Author: Eyolf Østrem

The Airwaves, They Are A-Changin’

The Airwaves, They Are A-Changin’
Amazing how we think the same about things, Dylan and me :-) It’s only a month or so since I wrote:

Why doesn’t he give us something he’s interested in? He obviously loves old music, the kind of songs he rips off and records with new lyric collages, the kind of stuff he sings when he’s all by himself. That’s what he does amazingly well, so why not do it more? How about ditching the war-horses — they’re as tired as him — and playing a show once in a while, with Doc Boggs, Gene Austin, Johnny and Jack, Charles Aznavour, stuff we know he loves?

And now he’s going to do exactly that, on his own radio show… This is exciting news indeed.

“Song sites face legal crackdown”

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Song sites face legal crackdown

Before you act: there’s no point in writing comments like: Where’s the zip file? I want the zip file. Can you please send me the zip file?

well well… What can I say? Several people have sent me links to this and other similar news reports, concerned about what is going to happen to dylanchords.
I understand the concern — I share it, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.
On the one hand: I don’t want to go to jail, and I can’t afford a 500,000$ lawsuit. Those are two good reasons to shut down the site right now.
On the other, I keep telling myself that I don’t have much to worry about: all the lyrics are already freely available from bobdylan.com; all the tabs are my own interpretations and “intellectual property” in some sense of the word, I haven’t copied them from anywhere, and god knows I haven’t cast so much as an eye on the official chord books — heaven forbid! (in fact, had the publishers done a decent job on those, I would never have started this site); to my knowledge, chord charts in the form and with the contents you will find on dylanchords.com have not been copyrighted; etc. All in all, if I were the judge, I couldn’t really say that the site is much of an infringement.
Then again, I ain’t the judge.
The Australian Copyright Council writes:

If you own copyright in a musical work or lyrics, you are generally the only person who can:

  • reproduce it: for example, by recording a performance of it, photocopying it, copying it by hand, or scanning it onto a computer disk;
  • make it public for the first time;
  • perform it in public;
  • communicate it to the public (including via radio, television and the internet);
  • translate it (for lyrics); or
  • arrange or transcribe it (for music).

That would mean that I would need Dylan’s permission to arrange the songs, even though the “arrangements” (i.e. tabs) are my own.
However:

Unless a special exception applies, copyright is infringed if someone uses copyright material in one of the ways set out in the Copyright Act without the copyright owners permission. The special exceptions include fair dealing with copyright material for research or study, or for criticism or review.

The disclaimer about “research, study, personal use” etc. is a standard mantra in headers of tab pages, which I’ve never really taken seriously, and I doubt that anyone has — especially not the publishers and copyright holders. Whether or not a use is fair depends on four factors, listed in the US Copyright Act:

• the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
• the nature of the copyright work;
• the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyright work as a whole; and
• the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I’d say I score a point on #1, but I lose on the other three.

All in all, the situation is too unclear for me to see through it, but also to just sit and wait. I have therefore decided — actually while writing this — to take down the potentially offensive parts of the site until the situation has become clearer. There will be a solution, I’m sure, but until then: have patience! This is not a goodbye, but a “We’ll meet again”

And — not that I think it will have any effect whatsoever, but there’s a petition one can sign at http://www.petitiononline.com/mioti/petition.html

Genius, Guitars, and Goodbyes

My previous post caused more reactions than any post on this blog so far, and I should probably not be surprised. At first I intended to comment on the things that were said in the thread, but it has been growing too long. Here’s an opportunity to continue in a new thread, where comments won’t be lost at #59. :-)

Things I was not intending to do:

To disrespect Dylan’s integrity.
To take away the enjoyment of anyone who goes to a show and enjoys it.
To claim that Dylan is too old to be good.
To profit economically from his work.
To say that anyone who like what they hear are stupid and ignorant.
To say that all Dylan does now is to go through the motions an profit economically from his past work.

What I did intend was to urge people to think about what they do, and what that does to the performance situation. This was not based solely on one show. Rather, I was taking that one show as a point of departure for formulating views that I’ve had for some time.

Genius is not inherent but something that’s constantly in the making. If an artist produces something of inherent beauty, profound expression, coming from a sharp eye on the human condition, a gaze which transcends everyday thoughts, that expression might be called genius, but to call the artist himself a genius would be to subscribe to a concept of divine inspiration which Dylan may or may not embrace, but I don’t. Genius isn’t what you are, but what you do.
OK, Dylan’s an icon, OK, he has a charisma which pours off the stage in gallons, even today, but still? It is amazing that he can still do it. But how can he ever get anything like a clear perception of when what he’s doing is good — how can he possibly develop criteria for judging this — when the feedback he gets is uncritical adoration? When stepping over the amp next to his piano and moving slightly closer to the centre-stage and blowing some “tut-tut-tut” on the same note in his harp, will harvest the same ovations every night, and when saying “thank you” — once — brings down the house?
Part of Dylan’s greatness lies in his integrity, his unwavering confidence that what he’s doing is right. Take the ’65/66 tour: night after night with catcalls, Judas!, the English leftists’ organized clapping (“If you only wouldn’t clap so hard”), the boos, the reviews — enough to break anyone’s back, but Dylan sucked energy out of it and produced classic performance art. Or the gospel tours. Again: boos, ridicule, and audiences numbering 2000 rather than 20,000 or 200,000 — and again: brilliant shows filled with fire and brimstone, and not only coming from the texts. Even the self-inflicted nadir around 1990 could be seen in this light: perhaps the ultimate act of artistic integrity: to self-destruct in order to rebuild.
But when was the last time Dylan was booed? Even when he put out a bad performance? When was he last given the opportunity of the reality check that an honest audience reaction is? If an artist puts out a performance which is sub-par, he should be greeted with boos, regardless of what he has done in the past, or will do the following night. He should not be deprieved of the chance of a reaction to what he does, and not to what he has done or has been (which is in effect the same thing as treating him as a has-been).
It’s not necessarily the booing I’m after (although that would probably bring out some long-lost fire and brimstone in mr. D), but a nuanced response from the audience, where the audience is able to see beyond the god-like iconicity of the man up there, and hear what they hear, instead of first passing it through the “he’s a genius, so this must be good”-filter.
I think this would do us, the audience, good, but it is also our responsibility towards the artist: he’s engaging in an act of communication, but if the answer is the same, no matter what he says, what good does it do him — what kind of respect towards him is that?
One of the most puzzling — perhaps saddest, but I’m not really sure about this — moments in my Dylan carreer was the first time I was up front and was able to see him at ten feet distance. The show was great, but the look on his face… It seemed to lie somewhere between complete unemotionality and some kind of bemused superiority. Whatever it was, it looked like a mask. At the time I thought: He is not taking us, this, himself, seriously. He doesn’t have to, of course, and again: that he does not succumb to that kind of emotional interaction with the audience which is so commonly seen, is a sign of his integrity. But how can it be otherwise, when he is greeted with hoorays whatever he’s doing? Mustn’t he be thinking, either: “Why on earth are they cheering — that solo wasn’t very successful, was it?” or “Hey, that must have been a great solo — look at how they’re cheering!” In any case, it might be time for another “If you just wouldn’t clap so hard.”

I MISS FREDDY!

Before you comment on this post, please read the follow-up post “Genius, Guitars, and Goodbyes” — what you wanted to say may already be said there.

So, I broke the promise-to-self, to let Dylan tour on his own, without my help. I decided, after the last Scandinavian tour, that this was it; the shows were decent enough, but nothing more. I hyped myself up to enjoying them, liking them even, perhaps loving them, and moments like Desolation Row in Karlstad (best D-Row ever? Best D-Row ever!) made it a whole lot easier, but I also knew that I wouldn’t follow another tour again. Enough singsong, enough mumbles, no more days at the office for me. NeverEndingTour-Dylan never got better than 1995.
But things have changed, and for reasons more related to Wedding Song than to Desolation Row I had to give him another chance. Since he decided not to play Copenhagen this time, it had to be Gothenburg, and I was on the road again.
For the first time in a very long time, I was quite unprepared too. I haven’t heard a new show in two years, and I was looking forward to the closest thing to a virginal experience that I would ever get again. I knew there were some new band members, but I didn’t even know their names, let alone their faces. I was ready. C’mon, Bob, surprise me.
And man, was I surprised. It was a time-stopping experience. Two years just vanished, everything was just as I had left it. Given that that was two years ago, and that the man has been out there doing it all that time, that was not a good experience. One would expect that something had happened, but if it had, I don’t know what it was.
Call me Mr. Jones, call me Judas, but honestly, I had hoped for some development.
And the band… The band… Some years ago, even though I couldn’t always say the shows were great, inspired, etc., at least one could stand proud and claim that Dylan was backed by the best and tightest rock combo in the world, who played Brown Sugar better than the Stones themselves did.
Not anymore.
Tight? Nah.
Exciting? Nope.
Hard? Hardly.
I don’t want to sound negative; the steel guitar player was quite good — at times, he made his instrument sound like something Bucky Baxter might have handled. The guitarist behind Dylan — I think it was Stu Kimball — had his moments too. I guess someone likes the new guy’s solos (that must be Denny Freeman, then) but don’t count me among them. Melodic in the bland, cover-band style that you might hear in light entertainment TV shows; and a repertoire of licks so vast that they reappeared every other song.
After a couple of songs, every taste bud in my aesthetic body yelled: “We miss Freddy!” Initially, I just had to agree, and joined the choir. After all, I summed up my last concert experience (at least I believed it would be my last), writing “About Guitars and Kissing”, my eulogy to Freddy Koella, the guy who plays in Dylan’s style, but actually knows how to play.
But being the rational academic I am paid to be, I had to pass beyond that kind of populist clamour from the lowly senses — I had to think about it. Why has Dylan let Freddy go (or kicked him out?!) and replaced him with this? Images flash by: Michael Bloomfield — savage (and dead, of course). Robbie Robertson — there is a second-and-a-half scene in Eat the Document, just a soundcheck, where Robbie plays a few tones in E major and proves what a tremendous guitarist he was. Fred Tackett — he may wear glasses (so do I), but don’t let that fool you; he could be mean too. G. E. Smith — not my favorite guitarist, but there certainly was a bite there, some rough edges which we haven’t heard again before the days of Koella, paired with a certain dexterity which could become quite furious. J. J. Jackson — probably my favorite NeverEndingTour guitarist before Koella…
And now…! Where in this lineage does the current band belong?! Why is it that I suddenly came to think of Hearts of Fire in the middle of the show?
Again: Why does he do it? He used to say, about the mid-eigthies, that he didn’t know what his songs meant any longer. Well, he doesn’t seem to now either. “Leledi-laaay“, “painting the passports brown“, “justlikea woman” — all sung to the same melody, with the same emotional character. He might as well have sung “two litres of milk“, or “upmg kfadl ksdfie ewok” — it wouldn’t have mattered more, or less.
I’m not going to analyse him or his motives — is he just doing it for the money? is it just this pact with the Commander-in-Chief? Is it, perhaps, just another day at the office? — but my impression is that he is no longer hungry, he is no longer nervous, he is tired and content. It may be a very long time since he last went to the beach and danced with one hand waving free, but up until recently he has sounded like he wanted to. Not anymore. He’d be afraid of getting dirt on his boots, he’d be repulsed by the fish, he’d be too tired to walk through the dunes. He was so much younger then. That bothers me, much more than the lack of melodic variety.
I’m not talking about age here, but about guts and hunger, interest and desire. If he doesn’t know what it’s like on the beach any more and by the way doesn’t want to either, then why on earth does he have to sing about it? Why doesn’t he give us something he’s interested in? He obviously loves old music, the kind of songs he rips off and records with new lyric collages, the kind of stuff he sings when he’s all by himself. That’s what he does amazingly well, so why not do it more? How about ditching the war-horses — they’re as tired as him — and playing a show once in a while, with Doc Boggs, Gene Austin, Johnny and Jack, Charles Aznavour, stuff we know he loves?
Why not? Well, because if he did, he probably wouldn’t fill the halls he plays in now. The popular response, which he finally seems to embrace and enjoy after years of resisting it an trying to destroy it, has become too pleasant, it seems.

I expect to be flamed for this. I don’t mind. I don’t either want to convince anyone who truly thinks his current shows are better than ever. I don’t have the time for that: I have boxes upon boxes of old tapes full of flame and nervous energy that I have to listen through again.
Bye, Bob.

The dylanchords.com guide: “How to use Word without hurting Heiner’s eyes”

Upon general request, here’s my guide to proper use of MS Word:

  1. Never ever use direct formatting.
  2. That means: never ever click on any of the buttons in the formatting toolbar
  3. . . . which means that you might as well disable that toolbar altogether (right-click in the toolbar area and uncheck “Formatting”)
  4. You are allowed to keep it there for two reasons:
    1. To control what is going on in the document, and
    2. to click on the “Styles” button (the one with the two “A”s), which opens the “Styles” sidebar, . . .
  5. . . . which should always be visible, and which is the only acceptable way to format the text.
  6. Create styles for the types of text that you are going to use, and/or modify the existing styles to suit your desires.
  7. These desires should under no circumstance include using Times New Roman or Arial, which are Microsoft’s rip-offs of slightly more acceptable typefaces; but which in themselves are objectively ugly; and which give a discerning reader the impression that you don’t care how your document looks. Good alternatives are Garamond (which, in Microsoft’s version, is not a Garamond at all but a Jannon, but it comes close enough), Gentium, a nice, free unicode font (a combination of three huge advantages which are rarely seen together), or for that matter Book Antiqua, which is also a rip-off, but of a nice typeface: Hermann Zapf’s Palatino
  8. Use templates:
    • In an empty document, set up all the different styles that you think you will be using (plain text, indented text, blockquotes, headings, etc.), and save the document, not as a Word Document, but a Word Template (choose it in the drop-down list below the field for the file name).
    • Choose New document from template from the Files menu and select your template.
    • Lo and behold! All your styles are there.
    • You can apply your new template to any document through the Functions > Templates menu. Check the box with “update styles automatically”.

About Love
(What it’s about)

I discovered what love is all about the other day. This social construct, refined through centuries of human civilization and surrounded by myths and taboos, idealized, demonized, attributed to G/god or to body fluid imbalance, hormons or mormons — but what it’s really about…
Try to put your arms gently around the one you love, with bare arms (like the cavemen early in our evolution must have had), and rest your wrists against the naked skin of your partner — already warm under the mammoth fur or the blanket — and tell me if that isn’t what it’s all about — all these years of evolution and poetry: to get your wrists warmed.

The politics of typography

Did you ever consider the political implications of the ascii standard? No? Thought so.
Someone who did is Robert Bringhurst. And these are not the only implications of typography that he has considered. The title of his book The Elements of Typographical Style may not be sexy, not the kind of thing you would read on the bus or in bed, but, holy shit, it is! If one happens to be a typography freak, this is just heaven, but I suspect that even people who use Times New Roman and Arial (or who don’t know which fonts they’re using, which probably means that they use Times New Roman and Arial), might find something to enjoy here, and even get their horizons widened, so that the next time they open a book, they may not go straight to the mental images behind the curved lines on the paper, but stop for a split second and think “hey, that’s a nice ‘g’!”
Where was I? Oh, the politics. Consider this, about the ascii character set, the standard upon which most computer type setup is based:

The fact that such a character set was long considered adequate tells us something about the cultural narrowness of American civilization, or American technocracy, in the midst of the twentieth century.

The basic ascii set has room for 94 characters. Since c. 1980 we have had the extended ascii set, with 216 free slots — a considerable improvement. But —

This ignores the needs of mathematicians, linguists and other specialists, and of millions of normal human beings who use the Latin alphabet for Czech, Hausa, Hungarian, Latvian, Navajo, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yoruba, and so on. The extended ascii character set is the alphabet not of the real world nor of the un General Assembly but of nato: a technological memento of the them-and-us mentality that thrived in the Cold War.

Bringhurst is a Canadian, of course… They ain’t so bad, them maple-lovers!
And if you thought that things have improved — well, yes, perhaps. But Bringhurst has some cold water for that burning enthusiasm too:

The rate of change in typesetting methods has been steep — perhaps it has approximated the Fibonacci series — for more than a century. Yet, like poetry and painting, storytelling and weaving, typography itself has not improved. There is no greater proof that typography is more art than engineering. Like all the arts, it is basically immune to progress, though it is not immune to change.

The ascii set has 94 characters, Gutenberg used 290 for his bible. ‘Nuff said.

Chimes of Freedom

Chimes of Freedom was, I think, the first Dylan song that I really made an effort to transcribe. This was before the days of the Internet and in my case also before the days of Lyrics, so if I wanted the words on paper, I had to write them out myself.
Which I wanted, and which I did.
I was spellbound by those words. The layer upon layer of different meanings connected to different sensual experiences: the thunder storm, the lightning, the sounds, the “we”, which is not explained in the song, but I imagined a loving couple, on their way home from a date, to . . ., well, you know – all these and more, working together, flowing in and out of each other and each other’s natural domains, lightning itself evoking sounds, not by laws of physics, through its companion, the thunder, but by laws of association.
And all this channeled into Freedom, even giving that flashing sound a political or at least social dimension. No wonder the post-pubescent me had to love it.
And I had to see it on paper, to savour it, possibly also to understand the bits that escaped me in their sounding form. I only had it on vinyl (of course, this was back in those days . . .), and it’s only owing to my quick (and illegible, to anyone but me) handwriting that there aren’t more scratches and dents in that track. Somehow, I managed to get through it, and even solve some of the textual mysteries.
For this and other reasons, I have quite a special affection for the album version. I don’t know if it is because of this, or because Dylan has never really done it better, but I’ve never been quite satisfied with his live versions. They always leave me cold, don’t do it for me, and the result of having listened to all these versions that leave me cold, has been that the song itself has lost some of its attraction.
Then came No Direction Home. I won’t claim that this is the best version ever – it probably isn’t. The singing is the whining, slightly tense, 1964 voice – not his best year. I’ve even heard the track before, without any noticeable effect.
But this time, somehow, it worked.
I can’t explain why – probably a combination of circumstances (I was listening on headphones, walking around in our local grocery store, looking for some aubergines and some washing powder), and the thing that caught me was something as insignificant as the guitar playing between the verses.
It goes something like this:

  G
  :   .   .     :   .   .     :   .
|-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|
|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|
|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|  etc.
|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|-0---0---0---|
|-2---2---2---|-2---2---2---|-2---2---2---|
|-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|-3---3---3---|

Nothing much, and yet…
At first, the performance disturbed me. Especially two of the between-verses passages, where he keeps strumming this one G major chord abnormally long. I thought, “Damn, he has forgotten the lyrics.” It has happened before. But this time, “phew”, he managed to get back on track again. Until next verse, same thing again, even longer this time. But both times, the following verse with all its intricate images and assonances followed without any hint of a problem, so relieved by this I ended up listening to the sheer sound of the guitar: never have I heard a more perfectly ringing, shimmering tone from Dylan’s hand. It’s not that it’s simple word-painting or anything – that would have been trite; they don’t sound like church-bells, those guitar chords – especially not the kind which are caused by lightning. But they chime alright.
And I started wondering, if he hadn’t forgotten the lyrics, perhaps there was a reason he did it like this? Playing the waiting-game like that – unless one believes it’s just a mistake, and all one can think of is how painfully embarrassing this is – it forces one to notice that which is going on in place of that one expected but which is not. And what goes on here, is sound – simply sound. “Only silence is more beautiful.”

Useful software III: Image viewers and editors

I wrote earlier about a new image viewer — FastStone. I did like it, but it turned out the “Fast” part was an exaggeration. For a quick, efficient, feature-rich picture viewer/editor, there are really only two alternatives: irfanview and XnView. Which one is the right one, depends on your needs, but they’re both free and small, so why choose? — you can use them both.

Irfanview is the fastest viewer around. If what you have is collections of images off the net, this may not make much of a difference, but if you have the occasional 18 Mb scan on a CD, you’ll be grateful for the speed. It is also quite versatile in the handling of images.
The cons are, as always, a reflection of the pros: it is a bare-bones viewer/editor, and there is not much frills — not even the frills that may improve usability. There is a thumbnails viewer, but it opens in a separate window and you have to switch back and forth between them, so in practice, it has no thumbnail browser. There are also quite a few configuration settings you can do, but they tend to be well hidden, both in terms of placement in menus, and in terms of lingo — you have to know quite precisely what you’re looking for.

In all those areas, therefore, XnView is my #1 choice. Just as quick as irfanview for “everyday use” (I’d say; but the bigger the file, the greater the advantage of irfan), but way ahead in terms of usability: a good browser mode, with thumbnail view, preview and file browser (all can be configured), a tabbed interface, and a greater selection of filters and other effects, should you want to use it as a “Photoshop light”. Everything works the way it is expected, and it works efficiently. Good program! And free.

But if what you want is something even more in the direction of Photoshop, but you don’t want to spend that money, or don’t have time to wait for it to load, PhotoFiltre is what you want. That may actually be the case even if you think you want Photoshop. . . I have found it to have a much smoother learning curve than PS, so that even though you can do some more advanced stuff with PS, chances are you will never know, because you have to be a super-user to find out about it. PhotoFiltre works very intuitively, and in 90% of the cases, it has the tool you want, and it has it for you much quicker than that other program.
And it’s free for personal use.

All this applies if you’re a Windows user.

“. . . whatever / I Stumble Upon”

It started with “google” — an internet term which became a standard word in any word class and in any language. Then it was “blog”, which is apparently the word that most quickly has been entered in French dictionaries.
But where I live, “Stumble” tops them all. People can be ‘thumbs-upped’ for their great stumbles. It’s the best example I can think of of an idea which in itself is great, but which, when put into practice, not only proves itself as great in the way it was meant, but also has a potential for growth in all possible directions, which the originator could never have imagined.
The basic idea is this: say you’re interested in cats. You look for pictures of cats, but you’re not sure which cat picture sites out of the 61,700,000 hits on google are the good ones. But your friend, who also likes cats, sends you a couple of good links, and now you have somewhere to start.
He also happens to like dogs, and he sends a couple of dog links as well. You’ve never cared much about dogs before, but his links are good, so you check them out.
This is StumbleUpon, a link-sharing network community. You pick your interests, click a button, and come to a site which someone has recommended in that category. I’ve found some great sites-you-didn’t-know-you-needed that way. If you find something you like, you give it a thumbs-up, or if you don’t like it, a thumbs-down, and you will not be bothered by that site or sites like it any more.
But that’s not where it ends. You can write your review of the pages you come to. They will be collected in your own area of StumbleUpon – something like a blog. A blog with a purpose, because in principle you don’t just write about your cat (well, in this case you do), but about sites you like and why.
Especially the option to “photo-blog” has boosted this aspect of Stumble enormously. You will now find Stumblers whose profile pages are nothing but a collection of nice pictures (of cats, mostly). You will find networks, both organized and the wild, unorganzied ones that grow out of a common interest, a weird idea, a common aquaintance.
Check out my stumbles, and take it from there.

Wedding song

I try to be meek and mild. I try to be humourous too. And I’m always serious. Honestly. To some people, those don’t seem to go together well.
I’ve never received more complaints — verging on the indignant — than after I wrote about Wedding Song that

It may be a silly song, hastily written, badly rehearsed, and with some of the least successful poetic images Dylan has ever written (“I love you more than blood” – yuck!)

I’m sorry if I hurt someone’s feelings by trashing their favourite song, but I do think it’s a silly song. All reports agree that it was hastily written, and the recording bears ample evidence to the short rehearsal time, even though the performance miraculously hangs together and succeeds in the way that only Dylan can make it succeed and for which I love his music.

For once I agree with Clinton Heylin:

Though it is hard not to interpret the lyrics on a literal level, Dylan’s performance once again transcends the at times slipshod sentimentality. Which may well stand as the motif for all of Planet Waves. Though it is an album suffused with brilliant performances from both musicians and vocalist, Dylan had yet to fully excise some bad writing habits picked up during the amnesia. (Dylan Behind Closed Doors, p. 99)

The “slipshod sentimentality” keeps me from seeing the honesty that Dylan so desperately tries to display (or: that the persona in the song so desperately tries to display, or: that Dylan so desperately tries to make the persona in the song display), and which makes it sound dishonest to me, despite all the overwhelming images.

“You try so hard…,” as the Bard says.

Many have kindly suggested to me that “blood” is not to be taken literally. Frankly, I didn’t believe that Dylan was sitting at his breakfast table with Sara’s hand in one hand and a glass of freshly poured blood in the other, thinking “Now, which one do I love more…?” I’m well aware of the associations between family and blood. That still doesn’t make it a successful poetic image, for me.

There’s more to the poetic than making cunning connections or crafting rhetorical figures. Those things are to a poetic text what a virus is to a computer: They can be very powerful, but just being there — on the hard-drive or in a text — isn’t enough. As long as they don’t run — if they aren’t executed — they do no damage, nor do they do any good; they do nothing, apart from taking up space.
So, what does it take for an image to be executed?

The very sound of it is important, the physical qualities, that which is not connected with concepts, words, ideas. Already here, “I love you more than bleahd” fails, and not only because of the kitchen-table associations.

A certain broadness in the range of associations isn’t a bad thing either, instead of monomaniacal insistence on one topic (unless of course that insistence itself is what is on display). The blood image alone might have done it for me in a different context, but in the company of the other larger-than-life images in the song, trying to top each other in greatness of sentiment — More! More!! More!!! — it reminds me quite a bit of Dan Bern’s song Tiger Woods, which has the same escalation on overdrive (only this time successfully):

I got big balls
Big ol’ balls
Big as grapefruits
Big as pumkins,
Yes sir, yes sir
And on my really good days
They swell to the size of small dogs —

Balls big as small dogs — now, there’s some poetic imagery for ya!
But most important for how I judge a poetic image by its ability to project a persona which we all know is literary but whose experiences are close enough to our own that we can make them our own as if they were genuine. This is the fundamental failure of Wedding Song for me: I can’t for the life of me think of it as a genuine, honest expression of anything. Too many things stand in the way and prevent me from making it my own. And if that is the case, I’d rather go out there and get those experiences myself — and tell myself that I don’t need Dylan to tell me what it’s all about.
Which I did. There’s a reason why that particular song was featured on the front page on that particular day…

The death of classical music, III: Pythagoras, the ghastly adolescent, and the awful monster

Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Beethoven was a narcissistic hooligan

This article from the Guardian manages to combine two of the topics I’ve been writing about here lately — the death of classical music, and the heritage from Pythagoras — so I thought I should cite it.

From the speculations of Pythagoras about the “music of the spheres” in ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer’s idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.

This was a ghastly inversion that led slowly but inevitably to the awful atonal music of Schoenberg and Webern. In other words, almost everything that went wrong with music in the 19th and 20th centuries is ultimately Beethoven’s fault. Poor old Schoenberg was simply taking Beethoven’s original mistake to its ultimate, monstrous logical conclusion.

Whoa! These are some giant leaps in the argument… Flawed ones, at that, at least when they turn into value judgements.
It is true that for a long time (approx. from Pythagoras to Mozart) it was believed that beauty was an objective property, based in numerical relations. But the U-turn — in the author’s actually quite appropriate words — which more or less coincided with Beethoven, was that this 2,000-year-long line of thought was abandoned, in favour of a philosophically based notion of receiver reactions.
So, if “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, it is obvious that the perspective in both the production and the reception of beauty will shift towards the individual. But to give Beethoven the blame — or should I say: the credit! — for this, is a slight exaggeration.

He employed his genius in the service of a fundamentally flawed idea. If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart.

This is great…! I have only two things to say:
1. serving “the noble Pythagorean view of music” in the age of Kant — now that would have been a historical monstrosity and an employment of genius “in the service of a fundamentally flawed idea”.
2. In my book, Beethoven still rules.

IE—FF 54—33

I’ve collected some browser statistics from the visitor tracker for the blog. IE is still in the lead, but nowhere near the 90% which was the state of affairs at the main site before november 1, 2004. A third of the visitors now use Firefox/Mozilla, which is what specialist’s and web developers’ sites usually have. I’m very satisfied with you!
The main site statistics are not as accurate — they only track the last 100 visitors — but there, the figures are 68%–18% at the moment. A little less for FF, which is expected, but still a good share.
Those of you who haven’t made the change yet, may want to read my top seven reasons not to use the thing with the blue e. (And, in case you’re concerned: you can have both browsers installed at the same time, and Firefox will ask if you want to import all your favorites from IE, so you will not lose anything.)

Here are the complete figures:
Internet Explorer (4, 5, 5.5, and 6): 15,481 (54%)
Mozilla (Firefox and the Mozilla suite): 9,450 (33%)
Netscape: 1,559
Konqueror: 963
Safari: 933
Opera: 264
——————
Total: 28650

One Too Many Mornings

Seven years ago, I wrote, in the first version of the tab of “One Too Many Mornings”:

The chords below are what he plays. I’m not sure about the fingering, though. I have a feeling that it is played in some kind of altered tuning, but I’m not sure yet. The low g’s that are sounding throughout most of the song would indicate an open string. I’m working on it.

This was one of the first songs I tabbed — or should I say: failed to tab. At that time, I only had the song on vinyl, and apart from the huge problem involved in tabbing from a vinyl player (moving the pickup five seconds back not only damages the record, it is also impossible). I thought about various open tunings — especially the consistent use of the G on the deepest string pointed in that direction, but also the many instances of two neighbouring strings with the same tone — but in the end I settled with an approximation in standard tuning, and the song remained in the “things to do” folder (only to prove that the last sentence in the quotation was a lie).
Today I finally sat down with it again, and it turned out to be played in open A, the same tuning that he used on the Freewheelin’ outtake “Wichita Blues”. It’s an interesting tuning, because the strings are tuned as closely together as possible. This may also be the reason why it has not been used much: the closeness gives a very homogenous sound, but this also limits the sonorous possibilities. Also, the two c# strings give the major third a very prominent place, which almost rules out any blues oriented songs at the outset (in Wichita Blues, the highest string is not c#’ but e’).
Anyway, the tab is ready.