Scott Warmuth

Last Saturday I presented my paper "Several Stories Happening at Once: Intertext in ‘Love and Theft’" at The World of Bob Dylan 2025 conference. Such a receptive crowd! Brian Roberts and Eric Lott were also on the panel. An expanded version of my slides is on my IG: www.instagram.com/p/DMkYHLVOkQ...

22 years ago today, „Masked & Anonymous“ was released. Directed by Larry Charles and co-written with Bob Dylan, it’s a wonderful movie featuring an outstanding cast, intriguing dialogues and powerful musical performances — an artistic work that has stood the test of time.

#bobdylan

The M&A screenplay is just as dense as Chronicles: Volume One and “Love and Theft” when it comes to material incorporated from other sources. Larry Charles and I have touched base a couple of times. It still has *a lot* to give. Charles talks about writing with Dylan in his new book Comedy Samurai.

Denise Sullivan writes, “It's understandable if you missed the 80 year commemoration of the Trinity test, given the week that was.” I didn’t miss it, because I live in New Mexico. The haunting National Museum of Nuclear Science & History is just down the road, catty-corner from my local Costco.

I’d wager that the “reduced price” bit has its roots in an oral history captured by Junichi Saga in his book Memories of Silk and Straw. There’s an undeniable line that turns up in “Honest With Me” just a few pages later.

There is a 9 CD unabridged audiobook version of Chronicles: Volume One narrated by Nick Landrum.

I suppose that’s debatable. Dylan quotes a line from Shane in “Never Gonna Be the Same Again” (Don’t worry, baby, I don’t mind leaving
I’d just like it to be my idea”). Other Westerns are referenced in Masked and Anonymous. For example, Jake Fate echoes this Sterling Hayden line from Johnny Guitar.

Hey @michaelgray1.bsky.social, I saw that you posted, “I'm told that in ‘Shane’ the song Dixie is part of the sound track, with a scene where the camera pans slowly left to right across a small group of people; in M&A Dylan sings Dixie with a small audience & the camera pans across them likewise.”

Thinking of Chantal Akerman (June 6, 1950 – October 5, 2015). Bob Dylan has a couple of paintings based on shots from her 1977 film News from Home.

#ChantalAkerman
#BobDylan

Thanks to Steve Badolato for letting me know that he figured out that this Bob Dylan painting is based on a shot from Sweet Smell of Success. This brings the tally of films that have been identified as source material used in Bob Dylan’s paintings and drawings to 70. That’s a lot of movies!

There’s a Richard Prince/Bob Dylan centerfold in the Summer 2025 issue of Gagosian Quarterly. The accompanying text is an OK starting point for considering this stuff. (Bluesky insists on a censored version of the issue’s Picasso cover). gagosian.com/quarterly/is...

#RichardPrince
#BobDylan

“Thunder on the Mountain” - where Kokomo Arnold meets Louis-Ferdinand Céline. m.youtube.com/watch?v=5GDG...

Hulk was Kirby first, indeed. Kirby was the first artist to make me feel uncomfortable - those noses and the freewheeling anatomy! First exposure: Kamandi no. 10 in 1973.

Koons can Hulk out all he wants, but he still ain’t got nothing on Jack Kirby (my favorite artist). When I was born Kirby was in a basement two towns over from where my grandparents lived creating the Silver Surfer out of thin air with a pencil. A visionary.

Nice work! In 2016 when Daisuke Nakai interviewed me for this piece in The Asahi Shimbun he told me about drafts for “Floater” he saw in Tulsa that were on stationary from hotels in Tokyo and Nagoya. Particularly interesting, in that the song includes bits from a couple of Japanese oral histories.

For your listening pleasure.

Cool! My first car was a ‘76 Datsun. I have a groovy 22 second Datsun jingle from a radio station production library that features the “Sunshine of Your Love” riff arranged for horns.

“Books that mention Bob Dylan” is a subset of source material used in Chronicles: Volume One that intrigues me (there are a bunch of them). He turns up as “Dylan, our messiah” and “Dylan our Elvis” in American Rhapsody (a book quoted not only in the passage about Ricky Nelson, but throughout).

I see that Bob Dylan closed his show last night with “Garden Party.” Ricky Nelson’s “Be-Bop Baby” was one of the first records I ever owned. When Dylan writes about Nelson in Chronicles: Volume One he incorporates bits from Jack London’s “The Seed of McCoy” and Joe Eszterhas’ American Rhapsody.

Top notch song. This LP includes “Axe and the Wind” and a bunch of Willie Dixon songs that George “Wild Child” Butler recorded.

Oddly, the painting that they use in that article isn’t from Point Blank. It’s one from a series of Bob Dylan’s works that are based on scenes from The French Connection.

Additional Paris, Texas works from Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan has a whole bunch of paintings and drawings based on shots from Paris, Texas. This is one of them.

#BobDylan
#HarryDeanStanton
#ParisTexas
#WinWenders