Another Night of Poetry and Poses.

“At the Lincoln Center talk, the Coens compared their movie to “Margot at the Wedding” (Noah Baumbach was on stage with them) suggesting that, like that film, their new work will offer natural dialogue and a feeling of being dropped into the middle of a world. They also said they expected the film to contain musical performances.“

As breaking over the weekend, the Coens’ next project may well be a look at the sixties folk scene in Greenwich Village, based on the life of Dave Von Ronk — above, with Dylan and Suze Rotolo — and his memoirs, The Mayor of McDougal Street. He shouldn’t overpower the story, but I do hope Jack Rollins get his due.

The Biggest Wheel of Industry.

“Grabbing a microphone and cane while donning a black top hat, the evening’s ringleader, Napoleon Dynamite, announces to the audience: ‘We’ll perform songs about love! Songs about sex! Songs about death and songs about dancing! But not necessarily in that order.’“

Notify your next-of-kin: This wheel will explode! Elvis Costello and the Imposter’s Spinning Wheel Tour was in the area this week, and I got the chance to catch my third Elvis show. Here’s the setlist, as half-determined by random spins of Elvis’s big carnival wheel:

Encore 1 (acoustic): A Slow Drag With Josephine | Jimmie Standing in the Rain | Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Encore 2: Spin 9: Greenshirt/(Angels Want to Wear My) Red Shoes/Purple Rain | Honey Are You Straight Or Are You Blind? | What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?

So, as you can see, over thirty songs in there, and Elvis was in his usual top form. I could see “the wheel of songs” being more fun in theory than in practice, if luck hadn’t been such a lady to those of us at Wolf Trap — Granted no “Almost Blue,” “Man Out of Time,” or “Shipbuilding,” but any night you hear Elvis sing “Beyond Belief, “Indoor Fireworks,” “Alison,” “So Like Candy,” and especially “I Want You” (chosen by a contestant on a pick-any-song-you-want joker spin, and bless her for it) is a good night. If the wheel rolls ’round your way, definitely think about going. (Pic via here.)

The Man in the Long Black Coat.

“I love to hear a song that changes everything. That’s the reason I’m in a band: David Bowie’s “Heroes,” Arcade Fire’s ‘Rebellion (Lies),’ Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart,’ Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing,’ Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power.’ But at the top of this dysfunctional family tree sits the king of spitting fire himself, the juggler of beauty and truth, our own Willy Shakespeare in a polka-dot shirt. It’s why every songwriter after him carries his baggage and why this lowly Irish bard would proudly carry his luggage. Any day.“

As part of Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday celebration in the pages of Rolling Stone — the actual date is May 24th — Bono, as one of many artists picking their favorite Dylan songs, sings the praises of the magazine’s namesake. Also of note: Sinead O’Connor on “Idiot Wind”: “The way he delivers the words is fantastic. This voice just snarling, not bothering to hide anything. The rest of us are all busy trying to be nice people, when actually we’re f**king bastards underneath it all – whereas he was quite comfortable letting the bastard hang out. He was way ahead of his time on that. The only people getting close to him now are rappers.“

And Rolling Stone isn’t alone with the encomiums: See also AARP Magazine’s 70th birthday tribute, which includes comment from Maya Angelou, Bill Bradley, Michael Bloomberg, Paul Shaffer, Bruce Dern, and a host of others. For example, here’s Nick Cave:

“I was sitting, on my own, in a bar, in New York — it was the first time I’d ever been to that city — and I went over to the jukebox to have a look at what was on offer. I saw a song, ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ by Bob Dylan, and thought that that was a great title for a song, so I put it on, and that, as they say, was that. I was knocked down. What I heard seemed so simple, yet so full of ideas — chilling, funny, absurd, perverse, audacious, but heartfelt and mind-bendingly beautiful. I felt like grabbing the guy next to me and saying, ‘Did you hear that song?’ I felt like running out on the street and waving my arms around and yelling, ‘Hey! Has anyone ever heard of Bob Dylan?’ It was like I’d missed the moon landing or something.

So, I started a slow trawl backwards, down the years, through the records, and it was like stepping into Aladdin’s Cave — there it was, oceans of the stuff — all the terrible love and beauty you could ever want to hear.“

She once was a true love of mine.

“[S]he read modern poetry, studied art and drawing, and immersed herself in Bertolt Brecht and other avant-garde playwrights. When they became a couple, Rotolo introduced Dylan to these worlds. Close friends noticed the change: ‘You could see the influence she had on him,’ said Sylvia Tyson of Ian & Sylvia. ‘This is a girl who was marching to integrate local schools when she was 15.‘”

Suze Rotolo, author, activist, and Dylan muse, 1943-2011. “‘A Freewheelin’ Time’ is one of the first histories of the folk music years written from a woman’s perspective…it goes beyond gossip to ask a pointed question: How did it feel? Rotolo writes the era mattered because ‘we all had something to say, not something to sell.’“

Fragments of Legacy Code.

“I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day, I got in.” The Daft Punk guys release snippets of their upcoming Tron: Legacy score. I have a feeling there’s no way this film can live up to the hype, but these eleven minutes sound pretty darned good.

Portrait of a Mash-Up.

Like mash-ups? Like graphs? The new Girl Talk album, All Day, gets broken down into its constituent samples in a very handy visual format. Whatever the intellectual property consequences, this definitely puts me in a mood for DJ Hero 2.

Tales of Yankee Power.

What better way to celebrate eleven years of GitM than a ninth cuppa Bob (and my first in three years)? (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) The freewheeling Bob Dylan continued his never-ending tour Saturday night at George Washington University, and while the haters are hatin’, I knew what I was getting into — Dylan croaking his way through rockabilly versions of his classics — and had a grand ole time. Here’s the setlist:

Encore: Jolene | Like A Rolling Stone

So, if you’re keeping score, that’s a full five tracks from 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited. For me, the highlights of the evening were Ballad of a Thin Man, from that album, and especially Senor, from 1978’s Street Legal — one of my top 10 favorite Dylan songs (and one I missed during Bob’s 2005 Beacon stand.)

As far as the new stuff goes, I’d rather have heard any other Time Out of Mind track over “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” (well, except “Make You Feel My Love“), and “Ain’t Talkin’,'” off of 2006’s Modern Times sounds to me like Dylan trying a bit too hard to be Dylanesque. That being said, “High Water (for Charley Patton)“, off of 2001’s “Love and Theft (is that album really a decade old now?) sounded as lean, mean, and vital as I’d ever heard it. It’s rough out there, high water everywhere…but it’s good to know Bob’s still keep on keepin’ on regardless.

National / Collapse.

“I’m very proud of this record. I think it may be the best record I’ve made in terms of the latter part of my career. Where it goes and what it means to who I am? I will carry on for as long as I feel I want to do this.” Vanity Fair catches up with Elvis Costello on the eve of a new album, National Ransom. “I can’t put up with bad gigs or wasted opportunities. It has to count, because there’s somewhere I’d rather actually be.“

And, speaking of new albums, R.E.M. has named their upcoming 15th one: Collapse Into Now, due out this Spring. As some who’s come to prefer Around the Sun over Accelerate, here’s hoping it’s more like the former.

DJ Heroes.

“Change the scheme, alter the mood! Electrify the boys and girls, if you would be so kind!” As Castor’s request — that’s the Michael Sheen Jemaine-Bowie guy, apparently — Daft Punk unleash a new TRON: Legacy video upon the masses. The more I see of this, the goofier it looks…but, hey, I’ll be there opening night fo’ sho’.

You Will Start Out Standing.

“Since then, Dylan has changed, nearly died, been reborn, gone electric, gone Christian, and gone back to his roots. But this recording captures him before all of that has happened, at age 22, eager, in a hurry, and alone in a tiny room on 51st Street in Manhattan.“

Slate columnist and Dylanologist John Dickerson spends some time with The Witmark Demos. “There are secret songs that would never be published and storytelling of a kind he later abandoned. We get to sit in on the sessions where his songwriting evolved, as he takes on the subjects of love, death, and war first from one angle and then another. And some of the songs are beautiful.“