title, what title?

Perfect song for a rainy day: Can't get enough of that thin mercury sound: Dylan: The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That's my particular sound." Rosenbaum: Was that wild mercury sound in "I Want You"? Dylan: Yeah, it was in "I Want You." It was in a lot of that stuff. It was in the album before that, too. Rosenbaum: "Highway 61 Revisited"? Dylan: Yeah. Also in "Bringing It All Back Home." That's the sound I've always heard... Source: 66 Playboy Interview (link: http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/play78.htm )

The song that kicked open Bruce Springsteen's mind (link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRu66l3QI_U ) finally has an official video (link: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/11/bob-dylan-rolling-stone-video/ ). And what a video it is! Created by the digital Agency Interlude this is an interactive TV with 16 channels, with all the people on the screen are singing Like a Rolling stone. Having an award winning film director as a son can come handy sometimes (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Dylan ). I love the fact that one of the channels is History Channel with Pawn Stars on it. If you want to share my joy do watch this video (link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32NWr5RKDRg ) Dylan was many things over the years. Among the many faces he had, the one I associate the most is his Existentialist era (i.m.h.o.). After Visions of Johanna, like a Rolling Stone is his most iconic from this era. A world where everyone is singing Like a Rolling Stone reminded me of another ...

To celebrate World Poetry Day, here are some of my favorite poets an their poems: Rainer Maria Rilke - Der Ölbaumgarten - The Olive Garden   Pablo Neruda - Ode to the Onion   Federico Garcia Lorca   - Romance Sonámbulo - Sonambulo Romance   Ezra Pound  - Cino   T.S. Eliot  - The Wasteland   Bob Dylan Visions of Johanna Poetry deserves celebration. As the Turkish poet Sezen Aksu wrote 19 years ago: Eyvah şiirler azalmış, günümüz perişan Yanıyor içimizdeki koskoca orman -- Poetry is dying out, How miserable is our day, The great forest in our hearts, Is burning out

I am aware of the danger, that my blog will look like a Dylan fundamentalist website, to someone who's only read the last 2 months posts. Maybe I am a Dylan fundamentalist, but as anyone who's listened to Dylan, or read good poetry, his songs act more as a medium in which one can find not the answers, but other questions that put the original question in a broader perspective. I had written about a peculiar Dylan song, which did not make it to any "studio" albums, called "The Series of Dreams" earlier [ link to the earlier post ]. To this day I am not sure, what kind of dreams Dylan is referring to. The key question is, how does one know that one is not dreaming? I am not trying to go down the Matrix path. How do we know that our perception is different when we are dreaming? Maybe, a series of dreams are not just series of dreams, but a metaphor for life itself? Or even one step further, life IS a series of dreams? Or what do our dreams say of our experi...

A bright side of being a Dylan fan is his tremendous artistic output means you can always make new discoveries. Here is a song that appeared in the soundtrack of Wonder Boys, which was awarded an Oscar in 2000. Not that he cared...

Let us celebrate our modern p(r)o(ph)ets 70th birthday with the songs of two of his admirers, David Bowie and Syd Barrett. Though Syd Barret might have pulled a Dylan on Dylan. You gave your heart to every bedsit room At least a picture on my wall And you sat behind a million pair of eyes And told them how they saw Then we lost your train of thought The paintings are all your own While troubles are rising We'd rather be scared Together than alone I'm a poet, Don't you know it? And the wind you can blow it. Cause I am Mr. Dylan, the King, And I am free as a bird on the wing.

Dylan is a child of the north. He was born in the northernmost end of the Highway 61, Duluth Minnesota. Raised in Hibing, Minesota, he attended University of Minnesota for a few semesters. He went to join the Village in the Big City, and the rest is history. Yet, he has a thing for the American South(West). Romance In Durango, Senor, Stuck in Mobile with Memphis Blues, and If You Ever Go to Houston from his most recent album all carry a certain feeling of a hot and moist mystery with them. But in all of his Southern songs, Brownsville Girl is the most perplexing and addictive. It is a 11 minute southern saga, a real jewel out of what some call the worst album in Dylan's discography. It is a mix of three different stories: a Gregory Peck western, the story of the narrator's old love affair with a modern day Bonnie, a.k.a the Brownsville Girl, and the road story of the narrator and his current love. The stories mix seamlessly in this lovely song, in which characters of the ...

Bob Dylan has this great radio show called Theme Time Radio Hour. Every week he chooses a theme,such as Coffee, Devil, Trains, and plays a wide collection of songs about the theme. Interested can download almost all the episodes from the following website ( link to the website ). I was listening to the Weather episode the other day. He played De Niro's famous "Someday a real rain will come and wash away this scum" sample from Taxi Driver. Apparently Dylan likes this movie. So I googled De Niro and Dylan, and here is what I found: Brad Elderman ( link to his website ) took this photo in 1976 in a New York City backstage, where Dylan called the young and new actor to meet him in person. Apparently he tried a lot to get it back. I am happy he didn't get his way. Then I came across a similar picture in the Galatasaray blog I follow Kalendar Libero( link to the blog ): When Queen met the God. This picture of Maradona with Queen is from Queen's epic 81 South Am...

[SPOILER ALERT] It is a nice coincidence that I watched this good movie around the same time I discovered this great song. I really wanna watch the movie once again with this song in my head. Of course the longer version found in Tell Tale Signs. A Series of Dreams Bob Dylan I was thinking of a series of dreams Where nothing comes up to the top Everything stays down where it’s wounded And comes to a permanent stop Wasn’t thinking of anything specific Like in a dream, where someone wakes up and screams Nothing too very scientific Just thinking of a series of dreams Thinking of a series of dreams Where the middle and the botton drop out And youre walking out of the darkness Into the shadows of doubt Wasn't going to any great trouble You believe in its whatever it seems Nothing to heavy to burst the buble Just thinking of a series of derams Thinking of a series of dreams Where time and tempo drag Suddenly the gate is thrown open And you're left there, h...

I guess I won't be wrong if I say that Bob Dylan's artistic output is perhaps one of the largest in the contemporary music history. Thus one shouldn't be surprised to find interesting Dylan selections such as "Favorite Dylan Songs Starting with C" in the Internet. His website ( link to the website ), which has an incredible list of his songs, might give you an idea of about the sheer volume of his output. So from time to time I discover new favorites out of this collection. The song Series of Dreams is a voyage through well you know what, in which Dylan has no intention of telling anything specific, but just wants to paint the walls of a long and winding cave with the images. This beautiful song did not make it to any albums. I first heard it on his Greatest Hits collection a month or so ago, and was struck by it. Recently I came across an alternate version in his latest Bootleg Series Releases Tell Tale Signs. I have to say the alternate version is even be...

A retired car mechanic married to the daughter of the last Aztec king, who then gave birth to an ill-tempered Russian Cossack, who ran away from the army of Napoleon on the way to Mozambique after falling in love with a Turkish nomads daughter in Agri. Their son was arrested in the Parisian student uprisings, for writing an obscene poem to the most beautiful French girl alive, and deported to Mobile, Alabama on a slave ship captained by a certain Colombus, who's name was not Colombus. After finding out that his father was not the Russian Cossack, but a communist in the name Woody Woodpecker, the son ran away from his family ranch in the northern woods, to the circus on the mouth of Hudson, to portray himself as a lonely lunatic with a message from a god, or some gods, whose name or names he couldn't remember. It might have been one of the Aztec gods, or some jealous one from the land of Galilee. Today its the birthday of this guy who is nobody, but everybody. Happy Birthday S...

At the core of evolution lies the natural selection, which is an algorithm more than anything. There are many units that have different properties, which are distributed randomly in the beginning. All of them get to reproduce themselves, albeit with an efficiency that is related with the suitability of their inherited properties to the environment in which they are reproducing. It's all that simple. I'd like to share two possible applications of this algorithm in two widely separated, yet very interesting fields. Quantum Darwinism : It is a mystery, why the infinite number of ways a quantum states that a particle can be in manifests itself as a single classical state. In plain words, why don't we see two versions of ourselves in the mirror - until we look at the mirror, but that's another exciting story -, where as this may be the case for photons or atoms. One possible solution to this question invokes the natural selection algorithm a la Darwin. They postulate that th...

[33] DYLAN , Bob. Blonde on blonde, record album produced by Bob Johnston, Columbia Records, New York, March 1966, Columbia C2S 841. Anyone who touched computer science territory knows Donald Knuth. In addition to being a founder of Complexity theory, he is also the author of the popular -even ubiquitous- Tex academic typesetting environment. He is also known for his professional humour. His paper on the use of once popular "go to" statements opens up with three quotations. One is a title of one of my favourite Dylan songs. "You will go your way, I'll go mine." This is by far the coolest citation I've read in a scientific paper.

12 Haziran 1963 günü arabasindan inip evine dogru yurumek isteyen Amerikali Ayrimcilik karsiti aktivist Medgar Evers tam kafasinin arkasindan vurulur. Missisipi'nin ilk siyah hukuk ogrencisi Evers'i Ku Klux Klan üyesi Byron De La Beckwith vurmustur. Beckwith birkac gün sonra yakalanir. Ancak tamamen beyazlardan olusan juri bir karara varamaz. Beckwith'in ceza almasi tam 31 yil ve 3 mahkeme süreci sürer. 22 yasindaki Bob Dylan ayni yil "Only a pawn in their game" - "Oyunlarinda sadece bir piyon" adli sarkiyi yazar. Hrant Dink'in katlinin yildönümünda bu sarkiyi günümüz Türkiye'sine uyarlamak istiyorum. Dusuncelerimi daha güzen anlatan bir yazi bulamadim. "Oyunlarinda Bir Piyon Bir mermi doktu Hrant Dink'in kanini, kalabaligin arasindan gelen, Bir parmak cekti tetigi, kendi adina, Bir kabza saklandi kalabaligin arasina, Bir el cakti kivilcimi, Bir Adam'in beynine dogru, Iki goz aldi nisani, Ama suclayamaz kimse onu, Cunku oyunlarinda,...

Reminds me of my love and that lovely Dylan song: On a night like this I can't get any sleep, The air is so cold outside And the snow's so deep. Build a fire, throw on logs And listen to it hiss And let it burn, burn, burn, burn On a night like this. Let the four winds blow Around this old cabin door, If I'm not too far off I think we did this once before. There's more frost on the window glass With each new tender kiss, But it sure feels right On a night like this.

"We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it." Bob Dylan - Visions of Johanna "Forget your perfect offering, There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in. " Leonard Cohen - The Anthem "And nothing's forever not even five minutes When you're headed for the finish line" Lou Reed - Finish Line "Savaslar birbirine benzer, Kazanan olmaz, Kazandigini sanma, Kaybettiklerine bak biraz" "All wars are alike, There is no victor, Don't think you've won, On your losses should you ponder. " Bülent Ortacgil - Biraz Umut Ver "Ölümle yasami ayiran o cizgi, Siyahla beyazi ayiramaz ki" "That line separating death and life, Cannot separate black and white." Besiktas Supporters - Football Chant

The Rolling Stones review read "What is this shit?" after Dylan released a hard to understand and listen to album in 1970 titled "Self Portrait." After 2 successful -perhaps the most successful in Rock History- Trilogies he was bored of the attention and the meaning people were putting to his songs. The album was a joke more than anything. After what might be called his new millenium trilogy - Time Out Of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Time- and a very "pop" Together Through Life, Dylan pulled another Self Portrait at us. His new album is called Christmas at Heart and features the voice of generations sing songs of generations, the Christmas songs. All the artists' royalties are going to World Food Programme, helping the organization that feeds hungry children around the globe. My personal favorite from the album is the first single, with this delightful video which has Dylan in a wig, dancing, drinking and singing:

The Boy and The Girl fall in love. The Girl leaves the boy. The Boy is angry, and dreams of the Tirl suffering to ease his pain. An archetypal love story, which found its way into the repertoire of many singer/song-writers. Three of my favorites' approach to the story shows a lot about their character. First, the Boss. Bruce Springsteen's 1980 album River contains one of his best songs Point Blank. The hero sees his old lover on the streets and she doesn't say hi. The boss writes her a song how she is becoming just another lost soul of the society. He is sad for her, and sings her one the best lines in pop music history describing the sad nature of human condition: "Do you still say your prayers little darlin' do you go to bed at night Prayin' that tomorrow, everything will be alright But tomorrow's fall in number in number one by one You wake up and you're dying you don't even know what from" Lou Reed on the other side is certain that Sally ...

I have to say I may have watched the movie with a little bit bias. Intro scene with the original "Times Are A'Changing"? Acoustic, and without cutting it? I am sure all the the movie had a head start with all the Dylan fans. The movie is worth watching even just for the soundtrack. The list speaks for itself: Simon and Garfunkel, Philip Glass, and Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, and a Bob Dylan (an original and a cover). The story is from the cult comic series Watchmen, by Alan Moore, who also wrote V for Vendetta. The director is Zack Snyder, who is the director of 300, which I loved. His style matches even more to the alternative history setting of 1980s. The tone and the depth of the issues it discusses was very satisfying. I've watched the theatrical version, but loved it so much, that I wanna watch the director's cut as well. !!!SPOILER ALERT!!! Here is a taste of my favorite character in the movie, the Rorschach: Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he...

Judas, the accountant of Jesus and the apostles, drawn by Nikolai Ge. Borges wrote 3 variations on Judas and the problem of evil. In one of them, he was the real saviour, and not Jesus. Dylan wrote this: Why didn't Jesus forgive Judas, and made his bowels explode in a field?