Warsaw In October

Warsaw in October 🍁🎃

Ukrainian Fashion Week "Витоки"

I have finally finished reading this overwhelmingly long but curious biography and I have to say that I'm a little disappointed by the fact, that not everything which I believe is important was mentioned there. I think the book tries to focus on personal life and some legal issues and does it sometimes a little bit too much. However, reading it was quite nostalgic to me. I reminded myself of many things from Dylan's life that I'd forgotten existed (I'm pretty sure Bob himself forgot most of this). Lots of them intertwine with his musical and art career. I re-listened to a lot of his albums in the process of reading, and genuinely fell in love with them all over again.

It has to be noted that Polish translator/interpreter did a great job mentioning really necessary and i interesting footnotes which author refuses to talk about for some reason. Despite the fact that Howard Sounes doesn't seem to be completely unbiased, I really like the fact that Bob Dylan wasn't depicted as a god-like superhuman, but rather a guy who tried a lot of stuff during his lifetime and often became entrapped in his own ideas, sometimes for better (like marrying folk to rock in the sixties) and sometimes for worse (like preaching religion he only got into because he was feeling really down in his religious albums). Either way, even after reading this huge piece of book, you still see Bob Dylan as quite a mythical figure, although more humane in a general sense.

When I finished the book, it left me thinking about mortality of people and about the daunting existence on the face of Earth. Bob Dylan was born in 1941, so basically by the end of the first half of previous century, during the WW2, the period of time that seems so distant from the century we live in. And, despite the fact that everything changes rapidly around him, he still continues to exist in his own capsule in which he can feel free to sing old Sinatra's songs or create 17-minute long meditation on Kennedy's death. This is just fascinating when you think about how many different things can one person experience during a single lifetime, and even choose or refuse to be influenced by those events.

Either way, I highly recommend reading this book to all the BD fans, especially the young ones. It's just an amazing reading for those who want to understand how the background of the previous generations influenced them to become whoever they appear to be now.

What can I say? Roll on Bob, roll on towards inevitable ❤️‍🩹

I'm reading this book right now:

It's BD's biography by Howard Sounes, and at that point where I am in this book the most amazing story so far is the one of how Albert Grossman tricked Bob Dylan into the worst contract ever. If I omit some details, the gist of the story can be described with this random dialogue I had with my significant other today (we were talking about actual food btw, don't get any ideas):

( BD > My Fiance > MF; AG > ME )

ME: Dude, can I borrow your sausage?

MF: No.

ME: Please?

MF: Ok, but please take my hotdog bun too. And cheese. And ketchup. Because I don't want to be left with hotdog ingredients but without an actual hotdog sausage.

ME: Sounds like we have a deal!

ME: *takes the sausage, and the bun, and the cheese, and the ketchup, and then eats his tortilla chips too, and then still feels hungry*

If our relationship was like the one of Dylan and Grossman, I would take him to the court in a few years because he didn't borrow me mustard to my hotdog and made me eat all of this bliss without mustard as if I was a heckin savage >:(

That's basically what happened in the book, I ain't lying.

** I've edited the post only to insert this photo of Albert Grossman, 1961 NYC, colourized

"Either you show me hondogs or you freak off" (c)

Zsigmond Vajda

Danilo Stojanović - The Cursed Asparagus, 2023

Spicnik, Slovenia

© Robert Bilos