Royals and Dignitaries Warned 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall'

How fascinating to watch the recent Nobel Prize ceremony awarding Bob Dylan. Dylan's designation as recipient of the Nobel for Literature was instantly incongruous.

Singer Patti Smith performed Dylan's apocalyptic warning "A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall", in the middle of a fantastically plush concert hall for an audience that included a King, his royal family, members of parliament, international dignitaries, all wonderfully arrayed in luxurious tuxedos and designer gowns, as bejeweled and regal as imaginable.

Dylan's words and a spare Philharmonic(!) arrangement filled the room as Patti sang before the very type of audience that the song seeks to challenge. The song from 1962, like much of his work from that decade, seethes with rage at the institutions corrupted and the decency abridged in the modern world. And Hard Rain especially forecasts the dire consequences of allowing corruption to flourish.

And while Patti became overwhelmed briefly at one point, she soulfully delivers Dylan's words with great power.

Dylan's writing galvanized protests around the world, demanding humanity become the best it could be, his love songs throb with desire and longing, his words express hopes, dreams and sorrows felt by all. More than that. the elegant and vivid poetry of his words is imminently distinctive, unique and startling.

Dylan submitted a speech to be read (I truly appreciate the fact that only Dylan's words were heard at the event and that he was not seen), and he said:

"As a performer I’ve played for 50,000 people and I’ve played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me."

Awarding the prize, the host said "Alfred Nobel wanted to reward those who have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind." The prize committee did just that this year. 

Take the time to visit Dylan's website to read his lyrics. It's a stunning collection.

A HARD RAIN'S A-GONNA FALL

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains

I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways

I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests

I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans

I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard

And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall



Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?

I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it

I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it

I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’

I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’

I saw a white ladder all covered with water

I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken

I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children

And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard

And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall



And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?

And what did you hear, my darling young one?

I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’

Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world

Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’

Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’

Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’

Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter

Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley

And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard

And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall



Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?

Who did you meet, my darling young one?

I met a young child beside a dead pony

I met a white man who walked a black dog

I met a young woman whose body was burning

I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow

I met one man who was wounded in love

I met another man who was wounded with hatred

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard

It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall



Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?

I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’

I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten

Where black is the color, where none is the number

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it

Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’

But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard

It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall


Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music

Unboxing Videos Super Happy Wealthy Egg Surprise More More More

I noted some years back that folks were flocking to watch YouTube videos of the "unboxing" of numerous tech gadgets, phones and such. And from that, we can now view tens of thousands of video hours of folks opening packages and boxes of whatever you might wish to see.

Today, there's this woman named DisneyCollector on YouTube who has gotten over 93 million views of a video of opening some toy packages to reveal stickers and candy and maybe a toy here and there. With her own YouTube channel, it's estimated she is earning between 2 and 12 million dollars a year via ads on her page. A NYTime article ponders the trend here.

"YouTube in particular seems to have the ability to turn formerly unnamed, truly private little pleasures — the most insignificant of dopamine triggers — into rich, multichanneled cultures. Search “clean corn shuck,” and you will be surprisingly rewarded."

The writer of the article has a young child who loves watching DisneyCollector.

"Wouldn’t you rather watch a real Cookie Monster video?” I asked, after first watching it.

“No, no, Mommy,” my daughter said. “I like the toy. I like the hands on the toy.”

“Why?”

“Because I like it. A lot.”

J-Rabbit's Jazzy Acoustic Christmas Music

Two Korean ladies, Jung Da Woon and Jung Hye Sun, take their acoustic music to the internet, under  the name J-Rabbit. You can keep your Gangham madness. They have their own YouTube channel and their own website loaded with music, both covers and originals. Above and below are some samples of their Christmas music, and their covers of jazz standards are mighty impressive too.

2-Year-Old Rocks The House

Even at the age of 2 years old, he sure knows how to have a rockin' good time. The boy just owns the floor and the entire room. Check out his bow at the end. Thankyou, thankyouverymuch. He can also do some classy ballroom dancing too. Helps if mom and dad run the dance studio I guess.

But when you take in what Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart could write and perform at age 11, everyone the planet is a slacker. (And he started younger, age 4.) See how behind you are in your accomplishments?

Playing Bongos With Alice Cooper

(NOTE: I do not know why, but all the videos cited here are gone. That's too bad. I hope he did not get some kind of copyright threat. Fun while it was all there and I'll shoot Gary and email and see what happened ... 1/07/09)

His screen name is bongorilao, and he occupies a small but rhythmic corner of the Internet.

The video above is one of my favorites from this 47-year-old musician who has some 238 such videos for you to view at his YouTube page. His skill really shines when he is surrounded with drums as he plays and improvs with George Benson's "On Broadway". But his musical selections include The Beatles, Jethro Tull, Bob Marley, Uriah Heep, Black Uhuru, Sly and The Family Stone, The Allman Brothers, James Brown, Elton John, Earth, Wind and Fire, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, The Gypsy Kings, The Guess Who, Sting and much more.

His profile says:

"I hate negativity and all manifestations thereof, but hating is negative, too, so let's not talk about it. Just want to play bongos under a palm tree somewhere but the rat race has me.

Tell it, my brother. Like you, I'm here to do my verbal bongo thing.

I own a pair of bongos my parents bought for me when I was about 8 years old. I never learned to play them well, but I have always kept them and would not let them go for any price.

And here on this page of the Internet, I get to riff as I wish too, on my own little corner where I set the priorities, selecting what I wish to post about, write about, laugh at, celebrate and share with a few dozen or a few thousand people. I love writing about movies, for instance, and do so every Friday here, and those posts are always the most least read thing I place here. People don't care diddley squat about what I write about movies. But I do it 'cause I love it, not because someone seeks me out to read my movie musings.

Millions of people write online constantly, or make music, or share information and videos and only a handful become hits o' the internets. We do it because we can and because we love it.

Camera Obscura: 'Diary of the Dead'; Get A Life-Size Indiana Jones; And Laser Cats!

"When there is no more room in hell, the dead will create a MySpace page."

Let's talk about zombies.

Shambling undead humans who rise up from the grave to feast on human flesh were once the fevered imaginings of odd readers and bizarre writers and film-fans such as myself. Today, zombies are cultural icons. All across the globe, everyday folks will slap on some gory make-up and gather for Zombie Walks, and the movies about them and with them are everywhere, some very funny, some very scary and some very poorly made. The literary world reeks of rotting flesh and survival guides flourish to the point one may well wonder if some people know they are still creatures of the imagination.

The guru of zombies is George Romero and his most recent movie hit DVD this week, "Diary of the Dead". His dark fantasies have fired up imaginations for decades, movies that have skewered society with visceral glee. Students and teachers and film critics and cultural anthropologists pontificate on the Romero Zombie with frequent essays and doctoral thesis papers. In Romero's movies, the story is more than just a scary tale told in the dark - they are also stories about us all, about how we react and respond to disaster and destruction.

"Diary" continues such themes with a digital skewer. It's the YouTube Internet Zombie Age in his film, and more than any of his previous movies, this one pushes the undead into a vague fearful background and the foreground is full of cameras and people obsessed with them. The story begins with a narrator who says the following images were all captured via a variety of media sources, which the narrator is compelled to send out via the Internet. We then see a group of would-be low-budget horror movie filmmakers whose shoot is cut short when the radios begin crackling with reports of the rising undead. Quickly, the group gathers up and begins to flee, all of their actions being "documented" by an obsessed director named Jason.

Just as quickly, the viewer gets inundated with images within images, frames within frames. Our hardy survivors meet other survivors, but no matter what they do or where they go, they begin to die and transform into the undead. It is the camera and the cameraman (or woman) who remain the focus of the film. Though horrified and terrorized, the characters can't stop observing themselves as they are being destroyed. In one scene a character shoots a zombie and then passes the gun to someone else, saying "It's too easy to use". Moments later, after another attack, someone passes a camera off to someone else saying the same line "It's too easy to use."

Romero conceived of his idea to be an online movie only at first, and his MySpace page remains quite active. He hits all the aspects of the constant barrage of information, from cell phones to blogs to videogames , citizen journalism and surveillance cameras. And he notes too that even if the zombies devour every human, all those digitized details will remain long after all life is gone.

Does all of that information have any value? Towards the end of the movie, a comment is offered that all the billions of voices captured and sent around the world have no provided more truth or more illumination - instead it has deafened us, made us less sure of everything.

For the DVD release, 5 short amateur films submitted via MySpace are included in the extras and they're pretty good too - imaginative and spooky and funny takes on the zombie apocalypse. And I do have some complaints about the movie - mostly that Romero found some really bad actors, some of the worst in any of his movies. But "Diary" is more about the hardware, not the software, and the hardware wins out in the end.

One other aspect of all of Romero's zombie tales I truly like is that there is never a really clear explanation of a cause or a solution. How one might survive is considered, but if it's even worth surviving has always been his biggest question.

----

MOVIE NEWS

Also rising up from the long ago this weekend is Indiana Jones in "Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." If you just can't get enough Indy and crave more, then perhaps you can bid on a life-sized Indiana Jones to place in your own home. It's being offered on eBay, with bids starting at $50,000.

Another attempt at resurrection arrives from the director of not-very-good "Sahara", Breck Eisner. He's working on a new version of "Flash Gordon" and "Creature From The Black Lagoon." Keeping his career alive at this point is a notable feat.

A blogger worked some liveblogging for Quentin Tarantino's two-hour talk about his movies, which you can read here.

The movie "16 Candles" has just been re-enacted in 30 seconds by bunnies. The result is here.

See the latest on the new animated movie "Space Chimps and Patrick ", featuring the voices of Andy SambergWarburton. What I want to know is when will someone greenlight a feature movie of Samberg's SNL creation - "Laser Cats"??? I'll pay cash money in a heartbeat to see that!

GOP To Boycott YouTube Debate?

Why is it the GOP candidates for President are unwilling to participate in the YouTube/CNN debate?

Despite some claims that it was a failed experiment, the facts show that viewership was quite large among the 18-34 age group -- the highest ever since audience measurements began in 1992.

Details about YouTube also show that a larger percentage of users who express a preference are Republicans -- some 3.5 million self-identified Republicans, 3.1 million self-identified Democrats, and about 5 million who call themselves Independent. This via techPresident, who goes on to write:

"Seriously, I really haven't noticed a hugely disproportionate difference between the number of liberals and the number of conservatives on YouTube... I really haven't seen evidence that one is far and away more present than the other.

As a side note, who wants to join me in predicting that the Republican debate will get more video question submissions than the Democratic debate did? The Dem one attracted 2989 submissions. The GOP one already has 149 entries and they only opened it up on Tuesday. And they have until September. Now that people saw how neat the Dem one is, there are sure to be plenty more people uploading videos for the Republican one, although I'm not sure about whether or not this would be an indication of there necessarily being more people on YouTube who are Republican than Democrat-- probably more an indication of the greater exposure this format has attracted.

Also as an aside, I'm willing to bet that a significant chunk of the questions submitted are submitted by people who aren't YouTube users. That is, people who signed up for an account just so they could participate but haven't been active on YouTube before, for instance the Reverend who asked the gay marriage question in the Democratic debate only signed up for an account after a member of his congregation heard about the debate and thought it'd be a good opportunity. The majority of question-askers are undoubtedly regular YouTube users, but there's probably also a substantial chunk of submitters that are using the site for the first time.

There's no doubt that CNN was using YouTube to show off how CNN is kinda hip and tech savvy. But both the users and viewers of YouTube gained much in the process too. Hard core negativists, like Rush Limbaugh offered his view (via Beltway Blogroll):

"Above all else, this is a show. CNN is in this for ratings. They’re not going to turn over the all-important questions to these candidates to a bunch of dingbats who don’t know what they’re doing. ... The YouTube business is nothing more than the latest attempt by the Democrats and the media to extend the youth vote to the Democrat Party.

Yeah, how evil to expand awareness and engage younger voters.It must be a Satanic Liberal Conspiracy.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow says President Bush isn't "big on YouTube debates." What does that matter since he isn't a candidate? Does he just want to issue some marching orders to GOP candidates?

Talks are underway to perhaps reschedule the GOP event. But the Florida state Republicans are adamant to have the event take place:

"It is also evidence of Florida's growing and prominent role in the 2008 presidential election cycle, and we are excited to partner with the campaigns, CNN, and YouTube to bring the Republican presidential candidates to viewers across America."

I think if only two candidates, Sen. John McCain and Ron Paul, both who say they'd participate, are the only ones who show up, then I say go ahead and air the debate. Those who avoid it will speak volumes by their silence.

Black Friday

It is Friday the 13th after all. This is a fierce and fine song which builds to an impressive jam, and an exceptional video of Steely Dan live. And is it just me, or does Donald Fagen kinda look like a vampire here? Creepy. I've been wanting to post this for a few weeks and so here ya go. Would it be ironic/funny or just tasteless to dedicate this today to Don Imus?