So Suess me

Bob Dylan sings Suess. A slightly surreal singing sensation. Ok, enough with the alliteration already. I found this artifact on the Rocketboom site (which I liked, but find the novelty is wearing off...it can be a little too self conscious and errs on the cheesy side).

I like Bob Dylan. I didn't always like Bob Dylan. But he kind of grows on you. The video by Martin Scorcese No Direction Home was the turning point. (Apparently Scorcese never met Dylan - spot of trivia there for you).

In one of those convergent moments I also read a terrific article in the New Yorker about Dylan. Interesting quote:

The discrepancy between Dylan the interview subject and Dylan the musician is not an artifact of celebrity. It seems to have been part of the deal from the start. On most subjects that normal people talk about, Dylan seems either not to have views or to have views indistinguishable from everyone else.

The Suess site is kid of cool in a pointless (or point unknown) way. If you're a fan the music is obscure cool and corroborates another interesting point that signs off the article:

"90 percent of musicianship is phrasing, and the easiest way to appreciate Dylan's genius for phrasing is to listen to him, on bootlegs or on the late albums of traditional songs, perform songs that he didn't write-"Folsom Prison Blues", or "People get ready", or "Froggie went a courtin'".He gets it all. When my children were little, we used to have a cassette around the house of songs for kids by pop stars, n which Dylan did "This Old Man"("With a knick-knack paddywhack give the dog a bone). That performance had the weight of the world in it. I listened to it a hundred times and never got tired of it. You can refute Hegel, Yeats said, but not the Song of Sixpence."

...or "Green Eggs and Ham".

Comments

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Ze Frank thinks so you don't have to

Ze Frank appeared on my radar when I saw his presentation among the excellent TED Talks videos . This morning I was reading Russell Davies planning blog in which he referred to a clip by Ze Frank - Where do ideas come from. Here's the transcript: "...Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima [sic] writes, "Are you ever gonna break into song again? Are you running out of ideas?" Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima, that's a good question. I run out of ideas every day! Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themse

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer

ThoughtSpurs

Search This Blog

So Suess me

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Johnny Bunko competiton

Ze Frank thinks so you don't have to

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes