Category: Culture

Dylan at twilight

Dylan meets the Obamas (White House photo; click on image for larger size)

There are so many Bob Dylans that I don’t want to read too much into this. For all we know, Dylan will hit the road with Pearl Jam next year and play a couple hundred hard-rock shows. But two lovely videos suggest that he is settling into the twilight of his career following his unexpected triumphs of the past dozen or so years.

I’ll deal with the better-known example first: his recent performance at the White House of “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Backed by just Tony Garnier on upright bass and pianist Patrick Warren, Dylan offers an interesting contrast. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his guitar (in fact, he’s spent most of his time on stage in recent years randomly stabbing at an electronic keyboard), and he stops and starts several times. Yet he’s right on top of it vocally, singing a downbeat version of what was once a confident anthem. It bears repeated viewing — and listening.

The second is a live-in-the-studio version of Woodie Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi” (it’s the second video here). Dylan plays guitar, accompanied by Ry Cooder on electric guitar and Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks, of all people, on piano. As with the White House performance, Dylan’s singing combines his characteristic ragged edges with a softness and sweetness that I’ve rarely heard from him before.

I’m struck by what an effective, evocative singer Dylan can still be when his quiet rasp isn’t being overwhelmed by a full band. I’m also struck by the humility of these performances. The elderly-Western-gunslinger persona that he adopted during the past decade has been replaced by something more natural, more human.

None of us knows how much Dylan’s got left to give. His collaboration last year with Grateful Dead lyricist Rob Hunter, “Together Through Life,” was fun, but hardly up to his recent standards. His Christmas album was largely a joke, though I like the video for “Must Be Santa.” He is 68 years old and has a lot of miles on his odometer.

But he’s still capable of surprising us — and moving us.

The R-word and the M-word (and the F-word!)

Lauren Beckham Falcone has a good column in today’s Boston Herald, criticizing White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel for using the phrase “fucking retarded.” Falcone, who has a daughter with Down syndrome, writes:

Here’s the deal: the R-word is not an innocuous euphemism. It’s as hateful and belittling and bullying as racial slurs and homophobic epithets and sexual harassment.

Now, of course, Falcone is not responsible for her co-workers at the Herald. But it’s long past time for editors there to ban the word “midget,” a demeaning term for people with dwarfism. I realize Howie Carr’s head might explode the next time he tries to describe Bill Bulger as something other than “the Corrupt Midget,” but he’ll get over it.

By the way, it’s nice to see that we’ve evolved to the point at which people are more offended by the R-word and the M-word than they are by the F-word.

More on the difference gene

Last week I wrote about a new, cheap test that will tell prospective parents whether their children are at risk of having one of 100 or so different genetic conditions, including two forms of dwarfism.

Today I expand on that theme in the Guardian, arguing that such screening is tied to our conflicted feelings about difference.

Targeting the difference gene

A major theme of my 2003 book on dwarfism, “Little People,” was what would happen in the not-too-distant future when inexpensive tests would be developed to detect the 100 or so most common genetic conditions in utero. Would dwarfism and other human variations be eliminated? How would it change our uneasy relationship with difference, which we both celebrate and fear?

Now it’s starting to happen. The New York Times reports today that a company called Counsyl has come up with exactly such a test. It costs only $698 for couples. It’s not an in utero test; rather, the aim is to tell would-be parents whether they are carriers of genetic conditions. And there are questions as to how effective the test will be. But we have finally reached the starting line.

The most common form of dwarfism, achondroplasia, is not on the list, and there’s a good reason for that: it’s a dominant condition. If you have the gene, you’re a dwarf, and a carrier by definition. But diastrophic dysplasia and cartilage-hair hypoplasia, recessive forms of dwarfism, are on the list. (For those of you who have seen “Little People, Big World,” Amy and Zach Roloff have achondroplasia. Matt Roloff has diastrophic dysplasia.)

And what are you supposed to do if you learn you are a carrier? Counsyl calls these “Preventable Genetic Diseases Covered by the Universal Genetic Test.” We get the picture, and it’s mighty chilling.

We are all entitled to as much information as possible. It’s up to each of us to decide what to do with that information. Nevertheless, you can’t help but be concerned about where this is going to lead.

J.D. Salinger’s battle against free expression

J.D. Salinger, who died Wednesday at the age of 91, spent the last year of his life waging a wrong-headed battle against the fair-use exemption to copyright law, which allows for the use of copyrighted materials without permission under certain limited circumstances.

A Swedish humorist who goes by the name of J.D. California wrote a sequel to Salinger’s most famous work, “The Catcher in the Rye,” called “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.” Salinger sued for copyright violation, even though parody is protected by fair use.

Last summer I gave Salinger a Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award for this outrage against free speech. I am, of course, under no illusions that Salinger ever knew or cared. What’s more disturbing is that the courts held up publication of “60 Years Later,” and that the case is still pending.

Let’s hope Salinger’s heirs drop the suit.

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

Howard Zinn

Historian, social critic and war hero Howard Zinn has died at 87. The Boston Globe weighs in with a well-wrought obituary. Wikipedia’s thorough profile of Zinn is worth reading as well.

Zinn was a dedicated man of the left, and his take on President Obama, written just a few weeks ago for the Nation, is characteristic. It begins:

I’ve been searching hard for a highlight. The only thing that comes close is some of Obama’s rhetoric; I don’t see any kind of a highlight in his actions and policies.

As far as disappointments, I wasn’t terribly disappointed because I didn’t expect that much.

Zinn was best known for his book “A People’s History of the United States.” I came to it rather late — less than 10 years ago. Frankly, a lot of it struck me as the sort of cant that I got over in my teens – although I was also struck by how deeply Zinn loved his country.

“A People’s History” is well-written and meticulously well-documented, and I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in an alternative perspective on American history.

Photo via WikiMedia Commons.

Garrison Keillor’s base attack on his base

I have long detested Garrison Keillor, host of the faux-populist program “Prairie Home Companion” on public radio (not, I should note, National Public Radio). I have practically injured myself in my haste to change the station so as not to have to listen to his voice, oozing with smug insincerity. So I’m happy to report that, at long last, Keillor is returning my dislike.

Recently Keillor wrote a column attacking (are you ready?) Unitarians, for the sin of rewriting the words to “Silent Night” to make them less Christian. (For the record, we sing “Silent Night” to close the Christmas Eve service at our Unitarian Universalist church, and we don’t change the words, even though few of us are believing Christians.) Keillor has a few unkind words for the Jews as well. He writes:

If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.

For good measure, Keillor does not know that people who live in Cambridge are Cantabrigians, not — as he writes, crayon firmly in hand — “Cambridgeans.”

No doubt Keillor would respond that he was trying to be humorous. And I have no problem with making fun of people’s religion, not even Unitarian Universalism. But Keillor is as humor-impaired a humorist as has ever walked among us, so when he tries to be funny, mayhem is the almost-certain outcome.

What I find especially delightful about this is that liberal, affluent, public radio-listening UUs are Keillor’s base. He has just succeeded in alienating a rather substantial percentage of his microscopic audience. At the very least, I’d like to see him grovel and deliver an apology, insincere though it would be.

Here is a response from one of his former listeners, a member of the Cambridge UU church that was the proximate cause of Keillor’s outburst.

Update: And mea culpa. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby went after Keillor yesterday. “Remember when Keillor was endearing and witty?” asks Jacoby. Uh, no, Jeff. I don’t. But nice slam.

A depressing setback for marriage

At this point, it’s just depressing. Voters in Maine last night overturned their state’s same-sex-marriage law by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent.

The very idea that we should have the right to vote on whether our neighbors are fully human is offensive. The fact that the latest expression of “no, they’re not” comes from live-and-let-live Maine only makes it worse.

“God has given us this victory,” the Rev. Bob Emrich is quoted as saying in the Bangor Daily News. Perhaps KnowThyNeighbor.org will tell us how much cash the Big Guy ponied up.

Better news from Washington State.