User talk:Warchef

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[edit] Thanks

Warchef: thanks for additions to Bob Dylan. You seem to know quite a lot. regards Mick gold 11:28, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Curb Your Enthusiasm critical response

Why the hell should my opinion not be allowed on Curb wiki when there is a subjective referenced statement on the site under 'Critical response'?Stupid system. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tomheppy100 (talk • contribs) 02:29, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dylan quotes

Hi Warchef. I notice you've added a Neil Young quote (in parenthesis). And you've suggested doing the same for the rest of the list. I have put into this list various references, for examples Andrew Motion's remarkable essay on Dylan, Springsteen's great compliment to Dylan, when inducting him into Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, David Bowie's 'Song To Dylan'. But I have done it via footnotes. If we put these direct quotes (in parenthesis) after each name, doesn't it all become rather unwieldy? best wishes Mick gold 15:15, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Now I loook at Dylan article again, you seem to have done something weird to the footnotes. The Springsteen ref has vanished, and all the other footnotes have become garbled. I shall see if I can fix! Mick gold 15:22, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Many thanks for fixing! & pax vobiscum :) Mick gold 16:00, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Disputed fair use rationale for Image:The Golden Age Bobby Conn.jpg

Thanks for uploading Image:The Golden Age Bobby Conn.jpg. However, there is a concern that the rationale you have provided for using this image under "fair use" may be invalid. Please read the instructions at Wikipedia:Non-free content carefully, then go to the image description page and clarify why you think the image qualifies for fair use. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If it is determined that the image does not qualify under fair use, it will be deleted within a couple of days according to our criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thank you.BetacommandBot 21:52, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Imaginationland‎ Merge

User:Sceptre has started to unilaterally merge the episodes together, not waiting until the poll has closed. As there is a 3:1 opinion out there that this should not occur and I do not wish to break the 3R rule I was wondering if you could help me with reverting his edits? Thanks. -- UKPhoenix79 23:53, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Album galleries

Hi mate, sorry about the revert to the album gallery on the Gruff Rhys article. I'd created a few myself but someone's going through getting rid of the all - apparently it's ok to use album covers to illustrate the article on the the actual album because it's the "primary means of identification" but, because they're not free, they can't be used for purely illustrative purposes. Someone's also going through deleting album covers that don't have a specific rationale for each article they're used on which I take it you've noticed from the Disputed use comment for the Bobby Conn album cover. Cavie78 20:14, 10 November 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Disputed fair use rationale for Image:Rise Up!.jpg

Thanks for uploading Image:Rise Up!.jpg. However, there is a concern that the rationale you have provided for using this image under "fair use" may be invalid. Please read the instructions at Wikipedia:Non-free content carefully, then go to the image description page and clarify why you think the image qualifies for fair use. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If it is determined that the image does not qualify under fair use, it will be deleted within a couple of days according to our criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thank you.BetacommandBot (talk) 21:48, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Finnegan's Wake

I wrote the "explication" of the passage in the Wake that you deleted. It was meant as a guide for a new reader to extracting the imagery in the sentence, which someone pegged as obscure, but which was the first sentence in the book that I found particularly moving. There are no references becuase it is an obvious reading which only gets at the literal meaning, not at any allusions. I put it in to counter the absurd claim that the sentence is unreasonably obscure.

The passage reads "O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists, but (O my shining stars and body) how hath fanespanned the skysign of soft advertisement" The explanations I gave were:

  1. "here here" is heard as "hear hear" and also as a location
  2. sprowled is sprawled/prowled.
  3. duskt is dusk/dust.
  4. that dust is an allusion to "dust to dust".
  5. fornicationists are connected to dust/dusk through the forshadowing of night implicit in dusk and the forshadowing of death implicit in dust.
  6. That "O my shining stars and body" is a poetic sentiment of the internal reality of a dream.
  7. Fanespanned is "sacred spanning", originating in "fane".
  8. that the skysign of soft advertisement references the stars once again.
  9. That "hoth" and "hath" are symmetrically placed
  10. that "sprowled" and "fanespanned" have opposite sentiments, sprowled is dark and fanespanned light.

I don't believe that any of these things are particularly controvertial, and if they are, just add the alternate readings. Most of these interpretations are in the Finnigan's Wiki, for example. The only purpose of the paragraph was to explain the literal content of the sentence, not to bring out any allusions, which don't interest me very much.

In my opinion, the difficult part of reading the wake is not any of the allusions, which are mostly obvious and not so illuminating, but following the imagery and narrative. Reconstructing the images is made easier by an explicated sentence. It would have been nice if you would have produced a gloss to replace the one you deleted instead of just deleting.Likebox (talk) 08:00, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

(respond to comments on my user page, which I will move to my talk page) I see your point about the arbitrariness, but that was not my doing--- the person who wrote the previous version put the sentence up as a particularly galling example of obscurity. Perhaps the whole part beginning with "many find the language confounding" including the sentence should be deleted?Likebox (talk) 20:04, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
I also see your point about the subject of the sentence being obscure, but I feel that I understand it nevertheless, despite the screwy syntax. I agree with your changes for the most part, I just don't want a new reader to feel that the Wake is hopelessly impenetrable. I felt that way for many years, and I missed out on the unique experience it provides. That's why I put a gloss in. Maybe it doesn't belong, I don't know. Good luck, and happy holidays!Likebox (talk) 20:07, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
You got me thinking about the subject of that sentence. I tend to think its a form of "he" or "He", the dreamer "he" or a divine "He", a blend of an individual sleeping mind with a universal mind, a mind that comprises both sentiments traditionally considered high and those traditionally considered low. I mean, I tend to read it now something like "here here how He/he hath sprowled ...(...body) how He/he hath fanespanned ...".Likebox (talk) 21:12, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Protest song

Thanks for your kind words. I'm afraid I'm busy with work over the christmas/new year period, but I shall think about what I might contribute. I've always been fascinated by Dylan because of the way his work evaded the normal limits of protest songs. In Chronicles, he writes about how he was first turned on by Brecht/Weill's Pirate Jenny, which obviously deals with injustice, and yet it isn't really a protest song. When I first heard Dylan in 1964, I had read in the papers that he wrote 'protest songs' yet the more I listened to Blowin' In The Wind, the less I could hear any protest. The ambiguous chorus line seems to say: either the answer is so obvious it's in your face; or the answer is as elusive and as impossible to grasp as the wind. And the issues the song addresses - wars, people oppressing people - are hardly unique to the 20th century. The song sounded to me more like a series of Biblical parables. The other thing I found intriguing about Dylan's work in the 1960s, is that you can search his entire song catalogue and you won't find the word Vietnam once. I think that's extraordinary when you think how Vietnam dominated the politics and the protests of that time. Think of Phil Ochs and Country Joe MacDonald. Obviously, Dylan knew at some deep level that the word Vietnam would date a song very quickly. My personal hunch is that Vietnam is embedded in John Wesley Harding, and in Senor, but that hardly makes them protest material. In Rolling Stone (17 May 2007) Jann Wenner asked Dylan if America was a force for good in the world today. And Dylan replied, "Human nature hasn't really changed in 3,000 years. Maybe the obstacles and the daily customs have changed, but human nature hasn't changed. It cannot change. It's not made to change." That kind of thinking sheds an interesting light on the whole concept of Protest songs. best wishes & a very merry christmas! Mick gold (talk) 15:00, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi warchef, many thanks for your kind words. I’ve been very busy so haven’t had time to reply. Looking back on what I wrote above, I guess what I’m trying to say is: for me the significant thing about Dylan was that in the 1960s he was widely perceived to be part of a ‘protest’ movement. But looking back today, 40 years later, his work does not fit into that category. I mentioned how in 1964 all the papers told me ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ was a protest song. Does anybody hear it that way today? On the cover of Freewheelin’ the notes explained how Dylan wrote ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ during the Cuban missile crisis, and he believed he would not have enough time to finish the song. So each line is the beginning of a new song. But today we know that Dylan sang the song more than a month before JFK’s TV address to the nation (October 22, 1962) initiated the Cuban missile crisis for most Americans. Who thinks of the Cuban misssile crisis when they hear it today? They are more likely to hear it as a song about ecological catastrophe, a warning about a poisoned planet. Hence its use over TV footage of Katrina. Hence the new version at Zaragoza about clean water.
When I try to think of which Dylan song sounds like a protest song today, I’m left with ‘Who Killed Davey Moore?’. It clearly names an injustice, and it fingers 5 or six people or groups as the guilty parties. But today it sounds like one of Dylan’s least interesting songs because it sounds limited. ‘Only A Pawn In their Game’ begins as though addressing an injustice (the murder of Medger Evers, a shocking event at the time) but ends by enacting a whole social process behind the injustice. Similarly ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’. (In a more abstract way, the same is true of ‘Percy’s Song’ which I think is very beautiful. At the beginning, it sounds as though Dylan is trying to right a wrong that was done to a friend, but by the end, it has become a song about how one comes to terms with injustice that cannot be righted.)
So I guess all I’m trying to say is that if I were writing about Dylan’s ‘protest’ phase I would say that he was perceived as part of this ‘protest movement’ in 1962 & 1963, but today he seems to have been addressing much wider issues all along, and thinking about themes of universality, while appearing to be inspired by newspaper headlines of the day. And by 1964, I think he’d left it all behind, and had decided that the injustices and the evil he was combating were things that could be found in Shakespeare and Dante and the Book of Exodus, and would not be resolved by protest marches, hence his aversion to the label of ‘protest music’. (‘I’m not There’ deals with this theme amusingly, I think.)
In the article Protest song I think ‘Masters of War’ is described as a song about the Vietnam War. But ‘Masters of War’ was written at beginning of 1963 (January or February) and no young person in February 1963 was protesting about US involvement in Vietnam. I think there were only a few hundred Green Berets in South Vietnam at the time. In July 1964, 5000 additional US troops were sent to Vietnam, bringing total troop levels to 21,000. The song came to seem like a comment on Vietnam in 1965 – when US planes bombed North Vietnam for the first time: “you that build the death planes”. Operation Rolling Thunder commenced March 2, 1965, another Dylan connection. Dylan has said ‘Masters of War’ was about the issues that Eisenhower talked about in his farewell address to the nation in 1960 when he spoke of the ‘military-industrial complex’. But because of the world we live in, when Dylan sang a particularly venomous version of that song at the Grammies in February 1991, as the first Gulf War got going, it sounded like it had been written for that moment. (In the same way, when Dylan toured the US in 1974, as the investigations into Watergate gathered momentum and looked increasingly likely to bring Nixon down, the line "but even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” sounded like it had been written for that moment.
I would certainly agree with your point that Dylan's songs were adapted & appropriated by the 'movement', rather than written for them. I wish I had more hours in the day to contribute to Protest song “But at my back I oft times hear time’s wingéd chariot drawing near”. Best wishes Mick gold (talk) 10:31, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Warchef, a post script. I’m sorry my last comment was rather rambling and did not focus on the 4 points you left on my Talk page:

  • his performance at the march on washington with baez, amid king et al. does place him firmly in the thick of things
Yes but even by August 1963, Dylan was less than 100% behind the idea that such huge mass demonstrations achieved anything. Scaduto (p. 151) has the interesting quote at the end of the March on Washington: “Think they’re listening?” Dylan asked, glancing towards the Capitol. “No, they ain’t listening at all.”
  • his relationship with Seeger & Guthrie, and the huge influence they had on his art, places him very firmly in the American protest-folk tradition of the early 20th century, however little these influences might have manifested themselves directly in his lyrics (always felt Dylan belongs much more to this tradition than to that of his contemporaries; that he agreed with the former's emphasis on realistic social injustices rather than the latter's abstract notions of "love and peace", but that's always open to debate)
Agree that Dylan did not express any vague sentiments about love & peace. Pete Seeger’s enthusiasm for topical song-writing was obviously a huge catalyst for Dylan in 1962. ‘The Death of Emmett Till’ and ‘Who Killed Davey Moore?’ fitted the topical agenda. This phase did not last longer than a year.
  • it's probably more true to say that his songs were adopted by the movement rather than being written for it (however, one or two exceptions such as "Masters of War', "Oxford Town", "Hattie Carroll" could be argued to be actual "protest songs" - whatever they are)
Agreed. But ‘Oxford Town’ is very sardonic & oblique. It has no message except “Somebody better investigate soon”. As suggested above, ‘Hattie Carroll’ becomes a more general indictment of justice.
  • he rather forcefully distanced himself from the protest movement -
Agreed. The date is December 13, 1963, when he made his speech to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and said: “There’s no black and white, left and right to me any more; there’s only up and down, and down is very close to the ground.” (The full transcript is in Shelton, p.200 and there’s a long quote in Scorsese’s film.)
best wishes Mick gold (talk) 16:01, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Regarding the New Show entry

I'd like to thank you for starting The New Show page back in June. I was/am a big fan of the show. I happen to have old videotapes of 8 of the episodes, so I have gone through each of them and summarized the casts and sketches and have updated the page with this information. The episode that the SCTV website states aired on Jan 27, 1984 likely did not air on that date as per TV Guide entries, but due to the detail of that SCTV website I'm sure the show aired and I just didn't tape it at the time. Between the air dates of 06JAN-23MAR1984 there were only 12 possible time slots, with 2 I believe being pre-emptions. I have 8 episodes on tape and described, there's the other one about Teri Garr, and I'm not sure if there was a 10th. Do you happen to have any of these other shows on tape? I have seen an amazon.com entry for The New Show DVD but it doesn't look like it was released. It's possible that it's on hold. My speculation would be that if there is a DVD, it would only have "the best of" sketches. As a personal opinion, I feel the best sketches were anything with John Candy, since he seemed to just be made for this type of sketch comedy show. "Roy's Food Repair", "Mountain Mike", "Time Truck" were really brilliant. RickLangston (talk) 03:05, 22 January 2008 (UTC)RickLangston

[edit] Dylan & Protest song

Hi Warchef, I like the way you've bee re-writing the protest song page, and adding references and quotes from Marqusee et al. It's a big improvement. I have had time recently to re-write the Wikipedia page on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan which I've aways felt was one of his best albums. best wishes Mick gold (talk) 08:42, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Good work on NCfOM

Thanks for your excellent contributions at No Country for Old Men (film).
Jim Dunning | talk 15:37, 22 March 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Neon Neon

Much respect for creating the Neon Neon page, great job on it too. I was surprised to see no page for it so I attempted starting it but became disheartened fairly quick. Fair play! User:Phantompie

[edit] Finnegans Wake

Hi,

I appreciate your efforts to bring clarity and sanity to the appallingly overwritten Finnegans Wake article and I just wanted to volunteer for more editing on it. I have taken a scalpel to the intro and I think improved it. I agree with Gaff that this article could be FA-status one day and I think I know how it can be done. Your contributions were all in the interests of making the subject more lucid and I think that's the only way to go. Hope you're interested. Lexo (talk) 23:31, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

  • Hi,

I didn't mean to downplay all your hard work, sorry if I gave that impression. As an article, it has loads of good references and tons of information. Too much, in fact. Some of it reads like people are trying to cram all of Ellmann into an article on one book. I have gone through the Background and the first section of the Plot Summary and been fairly ruthless about cutting and reshaping stuff that seems to me either excessively detailed or just plain ugly. Always amazed by how some English grads can't write English - many passive constructions (in the year such-and-such a something-or-other was written by so-and-so), much sloppy and inconsistent punctuation. Not you of course. :) See what you think.

I would quite like to propose that in the interests of consistency we use the word 'book' rather than 'novel' throughout the article when referring to the Wake. It seems to me that the Wake transcends the novel genre, plus it was the word Joyce preferred. But if you prefer 'novel', I'm cool with that. It would be good to be consistent, though. Lexo (talk) 15:42, 28 May 2008 (UTC)