Posts Tagged ‘bob dylan’

Catching Up


It’s been a busy few days, what with the ThrillerFest award and all the discussions about heading for Arizona to write an e-single called Sarah Palin’s Arizona. The bottom line on that was that at this point in my career I’m not going to start writing without getting paid for it (except for this blog, which I’m doing, yes, to increase awareness of THE ROGUE in advance of its September publication, but also because I enjoy interacting online with all of you: or most of you, anyway.)

The way electronic publishing is evolving for magazine-length original pieces, the writer gets no fee or advance up front but is guaranteed a share in sales revenue down the line. If I did a Kindle Single directly for amazon, I’d get 70 percent of eventual revenues, but then Barnes & Noble would be unhappy because they want people to buy Nooks, not Kindles. And if you have a potentially big book scheduled for fall publication you don’t want to make Barnes & Noble–the country’s largest retailer of actual physical books–unhappy in the summer.

So you write an e-article that is not a Kindle Single exclusive and can also be downloaded on the Nook, the iPad, and across all other electronic platforms. But who pays you to do that? The answer, in this case, turned out to be no one. I was offered a deal whereby an e-partner would electronically “publish” Sarah Palin’s Arizona, but in return would take half of my 70 percent share of sales revenue. And would not pay me any sort of fee or advance for doing the three to four weeks of work involved in reporting and writing, but would only agree to pay a nominal sum to offset my expenses.

No thanks. This arrangement was described to me as a partnership, but I said, “Yeah, it’s like a partnership between a lion and a lamb.”

The further into the 21st century we progress, it seems that more people are devising more ways to not pay writers for their work. See Huffington Post as the most offensive and egregious example. And, believe me, even Daily Beast fees are–to be generous about it–minimal.

Not that it broke my heart not to spend up to two weeks in Arizona at the height of summer. The fact is that it will feel good not to have to write anything more about Sarah Palin. I’ve even spent days at a time recently not even thinking about Sarah Palin. Not thinking about her was accompanied by a strange feeling I recognized from my distant past. I asked Nancy, who’s been with me since 1970, what she thought it might be. She said, “Happiness?”

Bingo! There will come a day late this fall when I’ll be able to throw up my arms, jump in the air, and shout out, “Free at last!”

That, of course, leads to the question of what to do next.

When I met Rosanne Cash recently at her concert at Bard College, alma mater of my son James the Agent , I told her I’d like to write next about someone I admired and respected, whose life and work had inspired me throughout my own life, as did Rosanne’s father, Johnny.

Thinking more about this in recent days I’ve found myself thinking about Bruce Springsteen. I first heard his music in the mid-1970’s, when Philly radio stations started playing it and Nancy and I were living in New Jersey. (We think of the 1970s as either “Joe and Nancy: the Jersey Years,” or, more simply, “The Lost Decade.”)

But I’ve watched and listened as Bruce grew, both as musical talent and man, over the many years since. He’s become, even more than Bob Dylan (whom I consider a demigod), our Walt Whitman: poet of the common man, lover of democracy, personification of what we as a nation can be at our best.

I’ve read Dave Marsh’s excellent Two Hearts, but, especially in light of the recent passing of Clarence Clemons, I think it might be time for me to do my own celebration of BRUCE SPRINGSTEEEN: AMERICAN.

It’s sure more fun to think about than it is to think about Sarah.

And listen here to Rosanne’s great duet with Bruce on “Sea of Heartbreak.”2-17 Sea of Heartbreak (feat. Bruce Springsteen)

HOWEVER: I can’t put Sarah behind me just yet. She got that Newsweek puff cover, she’s got Greta Van Susteren saying she’s running, and the GOP field continues to display its inadequacy. At some point, she has to figure, “Why not?” If she doesn’t, Bachmann takes her mojo away. If she does, she becomes the white hot center of U.S. politics once again. I’ll have more to say about this in days to come, but for tonight I’m going to listen to Springsteen and feel happy that I don’t have to board a flight to Phoenix tomorrow morning.

Rosanne Cash tells what a caring, truly pregnant mother would have done in Texas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Johnny Cash was and is one of my few heroes.  My admiration for him is based not only on my appreciation of his unique talent as singer, songwriter and performer, but on the courage he showed as a Nashville heavy hitter who stood up for Bob Dylan way back when Bob was considered a commie jew anti-war hippie by the country music establishment, and for Johnny’s overcoming substance abuse problems to create a whole new oeuvre in his later years, and for his being a man who never tried to shove his Christianity down anyone’s throat, and who, throughout his life, opposed needless war, imperialism, racism and insensitivity to the less fortunate among us.

It was my admiration for him that first led me to the marvelous music and equally fine writings of his multi-talented daughter, Rosanne.

In October, 2008, she wrote a brilliant commentary in The Nation, called “Why I’d Be a Better VP than Sarah Palin.

Contained therein is her straight from the shoulder shot about Sarah being pregnant with Trig in Dallas and taking the wild ride to Wasilla:

Finally, there is one subject in which I find I am even more conservative than the Governor, and that is in the area of neo-natal responsibility. The Governor was eight months pregnant and in Texas to give a speech, when her water broke. She reportedly made her speech and then traveled eleven hours, dripping amniotic fluid, bypassing Seattle and Anchorage (major cities with world-class hospitals) to travel to a small hospital in Wasilla that had no neo-natal intensive care unit, and gave birth there. Call me a wimp, call me insecure, but you had better also call me a maverick, because I would have said “Damn the schedule! Damn the speech and the airline ticket!” If this had been me, as soon as my water broke, I’d be at the closest hospital and that baby would have been born in Texas!

This is from a mother of five whose career has taken her to far more places around the world than Sarah’s has.

It’s a question of priorities.

What matters more:  the life and well-being of your Down Syndrome baby, about to be born prematurely, or your image?

The estimable Ms. Cash makes clear the choice she would have made.

Which is the choice any sane and caring woman in that circumstance would have made.  And the choice her husband–if he were caring–would have insisted on!

This leaves us with only two options:

a) Sarah is/was either not sane, or was so uncaring that she was more concerned about her image than about the life she was carrying inside her.

or

b) She wasn’t pregnant.

I just don’t see a third alternative.

 

New York Times calls Sarah Palin: “The Woman Who Might Be President”


She shows up in black leather with a Harley helmet on her head, and, yes, her talking points written on the palm of her hand, and mainstream media—-as exemplified by this story in The New York Times, (featured at the top of their home page, which is equivalent to above the fold on page one, back when anybody actually read the print edition)—-rolls over giddily and begs her to scratch their collective belly.

For sheer mastery of celebrity theater, Sarah Palin cannot be beat.

Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska, let the anticipation build for hours on Sunday in the Pentagon’s North Parking Lot, where thousands of bikers (and their rumbling Harleys) had gathered for the annual Rolling Thunder rally ahead of Memorial Day.

And then, suddenly, there she was: Ms. Palin, with her husband, Todd, and the rest of the family. Wearing matching black Harley-Davidson helmets, they rode motorcycles toward the front of the procession through a crush of cameramen, photographers, reporters and leather-clad bikers, all jostling for just a peek at the woman who might be president.

It’s long past time for those of us who believe that Sarah continues to represent a real threat to the (largely) rational discourse that has been a hallmark of our democracy for 235 years to keep blaming her and recognize that it’s the enabling by mainstream media, desperate for page views as print circulation plummets, that keeps her not only afloat, but aloft.

MSM argue that they have to cover her because everything she says and does is “news.”

But it’s only news because they make it news.

Granted, as a candidate for vice president in 2008, Sarah was news. But since November, 2008–and even more so after she quit as Alaska governor in 2009–it’s been MSM’s presenting her as a serious person, even while deriding her in the snobbish fashion that allows her to call them “lamestream”–that has kept the helium in Sarah’s balloon.

What’s clear from the weekend is that nobody has learned a thing.

She starts a “bus tour”—one for which her organizers refuse to say where she’ll be tomorrow— on the back of a motorcycle, and she’s hailed for her “mastery of celebrity theater,” and praised for outFoxing (pun intended) the MSM journalists who chase after her, tongues hanging out.

Okay, but cover her in the entertainment section. Even as the solemn debate about whether she’ll actually be a candidate next year continues, The New York Times calls her, without apparent irony, “the woman who might be president.”

And Chris Matthews, who stated the obvious last week by saying, “she’s profoundly stupid,” said more recently:

“She is really good . . . she’s fantastic on a stage. When she walks out on that stage there’s something kinetic happening. She looks great, look at her, she’s alive, she’s smiling, she’s doing stuff, she’s moving around. You can’t take your eyes off of what she’s doing.”

God help us, his leg is tingling again.

And both John McCain and Andrew Sullivan said yesterday that given the right set of circumstances she could beat President Obama next year.

Hey, if exchanging nasty comments about Sarah on this or any other blog makes you feel good, by all means keep on doing it.
But don’t kid yourself that it’s having any effect in the real world, where media memes are created, where elections are decided, and where the moral, ethical and political contours of our country are being shaped.

Seeing the gleeful embrace that MSM is giving Sarah as she returns from self-imposed, post-Tucson exile, I don’t quite despair, but I worry.

And in my head, I replay Bob Dylan’s lyrics from “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” which he wrote and first performed in 1965, in the wake of the John F. Kennedy assassination:

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue…

The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

Sarah hops on a Harley at the Pentagon and MSM falls back in love with her again.

Happy Memorial Day.

Bob Dylan is 70!


 

 

 

 

 

SO MUCH has been written about this extraordinary genius–is any genius not extraordinary?–who not only captured the essence of the 1960s in words and music, but who, instead of stopping there, has gone on for forty more years to inimitably distill and define the American experience, always remaining true to his muse, his art and his craft, not caring if the critical tide was flowing with or against him.

HE’S 70 now, and still doing what he loves best:  playing his music to live audiences all over the world.  In April, he toured Asia, performing in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Singapore and all over Australia.  In June, he’ll be in Ireland, England, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, before returning home for a July 15 concert in Costa Mesa, California.

THIS is a man who came east from Minnesota in 1961 and began performing in Greenwich Village coffeehouses.  His first paid performance was at the New York University student center.  Later that year, he played harmonica on the Harry Belafonte album Midnight Special. Fifty years later, he’s still playing harmonica and guitar and keyboard, and he’s singing:  in a voice that proudly displays every one of the years he’s lived during his professional career, which now spans half a century.

BOB DYLAN was the voice of the generation that first fought for civil rights and against war in the 1960s.  He did much to shape my consciousness in those years, and as he’s matured and given voice to the complexities of love and loss and the many other vagaries and mysteries of this existence we all share, he’s continued to speak to my heart, mind and soul.  He was an inspiration to me when I was 18, and he’s no less an inspiration to me now, at 68.

ON his website,  Bob recently posted a reply to false reports–seized upon by Maureen Dowd in a particularly inane New York Times column–that he’d allowed the Chinese government to censor his set list as a pre-condition to his appearances there last month.  What hogwash!

FOR his 70th birthday, I’ll wish Bob what he wished a newborn child of his in the early 1970’s:

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
May you stay forever young

Now listen to him sing it, in the original acoustic version:

3-18 Forever Young

 


Ain’t Gonna Work on Sarah’s Farm No More

In Madison, Wisconsin today–and not for the first time–Sarah tried to identify herself with organized labor.
She said, “I’m here as a patriot, as a taxpayer, and as a former union member.”

I said, “Huh?”  Lord, lordy, in all my research I somehow must have missed Sarah’s blue collar union days.    But at least there’s still time to write about them in my last chapter, due June 4.   So I checked.

Turns out that Vince Beltrami, president of Alaska AFL-CIO, already wrote about those glory days–on Feb. 19,in the Anchorage Daily News.

Beltrami was irked by the “utter hypocrisy” of Sarah urging (via Facebook) her “union brothers and sisters” to oppose
the protests against Wisconsin Gov. Walker’s signing into law a bill that stripped public employees of union rights.
He wrote, “She belonged to my union, the IBEW, for about a minute, over twenty years ago, one summer, in a temporary position.”

Now, again, she claims a link with organized labor by saying she’s “a former union member?”

Who does she think she’s kidding?

She’s not even Maggie in Bob Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm, she’s Maggie’s ma.

I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more
Well, she talks to all the servants
About man and God and law…
She’s sixty-eight, but she says she’s twenty-four
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more