"From the very first scenes, as played by Chalamet, this Dylan has no use for anything other than his own songs and his desperate, entirely internalized, need to keep making them."

"Everyone else... they’re all just obstacles that stand in his way. Chalamet’s Dylan is aloof, peevish and, frankly, kind of a jerk. Nearly everyone in his orbit suffers accordingly. The closer they try to get, the more Dylan vaporizes and wafts away. But this doesn’t happen because of fame or riches or drugs, like it would in most music biopics. It happens because of who Dylan is. He just doesn’t care. He lives his life and writes his music and manages his career like a man who knows everyone around him is trying to write a biopic about him."

Writes Will Leitch, in "Don’t think twice, Dylan fans. ‘A Complete Unknown’ is all right. The impossibility of ever truly understanding Bob Dylan is the movie’s central tension" (WaPo).

I wonder if Will Leitch is related to Donovan (Leitch). Just an idle thought. It's hard to see how it would matter. Anyway, are you planning to watch this movie? Bob Dylan recommended the movie. I blogged about that 13 days ago, here. He also recommended the book the movie is based on — "Dylan Goes Electric" (commission earned) — saying, "After you’ve seen the movie read the book." But the movie doesn't premiere until Christmas, so I went and read the book out of order. I do some of the things Bob tells me to do. Some of them. Not all of them. 

Here's something from the book that I happened to highlight:

"American Idol is shedding contestants like an Agatha Christie whodunit. There goes Effie Passero through a trap door."

"A suit of armor fell on Ron Bultongez. Amelia Hammer Harris took a hard fall off the Orient Express. And now we’re at the top 14 with the shivering, terrified survivors who just want Ryan Seacrest to lower his monocle and solve this whole thing for everyone. But we’ve got five episodes left to deduce which contestant deserves the crown, and I have a sneaking suspicion it could be anybody. Let’s roll through these 14 contenders, comment on the eliminations, and wonder if Lionel Richie knows his sparkly blazer would look smashing on Vicki Lawrence."

Louis Virtel is doing a fabulous job of recapping "American Idol" at Vulture, with snappy sentences and full, commercial-free, clips of every performance. That link goes to the recap of last night's results show, where my favorite, Maddie Poppe, sang "Walk Like an Egyptian":



And here's the link to the Sunday episode recap, with each performance ranked by Virtel, including #1, Maddie Poppe, doing "Homeward Bound":



ADDED: Here's what Virtel wrote about that "Walk Like an Egyptian" performance:

I’m all for Maddie Poppe’s calmed-down, twee’d-up renditions of songs... “Homeward Bound”? Sure. “Brand New Key”? Absolutely. But after Ryan Seacrest announced she was safely in the top ten, Maddie gave her first baffling performance of the season: an undanceable take on “Walk Like an Egyptian.” It’s as if she wanted us to pay attention to the Bangles’ lyrics, which are … well, they’re stupid. Let’s talk a look at “Foreign types with the hookah pipes say / Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh / Walk like an Egyptian.” That’s offensive, senseless, and then back to offensive. And she didn’t even throw us the saucy Susanna Hoffs side-eye to soften the embarrassment! I’m worried now. Soon, Maddie with perform “Kokomo” as a piano ballad or add marimba to “Tears in Heaven”! Here’s hoping she’s back on track with an angora-warm version of “You’ve Got a Friend” or something next week.

Ha ha. Ask Meade if I didn't say out loud, "The lyrics to this song are actually pretty offensive."

AND: Here's the old Bangles video featuring the ancient mystery of Susanna Hoffs's inability to position her irises in the center of her eyeballs. As for the idea of "the Bangles' lyrics," I've got to object. They didn't write the song. It was written by music producer Liam Sternberg, who, Wikipedia tells us, "wrote the song after seeing people on a ferry walking awkwardly to keep their balance." The only connection to Egypt is that Sternberg thought the people looked like the figures in the ancient Egyptian paintings.

Is the song offensive? It's one of the songs Clear Channel banned after the September 11, 2001 attacks. [CORRECTION: That statement is wrong, as explained here.] It's got that casual, silly attitude toward ethnicity found in many old songs — "Ahab the Arab" ("There he saw Fatima layin' on a zebra skin rug with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes and a bone in her nose ho, ho"), "The Sheik of Araby" ("At night when you're asleep/Into your tent I'll creep"), "Midnight at the Oasis" ("You won't need no camel/When I take you for a ride"). I'm just naming ones about Arabs that spring immediately to mind. There's also Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs...



You wouldn't do that today. Domingo "Sam" Samudio was Mexican American, and he just enjoyed Yul Brenner as Pharaoh in "The Ten Commandments." As for Yul Brenner, he was a combination of Swiss-German, Russian, and Buryat, but it was accepted back then that he could play an ancient Egyptian. And he also got to play the King of Siam.

I'd branch out to other ethnicities, but I'll just say "Turning Japanese," and I'll leave it to you to come up with some other silly songs that would steam people up if they came out today (but maybe we can still love because they are old).

"Turning Japanese" was just a way of saying I feel like a foreigner in my own culture. The lyrics had nothing to do with Japanese people:

No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women
No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it's dark
Everyone around me is a total stranger
Everyone avoids me like a cyclone ranger

But the video (and that musical riff)... just comically leaned into Japanese stereotypes (back in 1980, when not letting anything offend you was kind of the culture):

Loved the concert tonight at the Stoughton Opera House.

Geoff Muldaur and Jim Kweskin. Love them.

Here's their new album: "Penny's Farm."

Here's a video of them playing in 2013:

"Clothes, like people, can relax more freely when in the company of others who are very similar in type, and therefore organizing them by category helps them feel more comfortable and secure."

Said Marie Kondo, author of "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing," the subject of a NYT article titled "Kissing Your Socks Goodbye/Home Organization Advice from Marie Kondo," which goes on to say:

Such anthropomorphism and nondualism, so familiar in Japanese culture, as Leonard Koren, a design theorist who has written extensively on Japanese aesthetics, told me recently, was an epiphany to this Westerner. In Japan, a hyper-awareness, even reverence, for objects is a rational response to geography, said Mr. Koren, who spent 10 years there and is the author of "Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers."

"Wabi-Sabi" got me drifting off trying to remember that Jim Kweskin song on that album we always listened to in college. What was it? Ah! The album is "Relax Your Mind." The song is "Guabi Guabi."



And that's how we relax in America, some of us anyway. Much as I'd like my house de-cluttered in some way that I might find all the more relaxing by thinking of it as Japanese, I just don't care anywhere nearly as much as I did before listening to "Guabi Guabi." How organized are Jim Kweskin's closets? But back to Leonard Koren:

"Think of the kimono, and the tradition of folding... There is also the furoshiki, which is basically a square of flat cloth used daily to wrap packages. Folding is deep and pervasive in Japanese culture. Folding is a key strategy of modular systems that have evolved because of limited living space.”

And in America:



Let's fold scarves!

On swatting a fly.

1. BBC gives you 10 ways to swat a fly — including a technique called The Barack.

2. PETA doesn't appreciate The Barack: "We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals. We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals."

3. There's a song called "Never Swat a Fly." I'm familiar with the old Jim Kweskin version ("Don't do that, Delores/You should never swat a fly"), but here's the 1930 Abe Lyman version. Lyrics:

Never swat a fly, he may love another fly
He may sit with her and sigh the way I do with you
Never harm a flea, he may have a favorite she
That he bounces on his knee the way I do with you
Never stop a moth when he is gliding through the air
He may have a date in someone's flannel underwear
Ah! Ah! Be careful!
Never spray a nit with a great big can of Blitz
He may think some nit has it the way I do with you

Rubberbandjo.

I just noticed it would be really easy to become the #1 Google search result for "rubberbandjo." But if you really want to make a rubberbandjo, this looks like a plausible method. Or do you think "rubberbanjo" is a better spelling? Might as well capture the #1 for that too. Aw, come on. Don't tell me you're not fiddling with the office supplies as we wind down toward Christmas. Hmmm.... fiddling.... what have we got here....

IN THE COMMENTS: There's an effort to assemble the Alt House Band with everyone playing instruments concocted out of various items. I mention the washtub bass, and then matthew points us to the gas tank bass:



Loved it! Let me offer up one of my favorite songs with some of my favorite washtub bass:



AND: Let's have some whamola in this band:



MORE: Here.

"Genghis Khan/He could not keep/All his men/Supplied with sheep."

Robert Christgau, utterly seduced by Maria Muldaur singing Bob Dylan songs, says: "I got a whole new idea of what those sheep are for."

Uh, yeah, but officially the lyrics to "You Ain't Going Nowhere" are:

Genghis Khan
He could not keep
All his kings
Supplied with sleep

Christgau's smitten. Touting Muldaur's sexiness, Christgau is pretty insulting to the Byrds -- "anything but sensual" -- and Linda Ronstadt -- "an ambitious ingenue at best."

(And if those "You Ain't Going Nowhere" lyrics made you think of John Kerry... should I be mean and say (Christgauchely): you're anything but sensual?)

Anyway, I've loved Maria Muldaur since the 60s, when I had all the Jim Kweskin Jug Band records, played them constantly, and made my friends care about them. On the clip at the first link, you can hear Maria singing "I'm a Woman," from back in those days.

Christgau's review is too much about how Maria found so much sex in Bob Dylan's lyrics, as if Maria and only Maria knows the true depth of sexuality. It makes him seem a little silly, but she still sounds great.

Unplayable 45s I won't throw out: #5 in a series.

Let's look at this obscurity from 1967:



"The Eggplant That Ate Chicago" was written by Norman Greenbaum, who had a big hit a few years later with "Spirit in the Sky," a song we heard all the time at The Halfway Inn in East Quad, all those many years ago (in 1970). But back before I went to college, when I was playing 45s on a record player that closed up like a tiny suitcase, I liked this Dr. West's Medicine Show & Junk Band song. It fit in with the Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band and Lovin' Spoonful kinds of things that I was quite fond of. Boy, Dr. West's Medicine Show & Junk Band... that is such a thoroughly hippie name for a group that it makes me feel all bad inside for a thousand amorphous reasons. Ah, snap out of it! Let's look at the lyrics:

You'd better watch out for the eggplant that ate Chicago,
For he may eat your city soon.
You'd better watch out for the eggplant that ate Chicago,
If he's still hungry, the whole country's doomed.

He came from outer space, lookin' for somethin' to eat.
He landed in Chicago. He thought Chicago was a treat.
(It was sweet, it was just like sugar.)

Norman then, Norman later:



A YouTube search for Norman came up empty, but so what? It gives us a chance to listen to the Jim Kweskin Jug Band: here.

Have a good evening listening to some old hippie music.

UPDATE: Well, apparently my YouTube search skills suck, but Sippican comes to the rescue. Here's "Spirit in the Sky."

Yeesh! That's a primative music video.

I've never been a sinner
I've never sinned
I've got a friend in Jesus

It was really early Christian rock.

A life spent playing the jug and the washtub bass.

Goodbye to Fritz Richmond, who played the jug and the washtub bass in Jim Kweskin's Jug Band:

Drawing on his expertise as an Army helicopter mechanic, he strung the washtub bass with a steel cable, turning it into a usable instrument. To play it, he developed his own steel-and-rawhide gloves.

He won national attention in 1963 with the Kweskin band. Only when he joined the band did he learn that he would be playing the jug as well as washtub bass. None of the members of the band knew the instrument firsthand; Mr. Richmond learned how to play it from scratchy old records.

Mr. Muldaur said Mr. Richmond was an innovator who, among other things, suggested the Lovin' Spoonful's name and was the first to wear the granny glasses with tiny colored lenses later favored by many other musicians. While most wore the glasses to be trendy, Mr. Muldaur said, Mr. Richmond wore them to hide the fact that the exertion of blowing the jug made him go cross-eyed.

Oh, so that's why we all wore those glasses! I wonder how many other fashion trends were started by someone who had an idiosyncratic reason for wearing something unusual.

Anyway, I loved the Jug Band. Here's a greatest hits record -- and you can listen to some clips.

"The R. Crumb Handbook."

I've been reading "The R. Crumb Handbook." (Yeah, it's one of the five books referred to here, the guessing commenters will be interested to know.) I was not an R. Crumb fan until the movie "Crumb" drew me in. The Handbook is terrific, mixing written biographical text and illustrated pages. The text to a great extent tracks the story told in the movie, with some notable differences. The book emphasizes Crumb's Catholic upbringing, a subject entirely missing from the movie.

When you make a documentary, you take your footage and tell the story you want -- like a lawyer deciding what evidence to present. The R. Crumb of the movie was shaped by weird parents, the repressive American culture of the 1950s, and the liberating effect of LSD and sex. The Crumb of the book is much more grounded in serious respect for art and an intensely religious upbringing.

The book comes with a CD of Crumb's old-timey music. Fans -- like me! -- of Jim Kweskin should enjoy it. I'm sitting in a café, waiting to get my hands on the new marijuana case, and, needing to screen out something awful the baristas decided to unleash on the nerve-jangled customers, I started playing the Crumb CD through the headphones on my computer. The fifth song is a bit much, but it makes me laugh anyway. It's a jaunty little ditty called "My Girl's P***y."

Now, let's see if I can get to the case.