collisionwork | High Water Everywhere

Today has been a particularly Dylan-oriented day in one of those Dylan-oriented periods I go through from time to time. Now that the wi-fi is back, there's no reason not to blow off a quick post with a few links.

I don't have the new album,

, yet. Found a cheap place online to order it from, it's on the way. Can't wait. (well, can wait, obviously, I'm gonna have to until it gets here) I don't think it can quite mean as much to me as the last two albums of his, which both arrived exactly at a point in my life where they connected perfectly with where and who I was at the time (Time Out of Mind while I was in a period of lonely exile in Maine, "Love and Theft" immediately post 9/11/01), so not being in any period of crisis now, I don't think the new one will take over my life quite the way those did.

We watched No Direction Home recently, and I read Greil Marcus's book about, and called, Like a Rolling Stone while up in Maine (both good - I have some quibbles with the documentary's structure, but what the hell, the new interviews were good and the archive footage was amazing!). So, I'm having another DylanFest at CollisionWorkCentral as I work out a schedule for Temptation. Made up an iTunes playlist of all the Dylan I'd entered there, in chronological order (just about 7 hours worth), and when I started this post we'd just reached the title track of Slow Train Coming -- now it's "Frankie and Albert" from Good As I Been to You.

In today's websurfs, Dylan was everywhere, so here's some of it:

Jonathan Lethem interviews Dylan in Rolling Stone (only an excerpt, and the quotes have been all over the place, but fine enough if you didn't see them, and don't want to pay for an issue of Rolling Stone)

Lethem also points out great forgotten Dylan tracks (with streaming audio)

And did you know about the Bob Dylan bio-pic being made by Todd Haynes, I'm Not There, with seven actors of various races, nationalities, and gender playing different aspects of Dylan? Here're some shots of the lovely Cate Blanchett as mid-60s Bob.

And an article by Louis Menand from the new New Yorker that's somewhat of a review of a new collection of interviews with Dylan, but becomes more of a commentary on Dylan in general (pretty good, though I'm stunned by the verse he quotes from "Ballad of a Thin Man" as an example of a "bad" Dylan lyric -- I mentioned it to Berit last night after reading the article, and she agreed, "That's the best verse in the song!").

Tomorrow, cats, ten random, and Temptation.