Category: All Posts

Richard Egan’s right to die

Richard Egan, co-founder of data storage technology leader EMC2, was a Republican fundraiser and a friend of Dick Cheney. Diagnosed in May with advanced lung cancer, a couple of days ago Egan killed himself with a shotgun.

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/20608388/detail.html

Richard Egan, 73, was inside his Four Seasons condo on Boylston Street when he killed himself in a closet. His wife and visiting nurse were in the home at the time and heard the gunshot.

As a noted Republican, Richard Egan had a perfect opportunity to step forward and proclaim his right to die with dignity, and denounce the lies about the proposed health care legislation having a provision calling for “death panels.” He didn’t do that, but I think somebody should.

Dylan went electric … when?

Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan, 1963
Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan, 1963, © Jim Marshall

Bob Dylan famously “went electric” at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival, to a somewhat mixed response.

When I first heard the “Biograph” set in ’85, which I got on LP before buying my first CD player, I was stunned by the pairing of these two songs.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/AUG/Biograph.mp3]

“Mixed Up Confusion” was recorded in 1962. ’62! With “Tombstone Blues” Dylan was just picking up where he’d left off nearly three years before. When I first heard this I felt as though Dylan hadn’t caught up to Folk Rock, but that he had, in fact, secretly invented it.

Dylan the tourist

Back in May, it was reported that Bob Dylan joined a Beatles tour in England, and went essentially unnoticed, to see John Lennon’s boyhood home.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/8046278.stm

But that wasn’t the first time Bob Dylan visited the hometown of the Beatles. Here he is in Liverpool in 1966, only a couple of months before his motorcycle crash.

Bob Dylan, Liverpool, England, 1966
© Barry Feinstein

Plutocracy

Clare, in Clare and the Reasons, is Clare Muldaur, daughter of Maria and Geoff. Here she sings in defense of Pluto, the little put-upon planet that scientists say may not actually rate being called a planet. Listening to the French version, “Pluton,” on her MySpace page, with its dreamy use of a theramin sound, I get a sense that this was intended to be the missing final part of Holst’s suite The Planets, which was composed before Pluto had been discovered.