Apparently the review calls the writer a “scholar” (studioso) whose “attentive analysis” shows how the Talmud, Torah and Kabbalah are for Dylan inexhaustable sources of inspiration and wisdom that he uses with diverse approaches during his entire career. I’ll take it.

Seth Rogovoy and Happy Traum will co-host the The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild’s Second Annual Bob Dylan Birthday Celebration on Saturday, May 22, 2010, at 8pm at the Kleinert/James Arts Center, 34 Tinker Street, Woodstock, N.Y., part of the historic  Byrdcliffe artist’s colony in that famed town.

Traum, a guitarist, folk legend, and former Dylan sideman, will perform and share hosting duties with Rogovoy, the author of BOB DYLAN: Prophet Mystic Poet, and a singer-guitarist himself. Copies of the book will be on sale and available for signing at the event.

Other performers include indie-folk songstress Kelleigh McKenzie; roots music/Celtic fiddler Alex Caton;Jason Sarubbi and Sean Schenker of The Trapps; singer/songwriter, Dean Batstone; Frank McGinnis, of the powerpop/rock band By Land or Sea (formerly Frankie and His Fingers), eclectic folk-rocker, Doug Yoel; Tasa Kvistad and Rob Pisano of the acoustic duo, Tasa and Rob.

Tickets are $20/$15 WBG members. For more information and to purchase tickets contact the WBG at 845.679.2079 or go to www.woodstockguild.org.

just to be provocative, or taken out of context, Sean Wilentz does a great job putting into context the simmering controversy over Bob Dylan’s sampling of previously existing lyrical and musical material.

And no, for those who still expect it, he did not play any songs by nor acknowledge his relationship to his father. Duh. Why should he?

Then again, he doesn’t need to, because as Dylan matures – he turned 40 last December – he looks remarkably more like his father every day (check out the photos accompanying this review).

But what Jakob Dylan did offer was an intense, if somewhat monochromatic, 90-minute run-through of his more recent roots-rock. He played the entire Women + Country program and most of Seeing Things, and made it all sound of a piece, backed by the ensemble named Three Legs for this tour, but typically working as singer Neko Case’s backup band.

Case, along with Kelly Hogan, were on hand to lend backup vocals, harmonies, and occasional duets, and those were some of the highlights of Dylan’s show.

If not voluble, Dylan is certainly a more genial frontman than his enigmatic father, but he’s learned some lessons well, including how to stand motionless at a microphone to intone his haunting ballads and mid-tempo country-rockers about, well, women and country for the most part.

Click here for complete review…

Presumably what the bureau also had in mind in launching a new website, Come Home Bob Dylan, was garnering a little publicity for the isolated area renowned for its stark beauty and cold winters.

The website includes an online petition calling on Dylan to come home to Hibbing, Minn., as well as sharing pages for photos and video, and links to informational pages on Hibbing and the Iron Range.

Rosenbaum goes on to say that “Rogovoy’s source-hunting is so relentless, one can only bow to his ingenuity as he pins just about every Dylan line you can think of, like a dead butterfly, to its biblical source box. I was particularly impressed by the wealth of allusions to the Davidic stories he finds.”

He hails the book’s “…deepening of the detailed picture now emerging of Dylan’s Jewish upbringing. Rogovoy shows that the Zimmermans were at ‘the center of Jewish life in Hibbing,’ and that young Robert’s bar mitzvah broke attendance records at the local hotel.”

Read the text of the full review here.

In The Heights by Bernard Zalon

Zalon contacted me recently to share one of his newest creations, called In the Heights, which on the surface seems to capture a typical scene out front of 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which some may recognize as the world headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish outreach movement.

The artist honors me by telling me that while he was working on the piece, he heard me being interviewed on a radio program talking about my book, excerpts of which he had read online. “So I was inspired to add something.  I just finished it, and I think you will appreciate it,” he wrote.

I am immensely humbled by Zalon’s generosity. I can’t think of a better way to have my own work appreciated than by having it somehow inspiring or becoming a part of another’s — especially someone with the talent and vision of Zalon.

If you look closely at the etching, you can see a Dylan-esque figure — perhaps Bob Dylan himself — hanging out among the Hasidim.

Detail from "In the Heights" by Bernard Zalon