Bob Dylan is a Genius

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Bob Dylan - Infidels

Bob Dylan’s “Infidels” (1983)

One of my favorite Bob Dylan songs is “Sweetheart Like You” from his Infidels album. When I first heard it I was taken aback by the words, how Dylan was able to weave such a poignant story with cinematic qualities. That’s why there will be no songwriter in our time quite as good as Bob Dylan.

When I listen to this song I picture a seedy bar, almost empty and a sweet little old lady who cleans up after the drunks.  I couldn’t have imagined these scenes in my mind without Dylan’s words. Dylan creates these visions for us lyrically.

It was Bob Dylan who wrote “Make You Feel My Love“,  not Adele.  Adele is a great singer and songwriter in her own right, but you have to hand it to her for admiring greatness like that.

Here are a few lines from “Sweetheart Like You” by Bob Dylan.

We’ll the pressure’s down, the boss ain’t here, he gone north for a while.
They say that vanity got the best of him, but he sure left here in style.

By the way that’s a cute hat, and that smile’s so hard to resist. What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?

You know I once knew a woman who looked like you, she wanted a whole man, not just a half. She used to call me sweet daddy when I was only a child, you kind of remind me of her when you laugh.

In order to deal in this game, gotta make a queen disappear, it’s done with the flick of a wrist. What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?”

Take a listen and tell me what you think, does this song move you in the same way?

 

 

Aldershot Turning Into a Ghost Town

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Aldershot Wellington Statue

I grew up in Aldershot, am proud to say that’s where I hail from. Aldershot used to be the home of the Army. Wellington settled the troops there after Waterloo. Aldershot was a Historic Military Town in the truest sense.

This weekend I have been participating in a sentimental trip down memory lane on Facebook in a group setup by Keith Bean, an Aldershot local. We have been remembering our teachers, the football team’s struggles, the trouble we used to get into, and how far away from Aldershot many of us now live.  Some of us moved to other parts of England, some of us ended up down under in Australia and others like myself are in America.

Even though I am half way around the world in glorious, afluent Orange County, I still care about the place I grew up. I really wish Aldershot could rise like a phoenix from the ashes and become a thriving metropolis.

Here’s a little video taken inside Aldershot’s Wellington Centre mall, the main mall in the town center. When I visited the town after 25 years back in 2008 it looked the same, and this video made a year ago November 12th confirms the place is a ghost town. It makes me sad to see the place I grew up going through such hard times.

Watch Video

When the Army left, it blasted a gaping hole into the infrastructure which had kept the town going for many years. The town had been in general decline for decades, but the Army leaving was the final nail in the coffin.

Here’s a two-part documentary I filmed back in 2008 in Aldershot.

Part 2

I hope there is some master plan that we don’t all know about which includes a solution which will turn the situation around in Aldershot.

Hat’s off to Keith Bean for creating such a vibrant group.

On Old Pictures and The Shining

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Image:  instagram.com/skyzzle

Do you have a shoe box or old cigar box full of old photos?  I do. I like to pull it out every so often to glance at them.  None of the pictures are older than 30 years or so, I wish I had more of my grandparents and great grandparents.   My great grandfather helped to build the Titanic so they tell me. Would love to know if there are pictures of him floating around, would love to know what he looked like.

Photos help to link us to our past. They help to connect us to who we are, or who we were. When I look at old pictures of myself, I can’t believe how relatively normal I look, while remembering how insecure I always felt about how I looked. I don’t think there has ever been a time in my life where I have felt happy with my appearance.  Today I am happy. I can look in the mirror and accept that this is my 49 year old version. I try not to be so hard on myself, after all, we all get older and our bodies change, we lose our hair, the wrinkles come a creeping.

There’s a great scene at the very end of the film “The Shining.”  Music plays from the roaring twenties as the camera pans in on a large photograph of a New Years Eve party which took place at the Overlook hotel. The camera zooms right in on the main character, Jack Torrance, laughing, dressed in a tuxedo, having the time of his life.   Sometimes I wonder if there is a photo floating around of my great grandfather doing the same thing.

So, do you have a shoe box or cigar box full of old photos?  Send me a tweet so I can take a look.

 

Thanks to Apple Design, Partially Deaf Can Enjoy Music

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Options for Hearing Impaired are Excellent

Options for Hearing Impaired are Excellent

One of the things I find most frustrating about being deaf in one of my ears is the experience I have listening to music on headphones. For many years technology companies ignored this problem, thinking that everybody who had headphones could hear the music in both ears. On recordings made in the 60’s and 70’s it was quite common, due to track limitations, for essential parts of a song to be heard either on the left or the right. This is called panning. One of my favorite songs is  “Substitute” by The Who. The song opens with a strident guitar riff playing in the left channel, but because I’m deaf in my left ear all I usually get is a tickling sensation, the indication that sound is being pumped into my ear but indistinguishable. If I turn speakers on sure I can enjoy the song, but at work it’s next to impossible.

I recently purchased a new iPhone 5s from Apple, it now contains my entire music collection. This morning I was amazed to see how far along accessibility settings had come for the deaf and hard of hearing. They now include a setting for mono audio which will blend the sound from a stereo track into a mono track that can be heard in both earphones evenly. This has been an absolute godsend  for me because I can only year out of one ear. Since I discovered it this morning, I’ve been sitting here listening to all of my old 60’s and 70’s songs on the iPhone enjoying every riff, every chord as if I were listening on speakers. The engineers at Apple have clearly responded to their customers by building in these exciting features. I imagine many partially deaf people have written to Apple imploring them to do something and they responded brilliantly in this software release.

Thank you Apple for enabling me to enjoy my music.

 

Tis The Season of Discontent for Common Courtessy

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watch-where-you-are-going

I like to walk around the mall and listen to music during lunch. The other day when I was on my way back to work, I stepped off the curb where a large gray SUV was parked in front of the exit door. There was a BMW which had stopped in front of it by the curb. I glanced to my left and noticed the mall security car was approaching to get the cars out of the way when I felt a very hard thump on my right shoulder. It felt like someone had given me a hefty punch. I turned to my right and felt the back end of this large SUV pushing the entire right side of my body out of the way. I exclaimed Woah!! and took a look at the driver, it was a woman, nicely dressed with a sequined hat on. She didn’t even roll her window down or look at me, she was too busy maneuvering her SUV around the BMW.

At first it didn’t bother me, but the more I thought about it as I drove back to work, the angrier I got. I mean, this is supposed to be the holiday season when we walk the talk of good will toward our fellow man, and this woman didn’t give a hoot about almost knocking me to the ground. What if it had been a little kid, what if I was not almost past the back of her car? It could have ended much worse, but had it been me who had done this, I would have at least got out of my car to apologize.

Maybe its Orange County and the way the people around here act. Everyone is so busy and wrapped up in themselves, jumping from moment to moment missing the moment in the process.

Let’s be more careful out there. Let’s take better care of each other. When we hit people with our SUV’s, let’s take a second to apologize.