Maybe you can share experiences with Luther Campbell and 2 Live Crew about being banned. Censorship turned out to be very lucrative for those guys.

AV

Even for a country with a massive labor force like China, it would simply be impossible for the Chinese censors to ban blogs individually. Certain sites, such as those pertaining to Tibetan Independence, the Falun Gong religious movement, or Wikipedia (usually) are singled out but for the most part the government will just do a blanket ban of all Blogspot or Typepad powered blogs. Why Joe’s is banned I have no idea, but I believe FJM is run on Blogspot so that’s why it isn’t permitted here. That, or members of the Chinese Communist Party secretly believe that certain pitchers “just know how to win”.

Luckily for us, there are proxy servers that allow us to see prohibited websites undetected, though it does slow loading speeds down considerably. So don’t worry, Joe, no one in the Chinese government has an axe to grind with you!

Enjoy yourself in Beijing, Joe, and thank you Margo for keeping this wonderful blog up and running.

Good analogy. The difference IMHO is that Bob was smarter, set out purposely to craft Dylan from Zimmerman, and seemed to enjoy the repartee with the “square”/”philistine” press at least early on. Cobain bought into a kind of commercial-noncommercial paradigm whereas I think Bob’s view was a bit more, let’s say, transcendent. I think Cobain was a bit more unstable, fatalistic by constitution….

I agree that the fame took a toll on the guy and that he was done with the spotlight by hook or by crook after Blonde on Blonde. But you could compare him to others besides Cobain and anyone else that huge that has to go a little bonkers some time, like that Seal song. Brando, Elvis, Lennon, Elton John, Eddie Murphy, Michael Jackson, etc. he fared okay.

I also like the hippie asking him about the significance of his motorcycle shirt on the “Highway 61″ album cover. From what I recall, the hippie launched into his rendition of the symbolic nature of bi-cycled vehicles and the duality of their nature in regard to youth culture or some such thing while Dylan, dumbfoundedly, could only respond by laughing and saying something like, “Um, yeah. Motorcycles are nice, I guess.”

I think the thing that I got out of Scorcese’s bio that I didn’t get out of Pennebaker’s is just how much of a toll the fame took on Dylan. You could see by the end of the film that he was really cracking up. What it really reminded me of is the arc of Kurt Cobain. They are very remarkably similar. Both were seen as the voice of a new, uprising, self-important youth culture. They had their music over-analyzed, their words popularly over-emphasized. And neither could really understand what the hub-ub was all about. It seems to me that if Dylan didn’t wreck his motorcycle, we could have lost him in the same way we lost Cobain.

As a longtime reader of both blogs who rarely comments, I just wanted to add my own two cents in precisely when you won’t be able to read it. But I just couldn’t keep silent – it’s too important. What’s too important, you ask? (Oh that’s right, you can’t read the comments) Totino’s Pizza Rolls.. I got them the other day for my kids because they’re on sale and the kids love them…I know, I’m going to hell…and there are a few left over and I pop one in my mouth and …. holy schmazzoly, they are DELICIOUS! How is that possible?