Throwback Thursday: Patterns

While watching an episode of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, "Night Call" (Episode 139 -- February 7, 1964) there is a scene where the old woman has been assisted into a wheelchair. The camera angle is from the viewpoint of an adult looking down to the woman. Across her lap is a knit afghan with a zigzag pattern similar to the kind my grandmother used to make, and it seems like for just a moment the camera lingers on the pattern.

One of the thoughts I had at that moment: what would an afghan look like if instead of being knit into a pattern, the colors and knitting were totally random? Isn't it the pattern or design that gives the afghan its interest?

I recently wrote about color as a facet of making or appreciating art. Design and pattern could be added to the list of things which can make a drawing or painting interesting.

Nature is full of patterns, from atomic structure to the design of galaxies... from the incredible Fibonacci sequence to the rhythm of waves... from the phenomenon of day and night to the miracle of a heartbeat...

Many patterns are useful and many "just are." Daily routines, tastes, patterns in our relationships, patterns of thought, of behavior, of interaction with our personal space... patterns in how we go about getting self-understanding, patterns of taste, of desire, of haste, of waste.... Patterns feel right and normal to us.

For the Dionysian, chaos is the preferred realm. Order and structure feel confining. Daily routines get boring. A steady job is like working on a chain gang. Admittedly, there is something appealing about the unknown, about loss of control... temporarily.

But how many are there who can truly live an utterly patternless existence? You don't know when you will rise, or lay down, go out or return home again... if at all...

In the realm of art I have at times enjoyed making totally abstract art. Yet even then, when painting random colors in a random way, I would have to say that total arbitrariness is unnatural. Our mind keeps wishing to interpret, to organize the impressions made by the colors, lines, strokes, shapes... While adding more lines, I can choose to define the shapes or leave them totally loose. But we are attracted to a measure of order, shape, balance and pattern.

We notice it in music, too. A beat, rather than arbitrariness. In jazz, the straight beat may be replaced by syncopation, but even syncopation structures itself. Chord progressions, harmonies, all conspire to organize sound into pleasing patterns.

In certain realms patterns are especially comforting. Breathing, for example... regular breathing, in and out, easy, nourishing us with vital oxygen, this is good. Difficulty breathing, due to failing lungs, lack of air, being held underwater... these can be pretty frightening.

I guess that's one of my patterns, to take a string of thought into unexpected places. Come back tomorrow and we'll see where it goes next.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 25, 2008

Throwback Thursday: John Lennon's "Mind Games" and His Spiritual Quest for Peace

The power of the Beatles' breakup was such that when they each went their own way many of their fans followed all of them. I was one, purchasing all their first solo albums and several that followed from Paul and John. Mind Games was John Lennon's fourth album after the breakup, released in the fall of 1973 while I was on a semester break from college. The captivating cover art was itself memorable. The following year the title song from the album went gold as a single. This single is the topic for this blog post.

In the early 70's John Lennon's songs were very open about his inner struggles, his conflicts with family, relationships and religion. A previous album captured his explorations with primal therapy as one method of dealing with this inner pain. To some extent this candor in his songwriting is what made these albums so riveting.

Songs have hundreds of ways of introducing themselves. Sometimes it's a guitar lick after which each of the other musicians joins in. Sometimes they join in one at a time and build layers to form a backdrop for the vocals. Sometimes it's the snap of a drumstick blast, as in Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." Sometimes it's a syncopated drum intro like the Stones' "Honky Tonk Women." In this case, the shimmering, scintillating tapestry of sound is full and flowing from the start, producing the sensation of entering a timeless stream that has no beginning and no end, the wheel of life as it were. Three notes, one sustained and the other two stepping up with a leap to the third, over and over and over. At the song's end this musical backdrop carries on, doing that "ritual dance in the sun."

In 1963 Eric Berne published the best-selling Games People Play, introducing the popular culture to the concept of transactional analysis. A few years later session musician Joe South produced his one and only mega-hit in a song by the same name. "Oh the games people play now, every night and every day now, never meaning what they say, never saying what they mean."

John Lennon offers a different take in this one, foreshadowing a concept that would re-emerge in his song/album Double Fantasy.

In the movie Yellow Submarine we find Lennon quoted as saying, "It's all in the mind, you know." The extreme version of this philosophy embraces the notion that reality as we know it is all in our minds. That is, there is no objective reality but only a projected reality. Lennon's behavior, however, did not affirm this solipsist view but reflected an ongoing concern for the world at large, a commitment to peace and love.

The song "Mind Games" was itself written in the late 60's before the Beatles parted ways, originally titled "Make Love, Not War." The inspiration for the song came from another book about games called Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space by Robert Masters and Jean Houston.

The line "Yes is the answer" is an acknowledgement of the artpiece by Yoko that originally brought them together. Too often, as Eric Berne documented, the games we play keep us apart. John Lennon's appeal is for us to play a different kind of game that brings us together.

Mind Games

We're playing those mind games together
Pushing the barriers planting seeds
Playing the mind guerrilla
Chanting the Mantra peace on earth
We all been playing those mind games forever
Some kinda druid dudes lifting the veil
Doing the mind guerrilla
Some call it magic the search for the grail

Love is the answer and you know that for sure
Love is a flower
You got to let it, you gotta let it grow

So keep on playing those mind games together
Faith in the future out of the now
You just can't beat on those mind guerrillas
Absolute elsewhere in the stones of your mind
Yeah we're playing those mind games forever
Projecting our images in space and in time

Yes is the answer and you know that for sure
Yes is surrender
You got to let it, you gotta let it go

So keep on playing those mind games together
Doing the ritual dance in the sun
Millions of mind guerrillas
Putting their soul power to the karmic wheel
Keep on playing those mind games forever
Raising the spirit of peace and love

Throwback Thursday: Fate and Consequences in 'The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs

One evening last year my daughter's former English teacher asked if i'd ever read The Monkey's Paw. I forget the trigger event, though it may have been discussing The Nonsense Room, a story from my book Unremembered Histories, short stories with a supernatural twist. I'd read it perhaps half a century ago when I was in school, but remembered nothing about it. After revisiting this story I now recommend it here to you.

The Monkey's Paw is essentially a variation of the traditional genie in a bottle genre in which a person can get three wishes. But it's three wishes from the dark side. Not only do the wishes come true, when they do they have unanticipated shocking consequences. The manner in which the tale is told is what grips you. As with all good stories, the reader plunges forward because he or she is eager to see what will happen next.

It begins on a dark, dreary night as the White family waits for a visitor to their out of the way home.  The father and son are playing chess in the parlor while white-haired Mrs. White sits knitting by the fireplace.

The second paragraph, a single sentence, foreshadows the sum total of the story: "Hark at the wind," said Mr. White, who, having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.

Chess provides a great variety of life lessons. Decisions must be made all throughout. Consequences of decisions aren't always readily recognizable. All too often they are made with unnecessary haste and dire consequences.

Thus we are conveyed into the story as the White's visitor arrives, a sergeant-major who has spent 21 years abroad in what the Whites believe to be exotic and adventurous places. As they talk, and splash down a few drinks, the topic turns to a monkey's paw that the visitor had mentioned to Mr. White a few days earlier.

The soldier attempts to divert the conversation, though against his better judgment he acknowledges that there is something magical in the matter. He is actually carrying the thing on him at that very moment, but in an effort to be done with it he throws it on the fire.

Mr. White takes fast action and rescues it. The grim visitor is solemn and says, "Better let it burn."

White's impulsiveness becomes the story's turning point, cementing the family's doom.

Like many such stories there's a moral: don't mess with fate. Stephen King's 1000-page 10/23/63 has essentially the same moral, except in a much more massive form. King's story is about a man who goes back in time in an effort to keep JFK from being assassinated.

Hollywood, of course, loves this kind of magical lore in films, in part because the public's craving for it seems endless. I half wonder if the Robin Williams film Jumanji had some of its ideas stimulated by The Monkey's Paw. Kids find a magical game board and start to play, but soon learn that there are unexpected consequences to each move. Sound familiar? There is even a connection to India and other exotic places here.

If you go back to the beginning of the 20th century you can see lots of fascination with "exotic places," which must have been a portion of this story's original appeal, in addition to the creepiness of its premise. Writers like Jack London and Joseph Conrad, among others, capitalized on this interest in all things foreign.

Meantime, as noted earlier, I encourage you to take a few minutes to read The Monkey's Paw. It's an unusual and very compelling story, and a good read.  

Throwback Thursday: Dreaming of Dylan

Two nights ago I met Bob Dylan. The meeting took place in a dream, so it was not a real encounter with the legendary singer/songwriter. I'm not sure how old I was in the dream, but he seemed to be somewhere in his fifties or sixties.

In the dream we were standing in a room with rather dim lighting, talking. It was a very normal conversation. He didn't smile much but he wasn't cold or aloof. Unfortunately, when I woke I didn't write down any of its details. We met and we talked, like people do sometimes. 

What it made me think of, though, was Mary Lee Kortes' book Dreaming of Dylan, which I wrote about in April of 2019. The book was definitely a fun read. Here are a few excerpts and my review from that time.

* * * * *

Dream 103 / Dylan Vs. Paulsen
I am sitting at the kitchen table with my parents. I’m very young in the dream, only seven or eight years old, and the presidential election is coming. My parents are fighting about who to vote for: Bob Dylan or Pat Paulsen.

* * * *
Dreams are one of those amazing phenomenon that fall into that area of mystery as regards what it means to be human. Studied by psychologists and now the domain or neuroscience, who can definitively say where they come from or what they mean. One thing for certain, our minds produce pretty wild stories sometimes.

What is is that makes our dreams so vivid? The fun part, though, is sharing those dream anecdotes and stories with others, in part because often there doesn't seem to be any kind of logic to the dream at all. It just goes where it wants and you go with it.

And that's what makes these 115 dreams so much fun. Even if you're not a Dylan fan, you'll enjoy these stories because after a lifetime living in this world you will undoubtedly have formed a certain kind of image of the Nobel Laureate so that when he appears in dreams, he's often the caricature of his persona. Or not.

The book, published by BMG Books, is titled Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob. The author is Mary Lee Kortes, a recording artist and performer who has actually opened for Bob, so in a sense she's already had a dream come true, I suspect.

I don't know how long it took to assemble this collection of dreams, but the final outcome is a totally first rate execution of concept. It's a beautiful book as well as totally entertaining, especially if you're a fan. The contributors come from all over the world, from painters to poets to Patti Smith.

If you're a Dylan fan, you already know where the title of the book comes from, the title of a song on Bringing It All Back Home. The spirit of the book itself is in alignment with another familiar song, Talkin' World War III Blues, which ends with this famous stanza:

Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody’s having them dreams
Everybody sees themselves
Walkin’ around with no one else
Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
I said that

* * * *

One other feature of the book that is somewhat amusing is the irregular structure. That is, the dreams all have numbers but they are not in the order of the numbers. You might expect 1 to be first and 115 to be the last dream in the book, but then again, tell me a dream in which the story makes sense and I will tell you 50 where it's a jumble of unexpected juxtapositions. I think the absence of a table of contents and the jumbled structure just makes it all that much more fun.

Here's the author's dream, which she shares at the beginning of the book.

Dream 106 / Wrong Key
I was rehearsing for a Losers Lounge show (an NYC series that takes place at Joe’s Pub). I was scheduled to sing Townes Van Zandt's "No Place To Fall" and was rehearsing with the guy who is going to accompany me--Bob Dylan.

We were in a dark dirty white room, just the two of us. He was sitting on the floor strumming a lute and playing the song in a weird key.

"That’s the wrong key," I told him. "I sing it in D. What key are you playing it in?"

He looked up at me. "The key if I"

I was so annoyed. "There’s no such thing," I said.

“That’s the key I play it in,” said Bob.

--Marie Lee Kortes
Musician, Author / Brooklyn

Some of the dreams are more developed and more detailed, stretching two to four pages. Others are brief, and hilarious like this one.

61 / Space Visionary
I have had many dreams about Dylan, and he has never spoken to me in them until recently when he named a hill near where I grew up. “You can see the city from there," he said. But you can’t.

--Jeff Ward
Writer, Singer/Song Writer / Ireland

* * * *

Illustration for Dream 103 / Dylan vs. Paulsen

The titles alone are worth the read... Or, you can skip the words altogether and enjoy the illustrations, photos and design. Yes, Dreaming Of Dylan is an enjoyable experience any way you choose to engage it.

Here are some of the titles of the various dreams...

Desk Set
Fur
Sobering
What's In Your Freezer
Duet With Dog
Meet Me In The Morning
It'll Cost You
Walking The Room
I Dreamed Bob Dylan Had A Crush On My Mom
Time Traveler
O Captain
Not Alone

You can find the book here at Amazon. Dreaming of Dylan. I am confident it would make a great gift for any Dylan fan, including the Dylan fan in your life.

Related Links
For more about the author, visit https://maryleescorvette.com/about
Schedule for Duluth Dylan Fest 2023 

Throwback Thursday: Joe Cocker's Dylan Covers Continue To Reward Listeners

This week I was watching a DVD on Joe Cocker and it brought back to mind this blog post I assembled four years ago. It was impressive how much energy he generated. 

Bob Dylan earned the Nobel Prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." He not only consumed the music, he re-shaped it, gave it new luster, and shared it in new forms. It would be comparable to inventing new colors to add to the rainbow.

Now available to all, countless artists have inhaled the new "colors" Dylan gave us and proceeded to take them to new and remarkable places and spaces. One of these performer/interpreters was Joe Cocker, who passed from us in 2014 but has not been forgotten.

There are certain performers whose distinctive qualities set them apart as one of a kind, and Cocker was one of them. He'd been around for many years before he exploded on the scene in 1969 with his first United States tour which included Woodstock. His re-interpretation of "With A Little Help From My Friends" established him as a seriously notable performer. (It didn't hurt that his friends included Jimmy Page, Leon Russell, drummer B.J. Wilson and Tommy Eyre on the organ.)

After three years with his Grease Band, he assembled Mad Dogs & Englishmen, continuing a life of recording and performing. Once Joe Cocker embraced a song and reconfigured it, it became his own.

Here are nine Dylan songs that Joe Cocker recorded. Most, like Dear Landlord, were already familiar by the time he gave them renewed electricity. Others were not released by Dylan himself till much later. (Even lifetime fans have been repeatedly surprised and impressed by the contents of what keeps coming out of the Dylan vault.) The five emotion-laden tunes embedded here are among my favorites.

Dear Landlord (Joe Cocker!, 1969)

Just Like A Woman  (With a Little Help from My Friends, 1969)  Amazing.

Watching the River Flow (Luxury You Can Afford, 1978) -- Joe Cocker and the gang ratchet things up with this live performance in Italy. Love it. But then, here he is belting it out in San Francisco. Mmmmm, yeah.

Dignity (Organic, 1996)  Another great selection.

Let's close it out with this wonderful version of Ring Them Bells (Hymn for My Soul, 2007) from Dylan's Oh Mercy.

Want more Joe Cocker interpretations of Dylan? These are also easy to find...

Seven Days (Sheffield Steel, 1982) was released by Dylan on his Bootleg Series: Rare & Unreleased in 1991.

I Shall Be Released (With a Little Help from My Friends, 1969)

Catfish (Stingray, 1976)

And a laid back Reggae version of The Man In Me (Stingray, 1976)

* * * *
Trivia: Tommy Eyre, who played the organ on Joe Cocker's With A Little Help From My Friends, married Scarlet Rivera in 1991, to whom he was wed till he died from cancer in the summer of 2001. Scarlet has become a "special friend of the Northland" with many fans here as a result of her performances on behalf of the Armory (among other things.) Bringing this blog post full circle, Scarlet's imaginative violin work contributed to the distinctive sound Dylan's Desire album. Being recruited to travel with the Rolling Thunder Revue helped ignite her own career as a performer.

* * * *
Acknowledgement: Source for the nine songs, the tribute to Joe Cocker at Positively Bob Dylan.

Throwback Thursday: A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 24 JULY 2016

“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people” 
~ Leo Burnett

When I wrote about creativity and "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" I still had a few stories to add.

From series by artist Pere Salinas of Spain.

Years ago I worked for a company that did something I felt was fairly progressive. They hired a consulting firm to put the entire management team through the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator Test. After interpreting the results, and without telling us what they indicated, they had us go off campus for a couple days to have us do exercises that not only revealed who we ourselves were but also whom our peers were.

Those familiar with Myers-Briggs know that the first category has to do with the intuitive-sensing scale. Some people are extremely high on intuition and others quite reality based.

The first exercise we did involved having us sit at tables in groups of six to eight. Then the facilitator gave us each a large sheet of paper and a marker to write with. He picked up a chair, held it over his head upside down, and began throwing markers in the air while walking around the room making noises, occasionally repeating, "What am I doing."

The group at my table began writing furiously. I thought he was a soldier in a pillbox and the markers were bullets exploding. Another at my table saw them as sparklers or fireworks. All kinds of translations were recorded for the duration of time that was allotted and when we finished the sheet of paper was nearly filled with possibilities.

Our lists we then read to everyone in the room, and the findings proved hilarious. We did not know that we'd been placed at tables based on how each of us ranked on the Intuitive scale. As it turns out, my table was comprised of the most intuitive/creative people in the company. When our list of interpretations was read to the group there was laughter. No where on our list were statements like, "He's walking around with a chair over his head." Or "He's throwing markers into the air."

By way of contrast, the table made up of the most extreme Sensing people had not one creative interpretation. Their list said, "He is holding a chair over his head and throwing markers into the air." And I'm not sure they added anything else to that list.

There were a number of takeaways from this first exercise. One of these was the surprising realization that all of the people in our finance department were at the S table. The facilitator noted, "Isn't it nice to know that the people counting the money and balancing the books are not doing it creatively?"

I'm in advertising, one of the professions where highly intuitive/creative people thrive. Hence, a number of good books about creativity have been written by ad agency heads. One of these is A Technique for Producing Ideas (McGraw-Hill Advertising Classic) by James Webb Young, New edition (2003).

The book is a relatively short -- no, very short -- volume that essentially outlines the five key steps in the creative process. For many people, including creative people, creativity is in essence a mystery. Hence, we hear of writers waiting for their muse, artists waiting for inspiration. But if you're in the advertising game, do you really just wait around for inspiration to strike out of the blue? Are there ways to prime the pump? Are great ideas really only a matter of chance?

In the second chapter of Young's little volume he tells about how ancient mariners, as they traversed wide open seas, would suddenly come across lovely atolls above the waters. The unexpected had an air of magic about it. "And so it is, I thought, with Ideas," Young writes. "They appear just as suddenly above the surface of the mind; and with the same air of magic and unaccountability."

Scientists understand that these atolls don't really just appear out of nowhere. They are the product of countless, unseen coral builders working below the surface of the sea. So Young asked himself, "Is an idea, too, like this? Is it only the final result of a long series of unseen idea-building processes which go on beneath the surface of the conscious mind?"

But he went further, wondering if these processes can be identified so they can be stimulated, corralled, developed into a formula. The fundamental prod behind all this was a single quest: "How do you get ideas?"

Young continues: "This brought me to the conclusion that the production of ideas is just as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just a must a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool."

A little further in the book Young writes, "What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced; and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas."

What constitutes an "idea" you may ask. According to Vilfredo Pareto "an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements." (EdNote: You may be familiar with Pareto due to the principle named after him, a.k.a. the 80-20 rule.)

Young affirmed that “knowledge is basic to good creative thinking,” but that this is not enough. Rather, “knowledge must be digested and eventually emerge in the form of fresh, new combinations and relationships.”

I referenced the book in a 2008 blog post and see that you can purchase your own used copy for one penny plus shipping here at Amazon.

* * * *

EdNote: Picture at top right by Spanish artist Pere Salinas.
Related: New Work by Pere Salinas

Throwback Thursday: Bob Dylan's Tarantula, Revisited

So, I decided to give Tarantula another chance this week. What prompted me was that marvelous scene in I'm Not There in which Cate Blanchett, as Dylan, is in in the middle of a hotel room with white walls upon which a giant tarantula in silhouette is crawling. It's an unforgettable scene. The book itself less so. And yet, it remains in circulation, in spite of itself.

Tarantula has been compared to Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg (The Beats) and Rimbaud, but my first impressions upon re-reading it were James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and Andy Warhol's proclamation, "Art is whatever you can get away with."

If I were asked when I first picked up a copy of this book I would have said it was when I was in high school in the 60s. The reality is that the book was never "officially" in print till 1971, proof that memory is a faulty and unreliable creature. So I must have been in college at the time. The cover was cool, and the title was cool. But the content? It depends on what lens you assess it through.

It wasn't till later that I became acquainted with Finnegans Wake, Joyce's 14-years-to-produce language game that made little sense to anyone and struck most common folk as a massive inside joke. Was it a joke on the readers or on his publisher?

So it is that Dylan produced a bit of prose here that was supposed to be something important. Was it also an inside joke? A joke on readers or on McMillan, his publisher?

What probably happened, no doubt, was that in 1966 Dylan had become such a hot commodity that anyone who published anything he wrote would be guaranteed a profit. A pitch was made, contract signed and the deal set in motion.

"Something's happening but you don't know what it is, eh?"

I dunno.

It's a book of historic significance only for the fact that Dylan wrote it, and it has an iconic photo on the cover (I already said that, I know). The back cover (of my copy) says this book "captures the tone and spirit of the turbulent times in which it was written."

Straight up, that's McMillan's marketing copy. His songs did, but nothing in this book really does that.

To capture the times I would suggest Dr. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five or Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Reading James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time is a bracing read as well, and no joke. Michener's Kent State is on point at the end of the decade.

Dylan's Tarantula was an insignificant blip on the period's literary scene and even less in retrospect. It's easy to imagine him saying, "I was funnin' you." Something akin to his 115th dream, though even there there's serious satire taking place. The rambling tripe on most of these pages seems to have no real aim other than to fill pages with ink.

Perhaps it could be said that this was a foreshadowing of Seinfeld, which was essentially about meaninglessness.

Here are the book's opening lines, after the initial chapter heading Guns, the Falcon's Mouthbook & Gashcap Unpunished.

aretha/ crystal jukebox queen of hymn & him diffused and drunk transfusion round wound heed sweet soundwave crippled & cry salute to oh great particular el dorado real and ye battered personal god but she cannot she the leader of whom when ye follow, she cannot she has no back she cannot ... beneath black flowery railroad fans  etc.

Alas. I'm sure there is some backstory on all this, of which I've forgotten or am unfamiliar. It doesn't really matter. Here are a few of the more critical reviews of this book on Amazon.

Three Star Review
If you need to read a review of this before you buy it , you must have no idea about Bob Dylan and this particular book. Investigate thoroughly before you commit. All Dylan fans will want to have it , whether they read it or not is up to them. I tried and couldn't really do it - but I had to "own" it.

Two Star Review
Dylan is by far the greatest songwriter of all-time and perfectly deserving of a noble [sic] prize in literature if ever one is bestowed upon him. However this stream of consciousness book is pure crap. It will be a highly collectible book if you have the first edition, first printing in good condition in about 50 years. Till then read Lyrics 1961-2001 or Chronicles vol.1 instead.

One Star Review
Is Bob Dylan now the pen name of a machine learning software fed hastily written assignments from a one hundred level poetry class? Tarantula is what the software produced.

One Star Review
I really couldn't make sense of this book. I am old enough to blame myself when this happens. I like his lyrics, but this book is unreadable. I wonder if he wrote it deliberately to mock those who say they get it. It is as if you hold up a toddler's doodle to art critic, who compliments it as some work of genius.

* * * *
On the flip side there are many like these five star reviews:

A Masterpiece
Spontaneous bebop prose poem. As with Naked Lunch, I can only absorb 10 pages at a time and then my head hurts gloriously. If you love Dylan, buy it, dog ear it, highlight, and rave.

Good book by Dylan when he was 23
I enjoy reading this as much as I did when I got my first copy in the early ‘70s. As dazzling as Bob’s music.

* * * *
It's probably significant that when you go to Bob Dylan Wikiquote, itself an exceptionally long Wikiquote entry, there are no quotes from Tarantula.

But that's OK. I own it, read it again and am happy to have it on my bookshelf. Do you have it on yours?

Throwback Thursday: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bob Dylan

22 DECEMBER 2011
I found this last night online. Kinda fun story of a guy who did the best he could to hold Dylan at arm's length, but after a long, long time finally got it. I like the title of the essay because of its deliberate take-off on the sub-title of Kubrick's classic, Dr. Strangelove.

The Mike Walsh story begins this-away....

Let me make this clear up front: I'm not a Dylan-head, Dylan-ite, Dylan-phile, Dylan-ologist, or any other kind of extreme Dylan fan. In fact, I never bought a Dylan record or CD until just a few years ago. I never saw the need. Growing up in the 60's, Dylan was on the radio all the time --"Blowing in the Wind," "Don't Think Twice It's All Right," "The Times They Are a Changin'," "All I Really Want to Do," "It Ain't Me Babe, "Mr. Tambourine Man," etc., etc. Plus, many other bands had hits with his songs, like Peter Paul and Mary, Hendrix, and The Byrds. There was no escaping Dylan back then. You listened to him whether you wanted to or not.

In college, it seemed like everybody in the dorm except me owned Dylan's Greatest Hits, Volumes 1 and 2. So I had to listen to the same songs all over again at just about every dorm party. One kid down the hall even had a guitar, a neck stand with a harmonica, and a music book of Dylan's greatest hits. So I got to hear the same songs played and sung live -- quite amateurishly, to put it kindly. By the mid-70's I'd had quite enough of Dylan -- so much so that I did a nasally, slurred vocal rendition of "Like a Rolling Stone" just to torture the Zimmermanites, even though they never seemed to mind. In fact, they joined in no matter how obnoxiously I wheezed, "How does it feeeeeeeel?", so the joke was always on me.

What I wanted to hear was something different, something that wasn't on the radio. Soon punk and new wave surfaced, and I've been a slave to indie rock and the underground sounds ever since, as my record collection can attest. My opinion of Dylan stayed the same during all that time, even though I didn't sing "Like a Rolling Stone" quite so often (although I did work up an even more annoying version of "The Needle and the Damage Done" but that's another story).

The rest of the article can be found here at the Phawker blog where you'll read that it took many a year for this fellow to come around. For some reason I was much more prepared for his outside-the-pop-40-box sound a bit earlier than that. When Ed Hilliker loaned me The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan on the school bus in seventh grade, I recognized something stirring there. A few years later, when Ed shared about the beauty of eating flower petals on a subway in Greenwich Village with his girl friend, I wasn't so sure about that part of the new scene.

Last night I remembered his story about the flower petals because my wife Susie bought some edible flowers to brighten the darkness of our Winter Solstice. She thus decorated my stew with a pansy. Which I ate, incidentally. It made me smile as I thought of Ed H. on the subway... Funny how Subway became a franchise, and yesterday noon I ate a sandwich there.

An intersection of connections... Eds and subways and eating flowers and Dylan. As I write these lines I drift through Girl From The North Country and Boots of Spanish Leather... and Bob Dylan's Dream.... and I dream a little, too.

Hope you're still holding some dreams in the hearth of your hearts. Keep 'em goin'....

* * * *
EdNote: Tonight (2019) we'll see Dylan in Mankato. This seemed like a good preface to a fine evening. What an amazing career.  And the beat goes on.

Picture top right by ennyman, painted on a page from the 1939 London Times

Throwback Thursday: Creativity Takes Courage

"Creativity takes courage." ~Matisse

Often, one of the hardest things for writers is a blank piece of paper. Much has been written about it, as the mind races around trying to decide what to put down as that all important first sentence.

In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote that he dislikes seeing a blank canvas, and when he sees one he feels obligated to smear paint on it. And I know exactly what he means.

In painting, before you can really do the work you have to do the prep. Once you get the surface ready (if canvas, with gesso) you still want to paint a neutral undercoat of some kind. At least, this is one approach that is common. It certainly doesn't apply if you are pouring stain onto an unprimed canvas like Louis Morris, but in traditional painting, that background undercoat helps set the tone.

So, I am staring at a box here where I am to write today's blog entry and I don't know where to go with it. Should I jump outside the box and write a string of absurd sentences about colons and dashboards or steering columns and carcinoma? Or do we follow this train we're on to some kind of logical conclusions?

I just deleted one direction this could have gone. Let's head Southeast for a moment. No, wait, maybe West. Or, never mind.

So, I am having an art opening this week on Tuesday evening. One of the pieces is a Tribute to Duchamp who said, "I am interested in ideas, not merely visual products." Thus was born the concept of conceptual art. The Tribute piece is an item I found at a garage sale for a buck, which if I were famous might garner ten thousand. The current price is, "To Highest Bidder."

The irony is that young people, and maybe even older ones, have never heard of Duchamp, or the urinal on display in a Philadelphia gallery (found art). Many don’t even know Magritte, Matisse or the other prominent artists who initially steered the direction of 20th century art away from representationalism.

Another irony: I began my college studies moving in the direction of philosophy (ideas) but found art more appealing because you ended up with a visual product. So Duchamp pushed art in a direction, but pure idea as an end has to return to earth in some form... whether it be paintings or perhaps in acts of service to one's neighbors, community, etc.

Think about it. Then express yourself.

* * * *

The Bee art is here to remind you that there's a 

Bee Friendly Day in Carlton this weekend.

WHY? BEE CAUSE.

Throwback Thursday: Reflections on Water and Ice

34 below zero F. Coldest reading yet on our thermometer. The sun is a muted white, beaming from the southeast. Back down below, a prism of color rises from Rocky Run, a pulsing pillar that at times is quite pronounced and at other times so indistinct as to be invisible. It springs from the earth near two pines across the way which I have never noticed before, just this side of the gravel pit. It extends quite high at times, the endpiece of a rainbow. How strange this phenomenon on a cloudless morn.

How can it be so cold out there? Where does cold come from? Absence of heat... but the sun is no further, nor nearer, than another day 50 degrees warmer.
~ Journal note, 15 January 1994

While looking through one of my journals I came across the above observations. I was attempting to describe a phenomenon that I'd never seen before coming to Minnesota, the way fog and crystal-laden moisture refracts light in the context of intense cold. Here in the Northland you can sometimes tell how cold it is by the way it squeaks when walking on the frozen snow as you go out to fetch the paper in the morning.

Water is the strangest thing. The manner in which it changes based on temperature, and not just random temps but a specific temperature, at 0 degrees Celsius. And how it vanishes (becomes vapor) when it boils. Yet it is still H20 so that when it condenses it become moisture again.

The density of water is another mystery. You would think that when water freezes, becomes a solid, it would sink, wouldn't you? Yet when icebergs break off from Greenland they float. This seems very strange. Yet we just take it all for granted.

I was reading how water expands when it freezes. This, too, seems strange because the molecules are still H20, yet they re-form themselves somehow when they become crystals. My initial sense would be that frozen water would take less room, as if the fluid's molecules were arrange themselves tighter together when they became solid. But this is not the case. In point of fact, water expands by 9% when it freezes, hence the burst water pipes some of people have experienced in very cold weather in the Northland.

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Physics is the study of nature and natural phenomena in our world. I have fond memories of Mr. Dennison's physics class my junior year in high school. A former minor league pitcher who after 7 years finally came up for a pair of games with the Red Sox at the end of a season, he was also our Junior Varsity baseball coach. I learned a lot from Mr. Dennison about many things, but never quite got the answer to why it's so hard to hit a knuckleball.

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By the way, did you see the size of the moon last night? (Unfortunately, a sheet of clouds slid across the sky to hide the eclipse that occurred shortly after dark.) I find it intriguing that when the moon circles 'round the earth its influence causes the tides to advance and recede. Because of gravity the earth's bodies of water pull inward, or downward depending on your point of view. But when the moon passes overhead the gravitational pull of our lunar companion produces swelling seas. What's especially interesting is how the waters on the opposite side of the earth also bulge to produce a high tide there as well. (You can read how all this works here.)

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It's also interesting that water covers about two-thirds of the earth, and that when we mature our own bodies are about two-thirds water. (The ratio changes from infancy to maturity.)

* * * *

Here's another observation. Whereas water is essential for our nourishment to survive, water is also a destructive force, causing buildings to rot, dead trees to decay, and so on.

* * * *

For those who are interested in other mysteries and observations about water check out these links:

The Many Mysteries of Water

5 Weird Things About Water

Middle School Chemistry Lessons on Water and Ice

Observations on Melting and Freezing

In closing, a quote to float your boat: “Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.” ― Wallace Stevens

EdNote: The journal entry that started this post was our second winter living just outside Duluth. Since that time I have since seen 42 below on our thermometer. Welcome to the Northland. The original blog post was published in 2015.

Throwback Thursday: Thanksgiving Seven Years Past

Piglet noticed that even though he had a very small heart, it could hold a rather large amount of gratitude. ~A.A. Milne

The following was written in 2010. With the exception of the description of the weather it could probably have been posted on any recent Thanksgiving. 

THROWBACK THURSDAY

Tomorrow is Black Friday. I know this because it has been in the news for a week. Also, today's Duluth News Tribune feels fifteen pounds heavier than normal. I'm guessing that Black Friday is some form of fix for people addicted to bargains.

Today is Thanksgiving. As its name implies, or rather exclaims, it is a day set aside to give thanks. Or at least that is how it was originally designated, as a day to celebrate the harvest, the bounty and abundance of God's blessing.

Nowadays it's a secular holiday for the most part, signifying a short work week (unless you work in retail), a Lions football game and time to eat turkey.

Yesterday it snowed pretty heavy here, though not as fiercely as predicted, for which I am personally thankful. I still have to blow the driveway though... but that's the price we pay for living here in Minnesota.

Thought for the day, from John F. Kennedy: "As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them."

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BONUS TRACK
-- The Power of Music to Comfort and Heal
Have a a very special day... and give thanks.

Recalling the Power of Clint Eastwood's Invictus

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 22 JUNE 2010

Last night watched the film Invictus, the remarkable true story of South Africa’s 1995 capture of the Rugby World Cup, directed by Clint Eastwood. This really is a wonderful story with impressive performances, starring Matt Damon as team captain Francois Pienaar and Morgan Freeman as the irrepressible Nelson Mandela.

Kudos to Clint Eastwood for the stories he has been bringing to the screen in recent years. This one is again an inspired piece of work and shows that he has learned well the craft of storytelling in film. I don’t believe we as Americans fully appreciate the impact and power of Nelson Mandela’s life achievements, not only in bringing down apartheid but in becoming the elected president who united this wounded and torn country.

This would be a great film if for no other reason than to introduce more Americans to the power of poetry to inspire the soul. For it was the nineteenth century Henley poem Invictus from which Nelson Mandela derived the inner strength to overcome those who imprisoned him for 25 years and hard labor.

Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gait,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

If my comments above fail to persuade you to see the film, perhaps this excerpt from an imdb.com movie review will help.

As a South African who saw this film on Friday morning, I can tell you you the entertaining, inspiring and enjoyable "Invictus" exceeded all my expectations.

It really is a true story of epic proportions yet it's told with an intimate feel, and it is at least 98% accurate to the events of the time. Clint gets all the big details and so many of the little details right, but he never goes over the top. He directs with minimum fuss and achieves maximum effect, just letting the powerful story unfold without getting in its way.

I watched the 1995 Rugby World Cup and saw Madiba come out in the Springbok jersey. It was a wondrous sight. And when Joel Stransky slotted that drop kick over in the dying minutes and the Boks won, I wept and cheered along with everyone else. After the match millions of South African - of all races - celebrated. It was an amazing time. It was the birth of the "Rainbow Nation". Nelson Mandela is the greatest and most beloved of all South Africans. The man is a living legend, but so human and real. When he was President he brought hope to all South Africans, white and black. We, in my country, will never stop loving this incredible man. Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman did South Africa and our beloved Madiba proud. Francois Pienaar is also an amazing South African, an intelligent, big-hearted rugby played who always lead by example, and Matt Damon's performance as him was superb. I was glued to the screen for every second of the film's running time (I didn't even move from my seat until the final credit rolled and the house lights came on), and I was moved to tears on several occasions. The final scene was especially touching.

My only question at this point is, what will it take to unite our own country’s mix of races and ideologies? Politicians run for office with this pledge but we're more divided than ever. Perhaps this is what the Olympics is intended to be about to some extent?

In the meantime, rent the film. It's a good one. Thank you Clint, Morgan, Matt and crew. And thank you Mr. Mandela for your vision and fortitude. You've held up a light against the darkness.

Throwback Thursday: Numbers Games

THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN 2008

Every picture tells a story. So do numbers. Here’s another page of numbers that speaks volumes.

In answer to the question, “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what’s right – just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time?”
In 1958: 76% said “just about always” or “most of the time”
In 1970: 50%
In 1976: 33%

Number of buildings the Pentagon owns or rents around the world, 2008: 316,238
Number of sites where these building are located: 4,668
Number of sites that are in foreign countries: 761
Number of sites located in foreign countries in 1967: 1,014

Percentage of persons classified as poor in U.S. who have air conditioning: 85%
Percentage who had air conditioning in 1971: 36%

Percentage of persons classified as poor in U.S. who have a color TV set: 97%
Percentage in 1971: 40%

Percentage of U.S. poor who own an automatic dishwasher: 40%
In '71: 20%

Percentage who own a refrigerator: Almost 100%
In 1970: 75%

Total Federal spending, 1968: $774 billion
Total Federal spending today: $2.5 trillion
Current Federal Wall Street/AIG bailout package: $700 billion

Number of persons in prison with drug crimes as most serious offense: 400,000
Number in 1980: 24,000

Number of persons worldwide who have died from starvation in the last hour: 2,738
Number in past hour who died from malaria: 342

Percentage of Haitian babies born with low birth weight: 25
Percentage of Haitians using adequate sanitation facilities: 30
Percentage of world illness caused by unsanitary drinking water: 80

Approximate number of deaths caused by 1998 civil war in Congo: 2.9 million

Number of live nuclear warheads in U.S. arsenal, 1966: 32,040
Estimated number of warheads in Pakistan today: 60-80

Number of synapses in human brain: 100 trillion

Number of web cams today: 100 million
Number of cell phones: 3.3 billion
Number of corporate email messages sent a day: 77 billion

Estimated number of times average person blinks in a day: 17,000

Estimated number of times average person laughs: Not enough

Throwback Thursday: DAI Member Show Exceptional As Always

TONIGHT is the Closing Reception for the Duluth Art Institute Member Show and the opening for three new shows--Gezielt (Carla Hamilton), Rooted Expression (Elizabeth Kuth) and Emerging Photographers 2017. 5:00-7:00 p.m. at the Depot. Join us. 

Meantime, for Throwback Thursday here's a blog post about the opening reception for the 2010 Member show seven years ago. 

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It's an awesome thing to be a young artist in the vicinity of New York or San Francisco or other flourishing cultural centers, nourished by the variety of aesthetic experiences exploding there. Truth is, wherever you go across the land, by whatever ribbon of highway you travel, you will discover pockets of creative energy displayed. There are artists everywhere doing some very cool things.

Last week, the Duluth Art Institute Membership Show opened here, filling the Great Hall of the Depot with a wide array of works by local artists. During my lunch hour yesterday I had a chance to check it out, having missed the Opening Reception the previous week because I was in L.A. The show consists of a single entry by any member desirous to contribute, and one readily sees there are a lot of people making some very interesting things. I saw that someone else has been painting Dylan, and I saw one of Adam Swanson's bicycles.

“Even though the work is un-juried, this show is a testament to the incredible array and quality of visual art in the Arrowhead region,” said Samantha Gibb Roff, DAI executive director.

Here's the mission of the DAI, according to their website: The Duluth Art Institute enriches daily life with dynamic, innovative arts programming that upholds excellence and promotes active community participation. From talking with the executive director and others, I have come to understand that the last phrase is probably the DAI's most important feature, promoting community participation. Through a range of programs the organization nurtures an interest in the arts among young people, and helps closet artists expose their creative passions to wider audiences. The DAI also has workshops to help professionals find more venues and to develop their careers in the arts.

In short, it is a small but energetic non-profit organization that is dedicated full time to community enrichment and appreciation of the arts. At the very least, check out their show at The Depot. And when you have a few minutes, check out their website as well.

Art appreciation isn't just for stodgy old folks with money. It's for everyone.

PICTURED here are scenes from the current show in The Depot's Great Hall. My own entry, A Postmodern Man, is in the lower portion of the photo at the top right.

* * * *

"If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced." --Vincent Van Gogh

Throwback Thursday: Dylan and Shakespeare Are Birds of a Feather

There's probably no better time to re-post this 2012 blast from the past than now with Shakespeare's First Folio in town. 

And What PERFECT TIMING.... For those who have had doubts about Bob Dylan's literary significance, it's just been announced that Bob Dylan has been awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature today. 

* * * *

May 2012

Friday evening's Scarlet Rivera concert with Gene Lafond and the Wild Unknown provided a great kick-off for this week's Dylan Fest events. When it came time for an encore, the group did us one better, returning the following night to rock the house at Tycoon's Saturday evening.

During the pre-event mixer last night I had the privilege of finally meeting some of the many people whose names I'd become familiar with but who had no faces... till now. I am referring here to the board of directors for the Armory Arts and Music Center. What a dedicated bunch. The excitement surrounding recent events including purchase of the property next door only serves to cement their resolve that the facility will be preserved.

Being around Dylan people, and by that I mean people who have been long time fans and thought deeply about Dylan's songs and importance, you almost inevitably glean new insights to add to your catalog of understandings. Such was the case last night.

A favorite song among many long-time Dylan listeners is Desolation Row, the capstone on Dylan's remarkable Highway 61 Revisited. The opening line of this song is a familiar one, "They're selling postcards of the hanging..." I have listened to it a hundred, if not five hundred, times. It is shocking to realize that people actually did sell postcards of lynchings. And last night, while upstairs at Tycoons, I learned some new information about the lynching that took place here in 1919, a dark blot in Northland history.

Backstory: I have been aware for many years of the terrible event that took place here. I have even written about it on my blog a few times, as in this moment when I was touched by Billy Holiday's rendition of Strange Fruit Until last night I never realized the the jailhouse was not eight blocks away at Sixth Avenue West, where the county jail had been most of my years in this town. The jail, where these three black men were scraped from was just one block from where they were put to death without trial. Duluth's jail, and Prohibition era speakeasy, was right there in Tycoon's for a time, and then in the building next door.

While getting to know various people, listening and talking, we got to the topic of how many different phrases and songs and lines from songs are so much a part of our culture now but that many of the masses are unaware that their origins come from Dylan songs. One gentleman noted that for the longest time he'd never read any Shakespeare, but when he finally did his first reaction was that his plays were full of cliches... until he realized what an astonishing number of sayings originated with this brilliant man, and before him they weren't cliches at all.

My guess is that many who discover Dylan for the first time also realize that he's been influencing them all along, without them knowing it.What follows is a blog entry I wrote a few years ago with regard to Dylan's tip-o'-the-hat to Shakespeare.

TELL OL' BILL

It just keeps getting better. I'm referring here to the Dylan catalog. It's not the prodigious quantity, but the remarkable quality of work that keeps fans coming back for more.

When Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 was released last year, my first reaction was, "Oh no, do I have a buy yet another Dylan album already?" Then the word started to get around, some cuts were played on KUMD's Dylan Hour, and a friend said it was a must have. Turns out he was right. After a year I still can't stop listening to the songs on this rich double CD, which is primarily alternative takes and unreleased material from 1989 to present.

The unreleased songs here like "Red River Shore", "Born In Time" and "Marchin' to the City" would have been enough for the foundation of a great album, but shuffle in all these fabulous alternate versions of songs like "Most Of The Time" and "Dignity" and it's just golden.

This weekend the song "Tell Ol' Bill" has been pulsing through my mind. The tune is haunting. The poetry mysterious and suitably subtle and evocative. So I wished to share it here this morning.

Last night I found myself agreeing with Foley Jones who begins his review of this song with the statement, "I’ve been shocked by the lack of attention paid so far to Tell Ol’ Bill."

The simplicity of its imagery and the extent to which it has been realised is what makes the song ‘major’. Just how many times can one man go to the same well and come back with something so full and fresh? Here we’re on archetypal first principles, more symbolism than imagery: the river, the high hill, tranquil lakes and streams, the ground, the wood. How much is he conscious of the possibility of reading ‘River of Life’ into the opening line, do you suppose? The sheer number of times that you get to ask that fundamental question about his ditties is evidence in itself to make the question redundant. That’s what he’s on about alright.

The song has a lot of the core mannerisms of Dylan’s recent work: the country swing, the stolen title, the references to Shakespeare, the preoccupation with death, and the wry fortitude with which that prospect is met.

Tell Ol’ Bill

The river whispers in my ear
I've hardly a penny to my name
The heavens have never seemed so near
All of my body glows with flame

The tempest struggles in the air
And to myself alone I sing
It could sink me then and there
I can hear the echoes ring

I tried to find one smiling face
To drive the shadow from my head
I'm stranded in this nameless place
Lying restless in a heavy bed

Tell me straight out if you will
Why must you torture me within?
Why must you come down off of your high hill?
Throw my fate to the clouds and wind

Far away in a silent land
Secret thoughts are hard to bear
Remember me, you'll understand
Emotions we can never share

You trampled on me as you passed
Left the coldest kiss upon my brow
All of my doubts and fears have gone at last
I've nothing more to tell you now

I walk by tranquil lakes and streams
As each new season's dawn awaits
I lay awake at night with troubled dreams
The enemy is at the gate

Beneath the thunder blasted trees
The words are ringin' off your tongue
The ground is hard in times like these
Stars are cold, the night is young

The rocks are bleak, the trees are bare
Iron clouds go floating by
Snowflakes fallin' in my hair
Beneath the gray and stormy sky

The evenin' sun is sinkin' low
The woods are dark, the town isn't new
They'll drag you down, they'll run the show
Ain't no telling what they'll do

Tell ol' Bill when he comes home
Anything is worth a try
Tell him that I'm not alone
That the hour has come to do or die

All the world I would defy
Let me make it plain as day
I look at you now and I sigh
How could it be any other way?

Credits: Bob Dylan, songwriter

Special Rider Music, publisher

Check out Foley Jones' complete commentary on this great song.
CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE

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DYLAN FANS & Friends: Join us Saturday night at The Rex for the 25th Anniversary celebration of John Bushey's KUMD radio show Highway 61 Revisited. October 15.  Purchase tickets here. 

Special thanks to KUMD, the Duluth Dylan Fest Committee, the Rex Bar and everyone else who is helping to make this event happen.

Will you join us?

"I can't think for ya, you'll have to decide..." ~Dylan

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CHECK OUT MY PINTEREST DYLAN BOARD, ALL DYLAN ALL THE TIME. 100 PINS