time, at one time the primary songwriter for Seattle's Soundgarden and Audioslave.  My friend saw Chris Cornell last Friday night, performing on an acoustic tour playing his own material and covers.

Here's Chris Cornell performing Dylan's "I Threw It All Away."



If you can catch the lyrics (not entirely easy) you might enjoy Cornell's rendition of  The Times They Are A-Changin'.  You can also try Reddit for some assistance, but this person, too, isn't always getting it right.

Meantime, life goes on all around you.