Musicians, Art, and the Odd Political News Tidbit

Reel 163, by Louis Armstrong

Armstrong made generous use of various kinds of adhesive tape not only to attach images to each box but also to laminate, frame, or highlight them. The works are untitled and undated, but he was making them as early as the 1950s; in a letter from 1953 he wrote, “Well, you know, my hobbie (one of them anyway) is using a lot of scotch tape . . . My hobbie is to pick out the different things during what I read and piece them together and [make] a little story of my own.”

–The Paris Review, via marathonpacks

Woman in Red Lion Pub, by Bob Dylan

Today he [Dylan] expresses similar impatience with the critics who have read into his art a variety of underlying feelings – anonymity, transience, rootlessness, even loneliness. Reaching again for the Halcyon book. “Let’s have a look, shall we [the pages fall open at Woman in Red Lion Pub, her dress executed in a vivid yellow]? Do you see loneliness in that? Or that [Six Women]? I don’t. And this one’s just a pastoral scene [Sunday Afternoon]. What’s rootless, transient and lonely about that? It’s a mystery why anybody would say or think such a thing.”

And later, in more topical news, Dylan endorses Obama (!!):

“Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval,” he says. “Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up…Barack Obama. He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.” He offers a parting handshake. “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future,” he notes as the door closes between us.

–Time Online, via Fancy