Vernam's hard-working staff has posted a few live tracks over in the all-music GAZINTAS blog. Not quite guaranteed to cure the post-election blues, but it just might help. If you're still feeling mopey afterwards, try watching the West Wing and pretending it's a reality show.
(Thanks to Greg for that latter suggestion, and for hosting all this Cipher nonsense, too.)
Having finished Dylan's Chronicles, Vol. 1, I must report that the boy can write prose. I still haven't gotten 'round to Tarantula, which didn't seem to convince anyone that Dylan's genius extended beyond songwriting. What a pleasant surprise that his new book captures a quirky, distinctive voice that is recognizable to anyone who loves his songs.
This is about the least self-serving autobiography I've read. Sometimes its openness is shocking, as when he conveys in excruciating but ultimately liberating detail the self-doubt he experienced while creating Oh Mercy. Other times, it is more sly and inscrutable. At first glance, he doesn't resolve any puzzles in the lyrics; you wouldn't expect him to telegraph who inspired "Ballad of a Thin Man," and he doesn't. In fact, it's hard to find references to any of the songs, and the book is no worse for it: Dylan is nothing if not respectful of the role that mystery plays in art. But he does drop some understated clues, as when he mentions off-handedly that he and girlfriend Suze Rotolo lived on 4th Street, which I suppose hardcore Dylanologists always knew.
Dylan's eye for detail and character development are impressive, and there's a near-total absence of score-settling passages. (One notable exception is the depiction of Robbie Robertson as a starfucker, which is too unflattering to have been accidental.) For someone with a reputation of irascibility, he has only praise for contemporaries and, especially, the performers from whom he borrowed to build his own persona. Dave Van Ronk comes across as a giant; you can sense Dylan's awe, even as he acknowledges the lack of ambition that kept Van Ronk from the big time. He describes lovingly how John Hammond exposed him to Robert Johnson, whose recordings at the time were virtually unknown. Hammond passed Dylan an advance copy of King of the Delta Blues Singers, which had an influence on him that tends to be understated, evidently, in spite of the major hint he dropped on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. Decades later, Dylan saw the film footage that surfaced several years ago, purportedly showing Johnson in performance on a Mississippi street; Dylan has no doubt it was the Man, though experts claim it wasn't. In writing about Johnson's songs, he stresses their deep poetics, which tend to get overshadowed by their guitar playing.
More to come . . .
I could've saved myself a fair amount of typing today if I'd first read this brilliant Tom Friedman column.
Despite an utterly incompetent war performance in Iraq and a stagnant economy, Mr. Bush held onto the same basic core of states that he won four years ago - as if nothing had happened. It seemed as if people were not voting on his performance. It seemed as if they were voting for what team they were on.
(As for that last sentence, Vernam said the very same thing this evening to Mrs. Cipher. Columnists are most brilliant when they agree with us, don't you think?)
This was not an election. This was station identification. I'd bet anything that if the election ballots hadn't had the names Bush and Kerry on them but simply asked instead, "Do you watch Fox TV or read The New York Times?" the Electoral College would have broken the exact same way. And maybe, "Do you watch Jay Leno or Dave Letterman?"
(OK, I made that last sentence up. But I'm sure Friedman would agree.)
"The Democrats have ceded to Republicans a monopoly on the moral and spiritual sources of American politics," noted the Harvard University political theorist Michael J. Sandel. "They will not recover as a party until they again have candidates who can speak to those moral and spiritual yearnings - but turn them to progressive purposes in domestic policy and foreign affairs."
That Sandel guy, he's brilliant, too. All brilliant, and all on the losing side.
The train ride downtown this morning seemed endless. Rolling past red brick industrial buildings that have stood for more than a century -- warehouses for corrugated cardboard boxes and god knows what else -- I tried telling myself the country has survived plenty of other awful elections. "Despair" is too strong to describe the feeling, partly because it doesn't leave much room for "Anger." Yesterday afternoon, when it looked like Kerry would win, I told a couple of conservative friends they were taking the news more gracefully than I could. Now we'll find out.
One day last week, I missed the 8:00 express and waited for the 8:10, reading Dylan's "Chronicles, Vol. 1" in the station when a candidate approached, flyer in hand. I've tended to ignore them on the train platform, regardless of their party persuasion; grabbing a cup of coffee seemed a much higher priority. She saw the book jacket and asked if it's a good read. Yeah, I replied. She said she'd known him in the early days, Greenwich Village. Acquaintances, not friends. "A real sweet kid," she said. I told her she had my vote, which was true before we'd even met. Yesterday she lost, of course. Her four-term incumbent opponent's main line of attack: The challenger was endorsed by unions.
So, as today's train pulled into Union Station downtown, I was thinking of her and many other hard-working, virtuous, patriotic people who must feel something close to despair this morning. I followed a bunch of fellow travelers through the tunnel, onto the concourse, up the stairs to ground level. Staggering to daylight. Trying to recall Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro." Finally, a blast of fresh air. TV news crews stacked up, at the top of the stairs. It can be only one person. I shake Barack's hand, wish him luck, and then barely make it into my building.
Here's exactly how I felt about 1:00 a.m., courtesy of Mike W.
Okay, this isn't funny anymore. Ohio is going to decide the next president, as Florida did in 2000. Well, hopefully not exactly as in 2000, with regards to the Supreme Court's intervention. Vernam gave in to exit-poll optimism, there's no denying. But the projected Kerry victory never jibed with predictions that Senate and House races would go to the GOP. Sure enough, we seem to have been sandbagged.
Fortunately, no one I know can get enough of the joy that is this 2004 election. Most of the networks, certainly, gave in to their urges and called Ohio prematurely for Bush. But some of them were backtracking by about 2:00 a.m. central, in the realization that over 200,000 ballots remain to be counted in that state. MSNBC's Pat Buchanan (playing the poor man's math-challenged, lunatic Tim Russert) went so far as to say, "It's hard to see how Bush can win if he doesn't hold Ohio." He pointed out that Bush got creamed in Pennsylvania but did well in Michigan and Ohio, both of which had a gay rights referendum on the ballot. Open season, etc.
But that's demagoguery for another day. Right now, there's a presidency at stake. Let every vote be counted.