Thanks to Renfield for the impetus to watch more WJ.
She rocks!
Sex-Crazed Sanity
A new use for Viagra. I carry some genetic risk for Alzheimer’s, indeed you bastards may have already diagnosed me. If I go this treatment route, Mrs. Renfield’s probably going to throw open the marriage on my end.
More Space Junk
I’m convinced that someday the mother ship is coming for me, so I like to scan spaceward. The International Space Station is the third brightest object in the sky, and Spot the Station provides an excellent resource for following it. I plugged in the hometown and got this:
In addition to the ISS, it’s important to watch the planets. The Hubble Telescope takes photos every year (monitoring Jupiter’s monolith, presumably) and recently uncovered excitement on Saturn:
“In the northern hemisphere of Saturn, it was early autumn when Hubble took this year’s look at the ringed planet. A mysterious six-sided hurricane has reappeared around the planet’s north pole. The storm, big enough to swallow four Earths, was first spotted by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. Last year it was hard to see but this year it has reappeared.
Farther out, it’s springtime on Uranus . . .”
Holy Mystery of Fandom
I like John Coltrane as much as the next egghead, but this is a little much.
Nowhere In The Bible Does Jesus Have A Sword Fight
I think i may have posted about this guy on Bastard Blog 1.0, but the information super highway suggested that I revisit his site and read his new stuff, and note that he has a new book coming out December 8.
David Thorne is hilarious, and his website 27B/6 is full of his snarky correspondence with various people and they’re all gold. Here’s a few samples…
I understand the importance the resurrection story holds in your particular religion. If I too knew some guy that had been killed and placed inside a cave with a rock in front of it and I visited the cave to find the rock moved and his body gone, the only logical assumption would be that he had risen from the dead and is the son of God. Once, my friend Simon was rushed to hospital to have his appendix removed and I visited him the next day to find his bed empty. I immediately sacrificed a goat and burnt a witch in his name but it turned out that he had not had appendicitis, just needed a good poo, and was at home playing Playstation.
Short lesbians with Blondie t-shirts always make for good employees. Anyway, apologies if you already knew about this guy, but if not, click here more more hilarity
I Wish I Could Do This
One of my favorite parts of playing the Left for Dead games is wandering around looking at the details. This tutorial gives me an even greater appreciation for the artistry involved!
Musicians!
I’m ready to discuss Peter Jackson’s Beatles event when you are. I liked it a lot, although I felt like it dragged a bit through the middle. What say you, bastards? What was the most surprising revelation?
Musician? II
The documentary we’ve all been craving is here.
Take it away, Norm!
Musician?
I was bored at a relative’s home over the weekend and noticed a copy of the Neil Young biography, Shakey. I started reading random passages and ran across something interesting. Someone (I forgot who) recalls a meeting between Stephen Stills and Bob Dylan. After the meeting, Stills mentioned to the narrator that although he admired Dylan very much, he didn’t consider Dylan a musician. The narrator was horrified. The great Bob Dylan, not a musician?
Stills was correct. Let’s look at the facts. As a guitarist, Dylan doesn’t display much that you couldn’t teach anyone. As for the harmonica (barely an instrument really, but let’s be thorough), his playing reminds me of why I hid our harmonica from my two sons when they were very young. As for his singing, you could argue that the younger Dylan’s voice gave an appropriate tone to some of his songs. But we’re talking about musicianship here, and his singing has never been good in purely musical terms. And as for his “mature” voice, it reminds me of the noise my stomach was making a couple of weeks ago after I ate too many ribs.
Then there’s songwriting. I won’t deny he’s written some good ones (hard not to do when you’ve written several million). At best, they are effective support for the main ingredient, his lyrics. Musically, there isn’t much going on in them. You can find great instrumental parts, but they’re the work of others such as Robbie Robertson, Al Kooper, et al. Well-known covers of his songs are always better than the originals. Well, maybe not always.
So is Dylan a musician? Nah.
Dylan’s talents lie in lyrics and self-promotion. But as a lyricist, he is not the infallible god of his most ardent fans. It’s been pointed out elsewhere that you can’t be “along” a watchtower. You can be in, on, around, or even buried under one (which might have been a better premise), but not along one. Nit-picking perhaps, but it has a reputation as a great song, and great writing must be precise, even where the meaning is obscure. Then, there are some real clunkers. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is just plain dumb. But to be fair, everyone has bad days, and you can’t write as much as he has without misfiring. I find the protest songs to be overly earnest and boring, but my anti-folkie bias might disqualify me as a judge of those.
His real genius has been in nurturing the cult of his own genius. I can’t think of an artist who has more deftly used aloofness and contempt to rope fans into a sort of narcissistic codependency. It has enabled him to carve out a career on his own terms, so good for him. It has also worked so well that there will be no clear-sighted reassessment of Dylan until most boomers have downsized to the cemeteries.
That said, I’ve always liked his Live 1966 album where he gave a middle finger to the folkies by going electric. There’s real rock’n’roll tension there, and The Band play like gods. I also enjoyed his Theme Time radio show back in the aughties.
Yummy
No lips or assholes in sight.