Portrait of Jeff Bezos (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
By honoring The Washington Post with its most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize Board appeared intent on sending a message to two people: Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos.
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On Monday, the Post received the Public Service Award for its reporting on the chaos unleashed by Elon Musk and his DOGE assault on the federal government. One of the lead reporters in that effort was Hannah Natanson, the target of an extraordinary raid by the FBI last January.
Last Thursday I had an opportunity to take part in a panel on the state of community journalism. I was struck by the nostalgia for print expressed by two editors who are many decades younger than I am, which is why I’m revisiting this still-relevant issue.
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The event, titled “Peril and Promise,” was a fundraiser for The Local News, a print-and-digital nonprofit founded a decade ago in Ipswich, Massachusetts. (Its print edition, as you can see, has a slightly different name: the Ipswich Local News.) The panel comprised Local News editor Trevor Meek; Taylor Ann Bradford, the editor of the H-W News, a fairly new nonprofit covering Hamilton and Wenham that offers print with a minimal digital presence (here is its Instagram page); Joel Barrett, news editor of The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, a chain-owned daily; and me. Moderating was retired editor Richard Lodge.
Bob Dylan and his band. Photo (cc) 2012 by Adrian Lasso.
Well, of course Bob Dylan deserves to be among The New York Times’ “30 Greatest Living American Songwriters.” He could stand all by himself. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a few bones to pick.
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First, Dylan’s “five essential songs” includes “Isis,” which is a good but not great song. More to the point, he had a co-writer on that one — Jacques Levy, whom Dylan employed as a lyricist on his 1976 “Desire” album. Of the hundreds of truly essential songs that Dylan has written over the past 60 years, why would the Times choose one on which he had substantial help with the lyrics?
Second, Jody Rosen, who wrote the Dylan essay, points to the so-so “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight,” from the B-plus “Infidels” album (1983), as an example of his sense of humor:
It’s like I’m stuck inside a painting that’s hanging in the Louvre My throat starts to tickle and my nose itches, but I know that I can’t move
You want museums and humor? How about this, from “Visions of Johanna”?
Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues You can tell by the way she smiles See the primitive wallflower freeze When the jelly-faced women all sneeze Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeez, I can’t find my knees”
That’s from 1966’s “Blonde and Blonde,” a top-five Dylan album (or top three; or best ever), which isn’t even represented in the Times’ list of essentials. Nor is his acoustic period, which many admirers still regard as his greatest. Now, I’m mainly a fan of Dylan the rocker, but it’s hard to imagine how “Chimes of Freedom” didn’t make it in here. He could have won the Nobel Prize for that alone. Consider:
Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Finally a nitpick. I’m glad to see that Dylan’s astonishing late-career comeback is represented in the essential-songs list. “Nettie Moore,” from “Modern Times” (2006), is deeply moving, both weird and elegiac. But the Times could have chosen “Not Dark Yet,” from “Time Out of Mind,” the 1997 album that began Dylan’s revival, which continues 29 years later. “Not Dark Yet” is even more elegiac than “Nettie Moore,” if less weird, and Daniel Lanois’ production makes it one of Dylan’s greatest recordings.
At least they got Patti Smith to contribute her thoughts about “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” She recalls hearing Dylan perform it live, before he recorded it. She says in part:
What I remember most was the line “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to,” which made me very sad. But the line that made me feel understood, and that I have held onto my whole life, was “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” A person like me, who had many conflicting thoughts about everything, a lot that I kept to myself: I felt like he understood.
My caveat is that absolutely no one is going to be satisfied with anyone’s list of Dylan’s most esential songs. Mine changes all the time — and no doubt yours does, too.
