Bob Dylan Show Last Night

The first concert which I ever went to was Bob Dylan, and last night, after years of wanting to, I got to see him again. However much I dislike the whole notion of the new arena in town, I really felt that this was not a matter of choice. Compulsion reigned.

The crowd was mixed but as I expected alot of middle-aged former hippies filled the ranks. I was situated near, on my left some really friendly and chatty longhairs who were, as it turned out, serious potheads and to my right in the row in front of me a John Belushi figure and his two buddies who arrived drunk and rowdy (borderline annoying but always amusing enough to negate this quality to a degree ) . The Belushi guy had an envelope full of joints on him.

The showed was scheduled for 8:00 pm and got going at maybe 8:17. When the band first walked on the stage I fixated on the bass player whom I mistook for Dylan. It was the black hat. Dylan, as I soon figured out, was the guy at stage right at the keyboard (where he was to stay for most of the night except for during his harmonica playing stints). He was wearing a cool white hat and a black suit which embodied, in a very subtle way though, his recent country man sensibility.

Victoria, British Columbia
Save-On Foods Centre
July 17, 2005

1. Maggie's Farm
2. Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You
3. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
4. Lay, Lady, Lay
5. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)
6. Blind Willie McTell
7. Watching The River Flow
8. Ballad Of A Thin Man
9. Highway 61 Revisited
10. New Morning
11. Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
12. Positively 4th Street
13. God Knows
14. Summer Days
    
    encore
15. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
16. All Along The Watchtower

I tried not to inhale too much second-hand smoke while I felt my eyes drying out a bit. The music first really hit me during Lay, Lady, Lay and I don't blame any possible contact high that I may have been experiencing. I won't bother even trying to explain what it was about this song or the other songs that I particularly enjoyed (namely Blind Willie McTell and the two encore songs. Damn it they really nailed All Along the Watchtower. The band was smokin') because I just spent a few minutes attempting this and gave up. His music and his persona are full of all these intangibles which I can't get my vocabulary around right now. I spent alot of time thinking about how weird it would be to have thousands of fans completely obsessed with you and every little aspect of your music. He is intelligent enough that I imagine he would think that the whole thing is silly or stupid or something. But he plays on anyway. He must be doing pretty well for himself off of these freaks (and I am one of them at times I'll admit but I do try to keep it reasonable). I think that he might find it disturbing or unsettling or whatever anyways.

The new arena didn't collapse on our heads. The security guards had succes in taming the crowds until the encore when nobody listened anymore. And shit, my buddies and I had great seats!

AMONG WHALES

On the recommendation of my new girlfriend K. I am now reding this excellent book, Among Whales , by Roger Payne. I would like to dig up a quote about how amniotic fluid in mammals is of the same constituency as the sea, where scientists figure life first emerged from. How humbling that each of us mammals emerges into life the same way. Whales, awesomely enough, emerge from the world of amniotic fluid into the sea itself which is much like an endless world of the same stuff.

Here is another quote from Payne's book which I find both marvellous and terrifying, from a passage in which he is describing the plants of Patagonia (which are some real tough customers):

There is even one species of grass (called "flecha" or arrow grass) which has a particularly cruel mechanism for dispersing its seeds. Each seed is tipped with an exquisitely sharp and multiply barbed point. When the seed gets picked up in a sheep's wool, every motion by the sheep causes adjacent wool fibers to slide back and forth a tiny bit along each other's length. This motion against the barbs on the arrow grass seeds moves the barb deeper into the pile of the fleece. When a sharp-tipped seed reaches the sheep's skin, it penetrates both skin and underlying body wall musculature. Once inside the sheep's body cavity, it penetrates the internal organs, eventually killing it - the sheep's decomposing body suffocating competing vegetation beneath it and also providing, I suppose, an excellent bed of fertilizer for the next generation of arrow grass.

Among Whales p.72