Bob Dylan

American observational documentary pioneer D.A. Pennebaker traces his embrace of film-making as a ‘witnessing process’ that allows him to reach a unique understanding of his subjects in this conversation on several rarely discussed films: the highly formative early shorts Baby (1954) and Daybreak Express
(1953–1957), the Drew Associates oddity David (1961), as well as Wild 90 (1968), Eat the Document (1972) and 1 P.M. (1972) – collaborations with Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan and Jean-Luc Godard, respectively. He addresses the meaning of cinéma vérité, Godard’s ‘reckless’ approach to film-making, and the sadness behind his second, and ultimately abandoned, collaboration with Dylan.

This essay explores two rockumentaries about Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds made roughly 25 years apart--"The Road to God Knows Where" (1990) and "20,000 Days on Earth" (2014)--and representing two radically approaches to documentary form:  the minimalist anti-rockumentary and the maximalist meta-documentary. Because of Nick Cave's investment in the history of popular music (and of popular culture more generally), this study also has a great deal to say about the development of the rockumentary as a genre, especially since the beginning of the post-punk era.

Musik ist eine Manifestation der grundlegenden menschlichen Fähigkeit, mittels Zeichen zu denken, zu fühlen und zu handeln. Die Musiksemiotik hat das Ziel, diese Fähigkeit und ihre Manifestationen wissenschaftlich zu beschreiben und zu erklären. Teil I des Buches umreißt den Gegenstand einer Musiksemiotik, behandelt die Emergenz und Koevolution von Musik und Sprache, hebt die kognitiven Aspekte der Musik heraus und frägt nach der Bedeutung musikalischer Zeichen. Auch Sprache (Literatur) und Bilder (besonders Filme) können mit musiksemiotischen Begriffen analysiert werden. In den Kapiteln von Teil II werden Beispiele musikalischer Zeichengestaltung behandelt: von der Polyphonie, der Kunst der Fuge über die Diskurskontexte von Blues und Jazz bis zum Lied und Rap. Ein weiteres Anwendungskapitel beschäftigt sich mit politischen Liedermachern (Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan und Wolf Biermann). Teil III ist den theoretischen Aspekten der Musiksemiotik gewidmet. Es behandelt das Zeichenkonzept und dessen Erneuerung im Kontext der Musiksemiotik. Im letzten Kapitel werden die musikalischen Phänomene der Melodie, die Dynamik der Fuge und quasi-narrative Strukturen in musikalischen Werken mit Modellkonzepten der Dynamischen Systemtheorie beschrieben.
Der Autor Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wildgen lehrt und forscht seit 1981 an der Universität Bremen in der Sprachwissenschaft, Semiotik und Philosophie. Seit 2004 sind Monographien zur Evolution der Sprache, zur Kognitiven Grammatik, zu Giordano Bruno, zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und zur visuellen Semiotik erschienen.

Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation. The Late Voice undertakes such an analysis by considering issues of time, memory, innocence and experience in modern Anglophone popular song and the use by singers and songwriters of a 'late voice'. Lateness here refers to five primary issues: chronology (the stage in an artist's career); the vocal act (the ability to convincingly portray experience); afterlife (posthumous careers made possible by recorded sound); retrospection (how voices 'look back' or anticipate looking back); and the writing of age, experience, lateness and loss into song texts.

There has been recent growth in research on ageing and the experience of later stages of life, focussing on physical health, lifestyle and psychology, with work in the latter field intersecting with the field of memory studies. The Late Voice seeks to connect age, experience and lateness with particular performers and performance traditions via the identification and analysis of a late voice in singers and songwriters of mid-late twentieth century popular music.

Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1: Time, Age, Experience and Voice
Chapter 2: ‘Won't You Spare Me Over till Another Year?’: Ralph Stanley’s Late Voice
Chapter 3: September of My Years: Age and Experience in the Work of Frank Sinatra and Leonard Cohen
Chapter 4: Time Out of Mind: Bob Dylan, Age and Those Same Distant Places
Chapter 5: Both Sides Now: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and the Innocence and Experience of the Singer-Songwriter
Conclusion: Late Thoughts
Bibliography Discography Videography Index

This short essay explores the cultural significance of Bob Dylan's infamous tune 'The Times They Are a-Changin' ', connecting Dylan's influences with the turbulent social and cultural developments in America 1960's and the subsequent influence Dylan's writing has had on todays generation.

Leading academics including Elliot Wolfson, James Diamond, Aubrey Glazer, Jonathan Karp, Frances Di Lauro, Samuel Zinner, Daniel Mackay, as well as music and cultural scholars Seth Rogovoy, Robert Sean Wilson, and rabbinic Dylanologists Rabbi David Zaslow, Rabbi Jonathan Seidel and Rabbi Joshua Rose will gather via Zoom on Sunday, March 14, 2021 for an all-day virtual conference on “Bob Dylan: Jewish Perspectives on His Repertoire – Themes of Prophecy and Redemption”.

The 7-hour intensive organized by the Oregon Jewish Culture Project features panel discussions and keynote addresses with such topics as “Foot of Pride: Themes of (False) Prophecy and Redemption” and “Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues: A Jewish Experience of Bob Dylan”, as well as “Darkness at the Break of Noon: Dylan's Apocalyptic Vision through a Kabbalistic Prism” and more.

“We are honored to have such high-quality participants for this unique event,” says Ahava Oblak, co-founder of the Oregon Jewish Culture Project. “The deep level of insight into Dylan’s essential canon by these scholars and spiritual leaders who have spent decades tracking Dylan’s mercurial religious self-representations and spiritual-societal insights promises to make this day deeply impactful for Bob Dylan fans of every faith”.

Panelist biographies, panel and keynote topics, and the complete speaker schedules are available at https://oregonjewishcultureproject.org 

All-day conference passes are available for $36 at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4839856 

About the Oregon Jewish Culture Project: Established in 2016, the mission of the Oregon Jewish Culture Project (OJCP) is to offer unique Jewish cultural programming in strategic cooperation and collaboration with other Jewish community partners. The OJCP is located in Eugene, OR, and benefits residents of Lane County, the larger Oregon Jewish community and our allies and regional partners.

Founded by Co-Directors Rabbi Jonathan Seidel and Ahavah Oblak, OJCP has hosted successful events such as the “ Jewish Food Conference”, “Native American-Jewish Storytelling Day of Sharing”, a concert featuring Sephardic singer Michelle Alany & The Mystics and classes such as “Jewish Food and Culture in History (Ancient and Medieval)”, “Introduction to Talmud: Hebrew and Aramaic”, “Basic Music and Liturgy of Judaism”, “Kabbalah and Science in the Renaissance and Judaism” and “Science: Antiquity to the Renaissance”.

"Rather than offering a complete album-by-album survey of Bob Dylan’s life and work from his first work to his most recent works (as I have tried to do in the past), this senior seminar will attempt to do a more intensive focus on ten important works that help to track Dylan’s evolution as a poet working in certain recurring genres (such as protest song, Jeremaic vision, blues or love lyric etc.). Each week one song will form the basis of a reading both in textual detail and in visionary scope, as connected to readings from Dylan himself as well as some important critics and writers (like Eric Lott, Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg) and cultural historians (like Sean Wilentz and Camille Paglia). The goal is to offer a way into Dylan’s whole “world” as poet in tactic and vision, his modes of writing, genres, political-cultural aims, imagination and so on. 

This will allow us to achieve insight into the recurring poetic and song genres Dylan uses, the “prophetic” vision and critiques of America he offers in transnational era, the themes and problems his work has evoked and transformed, and his metamorphosis as a poet of tropological power and cultural-political importance from the 1960s until, rather amazingly, his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
To give us a better sense of Dylan’s times and works as well as modes of writing, we will also read his autobiography, Chronicles: Vol. 1. This will help us approach his vision of America and cultural-political tactics, or, simply put, his poetics. To give a sense of his ties to the leftist cultural populist front as well as to the Beat literary movement, we will read Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America. Various readings from Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader will help us to contextualize each song as well as Dylan’s evolution as a poet and musician over the various decades, from the 1960s to the present. We will also see Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home and the Dylan-persona movie Masked and Anonymous when relevant, and make links to a range of Dylan works primary and secondary through the assigned readings."

Music is a powerful cultural medium. The volume explores the varied roles that music plays in human culture and society, and its unique symbolic and communicative properties. Contributors discuss Richard Wagner, Bob Dylan, John Cage, Eric Burdon, and Igor Stravinsky. From electronic and inner-city DIY to world music and rock concerts, the book looks at music’s part in creating the human sense of place, space, transcendence and identity. Philosophers, cultural thinkers, and sociologists collaborate to explain the exhilaration and fascination that human beings experience when they listen to music.

Table of Contents

Volume Foreword vii
Chapter One Introduction: Philosophical and Cultural Theories
of Music
Eduardo De La Fuente and Peter Murphy

Chapter Two Modern Hermeneutics and the Presentation
of Opera
Agnes Heller

Chapter Three Algo-Rhythm and Mello-dy: A Consideration of
the Relationship Between Technology and the Embodied
Performance of Music
Daniel Black

Chapter Four Bob Dylan Ain’t Talking: One Man’s Vast Comic
Adventure in American Music, Dramaturgy, and Mysticism
Peter Murphy

Chapter Five Music and Religion: Reflections on Cultural
Secularization
David Roberts

Chapter Six Prophet and Priest, Ascetic and Mystic: Towards
a Cultural Sociology of the Twentieth Century Composer
Eduardo De La Fuente

Chapter Seven Collective Effervescence, Numinous Experience or
Proto-Religious Phenomena? Moshing with Durkheim,
Schleiermacher and Otto
Mark Jennings

Chapter Eight Music as a Space of Possibilities 129
John Rundell

Chapter Nine Some Suggestions for a Phenomenology
of Rhythm
Stuart Grant

Chapter Ten The Paradox of “Do-it-Yourself” in
Unpopular Music
Joseph Borlagdan

Chapter Eleven Musical Culturespeak and Cosmopolitan
Identities in Australian Multiculturalism
Graeme Smith

Chapter Twelve The Piano and Cultural Modernity in
East Asia
Alison Tokita

Chapter Thirteen Popular Music, Cultural Memory and
Everyday Aesthetics
Andy Bennett

Chapter Fourteen Everything is Dirt: Reevaluating the Place
of Cultural Status in Producing Aesthetic Attachment
Claudio E. Benzecry

Chapter Fifteen Musical Listening and Boundary-Work
Michael Walsh

Early academic article on McCartney's songs during/after the Beatles. This focuses on themes of time and nostalgia alongside musical innovation in a selection of McCartney songs, 1963-2001. Some of my later publications on McCartney (and Lennon) are also available on my academia.edu page.

The ongoing assault conducted by the armed forces of the state of Israel on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza has, yet again, brought stark images to the world of the devastating capabilities of the awesome military machinery at the disposal of the 66-year old Jewish state.

Conference paper. This paper examines parallels between William Blake's myth of a failed god in works like _The Book of Urizen_ and the implicit narrative of Bob Dylan's conversion and disillusionment during his gospel period. The paper looks especially at Dylan's "Jokerman" and "Man of Peace."

Accostarsi a un artista divenuto mito poco più che ventenne, autore di cinquecento canzoni e cinquantadue album ufficiali, protagonista di millecinquecento concerti e duecentotrenta apparizioni video, soggetto di centinai di libri critici e di una ventina di biografie è impresa che richiede grande umiltà e giudizio. Tale premessa risulta necessaria per affrontare una riflessione su Tarantula, 1 perché Bob Dylan, come suggerisce Alessandro Carrera, uno dei suoi critici italiani più arguti, «ha smesso da tempo di essere un semplice artista. Ormai è una geografia, un universo semiotico, un'intera cultura concentrata in un unico performer». 2 Il rischio più evidente in cui si possa incorrere addentrandosi nella fitta foresta della dylanologia attuale risiede dunque in una semplicistica miopia critica, nell'indulgere di una celebrazione incondizionata della sua opera omnia, negando talora la discutibilità del valore di alcune sue produzioni. Tarantula, in buona parte, si colloca fra queste ultime.

The works of T. S. Eliot and Bob Dylan seem to flow from the same spring – an agonizing sense of the contemporary human condition and the state of society – and several critics have recently begun to observe the similarities between these two writers. Through comparative readings of T. S. Eliot’s and Bob Dylan’s earlier and later works this project investigates how their religious turn influenced their work. This project argues that the earlier works of Eliot and Dylan share several Modernistic characteristics both in terms of their depiction of the bleak modern reality and in terms of stylistic features. It then goes on to show how their later, distinctly spiritual works, written after their significant religious turn - in contrast to their earlier more cynical and secular works - convey a sense of faith and meaning despite the grinding reality of modern life. A key focus of the project is, therefore, the extent to which the earlier and later works of Eliot and Dylan reflect different understandings of the essential factor in Modernist writers’ portrayal of the twentieth-century human condition: alienation. In the earlier works of Eliot and Dylan, the alienation seems to be that of an individual who has been detached from his essential nature and spirituality and is experiencing a sense of powerlessness and despair due to the social and political structures of modern society. Their later works, by contrast, depict individuals experiencing alienation after having embraced religious faith in a society with different beliefs and values.

The essay first utilizes the hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval in order to examine ancient Hebrew prophecy, with an eye toward eliminating the potentially repressive elements of this ancient tradition, and toward reclaiming those elements that contribute to the postmodern project of defending otherness, and fostering transformation. With this reclaimed prophecy in hand, then, the essay explores the songs, performance style, and life of Bob Dylan as an example of a distinctly postmodern prophecy, i.e., prophecy that remains in continuity with ancient prophecy, and yet is distinctly postmodern.

This book is an excellent monograph on the modern treatment of nonlinear oscillations by geometrical methods of dynamical systems formulated in the style of the "Smale school". It contains both qualitative and quantitative investigations of many nonlinear "real" systems which have ample applications in engineering and covers a detailed and rather rigorous analysis of some phenomena peculiar to those systems such as chaotic behaviour and several types of bifurcations. The mathematical models considered are confined to sets of nonlinear ordinary differential equations and nonlinear maps arisen from their discretizations on finite dimensional Euclidean manifolds. The book comprises seven chapters. The introductory first chapter reviews some basic topics in the geometrical approach to the theory of ordinary differential equations (flows) and nonlinear maps. The concepts of stable and unstable manifolds associated with fixed points, homoclinic orbits, Poincare maps and structural stability are introduced. The second chapter deals with an unsystematic treatment of four examples of nonlinear oscillations: van der Pol and Duffing oscillators, the Lorenz equations and the problem of a bouncing ball from a massive, sinusoidally vibrating table. It is shown that all these problems manifest chaotic behaviour and they possess strange attractors associated with the existence of homoclinic orbits. The third chapter discusses the local bifurcation theory for flows and maps with special emphasis on center manifold and normal form theorems. The analysis is restricted to one-parameter (codimension one) bifurcations of equilibria. The fourth chapter treats some classical analytical methods of averaging and perturbation to study periodically forced oscillations. It is shown that some global information are obtainable by these methods under suitable conditions such as approximations to Poincar6 maps. Melnikov's method is described for two-dimensional forced system on the manifold R* x S'(R: real line, S': circle) to study perturbations of homoclinic orbits and Hamiltonian systems. This chapter ends with a brief discussion of chaos and nonintegrability in Hamiltonian systems and KAM (Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser) theory. Chapter five is concerned with quite a rigorous treatment of chaotic behaviour. Both the irregular character of individual solutions and the complicated geometric structures (invariant sets with hyperbolic structures, attracting sets, attractors and strange attractors) are described. The horseshoe map of Smale is discussed at length and the technique of symbolic dynamics is only briefly explained although it has been extensively employed as the principal method of attack. Invariant measures, Liapunov exponents and topological entropies of maps, capacity and Hausdorff dimension of metric spaces are defined in final sections. Chapter six involves dynamical properties which can not be deduced from local information. The global homoclinic and heteroclinic bifurcations, bifurcations of one-dimensional maps are discussed. Wild hiperbolic sets are introduced and the application of renormalization group methods (which were developed in condensed matter physics) in one-dimensional maps is outlined. The final chapter discusses bifurcations from equilibria which have multiple degeneracies. Bifurcations involve two parameters. The cases corresponding to eigenvalues which consist of double zero, a pure imaginary pair and a simple zero, two pure imaginary pairs are considered. A final section is devoted to two problems involving partial differential equations. The book is very well written and quality of its printing is excellent although there are a few but rather annoying misprints. We believe that the coverage would be very interesting to engineers, physicists and mathematicians. Mathematicians would be delighted to see many practical applications of the advanced mathematical approaches via microcomputers.

Une lecture historiographique de la période pendant laquelle Bob Dylan est passé du mouvement folk au rock'n'roll. Considéré comme un traître politique et musical à l'époque, les analyses récentes offrent à cette période de nouvelles interprétations.

Rodriguez was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1942, about a year after Dylan. However unlike Dylan who came from a middle-class background, 5 Rodriguez was the sixth child of blue-collar working class, first generation Mexican immigrant parents. 6 Dylan and Rodriguez grew up in the same country at the same time. Rooted in folk and blues, Rodriguez's songs are intimate and poetic and address complex issues like the urban squalor and class divisions in Detroit, love, sex and misogyny, and in many ways the failure of the "American dream" -comparisons to Dylan were inevitable. Yet by 1972, while Dylan had not only firmly established himself as an artist and released his 11 th album -New Morning (1970) -but had also been heralded as a prophet and the "voice of his generation", 7 Rodriguez disappeared into obscurity after releasing just two albums, both of which tanked.

Bob Dylan has spent a lifetime despising the nineteen-sixties - all the while being held up everywhere as its avatar. This comic tale of mistaken identity is the the story of his life. No matter what he says - let alone what he sings - it seems to make no difference. When he wrote a percussive-pulsating one chord rant-chant against living in a 'Political World' in 1989, it was dismissed by critics - sub-standard Dylan, they said. What they were really saying was: no, we don't believe you. You are a protest singer at heart. You don't really loath politics, whatever you might say or do. So books continue to be written about him as if he was a nineteen sixties political radical playing loquacious-hipster king to Joan Baez's platitudinous-remonstrating queen. No matter how much he might excoriate this notion of his marvelous biography, Chronicles, Volume One - one of the great pieces of American literature, on a par with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Angie March - it changes nothing. Left-liberal writers still compulsively lionize him in their own image - and their feckless children, who populate the modern media machines, regurgitate the same risible clichés about him.

This article argues that Bob Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’, which accompanies a key scene in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, has had its relevance to the narrative enhanced by the song’s widespread propagation. The analysis provides a context for Dylan’s score in Peckinpah’s oeuvre as well as within more general late 1960s and early 1970s scoring trends in the film western. Pertinent is the number of versions afforded Pat Garrett (a theatrical cut, a director’s preview and a hybrid ‘special edition’), resulting in either the inclusion or omission of Dylan’s vocals and lyrics. The presence, or lack thereof, of this important element affects the semantics of the scene and film. In tracing aspects of the history of the song’s presence in cinema after Pat Garrett, the article shows how the drama of the original ‘Heaven’s Door’ scene is often reiterated. This dovetails with Peckinpah’s and Dylan’s shared concerns with memory and cyclicality. Finally, the article illustrates that the use of popular ‘standards’ with judiciously omitted lyrics can suggest an interior monologue and a novelistic insight into a character’s thoughts.

Ph. D. dissertation defended at the University of Huddersfield, U.K. A commentary on my publications on 1) Music and Society in Italy; 2) A psychoanalytical interpretation on myths on the origins of music, and the minimalist turn of the 1980s; 3) Bob Dylan and American culture; 4) Italian singer-songwriters; 5) Popular music as a planetary experiment.

This book is an excellent monograph on the modern treatment of nonlinear oscillations by geometrical methods of dynamical systems formulated in the style of the "Smale school". It contains both qualitative and quantitative investigations of many nonlinear "real" systems which have ample applications in engineering and covers a detailed and rather rigorous analysis of some phenomena peculiar to those systems such as chaotic behaviour and several types of bifurcations. The mathematical models considered are confined to sets of nonlinear ordinary differential equations and nonlinear maps arisen from their discretizations on finite dimensional Euclidean manifolds. The book comprises seven chapters. The introductory first chapter reviews some basic topics in the geometrical approach to the theory of ordinary differential equations (flows) and nonlinear maps. The concepts of stable and unstable manifolds associated with fixed points, homoclinic orbits, Poincare maps and structural stability are introduced. The second chapter deals with an unsystematic treatment of four examples of nonlinear oscillations: van der Pol and Duffing oscillators, the Lorenz equations and the problem of a bouncing ball from a massive, sinusoidally vibrating table. It is shown that all these problems manifest chaotic behaviour and they possess strange attractors associated with the existence of homoclinic orbits. The third chapter discusses the local bifurcation theory for flows and maps with special emphasis on center manifold and normal form theorems. The analysis is restricted to one-parameter (codimension one) bifurcations of equilibria. The fourth chapter treats some classical analytical methods of averaging and perturbation to study periodically forced oscillations. It is shown that some global information are obtainable by these methods under suitable conditions such as approximations to Poincar6 maps. Melnikov's method is described for two-dimensional forced system on the manifold R* x S'(R: real line, S': circle) to study perturbations of homoclinic orbits and Hamiltonian systems. This chapter ends with a brief discussion of chaos and nonintegrability in Hamiltonian systems and KAM (Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser) theory. Chapter five is concerned with quite a rigorous treatment of chaotic behaviour. Both the irregular character of individual solutions and the complicated geometric structures (invariant sets with hyperbolic structures, attracting sets, attractors and strange attractors) are described. The horseshoe map of Smale is discussed at length and the technique of symbolic dynamics is only briefly explained although it has been extensively employed as the principal method of attack. Invariant measures, Liapunov exponents and topological entropies of maps, capacity and Hausdorff dimension of metric spaces are defined in final sections. Chapter six involves dynamical properties which can not be deduced from local information. The global homoclinic and heteroclinic bifurcations, bifurcations of one-dimensional maps are discussed. Wild hiperbolic sets are introduced and the application of renormalization group methods (which were developed in condensed matter physics) in one-dimensional maps is outlined. The final chapter discusses bifurcations from equilibria which have multiple degeneracies. Bifurcations involve two parameters. The cases corresponding to eigenvalues which consist of double zero, a pure imaginary pair and a simple zero, two pure imaginary pairs are considered. A final section is devoted to two problems involving partial differential equations. The book is very well written and quality of its printing is excellent although there are a few but rather annoying misprints. We believe that the coverage would be very interesting to engineers, physicists and mathematicians. Mathematicians would be delighted to see many practical applications of the advanced mathematical approaches via microcomputers.