4 videos, arranged in order from wholesome to surreal.

How kids act when teachers do normal things:

Clanger, clanker, clunker, clinker.

Words that have confused me in the last 24 hours:

"Clanger" — seen in the bobdylan subreddit: "Favourite Bob ‘clanger’ but you really love?" The "u" in "favourite" alerts you to a Britishism. We get the meaning from the context: "Despite Bob being the greatest lyricist of all time, he’s also got some, in my opinion, clangers." I was excited to read this thread because it took on a subject Meade and I had discussed that very day: the 3 lines in a row that end in the word "table" (lyrics here). Anyway... clanger... don't we Americans say "clunker"? Or is "clunker" more of a car, the kind of car Obama offered cash for. 

"Clanker" — seen at Metafilter: "I’m being hustled by clankers"/"These agents are not trying to make money for their creators. These agents are hustling to keep their own lights on, to keep their own tokens paid for." Again, it seems as though "clunker" would do, but I guess robots hustling about make a more high-pitched sound, not so high that it's a "clinker." But I learn that "clanker" is a hot new word. Here's the NYT in August 2025: "How ‘Clanker’ Became an Anti-A.I. Rallying Cry/The term, which was popularized by a 'Star Wars' show and is rooted in real frustrations with technology, has become a go-to slur against artificial intelligence and robots."

By the way, the OED tells us that "clinker" is U.S. slang that originated in baseball — another word for "error." It now means: "An error; a failure, a 'dud'; esp. a film, song, etc., of poor quality. Also (occasionally): an incompetent or unsuitable person." I like this quote from the NYT in 1983: "Peer pressure combines with our fear of being wimpishly irrelevant to prompt most of us to include a few real clinkers in our otherwise carefully considered presents."

"Clunker" has meant a bad old car since at least 1930, the date of this quote found by the OED: "His Honor Rides—Mayor Frank Edwards as he appeared yesterday on his mighty charger for the opening of the Automobile Show of 1930, with Cap'n Dobbsie riding a ‘klunker’, one of the show's exhibits." It's meant "a failure, a 'dud,'" since at least 1963.

I think clanger, clanker, clunker, and clinker are all words based on sound: clang, clank, clunk, clink. I'll put them in order of pitch, low to high: clunk, clang, clank, clink. There, now, confusion conquered. 

Clink!

*Rides off in Cap'n Dobbsie's klunker*

Why we're listing to "Undun" this morning at Meadhouse.

There is a Bob Dylan connection:

"Undun" was written by Bachman after hearing Bob Dylan's "Ballad in Plain D," which included the phrase "she was easily undone." Bachman's song tells the story of a girl he had seen at a party who, after dosing herself with LSD, slipped into a coma.

But that's not it. It started with that Fetterman-and-shorts post at 5:50 a.m. In the comments, Temujin said:

"I looked in his eyes. I can't picture his face... I didn't see the skin. When I think about him... all I see is these deep oceans of blue in these deep concerning eyes."

"And this like white light behind them. That's what I picture when I think about what did Bob Dylan look like to me. All I can see is these the deepest bluest eyes with the most concerning emotion in them and then this like aura of like white light. That's what Bob looks like to me in my memory. I can't remember his face...."

Said Billy Strings.

Theo Von: "It's almost something that's like almost like maybe from another realm or something. I think God, like God's concern, like shows up in our eyes, I think. So maybe he just has a lot of like concern from the other side, you know?"

Billy Strings: “Yeah. And it's it's not a paranoid concern. It's more of like a compassion and and a like like a love like from an elder, you know?”

Theo: “Yeah. Maybe like a kind of semi-aggressive intrigue kind of.”

Billy: “Like a some kind of musical grandpa, you know?”

Theo: “Yeah, dude. Bob Dylan, bro. Wow.”

"The other book I’ve been reading, Michael Glover Smith’s 'Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think,' takes up Dylan’s... forays into the world of cinema."

"I got to witness one of them a few weeks ago, when I attended a rare public screening of the provocative and polarizing 2003 flick 'Masked and Anonymous,' co-written by Dylan and Larry Charles. I hadn’t seen it before, but I immediately entered the cult of admirers who believe it was unfairly maligned when it was first released. (Roger Ebert called it 'a vanity production beyond all reason.' I hope Dylan chose to take that as a compliment.) I have also had the 'Masked and Anonymous' soundtrack on repeat — especially its eclectic assortment of Dylan covers by a global panorama of artists like the Sertab Erener, Francesco de Gregori and the Magokoro Brothers. You’ve never truly heard 'My Back Pages' until you’ve heard it in Japanese."

Writes Lindsay Zoladz, in "My Summer of Bob Dylan/Hear tracks inspired by his Long Hot Summer Tour, including 'My Back Pages' and 'Mississippi'" (NYT gift link, where you will find a playlist that includes "My Back Pages" in Japanese).

Here's "Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think." And for a second book Zoladz writes about, "After the Flood/Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace." Both of those links work to send a commission to me.

As for "Masked and Anonymous," I couldn't find it streaming anywhere. Meade, who's seen it twice, seems to think it's on YouTube, but here's a link to buy the DVD, if you still have a DVD player. It's only $9.48. Here's the trailer:

"The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered."

"When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move."

Writes Bob Dylan, answering the NYT's question what are the best things and the worst things about being 80, in "Bob Dylan and Liza Minnelli Already Turned 80. They Have Thoughts for Trump." Yes, Bob Dylan responded to a journalistic query on the occasion of Donald Trump's birthday.

Time doesn't move, but the world moves. Bob also says: "The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it...."

And was time moving in the past? Bob also says: "The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country.... You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would."

ADDED: Based on what I quoted, you might find the headline confusing. Bob didn’t say anything about Trump and what’s Liza Minnelli doing there? But the article actually has a bunch of other celebrities — Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel, Gloria Steinem, and Dionne Warwick. And all of them, including Liza, are shown answering the question “Any advice for the president as he turns 80?” I presume Bob was asked that question too, and he refused to answer. Nevertheless, Bob’s answering of the two questions he did answer – what’s the best thing and what’s the worst thing about turning 80 – is put at the top of the article. So The New York Times wanted to make it about Trump and all the other celebrities went along with that but whatever it is Bob happened to say about aging and time mattered more, and I’m glad The New York Times was able to see that. And thanks to Bob for seeing, once again, that you don’t have to answer the question asked by the one who walks into the room with a pencil in his hand, sees the President of the United States standing naked and asks, How would you advise that man?

"I think Platner is probably worse than Newsom but he reminds me more of Fetterman, who I originally liked. That may be why I have never liked Platner."

"I am intimately acquainted with the genre of New England failsons, being as I am a faildaughter of that sort of edge of aristocracy myself. He has no principles as far as I can tell and no real experience in much of anything but arrogance. He’s bad news through and through, and I suspect a Dino if you will. Even without the nazi tattoos and the extremely believable and coherent accusations of sexual wrongdoing and quite possibly assault, this is not someone we need in the Senate."

Writes someone called mygothlaundry in a Metafilter discussion based on a Liberal Currents article titled "Graham Platner and the Class Politics of Impunity/Solidarity with working class women never seems to enter into it."

"Failsons" and "faildaughters"... I'd never noticed those words before, but, poking around, I can see they've been around for a while.

"The teams totaled 34 hits, and 14 pitchers combined to throw 444 pitches. It was the fourth game in major league history with at least 29 runs and 11 homers."

I'm reading "Brewers outlast A's 15-14 in 12 innings as teams combine for 11 homers and 34 hits in Las Vegas/Andrew Vaughn had four hits and four RBIs, including a two-run double that tied the score in the ninth inning, and the Milwaukee Brewers outlasted the Athletics 15-14 in 12 innings at Las Vegas Ballpark in a wild game that featured 11 homers" (WaPo).

No, I wasn't watching. That game started at my bedtime — 9 p.m.

I just noticed that there's a team now that's just named the Athletics — no city/state in the name. Just the mascot... and it's the most generic mascot. The Athletics. And they played in Las Vegas last night — "at the site of their Triple-A affiliate, the Las Vegas Aviators." They seem homeless. They're not in Oakland anymore, and their normal home these days is West Sacramento, but not enough of a home to become part of its name. Playing a few games in Las Vegas this week has something to do with Las Vegas being its future home. A new stadium will open in 2028.

But maybe you watched basketball last night. I'd rather watch a random baseball game than an important basketball game, but I did pause the movie I was watching and go downstairs to hear the National Anthem and catch a glimpse of Trump. The NYT says "Mr. Trump smiled and saluted in the face of deafening boos when he briefly appeared on the arena’s video board...." I went back to my movie — "A Complete Unknown," now, finally, on HBO — but I did look up the result this morning. I see Trump ruined everything:

Ooh, that Trump. The Knicks lost. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan won. That's what Joan Baez says to him at the end of the biopic: "You won." He's all "What did I win?" and then he rides off into the sunset on his motorcycle. 

The prairie's edge at dawn.

"I'd rate him top 10, could you imagine Ole' Blue Eyes singing 'It's alright Ma, I'm only bleedin''?"

A comment on the facebook post "Bob Dylan is the 56th greatest vocalist in music history," which links to "The 100 Best Vocalists of All Time/Vocalist Week begins with an artist-assisted list of the best to ever pick up a microphone" (Consequence).

That reminds me, when I was a teenager, my father liked to engage me in what he called "Socratic" debate, and I vividly remember the time he took the position that if a microphone was used, it was simply not music.

I think of him this morning as I encounter the greatest vocalists in music history restated as the best to ever pick up a microphone.

History is a long time, far longer than the era of the microphone. I assume nearly all of the top thousand greatest vocalists performed without a microphone.

"Other incidents in the book are merely surreal: the appearance of Bob Dylan in a blue mohair suit..."

"... at [Brian] Jones’s hotel door in the middle of a Northeast blackout in 1965, bearing guitars and 'excellent weed'; a passing mention of future Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as one of the drug buddies who 'revived Keith’s appetite for coke and heroin' in the late 1970s; a young Harvey Weinstein, then a regional concert promoter, passing out Afro wigs to the band and crew during a raucous tour closer in Buffalo."

From "You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Unless It’s a New Rolling Stones Biography/The music journalist Bob Spitz, a keeper of numerous rock ’n’ roll flames, has turned out a colorful and authoritative new take on a much-documented band" (NYT).

Here's the book: "THE ROLLING STONES: The Biography," by Bob Spitz (commission earned). I might buy it. It wouldn't be the first book about The Rolling Stones for me. I read Keith Richards' autobiography. Somehow all I remember is him as a little kid keeping a mouse in his pocket. Blogged here.

But anyway, downloading the Kindle of the Spitz book just so I can do a word search on "mohair" is exactly the kind of thing I would do.

"Bob was inspirational. I always just think: ‘The vandals took the handles.' Just that little phrase out of everything. It’s so sort of corny but brilliant."

Said Paul McCartney, quoted in "Bob Dylan and the Beatles: When the Fab Four Became the Fab Five/Jim Windolf’s new book, 'Where the Music Had to Go,' traces the influence of Dylan on the Beatles and the Beatles on Dylan" (NYT).

You might think I'd read that book, but I actively don't want to read it.

"The euphoria of the first moon landing was directly connected to our ambivalence about the science that made it possible."

"Rocket technology, which lifted man to the moon, could also hurl hydrogen bombs across the planet. Like the promise of artificial intelligence and bioengineering, the promise of space was shadowed by the possibility of planetary annihilation.... The original space program had fierce and cogent critics in the United States, but the allure of the technology, the bravery and telegenic decency of the astronauts, and the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon eventually won out.... [O]n a nervous night, the world watched us again... wondering whether there might be nuclear bombs.... Trump backed down, but...[t]he distant, wide-eyed wonder of unprecedented achievement of the Space Age had been eclipsed by a deferred promise to return an entire people to the Stone Age...."

Writes Philip Kennicott, in "Trump’s dark rhetoric eclipses the new wonders of the Space Age" (WaPo).

I'm a little older than Kennicott, who was probably a young child at the time of the first moon landing. I was 18 and completely disaffected because of the Vietnam War. I didn't experience anything like "wide-eyed wonder." The boys my age were all in danger of being drafted and sent to fight in a war people were justifiably pessimistic about. Nixon was just as horrible to us as Trump is to the Trump-haters of today. I declined to respond with the awe the news shows told us to feel because I didn't want to see anything going well for Nixon. Less than a month after the moon landing, there was Woodstock. Who was a sucker for "telegenic decency" in the summer of 1969? Were we conned by "the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon"? Five years before the landing, we were laughing at Bob Dylan's sarcastic lines, "I ask you how things could get much worse/If the Russians happen to get up there first/Wowee! pretty scary!"

Easter sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Video by Meade.

Easter bonus:

"You stay to the left and then you lean to the right..."

"Cow Licking."

I've been a huge admirer of Georgia O'Keeffe since I first saw the Life Magazine article "Georgia O'Keeffe, on the Ghost Ranch." That was 1968, and I was 17. I've looked at so many of her pictures, in person and in books, but I had never seen "Cow Licking" until this morning. 

I love it. Don't you? But let me tell you how I happened to run across it this morning. It was 5:43 a.m., and I'd been downstairs in breakfast-and-blog mode for a while when I got this text from upstairs:

Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could've carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face

I know what that is. It's Meade, sending me a Bob Dylan lyric and boldfacing the part about a small dog licking the face of whoever "you" is. Who is this person whose only teachers — law professors — are Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the jungle, and the sea? He rode in on a white horse, he's buff and handsome, and now he's lolling about in a field with a small dog licking his face. Maybe you remember being told that this song, "Jokerman," is about Jesus.

I don't know about that. I see that Dylan said it was something "mystical" that came upon him down there in the Caribbean — something "inspired by these spirits they call jumbis."

I didn't get far into that because Meade texted "What is that famous painting?" And he didn't mean that Dürer painting that is the first image in the "Jokerman" video, that image that just about everyone thinks is Jesus but is the artist himself, Albrecht Dürer:

Meade was thinking about something else: "Black man, lying supine on desert sand with stars above and a small dog."

I immediately thought of Henri Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy":

Yes, that's not a dog. It made me think of this scene in a Chaplin movie I'd watched upstairs last night while Meade was watching basketball downstairs:

Texting this morning from upstairs, Meade thought it might be a different Rousseau painting. I found "La Noce," which has a "comically oversized and awkward" dog that, we're told, takes "the eye deep into the composition" and asserts the artist's "position as the master of spatial paradox."

I text-typo'd "that’s the only rousseau with a god that i found."

I asked Grok, "What's that famous painting with a dog licking a person's face." And then "Is there ANY famous painting showing any kind of tongue-licking?" and "Dog or person or other animal — now I'm just looking for licking. I'm thinking licking isn't seen as something worth painting — too in-the-moment and active to be frozen into a still image. But maybe somebody did it. All I can think of is that Rolling Stones logo."

And that's how I found "Cow Licking."

UNANSWERED QUESTION: Why did Meade send me that Dylan lyric and boldface "with a small dog licking your face"? I think it had something to do with the rumor that Mayor Mamdani has a secret plan to run all the dogs out of New York City.

Juiciest dog rumor since "They're eating the dogs."

"Hi, I'm Jerry Lewis. Bob Dylan has always been a protester not only to the fashion of his times but the trends of the thing."

"And that's super, simply marvelous. So when Parimutuel Records came to me and said, 'Hey, Jerry, whoever you want to record would you just do? Manilow would be good. You want we should give Barry a call? And I said, 'Uh-uh, I want to do Dylan 'cause he makes me feel good a lot and that's why I chose his stuff to be on my album 'Lewis Sings Dylan.' Oh yeah!"

An obscure but great clip of SCTV in 1984 at YouTube.

Amazing how long Martin Short has been around....

And amazing how long people have been kicking Jerry Lewis around. Here he is, in a musical scene, in his prime, in the 1960 movie "The Bellboy":

I ran across that movie on The Criterion Channel the other day, and I've been watching it in bits. I like watching things that can be watched in bits, and "The Bellboy" is great for that. As the opening monologue explains, "There is no story and no plot. That's right, I said, no story and no plot. It is actually a series of silly sequences, or you might say it is a visual diary of a few weeks in the life of a real nut." Perfect for our times. It's almost TikTok. 

"One day, he is a man who loves his wife and has just bought a terrifically expensive mattress for their bed."

"The next he tells her, his eyes narrowing into a shape she had never seen before: 'I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life but I don’t.' He tells her she can have everything, including custody of the children. 'I don’t want it,' he says. 'I don’t want any of it.'"

From "Her Life Was an Old-Money Dream. It Collapsed in a Moment. Born into exceptional privilege, Belle Burden had it all: love, money, family. Then her marriage fell apart" (NYT).

Now, I clicked on that link because the headline bugged me. I keep seeing these sudden-collapse headlines. Articles are always offering to pinpoint the moment when things changed. There's one on the front page of The London Times right now: "The moment Landman’s teenage blonde changed American TV." It's annoying me. They think we're manipulable by our belief in the magic moment.

But I'm blogging because of the mattress, the "terrifically expensive mattress." I think I've blogged about that mattress: "[T]he most preposterously priced mattress, a king-size Grande Vivius, costs $539,000...." I've made a new tag, "mattress," and added it retrospectively, which is a much bigger task than you might think. There are so many posts about someone known as "mattress girl" and I've repeatedly blogged about the line "it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine."

But really, if you were the stay-at-home wife to a rich man, would the purchase of a terrifically expensive mattress make you think he is more likely to stay or less likely to stay? He might want to cushion your fall, to pacify and lull you. What is the meaning of a mattress?

AND: Maybe the mattress was the tipping point. That mattress was exactly what made him see that the life they'd formed together was her vision of the good, and he couldn't relate to it at all. She wanted grand material things and he didn't want any of it. You don't need me, you have the mattress. 

"Now the senator came down here/Showing ev’ryone his gun/Handing out free tickets/To the wedding of his son."

"An’ me, I nearly got busted/An’ wouldn’t it be my luck/To get caught without a ticket/And be discovered beneath a truck...."

Sang Bob Dylan, in his most-Bob-Dylan song, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again."

I'm just trying to read The New York Times* and the headline is "Handing Out Free Tickets, Mamdani Says Theater Should Not Be 'a Luxury.'"

What's with these politicians handing out free tickets? I'm suspicious, but maybe the mayor's just flaky, pie-in-the-sky.

“The shared laughter in a crowded theater, the eager debrief after a musical, the heavy silence that hangs over all of us in a drama — these are moments that every New Yorker deserves,” Mamdani said later, explaining the initiative during a news conference at one of the festival’s venues, Brooklyn College’s Leonard and Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts.

That quote is wild. What man of the people would say "the eager debrief after a musical"? He seems like more of a poet... an abstruse poet. 

There was once a country ruled by a poet. It was Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia. 

_________________________________

* If you're with me in Bob Dylandom, you just thought "shoot a few holes, blow their minds." But I don't like seeing those words today, in the shadow of the killing of Renee Good, and there they are along with "showing ev’ryone his gun" and "discovered beneath a truck" — truck ≈ SUV.

"Collectivism" — he spoke the word, as if a wedding vow.

Mamdani said it, he highlighted it: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism." He promised it. He attributed warmth to it.

The link goes to my post yesterday with that quote as the title. In the comments, I wrote: "He's saying the words that have been left unsaid in the past. In that way, he's like Trump."

Who are the other American politicians who might have said "collectivism" — in a positive way, not as a way of criticizing somebody else? Bernie Sanders, who swore in Mamdani, doesn't use that word.

This blog has a 22-year archive, so I did a search to see how "collectivism" has figured into our discourse. I found 14 items, and I don't think any of them count as a positive use of the word in the style of Zoran Mamdami. 

Here are all the past occurrences of "collectivism" on this blog, in chronological order: