Review: Bob Dylan & His Band

I am a week late in posting this. Here's a review I wrote of Bob Dylan's fine fine performance in Seattle last Monday for Seattle Weekly.

There he stood, leering at the crowd from under the wide brim of his black hat, lips twitching into a smirk as he growled those classic words: "Lay lady lay...lay across my big brass bed." And the women standing behind me complained to each other, loudly: "God, his voice! He sounds awful!"

Not the Dylan I heard. He sounded better than I'd ever heard him sound in a live setting. That voice of his now proudly amplified, Dylan lets his ashen throat do all the work. Lyrics perhaps once sung sweetly are now bitten off syllable-by-syllable, chewed up, spit out, exhaled through an old rusty tailpipe. He's a better singer now than ever before. He is not a 28-year old folk darling, but a 68-year old bluesman who dresses like a cross between Zorro and a Civil War general and sings old songs in weird jazzy mutations and new songs as if it were still the 1950s...or the 1920s, depending. The fucker is weird and a total enigma. But he's always been that way. It's just that he's even weirder now.

Dylan opened last night's WaMu Theatre show the same way he opened the previous night's set at The Moore, by launching into the bluesy stomp of "Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking" from Slow Train Coming. He stood behind his keyboard, hunched over it like a vulture, looking up now and again to give cues to his band. With Texas guitar ace Charlie Sexton back again as a member of Dylan's crack quintet, Dylan seemed very much alive, throwing himself into every song, heaving his shoulders and swiveling his hips from behind the keyboard. When he stepped out from behind the keyboard, he sometimes played guitar and other times took the microphone like a Vegas lounge singer, reaching his arms out to the crowd to deliver lyrics like "Oh well I love ya pretty baby," from Together Through Life's swingin' single "Beyond Here Lies Nothing", or "You see somebody naked and you say 'Who is that man?'" from his menacing "Ballad of A Thin Man". Over the 100-minute set, he played a big chunk of songs from his last two albums, 2006's Modern Times and this year's Together Through Life, croaking his way through "Spirit On The Water", "If You Ever Go To Houston", and "My Wife's Hometown". A particularly aching "Forgetful Heart" was performed with flourishes of harmonica so haunting and vocals so peppered it sounded like it could've been an outtake from 1989's Oh Mercy. As great as he was, though, you could still sense disappointment from certain fans, like the aforementioned women behind me. They want young, handsome and giddy Dylan, not old, wizened, raspy Dylan. Too bad, because today's Dylan is pure bizarre magic and the appeal lies in the subtlety of the performances. The way he twists and mangles verses like a jazzman. The way he squints at the crowd in a way that makes you question everything you thought you knew. The way he smirks occasionally during songs in a way that makes you wonder if the entire show is some kind of inside joke you're not a part of. Like I said before, the fucker is weird and a total mystery. But Bob is still Bob spelled backwards.

Carts, Cars, and a Church

Top Hat In Morning Sun

More Photos

Photos: This Afternoon

Last Night, This Morning

A Walk Around White Center, Washington

I used up all the room on my Flickr account for this month,

so I have to post these here until October 1.

Quote of the Week...Maybe Quote of the Year

"I think it's important to realize that I was actually black before the election."

--President Barack Obama on David Letterman.

I gotta say, I think our current president is the funniest president in history. Aside from Nixon, perhaps...

Here's The New York Times Magazine's Matt Bai on Obama's Seinfeldian, post-modern sense of humor:

By MATT BAI

Published: August 6, 2009

It’s hardly fair, this thing we do to our politicians: when they refuse to depart from their carefully worded scripts, we deride them as wooden, fraudulent, synthetic. When they dare to reveal genuine passion or irreverence, though, we pound away at them for displaying insufficient self-control. Such was the case with Barack Obama’s recent and calamitous news conference, when the president plunged headlong into a debate over race relations. A barrage of criticism, which followed Obama’s extemporaneous comments, centered on his use of the word “stupidly” to describe the behavior of the Cambridge police. But perhaps the more jarring if overlooked moment in Obama’s answer came just before that, when he endeavored to cast himself in the place of his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose trouble began when he needed to break into his own home. “I mean, if I was trying to jigger into — well, I guess this is my house now, so it probably wouldn’t happen,” the president said. Then he flashed a mischievous grin and added, “Here I’d get shot.”

It’s hard to imagine an edgier joke than this — the nation’s president, its first black president at that, teasing about being gunned down in the White House foyer. Had Obama not gone on to malign a cop, it almost certainly would have dominated the next day’s punditry. And yet the moment was in keeping with what we have learned about Obama in the months since his inauguration. The president, it turns out, is quite funny — and sometimes a little reckless. Obama had to make his first apology just days after being elected president, for joking about Nancy Reagan’s séances. He ran into trouble with advocates for the handicapped in March, when he suggested to Jay Leno that his bowling on the campaign trail belonged in the Special Olympics. And before the Super Bowl, he angered fans of the singer Jessica Simpson by appearing to make light of her supposedly ballooning weight. (Fortunately for Obama, fewer than a dozen of those fans are old enough to vote.) You have to have a pretty determined sense of aggrievement — or just a dim view of the president generally — to take genuine offense at such throwaway one-liners. And yet they tend to obscure, if only for a day, Obama’s more serious objectives, undermining the comedian in chief’s reputation as an innately disciplined politician.

Obama is hardly the first television-age president to employ a sometimes unsettling wit. John Kennedy remarked in advance of the 1960 campaign that his father had asked him not to buy too many votes because he wasn’t about to pay for a landslide, and presidents have long turned to professional joke writers to humanize them. What makes Obama’s humor more combustible isn’t just its spontaneity but also its distinctly postmodern, Seinfeldian premise. There’s an absurdist quality to the president’s less serious side, a sense that he woke up this morning to find himself occupying this singularly bizarre place in American life and that he has just now become aware that he’s the only sane guy in the room.

This was the impulse he displayed last year when the Democratic candidates were asked in a debate before the Nevada caucuses to disclose their own weaknesses. Obama, answering first, admitted that he inclined toward messiness, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwardsself-servingly confessed to caring too gosh-darn much about other people. “If I had gone last, I would have known what the game was,” Obama joked afterward, with mock bewilderment. “I could have said: ‘Well, you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.’ ” More recently, Obama sounded mystified by plans for a new presidential helicopter. “The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” he remarked dryly. “Of course, I’ve never had a helicopter before, you know? Maybe I’ve been deprived and I didn’t know it.” Other presidents mastered the telling of the canned political joke. Obama’s shtick is that he finds such stagecraft, the falsity and pomposity of modern politics, to be as laughable as we do.

Such a perspective is entirely new in the White House, born perhaps of the same deconstructionist ethos that gave us “The Simpsons” and The Onion — self-aware acts of ridicule that would have seemed wholly out of place in the age of “All in the Family.” Our more recent presidents, reared in the age after the Great Depression and World War II, have tended to be deeply earnest types, class presidents and conventional insiders, the kind of men who affixed their flag pins to their lapels without a second thought. Parody, on the other hand, is an act of subversion, the province of the kid in the back row who refuses to grant the institution its inherent authority. In such moments of transgression, Obama seems inherently uncomfortable with the garish décor of the imperial presidency. With each self-mocking digression, he registers a small blow against the excessive reverence for the office that made possible, in some measure, the missteps of his predecessor.

What we sense about Obama in these moments too is an exasperation that runs below his surface equanimity. Humor enables him to publicly vent emotions that only those closest to him might otherwise see. (The notable thing about his riff on Gates’s encounter with the police was that you had the sense he had given it before, privately, while lying in bed with his wife or on the basketball court with friends.) Perhaps this is why some people you talk to find Obama’s humor off-putting and smug, an expression of hidden contempt that belies his twin mantras of hope and change. No doubt some of the president’s advisers, too, would prefer to see him take fewer comic risks. For others of us, though, Obama’s wit is closely linked to the outsiderness that got him elected. His improvisational asides are like bubbles of air reaching the surface of placid water, reminders that while he remains immersed in the process of Washington, his lifeline to the world outside remains intact.

Shots From Yesterday

With the post below in mind, here is a handful of pictures I took yesterday. Viawww.flickr.com/photos/greatnotions

America, 50 Years Later

There is a terrific piece by Luc Sante in yesterday's Wall Street Journal on the 50th anniversary of Robert Frank's book of photographs, The Americans. I first learned of the Zurich-born photographer via Jack Kerouac, whose introduction to a reprinting of The Americans was included in a weird collection of the Beat icon's non-fiction, which I read in my late teens. I had no interest in photography then, but was intrigued by Kerouac's description of Frank and his work--a European photographer driving across the United States, snapping pictures of Main Streets, diners, jukeboxes, empty highways, gas stations, dime stores, and lunch counters, some of which were even taken from inside his car through the rain-streaked grime of his windshield.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I love the United States of America (much as I enjoy traveling abroad, there's nothing quite like returning to the country in which I was born). But the older I get, the more I realize I'm more in love the idea of America. So was Robert Frank, which is why I think his pictures resonate so strongly today. But what was interesting to me as I looked at the photos accompanying Sante's WSJ piece was what has changed and what remains the same about America 50 years later.

For instance, Frank's pictures present an America cast in muddy shades of black, white, and gray. Furthermore, each shot looks as though it has been smeared with soot from a coal stove. No matter if he was presenting a beautiful woman in a posh hotel elevator or a cowboy leaning against a trash can, the insistent grittiness of the photos were a looming reminder of the massive industrial might of the United States. The America most people enjoyed in the 1950s was the byproduct of decades of chugging iron furnaces, aluminum smelting plants, flaming gas refineries, etc. But in these pics, it seems that people are too worried about nuclear war and segregation to ever think that corporate greed was slowly taking away their livelihood, like a rug pulled out from underneath them.

Of course, it would take the great (and American-born) Stephen Shore to capture the outcome of that particular American devastation, 20 years later. In Shore's best work, the American landscape of the 1970s is choked with corporate logos and slogans. Even mountains have taken a back seat to billboards.

As for America today, I would have to say that the best photographer capturing it is Minnesota-based Alec Soth. His Last Days of W is one of the most chilling collections of photography I've ever seen. Yet, as an American, I am somehow comforted by it all. As with Frank's work, Soth's photos will likely be better appreciated when America has some perspective. As for now, I know of relatively few Americans willing to admit that this is what America looks like...

Quote Of The Week: Keith Richards

"I'm trying to remember things, which is very difficult."

Keith Richards on writing his autobiography.

(Via Rolling Stone)

Scenes: Washington State 2009

The color of the sky is

why I live where I live

Julia Child In The Modern World

Like many people in the United States right now, I have a renewed interest in Julia Child. M brought home a copy of Child's memoir My Life In France and I was immediately pulled in by her prose, which is just as radiant and charming as she was. Example...

"I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume. Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth, took a bite, and chewed slowly. The flesh of the sole was delicate, with a light but distinct taste of the ocean that blended marvelously with the browed butter. I chewed slowly and swallowed. It was a morsel of perfection."

If people are wondering why a character like Child is resonating throughout our culture today, I think David Denby of the New Yorker put it best...

"She was incapable of modern irony."

The Meaning Of Edward M. Kennedy

Via The New Yorker's George Packer...

"It’s the strangest of his many paradoxes that such workmanlike, even obscure, accomplishment was the product of a man who owed his career entirely to the glamor of his family name."

I've never romanticized the Kennedy's as a family. Yet, there was something about Edward M. Kennedy that I always found endearing and admirable: his tireless work ethic, his ever-apparent flaws, his unflagging love for the United States of America. Reading his obituary this morning, I can't help but feel we, as a country, lost a part of our identity. And it has nothing to do with his family name, but rather a sense of Americanness that I'm afraid is lost forever.

Bob Dylan's Holiday Feast

Apparently, certain Jewish groups were astonished to learn that Bob Dylan will release a Christmas album this October. I first heard rumor of Christmas In The Heart a few weeks ago when news leaked that Dylan had recorded four Christmas songs at Jackson Browne's Santa Monica studio. The press seemed to raise an eyebrow at the news: What was Dylan, who was raised Jewish, doing recording "Oh Little Town Of Bethlehem" and "Here Comes Santa Claus"?

However, I think the Jewish groups and the press have missed the point entirely.

Dylan has never renounced his Jewish background, nor has he renounced his flirt with Christianity. While he stated that he is "a praying man" in Chronicles, his spiritual affiliation hasn't been the subject of much speculation since at least the late-80s. If anything, he's made it apparent that his faith is in song, which is what I'm willing to bet Christmas In The Heart is all about.

Songs. Christmas songs. Actually, to be more specific...American Christmas songs. Dylan is positively obsessed with the American songbook and there's no question Christmas songs have had a major impact on our culture. Many have said that this album--Dylan's 47th--will be akin to holiday albums by Elvis, etc. But I have a feeling Dylan's delivery will frame these songs to reflect things about our culture we often take for granted. After hearing Dylan cover "Winter Wonderland" in his scorched-throat growl, I bet walking through Macy's during the holidays will never be the same...

Metallica Is A Super Bowl Halftime Show Match Made In Heaven

I've gotta get this off my chest...

Last Sunday, I was at the Triangle Pub in White Center with my neighbor. We were discussing the NFL pre-season games we'd watched (I was especially boastful about my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers, who, naturally, wiped the floor with the Arizona Cardinals yet again). Being the music nerds we are, the conversation steered toward the musical guest most likely to play the halftime show at next year's Super Bowl. Watching Springsteen earlier this year was painful. The Stones were embarrassing a few years prior. Paul McCartney sucks. Tom Petty, while obvious, still ruled.

Given this track record, it seems like a no-brainer that the artist filling next year's slot will probably be John Mellencamp or Journey. But what about fucking Metallica? I would argue that no band embodies the raging energy of pro football better than Metallica and no band out there could match the flexed-muscle spectacle that is the Super Bowl better than Metallica. Better yet, the American heartland is chock-full of good ol' boys driving around in pick-ups with No Fear stickers on their back windshields blasting ...And Justice For All.

Their set would most likely suck to diehards...

"Enter Sandman"

"Fuel"

Variables: "Seek and Destroy", "For Whom The Bell Tolls", "Whiskey In The Jar".

Some have argued that Metallica is too metal for the mainstream, to which I say "And Prince is too fey, but he still played." It may not happen this year, but I'm willing to bet I'll see Metallica on that stage before my life is over.