Bob Dylan
Is Bob Dylan a poet, who didn’t know it?
What the Nobel Prize committee was saying by awarding Bob Dylan a nod for Literature
Please, English teachers: don’t assign Bob Dylan lyrics
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize is good news—unless it brings Bob into more classrooms as mere lyrics, divorced from his songs’ musical context
Good times that went sour
Robbie Robertson sings about his split with the Band on a new CD
What it sounds like
Michael Ignatieff addressed a rally of perhaps 1,200 this evening inside a hotel ballroom in downtown Ottawa. There were the requisite signs and thundersticks. Mr. Ignatieff was flanked by a dozen MPs and candidates, behind them the Liberal banner, three Canadian flags on either side. And amid all that, he quoted Bob Dylan.
‘Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music from Hank Snow to The Band,’ by Jason Schneider
One of the few Canadian music books that goes back as far as Hank Snow and Wilf Carter—and sheds new light on some of the more canonized mouldy oldies
Because the night
At a film festival, amid the stars and the hype and lurid glare of over-sponsored glamour, you live in hope that you’ll stumble across something thrilling, inspiring and wildly original that comes right out of the blue. Last night I saw exactly that. It wasn’t a film. And it wasn’t even officially part of the Toronto International Film Festival. It was a party celebrating a Patti Smith documentary that, due to a mysterious lapse in taste, had been excluded from the festival. Generally I find there’s not enough time to attend parties during TIFF. And whenever I do, I always seem to be at the wrong party, then get anxious reading breathless reports in the newspaper about about all the fabulousness I missed at the star-studded In Style soireé. But last night I got lucky. Joe Fresh, the Loblaws designer, was hosting the party at the Gardiner Museum with a tie-in to a non-TIFF screening of Patti Smith: Dream of Life. I went because I heard that Patti Smith was going be there, but had no idea she would perform. And no matter how many close encounters of the celebrity kind I missed at TIFF, I now feel I can safely claim that I lucked into the best party of the festival.
Photo Gallery: Toronto Film Festival 2007
The stars just seem to shine brighter north of the border. Exclusive pictures of celebrities on the red carpet and in their own habitat (aka hotel rooms) at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Check out Matt Damon, Jennifer Garner, George Clooney and Brad Pitt — erm, with an itchy nose.