Greetings! I will send occasional updates from here, to you, for free. Links to articles I’ve written. Maybe the occasional musing.
Writing: I have been on parental leave, but I wrote about cop shows post-Black Lives Matter and about how we miscount Presidents.
Watching: Babylon. She Said. Rewatching Andor.
Reading: The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus’s study of The Basement Tapes. The Basement Tapes is original songs and standards amateurishly recorded in 1967 and ‘68 around Woodstock, N.Y. by Bob Dylan and the Hawks, the band that had backed him on his recently concluded world tour and that was becoming known as The Band. For a decade The Basement Tapes was available exclusively via bootleg, and until just a few years ago only a small number of its tracks were featured on an inferior commercial release. Self-consciously rootsy, stripped-down, rarely totally earnest (one song is called “See You Later, Allen Ginsberg”), its most famous tracks include “I Shall Be Released,” “Tears of Rage,” and “Quinn the Eskimo.”
Marcus’s book is uneven — the first, long chapter, about the famous ‘65-’66 world tour during which Dylan was relentlessly baited by the crowds during his electric sets, is a highlight — but overall, what a bold and inspiring assertion of the Critic’s Prerogative to change everyone’s mind about an established canon. Because thanks to Marcus’s booki, the importance of The Basement Tapes to Understanding Bob is now the consensus outlook. (The Old, Weird America is to a shockingly granular extent the inspiration for the Richard Gere sections of Todd Haynes’s 2007 biopic I’m Not There — a title taken from a Basement Tapes track.)