BOB DYLAN AND ELEANOR CATTON: THE FRONT ROW INTERVIEW

I was on BBC  Radio 4's Front Row last night, discussing the new Bob Dylan album, Rough & Rowdy Ways, and the TV adaptation of Eleanor Catton's Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries. Friday episodes are 45 minutes, so I thought we were going to have a longer amount of time to discuss each item, but unknown to me there were a number of other pieces going in the show, and they also did very well to have a fine interview about Ian Holm, who died that day. You can link to it here on BBC Sounds, our reviews (host Kirsty Lang and Guardian music writer Laura Barton) start at about 15 minutes in; the Holm tribute follows after them.

I have seen the first two episodes of the series, for which Catton herself did the adaptation, and I enjoyed them enough to watch on. As I said, I think as the two time-lines and locations converge, in the mining town of Hokitika: if they keep expanding the number of (male) characters they could lose the focus, and if they don't they need to keep the mystery, and the danger moving. One thing I didn't say was how much I thought Catton herself resembled NZ PM Jacinda Arden! Judge for yourselves.

As I said, I felt Dylan's record was his best in years, harking back to the song-writing of Blood On The Tracks, but with more of a feel of the Basement Tapes/John Wesley Harding years. It is elegiac, but when I thought about, those albums, after his motorcycle crash, were also in the vein of looking back. I was lucky to be able to squeeze in a Gregory Corso quote about Jack Kerouac into this context, and I have to say I thought it felt particularly appropriate.

I do intend to write reviews of both the record and the show here soon, so I won't say more, but have a listen to the show.

JIM BOUTON: THE LAST WORD

Although I'd recorded the interview with Matthew Bannister a month ago, my appreciation of Jim Bouton has just been broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Last Word. It's a wonderful show: it begins with Peter Fonda and ends with Bouton: two icons of Sixties rebellion, of counter-culture, from different ends of the American spectrum. You can listen to the show on BBC IPlayer (actually now rebranded Sounds! to appeal to those too young to seek out obituary programmes) with this link . Fonda leads off the show; my bit is at the end, starting around 21 mins. The rest of the show is as interesting as usual, but I do love the way Fonda and Bouton play off against each other.

In case you missed my story at Arc Digital, going into more detail, you can link to that here.

APOLLO 11, NEIL ARMSTRONG, JOHN STEWART & THE MOON

Since this blog takes its title from a song by John Stewart, the 50th anniversary of the Moon landings might be a good time to recall another Stewart song. I was reminded of this while listening to the penultimate episode of Moon, on BBC Radio 4, a dramatization of the Apollo 11 mission taken from the transcripts of the communication on the spacecraft and with Mission Control in Houston. As the crew prepare for the lunar landing the next day, they are having their dinner, and oddly enough Stewart's song 'Mother Country' plays in the background.

The next day, of course, in the evening our time on America's East Coast, Neil Armstrong would set foot on the moon. The event came during tumultuous times, in the midst of assassination, war, demonstration, and the peak, perhaps, both of American dominance and Sixties revolution against it. But Stewart, who had travelled with Bobby Kennedy working on his campaign, and wrote songs about that, was struck by the accomplishment and the hope, the giant leap for mankind, of the moment. This is his song, 'Armstrong'. And thanks to the same technological push that got us to the moon, you can listen to it on You Tube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvQq3NQN1E8

DISNEY & THE GEORGIA ABORTION BOYCOTT: MY FRONT ROW INTERVIEW

Yesterday I appeared on BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme, talking with John Wilson about the Disney announcement they would not engage in production in Georgia if their newly-passed abortion ban came into effect. You can link to it here. Front Row booked me to speak without knowing my personal connection with Bob Iger, the Disney CEO, but that was both a good hook and something we did not linger on. You may recall last year there was some talk of Bob's running for president.

John and I had to cut the talk short because the previous interview had gone long, so I was rushing, and made a couple of verbal slips (New Jersey, not New York, was the second state pitching for business) and I didn't get to mention that Black Panther and the new Avengers movie were both filmed in Georgia. Judges in two states (Iowa, a state judge and Utah a federal judge) have struck down the bills passed by legislatures, while it has not passed in either Florida or Texas, the state where the original Roe v Wade case was brought.

But one important point we didn't get to was the possible knock -on effect in the Uniter Kingdom, specifically in Northern Ireland. Game Of Thrones was filmed there, as is Line Of Duty among others, but if the petitions against working in US states trying to limit abortion in the face of the national law, someone will eventually notice that Northern Ireland already does the same thing in this country, and their abortion ban is in some ways even stricter than Georgia's.

JAMES MC CORD: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the Watergate burglar James McCord went up on the Guardian online Sunday; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, as I went through it carefully with my editor to try to keep in on point to the Watergate saga and not digress too far into some of the other points of McCord's career. Thus there wasn't room for more detail on the deep background of Watergate, the relationship between Nixon and the CIA, and indeed the formal investigations: what they did and didn't approach and who indeed Deep Throat actually was. I will write more on this later, but after I talk about McCord on BBC Radio4's Last Word later this week.

The link between the Watergate burglary and Dallas is of course the biggest non-Watergate talking point. The placing of McCord in Dallas is double-hearsay, while Howard Hunt of course lost a libel suit when he was publicly named as being there on the 22nd of November 1963.

I should have brought up McCord's first big job with the Special Research Staff, which was cleaning up after the 1953 murder of Frank Olson at the Statler Hotel in Manhattan. Olson had been dosed with LSD a few days earlier in Maryland, as the CIA seemed to be worried he would inform on the 1951 incident in France involving an experiment with drugs--the deaths in the village of Pont Saint Esprit were blamed on rye bread and ergot. This was part of various CIA operations intended to use drugs as instruments of mind control and interrogation, as well as possible weaponisation. McCord helped ensure Church's death would be listed at suicide; the CIA#s MK-ULTRA program would resurface in the alleged brain-washing of Sirhan Sirhan.

MAVIS STAPLES, BOB DYLAN AND THE NEW/TANGLED UP IN BLUE

My Saturday evening was made this week by hearing the great Mavis Staples interviewed by a suitably respectful Clive Anderson on BBC Radio 4’s Loose Ends. Among the stories Mavis told was one about the time Bob Dylan proposed marriage to her, back in 1965. She talked about how cute Bob was, with his curly hair and blue eyes, and how she rejected the proposal.

I mentioned this on facebook (getting informed by the usual know-it-alls that the story of Bob's proposal was by now common knowledge, mea maxima culpa for missing that one) and I wrote that Mavis told Bob she was too young (she was 25 or 6), and didn’t know how to cook. You won’t have to cook, Bob said. Then I noted how that sounded like the lyrics to a Dylan song.

My friend Michael Goldfarb said ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ and I said ‘you got that right’, and proceeded to write a couple of verses for a revised version. So here, if Bob (or Mavis) wants it, is a newer version of the song:

Tangled Up In Blue (With Mavis

Mavis told Bob she was too young, that she didn’t know how to cook

You won’t have to cook at all said Bob, I just wanna sit and look

Up at you

Tangled Up In Blue

Mavis said Bobby you’re awfully sweet, and she looked into his blue eyes,

Bobby said girl please marry me, and I’ll win the Nobel Prize

Just for you

Tangled up in blue

Bobby oh Bobby you gotta relax, ever try taking it slow?

You say that you wanna just sit and look, but you know and I sure know

What you want to do

Tangled up in blue

Then they heard Pops play a guitar riff, comin’ out of studio two

Mavis walked out and she started to sing, Bob found his missing shoe,

As you do

Tangled up in blue

MRS MAY, MR BECKETT AND THE BREXIT ENDGAME

"The negotiations for our departure are now in the endgame," said Mrs Theresa May on the evening of 12 November, at the Lord Mayor's Banquet in The Guildhall, a suitable occasion to celebrate the kamikaze-like devotion to a display of the splendor of British (or English) sovereignty. It came a day after the ceremonies marking the 100th anniversary of the end of "the war to end all wars". The BBC Radio 4 Now Show was more perfectly ironic in describing the Remembrance Day ceremony as honoring the lives of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen who gave their lives in defense of Brussels.

But it was odd that May should choose a word recalling Samuel Beckett's play to describe the negotiations which would stretch until three in the morning that very morning, and which appear to offer very little to anyone. May's genius has been to divide her own party into three factions, one more than plagued Offshore Dave Cameron, which means that every aspect of the Brexit debate is now 'covered' by BBC by presenting all three sides of their national debate: that is, the Tory party: 'Irish Jake' Rees-Mogg and the errrggghhhh group of hard-line No Deal Brexiters; the Remoaners led by the latest opportunistic Johnson, JoJo, the one who gave Toby Young a job regulating university students, until someone noticed; and May's backers (the hapless Damien Green in the BBC Radio 4 Today knees-up I heard a few days ago) for whatever piecemeal 'deal' she manages to get in the end, hampered by the fact that Michel Barnier and the EU play chess while she plays Chequers. Put May, Mogg, Green and JoJo together and you could stage a production of Waiting For Go Now.

In Beckett, and much of Theatre of the Absurd, life is meaningless, and we cope with the existential anguish knowledge of that fact produces by engaging in rituals that create a sort of meaningful structure for our existence. As metaphors for May's Brexit Britain, you could much much worse.

Keeping that in mind, the endgame, as it were, of Endgame is instructive. Watch Clov's final speech again; you can find Michael Gambon's version here. "You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness"

STEVE DITKO: MY BBC LAST WORD ESSAY

I've done an essay on Steve Ditko, creator of Spider Man, Dr Strange, The Question, and Mr A, for BBC Radio 4's Last Word. You can listen to it here; the introduction comes just before the 17 minute mark. But as is so often the case with Last Word, the programme itself is worth the listen, especially the lead item on Oliver Knussen, about whom I wrote right here last week. I knew of Sam Chisholm from my days working at Sky, and then there are two fascinating obits for people I didn't know, Barbara Harrell-Bond and Anna Sandor de Kenos. It's this mix that helps explain why I love being part of the show. Thanks to producer Neil George.

Ditko called out for more length. Some of what was cut out of my script as recorded was in my Guardian obit of Ditko, which like the Knussen you will find just before this post. I probably should have spent a little more time on his weirdest super-hero, The Creeper. But look at that (very early) Mr A panel, and think that decades later, Ditko was writing far more argument into far more static panels. It was outsider art indeed. And I am writing a deeper dive into Ditko and Ayn Rand, which I will let you know about....

RICHARD WILBUR: MY BBC RADIO 4 LAST WORD ESSAY

Yesterday I mentioned, in the words I spoke at Kevin Cadle's funeral, the Richard Wilbur essay I'd recorded for BBC Radio 4 Last Word; today the piece was broadcast. You can find it here on IPlayer; it runs from 13 mins to 18 minutes into the programme. It was a very clever edit by the programme editor Neil George, who got an extra poem in, the wonderful 'Tywater', as well as created a new link into the lyrics from Candide. It sounds seamless and I'm very pleased with it. I hope it's a worthy tribute. One bit that was lost was my own reading of Wilbur's 'Museum Piece'...maybe I'll post my original script and record that one for it. Until then, Wilbur's readings are beautiful; listen and enjoy. The programme will be broadcast again Sunday evening at 8:30 on Radio 4.

HEFNER VS FEMINISM: SAMIRA AHMED (AND ME) IN THE GUARDIAN ON PLAYBOY

Samira Ahmed has written a piece on Hugh Hefner for the Guardian, on the place of Playboy and Hugh Hefner in the culture wars of the 1970s. You can link to it here. I'm quoted in it a few times. As I had just written on him for TLS and talked about him on BBC Radio 4 Last Word (see previous posts) we wound up discussing part of his place in our respective cultural developments--mostly at the point where, as I mention in the TLS, Hef had ceased to a 'revolutionary' and more a marketer widening out from the middle-brow middle-class which was his original target with Playboy.  As you might glean from the quotes, the discussion was spirited and fun: where it should have taken place was on BBC Radio 4 Front Row, but sadly Hef didn't schedule his death conveniently enough.

The first black playmate actually arrived in the pages of the magazine, via the Chicago Playboy club, in 1965: a better way of looking at the racial mix of playmates might be to consider how close they adhered to the template that Hef had established. I always assumed Hef thought of himself as a classic liberal as far as race relations went, but that didn't change what were his fetishes regarding the girl next door. I loved Samira's take on the London Playboy Club, and her parents' visits their on business (it was the only place in London to get a decent steak, they said). As I said, we should've had this talk on the radio!

I thought Samira's take on IVF, that women use it because they are forced to wait for men's immaturity to pass, was a bit harsh. I would have guessed that a bigger factor was women's desire to get ahead on the business ladder while they are young, knowing that motherhood is most often a set-back on that ladder. This is, of course, the ethos of a male-dominated world, and it raises a basic dilemma about feminism, and indeed other liberation philosophies: do you work to change society's mores, to open up opportunities for all, or do you reach out to grab your fair share of what society offers, within the existing mores, and call that equality? Samira mentioned Gloria Steinem and Debby Harry as former Bunnies with different attitudes; you might look at say Erica Jong's Fear Of Flying and the 'zipless fuck' as a way of simply appropriating the Playboy philosophy for women.

And the Guardian, being the Guardian, spelled hippie 'hippy' in the copy, meaning that even though it was my quote, when I saw 'hippy chicks' in print my first thought was confusion, and I wondered what being broad-beamed had to do with anything. But they have made the same prissy 'correction' to my copy when I've written for them too!

HUGH HEFNER: MY TAKE ON BBC LAST WORD

I appeared on Last Word last Friday, talking about Hugh Hefner, and the literary side of Playboy, which I was also writing about for TLS. You can link to it here. I mentioned Alex Haley, and they had a great quote from Hefner mentioning George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi party; in my piece you can read the story of the that interview. It's a fascinating radio show: I wish I'd heard the other quotes included, but of course, as with the TLS piece, it goes into the wider picture of Hefner and society...and the London Playboy Club.

DAVOS SYNDROME: NIALL FERGUSON TWISTS & MARK MARDELL LIMBOS IN COMO

Yesterday on BBC Any Questions, David Dimbelby trotted out the BBC's next Funny Tory PM Hopeful. Not content with having given Boris Johnson a platform, and paying him, at every possible opportunity, the Beeb has now turned to Jacob Rees-Mogg, another Etonian with the shuffle and the stammer who as usual drew chuckles and smiles but no serious challenging from his host. Not even when he stated, with a cloud of persiflage, that the UK had no legal obligation to pay anything to the EU; an echo of Bojo's dare for them to whistle. I was stunned how even his political opponents simply let that one by; one doesn't expect Dimbels to do anything.

But it was funny later when one of the audience asked a question about having many children, clearly a light-hearted attempt to draw more humour from the new Tory clown. I would have liked one panelist to ask a hypothetical to the chair: what if Richard Dimbelby had had, say, eight sons? Would any of the current BBC news presenters actually have jobs?

Then I was listening to BBC's World This Weekend today, Mark Mardell hosting the show from the Ambrosetti Forum, a Davos-like conference sponsored by the major 'consulting' firm on Lake Como. They were concentrating on Michel Barnier saying he was 'warning', not blackmailing, the UK, rather than concentrating on his explanation that the Brits owe money they committed to in 2014 through 2020, and they needed to meet their obligations. Was Rees-Mogg listening? The current Brexit 'debate' is, like the issue and campaign itself, being conducted not for negotiation purposes with the EU, but for party political positioning within the UK, which is why it is doomed. And when it falls apart, as it surely will, the Brexshiteers will rachet up the bellicosity, wrap themselves in Union Jacks, and boast of battling for Britain against Johnny Foreigner.

But more worrying was the programme's last twenty minutes, a calculated symphony of far-right propaganda which segued cleanly from Geert Wilders cheering on the Brexshiteers, to Niall Ferguson (not a huge leap as segues go), who was given a huge chunk of time to proselytize for the far-right with his usual exercise in disingenuousness, to use a polite word.

Asked about Trump, Ferguson built up a clever comparison with John Kennedy. Kennedy, it turned out, was the one with the chaotic presidency who rushed to the brink of war. There were little twists and glib half-truths littered around as character assassination, none of which Mardell challenged, but the essence of the argument was this: Kennedy's mindless aggression nearly launched nuclear war on the planet. Trump, on the other hand, while he signals craziness (remember Kissinger's advice to Nixon, about acting crazy so the Commies won't dare do anything? Forget not that Ferguson is one of Kissinger's hagiographers) is not actually crazy, but in reality being well-served in the serious stuff by advisers like General Mad Dog Mattis and General McMaster. Thus we should watch what they do rather than what Trump says.

Now Ferguson presumably knows full well that during the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy had to fight like Ali against Liston to hold off the generals and admirals of the Joint Chiefs, led by Gen. Mad Dog Curtis LeMay, all of whom wanted to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviets. If he doesn't know he can read the transcripts, not only of their meetings with the Presidents, but a revealing transcript of their discussions among themselves. They uniformly excoriated Kennedy for his weakness.

As we know, Kennedy steered us away from the brink, and soon exiled LeMay to NATO where he couldn't cause more trouble. And as we remember, Ferguson is not an historian as much as a propagandist who cloaks his militant far-right world view in the trappings of twisted history. But what was even more spectacularly fraudulent was his conclusion: that he wished, in a way, Trump would be MORE like Kennedy, and send the carriers to Korea. Which made his entire false comparison of the two men meaningless, except as a flashy and hypocritical false equivalency.

Mark Mardell offered no recognition of this. He didn't question any of Ferguson's 'history' of JFK. He didn't notice the oxymoron. He didn't show any awareness of history or current events. He was in Como, lunching with the heavy hitters of world business and their well-paid acolytes, and became yet another victim of Davos Syndrome, a well-fed variation of Stockholm Syndrome which seems to afflict those fronting BBC shows from such resorts especially hard. The canteen at Broadcasting House offers little to match.

HOW DOES IT FEEL? BOB DYLAN AND JUDAS REVISITED

Today is the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan and The Band's performance at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, when a spectator yelled 'Judas' at Dylan, who was in the midst of an amplified set. Note it's a 20 shilling ticket; I assume they didn't have the press set up to charge £1!

I listened to a 'report' on the incident on the BBC Radio 4 News tonight, presented as the moment Dylan's electric band faced the music, so to speak, and the audio quality of both the accusation, and Dylan's response: 'I don't believe you...you're a liar' were a lot more audible than they were on my bootleg CD, called Guitars Kissing And The Contemporary Fix, which I find I still listen to even though I have the 'official' version from Dylan's own Bootleg Series.

But the BBC version omitted what Dylan said next, as he turned to The Band and told them to 'play fucking loud'. I thought about the song they played next, 'Like A Rolling Stone', and how this reflected something essentially English. Not the BBC's coyness, despite the song, which benefits from loudness, being Dylan's best riposte. Listen to it: Mickey Jones (sitting in for Levon Helm who didn't make that tour) makes the snare drum explode as he starts the song, and Garth Hudson's organ swirls.

No, it was because the whole controversy was old hat by the time Dylan made it to Manchester. 'Like A Rolling Stone' had been played at Newport, to booing (although some of that allegedly was due to the bad sound system) and elsewhere (organist Al Kooper says the crowd was fierce at Forest Hills a little after Newport). But that was the summer of 1965, not '66.The song was released as single in July, and went to number 2 in the US charts (behind 'Help'). By the time the Highway 61 Revisited album was released in August, 'Like A Rolling Stone' was also number 4 in the charts in Britain. The Free Trade Hall protestor was already nine months past his sell-by date when he compared Dylan to Jesus' betrayer. Some things never change, and many things are presumed not to exist until they reach British shores.

Apparently Keith Butler, the guy who yelled Judas died 15 years ago, after a violent reaction to bee stings. A lonesome fate for a participant in what may be the most hallowed bootleg moment ever.

As Sgt. Pepper might have said:

It was 50 years ago today
Bob Dylan told the Band to play
Fucking Loud
 

THE AFGHAN WAR FILM: THE FILM PROGRAMME DISCUSSION

I was on BBC Radio 4's Film Programme today (we taped it yesterday). It's available on I player (link to it here), and will also be repeated on Sunday at 11pm; it's the first item on the show. Francine Stock and I had a fascinating conversation, both on and off air, which was cut down considerably for the slot; what remains is largely the wider view, which makes sense following the Peter Berg interview about Lone Survivor.

Doing the research for the interview, I realised there are quite a few Afghan war films I not only had not seen, but which had barely made an impression on me. We didn't record a conversation of why these films have made less impact than a number about Iraq, but I may review some here at IT along the way. We did discuss the two versions of Brothers, Susanne Bier's Danish one starring Ulrich Thomsen, and the American remake, directed by the Irishman Jim Sheridan, with Toby Maguire and Jake Gyllenhall. I pointed out that the Danish experience in the Middle East has had significant play in their TV series shown here, not only Borgen but some of the crime series as well, and more significantly that I am convinced Brothers is the source material, or inspiration, for Homeland.

Homeland was also a connecting point for me, to examine how wars that are unpopular, or at least not being fought by the country as a whole (the Bush wars are now 11 years old, and still make little impact on the home front--people scream 'support the troops' and keep their children home to watch American Idol) produce films that tend to concentrate on the effect of the war on us. In our discussion I had declared Three Kings the best of the movies set in these specific wars, but it had the advantage of that war's being over, and the ambiguity of our withdrawal as its political core. Most of the early, successful, films about Vietnam were about the home front, not just The Deer Hunter (which I still consider hollow) but Coming Home, Tracks, Rolling Thunder, and Who'll Stop The Rain (aka Dog Soldiers). Taxi Driver is part of that bunch too. Of course there were allegorical critiques, like MASH, Catch 22, or Soldier Blue.

The best of the recent  homefront movies is probably In The Valley Of Elah, where Tommy Lee Jones hardens director Paul Haggis' more liberal instincts. But you heard Francine mention Lions For Lambs, which we actually discussed in the tapings--I called it a remake of Starship Troopers which dares to question Ayn Rand.

We used to be less triumphalist. The British think their war films are more realistic and more understated, but they aren't. Look at the World War II combat films produced during the war, and how many of them involve loss and last stands. They Were Expendable, Air Force, Bataan, Corregidor, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, are the films of a nation who like to feel themselves the underdogs.

We also mentioned 9th Company, Fyodor Bondarchuk's movie set in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which I'm going to see soon and write about, and we didn't get to talk enough about the specific documentaries.

And though when they called I assumed it was to ask me to talk about  Jersey Boys, as I've written The Pocket Essential Clint Eastwood and I am old enough to have bought Four Seasons' 45s, I did at least get to talk to Francine about Clint's next film, American Sniper, which, like Lone Survivor, is based on Navy Seals, in this case the memoir of a Seal sniper. It's interesting that Clint played an assassin in Where Eagles Dare, a very Sergio Leone character in Kelly's Heroes, but when it came to war movies he's made only three: the very triumphal, very cliched, and basically Green Berets update (with victory at the end) Heartbreak Ridge, and then the much more sombre Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, both very much about the kinds of issues which Peter Berg described, the horrible toll taken on men at war. So I'm looking forward to seeing what sort of take Clint brings to that one.