Here’s K.T. Tunstall singing Bob Dylan‘s “Tangled Up in Blue” with Jools Holland in 2005. I love it. A few years ago–right around the time of this video–K.T. Tunstall performed “Suddenly I See”, the song which was played so effectively over the credits in the magazine-centric The Devil Wears Prada, to open the Annual ASME Award ceremonies. I was sitting next to my friend and colleage AJ Baime, and when the song ended, the crowd politely applauded as K.T. Tunstall bowed and exited the stage, head down, right in front of where we were sitting. The applause faded, but AJ kept at it, clapping and shouting “Yeah! Yeah!” until he was the only in the auditorium making noise, and K.T. finally lifted her head and gave him a big smile. And I thought, “Aha! So that’s how it’s done!”

Cathy, Tim, Greg, Susan, Jo, Dave, Ginny and I hit Town Hall on Saturday evening to attend a taping of the radio show Prairie Home Companion. We enjoyed Garrison Keillor‘s low key, folksy, whimsical fun, and his guests Gillian Welch, Joel Grey and especially Itzhak Perlman (with a very fine Klezmer orchestra!) were a treat. I do have to say that if and when I return to Town Hall, I’m definitely sitting in the orchestra, where we sat for Thursday’s Wainwright concert; sitting in the balcony for Keillor wa terribly tight and uncomfortable. After the show, however, we creaked ourselves to our full heights and walked around the block for an excellent dinner at a French restaurant on 44th Street called Saju Bistro. My friends ate things like rabbit, octopus and beets, and the food and the company were top notch.

Ryan Adams shot the video for this gem of a song on September 7, 2001. The World Trade Center looms in all its dopey, stolid earnestness throughout the film, oblivious to its imminent destruction. It always chokes me to see this.

On Wednesday, Ginny and I and Cara headed out for the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where Cara will soon begin her freshman year. Thinking to combine some tourism with one of the last acts of basic parenthood (everything after this gets placed in the supplemental category), we headed first for Cleveland, where we saw the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (left), which sits inside a dazzling I.M. Pei pyramid on the shores of Lake Erie, which, as just as the advance word promised, is indeed a Great Lake. We stayed in a Crowne Plaza Hotel with bad room service, and then hit the Hall on Thursday. It was pretty cool, although it wa bit disconcerting to see one’s youth in a musem. The effect that is produced is not the warmth of nostalgia, nor the intellectual stimulation that is produced by going to, say, the Met. It’s kind of cool, but kind of dull. The best moment was seeing a montage of British Invasion groups, and being reminded how very cool the Kinks and the Zombies and the Animals really were. It was amazing how well Eric Burden could shake his hair and his ass simultaneously, but of course one now sees that lhe indeed loked like the spastic madman his critics said he did.

After lunch it was south on a very straight and boring I-75 (highlight: a huge billboard in a cornfield says Hell Is Real), through Cincinnati, and then onto Lexington. On Friday we moved Cara moved into her room, a process hectic enough to inspire a couple of stories that will be top of the line private stock family stories. After she settled in, we went back and spent the night in a very nice Hyatt. The next day, we visited Ashland, the home of the Great Compromiser Henry Clay, and then attended a couple of information sessions with Cara before sharing a pretty bland meal at an Italian restaurant (this is why Tony Soprano was neve drawn to the witness protection program), before taking our leave, and driving back up to Columbus, where we spent the night in an excellent Westin, of whose quality we were not worthy. (Top right, a new Wildcat in her lair; bottom right, Clay’s pile; Top left, Cincinnati, Thursday, 4:55 PM; bottom left, Columbus, Sunday, 8:30 AM.)

On Sunday, we drove from Columbus to Canton, which turns out to be far from everything, to visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame. (If you wonder why the Hall of Fame is in Canton, it’s because football had it’s roots in Canton specifically and Ohio generally. But football soon left Canton for the bright lights of the big cities, and it’s no mystery why.) I liked the museum–it had some pretty cool Baltimore Colts stuff, including the Marching Band’s drum and Tom Matte‘s famous play-inscribed arm bands–but a lot of it was kind of static. They really could do a lot more. The best part was the collection of amazing films. And then it was eight hours back through Pennsylvania, and home. Happy to be back, but already missing Cara.

Thanks to the unlikely agency of The New York Lottery, my favorite new song is “Are You Ready?” by Fatty Gets a Stylist, which is masterminded and largely comprised by the Australian sensations Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall. It’s catchy, it’s summery, it made my buy a Mega Millions ticket, and I love it.

At a Paul Simon concert in Toronto last week, a Newfoundland woman named Rayna Ford called out for Simon to play “Duncan,” saying that it was the song on which she learned to play guitar. Perhaps feeling groovey, in any event feeling light-hearted, Simon promptly invited Ford onstage to pay the song. The video records a woman enjoying the thrill of a lifetime.

My new favorite commercial is this Volvo ad, featuring the unique song stylings of the Swedish singer Miss Li. Lots of pizzazz.

Aztec Camera was a Scottish new wave band from Glasgow whose creative engine was a young man named Roddy Frame. This cover of Van Halen‘s Jump, circa 1984, not only takes the party song and turns it into something strangely heartfelt, it then takes the resulting ballad and takes it. . . someplace wild. You’ll have to be patient through the boring video image, but you will be rewarded, because this song does have the best guitar solo ever.

Just finished Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, by the cultural critic David Yaffe. Very stimulating! Yaffe is a close, attentive, erudite listener and student, and a wise interpreter of the great Dylan. The book makes me wish I had paid closer attention to Dylan as an artist over the years, instead of just “liking” or “disliking” the current album or the the current song on the radio as it appeared. I feel as though I dropped the ball on one of the great artists of my generation that I might have actually been able to appreciate on some deeper level.

Here’s a particularly smart and well-written passage from Yaffe’s book: “Dylan used to be pitted against new Dylans like Bruce Springsteen. Now the new Dylan is the old one. No one expects the voice of Highway 61 or Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks any more. That voice is long gone. It is preserved on stacks of vinyl, reams of digital detrius, lost forgotten years, buried feelings, abandoned love. And as long as time will permit, and old man, past threescore years and ten yet still called Bob Dylan, will continue to song, recasting those anthems in the voice he has at that moment. He will not be the old him. He will be the new old him. One day, and we shudder to think of it, he will be gone, too, filed alongside a voice at times more youthful and dangerous, at others more ecstatic with belief or ravaged by doubt: a cawing, derisive voice, forever taunting, forever seducing, forever finger-pointing, forever bitter, forever elegiac, forever panting, and forever young.”