« Halloween: Homemade Candy Corn, regular and vegan | Main | American Ruins »

October 1, 2007

Pumpkin faces; Convert anything; Making Dylan's 'Blonde on Blonde'; Craig deadline passes; Tattooed Lamborghini

I'm on the road today, so just a few links.

Try this at home: Pumpkin Faces, inspiration from last year. At Planck's Constant.

Wedding song: MYSTIC NIGHTS The Making of (Dylan's) Blonde on Blonde in Nashville. At Oxford American, long and detailed.

... The strangest Nashville recording dates were the second and third. The second began at six in the evening and did not end until five-thirty the next morning, but Dylan played only for the final ninety minutes, and on only one song: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” He would later call it a piece of religious carnival music, which makes sense given its melodic echoes of Johann Sebastian Bach, especially the chorale “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Unlike “Visions of Johanna,” though, this epic needed work, and Dylan toiled over the lyrics for hours. The level of efficiency was military: Hurry up and wait.

Kristofferson described the scene: “I saw Dylan sitting out in the studio at the piano, writing all night long by himself. Dark glasses on,” and Bob Johnston recalled to the journalist Louis Black that Dylan did not even get up to go to the bathroom despite consuming so many Cokes, chocolate bars, and other sweets that Johnston began to think the artist was a junkie: “But he wasn’t; he wasn’t hooked on anything but time and space.” The tired, strung-along musicians shot the breeze and played ping-pong while racking up their pay. (They may even have laid down ten takes of their own instrumental number, which appears on the session tape, though Charlie McCoy doesn’t recollect doing this, and the recording may come from a different date.) Finally, at 4 a.m., Dylan was ready.

“After you’ve tried to stay awake ’til four o’clock in the morning, to play something so slow and long was really, really tough,” McCoy says. Dylan continued polishing the lyrics in front of the microphone. After he finished an abbreviated run-through, he counted off, and the musicians fell in. Kenny Buttrey recalled that they were prepared for a two- or three-minute song, and started out accordingly: “If you notice that record, that thing after like the second chorus starts building and building like crazy, and everybody’s just peaking it up ’cause we thought, ‘Man, this is it....’ After about ten minutes of this thing we’re cracking up at each other, at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago. Where do we go from here?” ...

Poof, you're a frog: You Convert It is a simple Web page that pretty much lets convert anything to anything else, as long as its digital: Documents Images Audio Video Units.

Looks like a handy tool, worth a bookmark.

Sen. Larry Craig stonewalls:

Deadline passes; Craig still in office Idaho Statesman

Sen. Larry Craig's original deadline to resign Sept. 30 came and went Sunday with the Idaho Republican still in office.

Craig, who announced Sept. 1 that he intended to resign Sept. 30, now says he will stay in office indefinitely, pending the outcome of his efforts to withdraw a guilty plea...

GOP Is Ready to Roll Out the Klieg Lights for Craig Washington Post

Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho is a tough guy to run out of town.

Not that his Republican colleagues aren't trying. Worried that the disgraced lawmaker intends to remain in the Senate indefinitely, they are threatening to notch up the public humiliation by seeking an open ethics hearing on the restroom scandal that enveloped Craig last month...

Factory life: Toys manufacture in China (25 pics). It's not at all like the elves' workshop at the North Pole.

B&W: The tattoed Lamborghini.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 4:13 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: Gene on October 1, 2007 1:42 PM