The Vegas line on the Ravens vs. Bills game started out with the Bills being a 1-point favorite. Twenty-four hours later, the line shifted to the Ravens being 2-point favorites. Either way, this Playoff game is going to be a close game. The weather will be cold–temps in the teens at game-time–but no snow in the forecast…yet.
The Kansas City Chiefs are 8-point favorites over the Houston Texans. Who do you think will win these games?
Bob Dylan just turned 80 years old on May 24, 2021. He also sold the rights to his music for $300 million. Universal Music purchased Dylan’s entire songwriting catalog of more than 600 songs in what may be the biggest acquisition ever of a single act’s publishing rights. With all this going on it seemed like the right time to read a couple of Dylan biographies.
Clinton Heylin’s Behind the Shades Revisited was published in 2001 and takes Dylan up to the dawning of the new Century. Dozens of interviews with Dylan’s friends and enemies are woven into Heylin’s chronological narrative. Heylin quotes Dylan quite a bit, too, in this 700+ page biography.
Several aspects of Bob Dylan stand out in Heylin’s books. First, Dylan can’t read or write music. He never learned during his 60 year career. Dylan doesn’t like the recording process. He doesn’t come in prepared or with a plan. Everything is improvised. And, as you might expect, many of the band members who worked on the recording sessions with Dylan, hated this “fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants” style. Some refused to play a Dylan session again after going through the painful process once. And, for most of Dylan’s recording career, he never had a real producer. Those “producers” who tried to guide Dylan in the studio were mostly ignored.
Clinton Heylin’s new book, The Double Life of Bob Dylan (2021), presents newly released archive material about Dylan’s life from 1941 to 1966. Clearly, Heylin is in the process of writing more volumes based on this new information. Heylin spends a lot of time (and words) on Dylan’s relationships with women. In my opinion, Dylan treated many of these women cruelly. Dylan led Joan Baez on while pursuing Sara Lownds (who he eventually married). “As one journalist delving into Dylan’s prime life wrote in 1990, ‘There are a lot of different women he sees, from all different walks of life. But they all tend to have one thing in common. They’re invariably very weird or very intense.'” (p. 709)
Dylan also believed whatever happened on his musical tours didn’t matter to his marriage. So, of course, he had sex with dozens of women during his many tours. Heylin covers all of Dylan’s tours, but has supreme contempt for the DYLAN AND THE DEAD tours. Heylin is not a fan of The Grateful Dead and describes the music generated from these events as terrible. After listening to the concert CD of Dylan and The Dead I have to agree.
From the Sixties on, Dylan abused drugs and alcohol. That might explain the decline of his musical talents and the mediocre songs he wrote in the 1980s and 1990s. Winning a Nobel Prize has more to do with Dylan’s early work than his later work. If you want to know about Dylan’s life, these two fat volumes supply all the facts you’re looking for. Are you a Bob Dylan fan? Do you have a favorite Dylan song? GRADE: A (for both books)
Kate Phillips stars as the First-Ever Female Detective in Male-Dominated Victorian London in the re-titled Miss Scarlet. The first four seasons on PBS, the title was Miss Scarlet and The Duke. “The Duke” was Inspector Wellington (Stuart Martin) who had romantic inclinations towards Miss Scarlet. But, last season, Wellington took a position with the New York City Police Department and in the first episode of the current season, Wellington decides to stay in NYC.
Which opens the door for Wellington’s replacement, Detective Inspector Blake (Tom Durant-Pritchard). Diane and I like Kate Philips as the struggling Miss Scarlet. The mysteries are not baffling, but they are challenging. Victorian London never looked so good (or shabby) and there’s a bit of humor mixed into the investigations.
Miss Scarlet is not must-see TV, but it’s entertaining and clever. GRADE: B
Back in the early 1960s, I was an avid reader of DC comics. The Flash was my favorite, followed closely by Green Lantern. But, I was also fond of Adam Strange, a man from Earth who traveled to the planet of Rann by means of a “Zeta-beam.” Adam Strange falls in love with Alanna and spends much of the comic book series saving her and her planet from invasions of weird aliens.
I also enjoyed the stories by Gardner Fox and the scintillating artwork by legendary Carmine Infantino. Most of the Adam Strange stories had a mystery within them that Strange needed to solve in order to save the planet.
This is the second Archive Edition of Adam Strange and I found it just as enjoyable as the First Archive Edition. If you want to take a walk down Memory Lane, this is a good place to start! Did you have a favorite comic book series as a kid? GRADE: A
Last week, Cap’n Bob wrote an enthusiastic comment about Joan Osborne’s version of “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” the classic Jimmy Ruffin soul song. I looked for my copy of Osborne’s Breakfast in Bed (2007), couldn’t find it, so I ordered another copy (you have no idea how many times this happens!).
Breakfast in Bed features six original Joan Osborne songs and covers of soul songs from the 1970s and 1980s. The album concludes with two songs from Standing in the Shadows of Motown: Martha and the Vandellas‘ “Heat Wave” and Jimmy Ruffin‘s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?” plus a Bonus Track, Curtis Mayfield’s “Everybody Needs a Friend.”
Cap’n Bob is right about the marvelous version of “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” Joan Osborne sings. Almost as good is Osborne’s rendition of the Hall & Oates hit, “Sara Smile.” If you love this music as much as I do, you’ll enjoy Joan Osborne’s mellow interpretations of these wonderful tunes. Are you a Joan Osborne fan? GRADE: A
TRACK LIST:
Barry N. Malzberg died December 19, 2024 after a fall. He was 85. During his long writing career, Malzberg wrote in a number of genres, principally Science Fiction, and remained a critic of SF publishers for much of that time.
Malzberg was also a very good editor. Neglected Visions (1979) celebrates mostly forgotten Science Fiction writers. Malzberg’s detailed Introductions to these stories puts the writers into context and suggests reasons why their careers lacked growth and recognition.
Malzberg quotes H. L. Gold (editor of Galaxy) who admired Wyman Guin: “Wyman Guin has the intellect of a Heinlein, the sensitivity of a C. L. Moore, the guts of Philip Jose Farmer…combined with ideas so profoundly original they are decades ahead of the field.” (p. 153) And, after reading “My Darling Hecate” I suspect you would agree with Gold as I do.
Some of these writers, as Malzberg points out, simply stopped writing. Kris Neville for example. Others are complete unknowns like Peter Phillips and Norman Kagan. The prolific Christopher Anvil (aka, Harry C. Crosby), Malzberg writes: “has only himself to blame for his relative anonymity, for he is a maddeningly uneven writer.” (p. 35) But with “Mind Partner,” Anvil hits it out of the park!
My favorite story in this collection is F. L. Wallace’s “Delay in Transit,” a story where interstellar communications is a key factor. If you’re in the mood for forgotten writers who deserve a Second Chance, give Neglected Visions a try. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
It took almost five years to make, but James Mangold, director of A Complete Unknown, persisted through the Pandemic and other delays to produce one of the finest movies of the year. Timothée Chalamet convinced me that he could play Bob Dylan (aka, Bob Zimmerman), a talented unknown from Hibbing, Minnesota who arrives in New York City to make a name for himself. Timothée Chalamet did 35 songs live on camera, including guitar and harmonica work. A recent BBC review called Chalamet “completely believable, better than the film itself.”
Mangold’s expansive Johnny Cash biopic, the 2005 film “Walk the Line,” focused on a much longer storyline. “A Complete Unknown,” based on Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (2015), focuses on four critical years in Bob Dylan’s life. The story starts with a 20-year-old Dylan’s arrival in New York City and ends with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan shocked the crowd with electric instruments and blew up his image as a folk singer.
Edward Norton is excellent as the intense folk singer, Pete Seeger. Both of the women who played Dylan’s girl friends, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, show more compassion for Dylan than Dylan showed them.
Are you a Bob Dylan fan? GRADE: A
SONG LIST:
Andrew Leigh has been a Professor of Economics at the Australian National University and served in the Australian House of Representatives. His How Economics Explains the World is a clear and concise guide to a topic most people don’t understand. Leigh uses examples and stories to make his points. Here’s a good example:
“In 2005, Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald vividly illustrated [economic principles]…by trading his way from a red paperclip to a house. First, he traded his paperclip for a fish-shaped pen. Then he traded the pen of a hand-scrulpted doorknob. Then he traded the doorknob for camp stove. This went on until his fourteenth and final trade: swapping a movie role for a small house. At each step, MacDonald valued the new item more highly than the old item–but he traded with someone who valued the old item more than the new. MacDonald didn’t just get himself a house–he did so through fourteen trades that made another person better off.” (p. 158)
Trade tends to improve the economic state of both parties. That’s why Trump’s plan to impose tariffs (taxes) on trade is a Bad Idea. Some ideas that seem good have Unintended Consequences. You would think shifting from a hunter-gatherer mode to an agricultural society would be an improvement. But, that brings changes:
“The societies that emerged from the agricultural revolution were often highly unstable. During its 500-year history, the Roman Empire had seventy-seven emperors. Half were murdered, and still more died in battle or by suicide. Just one-third of Roman emperors died from natural causes. In one exceptionally brutal eighteen-month period, Nero died by suicide. Galba was murdered. Otho died by suicide and Vitellius was murdered.” (p. 18)
That kind of carnage was unknown in hunter-gatherer societies that were always on the move. Later, more violence sprung up in what we mistakenly consider “civil societies”:
“….[Shakespeare lived] in an age of slavery and superstition. During the 1500s and 1600s, nearly one million people were killed for the crime of witchcraft.” (p. 43)
Without regulation, abuses grow. “Heroin was marketed by Bayer from 1898 to 1910 as an over-the-counter cough suppressant. Cocaine was added to Coca-Cola until the early 1900s. In 1913, one expert claimed that nearly a quarter of the US doctors were addicted to morphine.” (p. 80)
Of course, economists can be colorful characters, too. Take John Maynard Keynes, the originator of Keynesian Economics, for example: “Keynes was a collector of Picassos, Renoirs and Matisses, and an investor who was multimillionaire by today’s standards. He kept diaries of his sexual exploits (with men and women), recording sixty-five encounters in 1909, twenty-six in 1910, thirty-nine in 1911, and so on.” (p. 89)
Ignorance of economic principles is not bliss. “…Mao [Zedong] demanded that people eliminate sparrows, on the basis that they ate grain. The campaign called on people to make so much noise that the sparrows died of exhaustion. Millions of sparrows died, which meant that they were not around to eat the locusts that devoured much of the following year’s crop. Eventually, Mao imported 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to restore the eco-system. Crop losses contributed to a 40% drop in rice and wheat output between 1957 and 1961, and a famine that killed tens of millions.” (p. 118)
Andrew Leigh wrote How Economics Explains the World to help us live a better Life. I think he succeeded! GRADE: A
The Denver Broncos take on the Buffalo Bills in a Wild Card Weekend Playoff game. The weather in Orchard Park is predicted to be benign for this time in January: temps around 30 degrees with only a few flakes of snow. The Bills are 9-point favorites.
Although the Bills are favored, the Broncos have Nothing To Lose. So wily Head Coach Sean Payton probably has a few tricks up his sleeve to disrupt the Bills on Offense and Defense and Special Teams. Remember when Sean Payton pulled a surprise on-side kick in Super Bowl XLIV?
On the plus side, the Bills are relatively healthy and some of the starters were “rested” last week in the meaningless game in New England. Expect a lot of noise at the stadium! What Wildcard Weekend Playoff games are you interested in?
It won’t surprise you to learn that I love Asian food. A few egg rolls and some vegetable fried rice will send me into food ecstasy! When I read some very positive reviews of Hetty McKinnon’s new cookbook, To Asia, With Love, I was immediately interested. When To Asia, With Love arrived, I carefully went through the recipes looking for ones that would fit into my diabetic diet.
I found plenty recipes that looked appealing–the photos of the food will make you hungry!–but I was frustrated by the lack of nutritional information. Many of my favorite cookbooks supply nutritional information which helps me and others with dietary issues to make wise food choices.
So all I can say about To Asia, With Love is that the recipes look delicious, but I’m concerned they may come with a heavy carbohydrate load. GRADE: Inconclusive, but trend towards an A.
