Michael Gray's Blog, page 16

BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA HARDBACK WITH CD-ROM

I'm now selling, at the special reduced price of £25 each (P&P included), signed copies of the original hardback edition of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, 2006, each one including a fully searchable CD-Rom of the entire 750,000-word text. These will soon be unavailable from any bookshop, including Amazon. They are  now available from the Shop page of my website while this limited stock lasts.

Some of these are the American printing and some the British (the difference being that the pages of the US version are cream and of the British version white).

DAN DARE POSTMODERNISM

Following the blogpost Quaintess of the Recent Past No. 27, which referred to the Dan Dare modernism of the pods on the London Eye (and their design similarity to Paris buses of 45 years previously) I've had my attention drawn to a contemporary, and therefore inevitably knowing, version of the comic in which Dan Dare appeared (which was the Eagle,  printed on glossy colour paper and therefore far more expensive than those down to earth, much loved alternatives, the Beano  and Dandy).

Today's version is Spaceship Away and thanks to Roy Kelly I can reproduce the most Dylan-infested page of their story Gates of Eden, which features the brilliantly named John Wesley Hibbings (drawn by Tim Booth):

 There is another, still more vivid drawing of the Vincent Price Era Bob Dylan in another contemporary comic (or graphic novel, in this case, if you prefer), The Umbrella Academy, created by Gerard Way, the singer in My Chemical Romance. Here He appears as God, though He is unnamed:
That central frame: perfect.

A MUSIC VIDEO UNLIKE ALL THE REST

Here's a music video that makes all the others look the same:

The Cricket and the Lonesome Edison Record Session from Stoney Lonesome on Vimeo.

MAP 12: RAILWAYS OF THE SOUTHERN STATES 1865

I KNOW

I've written this in verse form  -  ok, doggerel  -  and it explains itself:

CILLA BLACK
OR THE STAR OF THE NORTH-WEST

When first I lived in LiverpoolSome pleasure for to findI heard a local singer thereMost pleasing to my mind
The scene was getting groovy thenThe year was ’62And in among the beat-group boysThis girl was fresh and new
Her rosy cheeks, her gutsy voiceLike arrows pierced my breastShe was The Maid Of MerseysideThe Star Of The North-West
She knew her black soul music thenShe knew her r’n’bShe made her reputationWithout panto or TV
You’d catch her at the Cavern thenOr the Tower in New BrightonSinging with a rhythm groupThe punters couldn’t frighten
But Cruel Fate did wreck herHer career was soon a past ’unPoor girl, she signed to Decca:Fame was snatched from Beryl Marsden.
So when the music biz sent roundSome tone-deaf cockney hackTo sign a slice of Mersey SoundThere was only Cilla Black.

PEOPLE JUST FLOAT? A GUEST POST

A degree of symbiosis seems to be happening at present between this blog and John Baldwin's Desolation Row Information Service newsletter. The latter's reader Wiebke Ditmer has responded in detail to my earlier blogpost about Dylan's New Orleans Series of paintings  -  but on the newsletter rather than here. Meanwhile something I saw in a newsletter of a few days earlier prompted me to ask its contributor, John Morrison, if he would like to re-run it as a guest post on this blog. He agreed, re-wrote it slightly, and here it is:
    On John Baldwin’s Desolation Row Information Service recently there was a reference to a painting by Theo Reijnders of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie playing their guitars in front of a cabin where Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker sat:
 © Theo Reijnders, 2005-7
The picture made me feel uneasy because Bob’s left foot, the weight-supporting one, seemed not to be in contact with the ground and indeed the dog which is just behind the two foreground figures also appears to be hovering just above the earth’s surface. Perhaps, I thought, this might be caused by some kind of ground-repulsion effect common to locations in the Deep South because if you look at the sleeve of John Hurt’s 1928 Sessions LP on the Yazoo label you can see the cow just behind John floating a good six inches above the surface of the pasture:

The cow doesn’t seem perturbed, but is probably used to it. It’s either a gravitational anomaly or faulty technique on the part of the artists.
Mind you, I think that if I had ever been lucky enough to hear John Hurt play live then I might have been seen to float a few inches off the ground too.

__
John Morrison has written a little about Bob Dylan in Judas! and The Bridge and done book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement. He has been entranced, but not uncritically, by Dylan since he was a schoolboy in the early sixties. He adds: “I was the person who persuaded Barb Jungr to record Man In The Long Black Coat and who was then mocked (gently) whenever she sang the song in public."
The picture credit on the sleeve of the Yazoo album is to a Robert Burger. An apt name, given the prominence of the cow.

QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST NO.27

The London Eye opened only in 2000 - really too recent to be the recent past - but those pods...


... always seemed so Dan Dare, so 1950s Futuristic  -  and then, initially c/o Retronaut, I found these wonderful French buses from, yes, 1955:

 
London Eye’s pods were designed by Leitner-Poma of America, an aerial lift manufacturer in Grand Junction, Colorado. But this is the American subsidiary of the French-based Poma, which in turn is owned by the unItalian-sounding Italian company Leitner Technologies. The 1955 buses were designed by Currus, France’s oldest coachbuilder, founded in Paris in 1805, using Citroen's “workhorse” U55 chassis.

A FINE RANT - PAY THE WRITER!

This should be played very loudly to every radio programme producer, including those at BBC local radio stations, who never mention money and therefore force you to mention it, at which point they come on to you as if they're a charity organisation and/or sound shocked that a writer should have anything so sordid as money in mind.

This interview was recorded in 2007, and is copyrighted to some corporation. I hope it's his. This venal unwillingness to pay writers has grown exponentially since this. My dilemma is, of course, that I am not paying him to use this interview. And neither am I being paid for writing this blog. It's all media madness.

MAP 11: THE MAZE SEVEN YEARS IN THE MAKING

I quote from Spoon & Tamago:

Japanese twitter user @Kya7y recently unearthed an incredibly detailed maze that her father created almost 30 years ago. When pressed for details, the father explained that he spent 7 years creating the map on A1 size paper, which is about 33 x 23 inches... Everyone seems to want to know more about the
man behind this amazing maze. This morning she wrote, “Where does my father work? At a public university!! In the athletic department!!! As a janitor.”

Here are two glimpses of this extraordinary, obsessive yet triumphant work:


The first image is c/o @Kya7y, the second c/o @Phantom_ss

THE PICTURES BEHIND BOB DYLAN'S PAINTINGS

The other day I tweeted “I'm expecting Scott Warmuth to tell us on whose photographs Bob Dylan has based his New Orleans Series paintings." I wasn't joking, and of course he and others already have  come up with some of the pictures behind Dylan's. He tells me it was Tara-Jane Hulligan Zuk, a Liverpool-based Dylan fan, who spotted this Leonard Freed photo of a boy and a blind man used by Dylan:
Dylan, of course, hadn't sat around in a New Orleans courtyard for hours painting the scene in front of him either. Indeed:
Scott Warmuth found that old postcard image back on January 20 (2013) when the Dylan paintings were first glimpsed online. He tells me that Anneke Derksen, a Dylan fan from Antwerp, found other postcards, including this:
Something like same argument might apply as over the Asia Series. The fact that Dylan's paintings are of other people's scenes may or may not make all this smell funny  -  other artists have followed much the same method  -  but it does seem sad. Here is someone whose generous creativity changed the times with a highly personal, hands-on plunge into the maelstrom of America, and who is now making millions of dollars essentially by copying other people's work. How much more you could admire that courtyard painting if Bob Dylan had  sat there for hours to achieve it.

The publicity for the New Orleans Series doesn't quite make the same spurious claim as with the Asia Series, that Dylan painted from life itself:

The 71-year-old star, whose works already hang in various European art galleries, came to inaugurate the exhibition himself earlier this week. “Each work is a fragment of a bigger story and each image is halfway between dream and memory," said a spokesperson for Milan City Hall, which is organising the show. It said the paintings were based on photographic images and had “a strange atmosphere of suspense" with their stories of love and violence. [from Art Daily ]

Yet while it states very clearly that the paintings are based on photographs, and the rest of the wording can't be pinned on Dylan himself, there is a specious sort of semi-claim here, isn't there? “Halfway between dream and memory?" Whose?