Minnesota’s second literary Nobelist is the subject of The Political World of Bob Dylan: Freedom and Justice, Power and Sin, a perceptive book by our porchite colleague Jeff Taylor. Herewith my two cents. I was gonna link to one of my favorite Dylan songs, “Cross the Green Mountain,” which I take to be the death-dream of Stonewall Jackson, but all I can find online is the truncated three-minute version. Find the eight-minute original, which Dylan wrote for Ron Maxwell’s Civil War film Gods and Generals. So, for your listening pleasure, something else: Kirsty MacColl would have been 57 years old this week. Composer of the pop gem “They Don’t Know,” MacColl died while saving her son in a motorboat accident in December 2000. Here’s her lovely cover of “A New England.”
The entire “Cross the Green Mountain,” courtesy of Brian “Righty” Frizzell: https://vimeo.com/82978694.
Kudos to Mr. Kauffman on his essay in the American Conservative entitled “The Meaning of America First”. Perhaps it was the King Tide that produced it , but once in a very great while now, the various mediums, and I do mean mediums of the cheekily christened Information Age actually leak a cogent thought and Mr. Kauffman’s essay, as usual is one of them.
Any mention of the hushed up Farewell Address these days should be greeted by cheers and a round of personal poisons all around. Its as though the ghost of the Marquis de Sade has arisen and is conducting new plays but not with the inmates of the asylum at Charenton . Rather, his new cast of crazies are the various grifters along the Potomac and their camp followers on Cable Telly.
Ah, Kirsty MacColl — that’s a name I haven’t heard in awhile. I remember hearing about her death (late 90’s?) and being quite saddened. In addition to her own fine music she should be remembered as half the duet in one of the greatest Christmas pop songs ever, The Pogues “Fairytale of New York.”
I almost always grouse that a movie is not as good as the book or isn’t showing history the way it is documented to have really happened. But “Gods and Generals” was one of the worst such movies ever produced. The book focused equally and evenly, in some depth and complexity and nuance, on four officers who became generals: Robert E. Lee, Winfield Scott Hancock, Thomas J. Jackson, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. The movie devoted about two thirds of its attention to a cardboard caricature of Robert E. Lee that failed to live up to the man’s good or bad points, one fourth to Jackson, humanizing him with utter lack of realism, and some bit parts about Hancock and Chamberlain, with darn little background, especially for Hancock. Jeff Taylor is worth reading, but I just don’t have much interest in Dylan.
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