Joy Ray

Oh my.

Who needs Halloween II when you have this?

It ain't me, babe

Last night I ran into some friends who, as it turns out, unbeknownst to me, read my blog.  How cool!

They had developed a theory that the sentiment expressed in my recent post about a Dylan concert (to paraphrase: "Fuck you, Bob Dylan.") is akin to the sentiment expressed so beautifully by Joan Baez in her song "Diamonds and Rust," which is of course a tribute to her ex-boyfriend, one B. Dylan.

That got me thinking about that song, which is one of the songs of my childhood.  My mom had the album it is from, and I used to listen to it all the time.  I didn't know who Bob Dylan was then, of course, and I didn't know the song was about him.  But even when I was very young, I found "Diamonds and Rust" to be intriguingly haunting, a blurry window into adulthood that seemed impossibly far away.  It introduced me at an extremely young and impressionable age to ideas like how glamorous it is to fall in love with someone that is both charming yet undependable, and how you can end that relationship yet still miss it.  "My greatest mistake," as Sheryl Crowe would put it more pithily and, of course, more shallowly, years later.

Here is the song, as performed live by Joan Baez in 1975:

As flattered as I am by the comparison to the song, and as much as I'm sure "Diamonds and Rust" is now part of my subconscious, I'm not sure that the sentiments are actually the same.  My blog post was expressing disappointment about Dylan's purposefully obtuse and eardrum-blasting concert, whereas the song seems to express disappointment that the first blush of passion and promise that Joan Baez felt for Bob Dylan didn't pan out.  She's nostalgic, but maybe not for a real person.

On second thought, maybe my friends are right.

Here is another YouTube clip I found, a performance with Dylan and Joan Baez at the Newport Festival in 1964.  Notice how he cheerfully drowns out her voice and hogs the microphone.  Notice her swooning regard.  Notice his impish grin. 

How can anyone NOT love Joan Baez?

Addicted to stats

One of my favorite things about TypePad is that I can see where people are coming from when they visit my blog.  This is endlessly fascinating to me.

For instance today I saw on my stats that I got this visit:

I then can click on the link (right column) and it takes me to the page the person actually saw, namely:

So searching for "buenos aires graffiti" somehow got a complete stranger to one of my blog posts.

Beyond that, the post really does have a picture of buenos aires graffiti - and it's a pretty entertaining one. 

Cool.

Calories on menus: an idea whose time has come

We went to an AMC Movie Theater tonight and saw something that I have never before seen - when we went up to purchase treats, the calories of each item were shown on the menu.

Here's what it looked like:

 

I have to say: THIS IS AN AWESOME IDEA.  It totally works, in terms of behavior modification.  When we first walked up, Jay said, “Hey, that mini pizza looks pretty good.”  Well, not when you see that it has almost 800 calories.    I was thinking: I don’t want to eat that fatty movie theater popcorn.  I’ll get something healthier, like a pretzel.  But as you can see, 1 “gourmet pretzel” has more calories than a medium popcorn!!  So, like usual, we split a diet coke and a medium popcorn, which according to the menu was a mere 220 calories each. 

Health just feels different, right?

Anyway, kudos to AMC.  And all chain/fast food restaurants should start doing this.  It’s very hard to order ‘naughty’ stuff when you can see the cold hard facts right in front of you. 

Like – who would ever order ‘movie nachos’ again, knowing it has almost 1400 calories??  Ick...

Why does Bob Dylan hate my eardrums?

Last night we went to see a show that I had high hopes for, something we’d heard about at the last minute through a fortuitous Facebook ad on Jay’s page.  Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and John Cougar Mellencamp were playing at a baseball stadium in Lake Elsinore which isn’t too far away.  Tickets were pretty cheap, and the event was far from sold out.  We bought tickets and rounded up some other friends to go with us.

Lately, I’ve been making a point of getting every chance I can to see old guys play.  I’ve missed my chance with too many, like Johnny Cash or Frank Sinatra.  And generally speaking, they tend to be really great.  Leonard Cohen. Kenny Rogers.  Neil Diamond.  I’ve already seen Willie (at the Wiltern, fabulous) and Cougar (at the Hollywood Bowl, surprisingly fun).  But I’ve never seen Dylan and didn’t want to miss this chance.

As the show drew closer, I started to hear ominous rumblings from people who had seen Dylan play disastrously in the past.  Too drunk, too mumbly, songs unrecognizable from the popularized version, etc.  Alarm bells were quietly starting to go off – but I remained optimistic.  He’s cementing his legacy, some said – this will be different.

So yesterday, 5 of us squeezed into a Suburu and drove down to Lake Elsinore, where I’d never been before.  It’s one of those incongruously rednecky Southern California towns.  Here are some shots of the ballpark we were in, home to the Storm.

 

 

 

I saw my first ever live-blogging-in-action here! UPDATE.  I think this is her.

Willie Nelson was up first, keeping it casual in the late afternoon heat with a floppy straw sombrero and a ‘family band’ whose sound was like something you might hear in a thrown-together jam at Willie’s house on a Sunday afternoon.  A little sloppy but his voice was beautiful and strong, making me wish (not for the first time) that he was my grandpa or at least my penpal. 

Jay bought this souvenir Willie doll. 

We admired the efficient equipment ‘conveyor belt’ that had been set up, a giant walkway connecting the stage to nearby waiting trucks.

As the daylight faded it was time for the Coug.  He put a lot more effort into his show, with a full band, really awesome sound, and more audience pandering aka showmanship.  We went down onto the baseball field for a closer view.

 

 

 

I have only a few comments about this portion of the set.  1) I wish that he’d played Jack and Diane.  2) Based on the lyrical content of his newer songs, he is apparently obsessed with dying and trying to deal with this fear through songwriting.  3) His cutish 13-year-old son (who came out to jam with the band for a song or two) has the unfortunate name of “Spud”.  Any bets as to how long it will take him to rename himself Bob or Mike or something more conventional?  4) The Coug is now adding an “h” after every “s”.  For instance, “shmall town”.  Why?

Next up was Dylan.  By this point the crowd was well and truly messed up, with pot smoke a-floatin’, drunks a-stumblin’, hippies a-dancin’, and seven maids a-sleepin’ on the lawn, passed out.  We went back down to the baseball field to see this iconic figure up close and personal.  Dylan came out wearing some kind of bizarre mariachi-inspired suit.  Compared to The Coug, his sound was glaringly terrible – both the quality (through the PA system) as well as the musicianship of the group.  Now perhaps the Coug’s band was too tight and slick – but Dylan took things too far in the other direction.  For instance he was halfway through his second song before I realized it was “The Times They Are a Changin’”!   

UPDATE: Oh, and by the way. If you want to get a better sense of what his vocals sound like, think Benicio del Toro in The Usual Suspects.

We made our way back up to the bleachers where our friends were sitting and watched in horror as the set grew progressively worse.  And – fun times – louder.  I literally was sitting with my fingers in my ears for the last half hour of Dylan’s endless rambling hurky-jerky set.

The set was long enough, and unengaging enough, that it led me to all sorts of ruminations.  For instance, why was Dylan’s set so bad?  Does he not care?  Does he not KNOW?  Is he deaf, does he have bad taste, is he surrounded by incompetent deaf people with no taste who give him bad advice?  Is it on purpose – some kind of statement or joke that I’m not cool enough to get? 

Or could it be that our older self is truly a different person from our younger self?  That the man who once was Young Bob Dylan is long gone, leaving in his place a shallow and unserious carny huckster set on leveraging Young Bob’s brand and songs to squeeze the easiest possible dollars out of smalltown drunks and stoners?

I entertained myself by thinking: if each set was a car, what car would it be?  I decided that Willie Nelson was like a big old flatbed pickup, parked in someone’s yard, with a big party on the back.  John Cougar was like a perfectly cherried out vintage pickup, complete with fuzzy dice.  Too perfect, too shiny, maybe even never taken out of the garage except to drive down the street in a local parade. 

But our boy Bob? Like a 1973 dune buggy.  You’re at the beach trying to relax and get a tan, and here comes this dune buggy, spinning out and coughing out exhaust fumes, doing wheelies around you and getting sand in your face, squeezing an ah-OO-ga horn every five minutes and laughing like a clown at your dismay.

 

The comparisons to Leonard Cohen were hard to avoid, given that the visuals of the show appeared to be somewhat cribbed from Cohen, not to mention the fact that the two are of a similar generation.  Leonard Cohen cares about his performances.  The show we saw was flawless, an improvement over his recordings, true to the nature of his songs, every word clear and embued with passion, a love poem to an audience whom Cohen seemed determined to respect as much as a treasured idol.  Dylan’s show came off, to me, as a big Fuck You.

To which I can only respond: Fuck YOU, Bob Dylan.  Go see Leonard Cohen and take some notes.

A complaint

When did people in airplanes stop thinking that it was polite to wait for those in the seats ahead of them to deplane first? What's the freakin' RUSH, people?