The Highest Day in Spring

We arrived pretty early. After what seemed like forever with the set and makeup, the first shot was the old vineyard. Actually, I think Alex, the director got the graveyard first. That was like this green sward with the black lamps of the undead. It opens the video. I think it shows the oldness, if that is a word, of it all. The reaching back into history.

So, the vineyard. Caitlyn was doing running shots and they were getting the bling on her bitchin' boots. I was told to just sit there. Everything was so green and buzzing and bright, hot and verdant. All of a sudden, this bright green frog jumps up on my chest and like, stares at me. Let's just say that I was "Ribbetted". I just up in a start like some pud and the DP starts laughing. He saw it. "Did you catch that?" I asked. Zollo was laughing so hard he couldn't answer.

I started feeling stupid for having jumped up. Micah told me it was a good thing I had, bright green frogs have a tendency to pee all over nice black shirts. I frowned. A narrow escape. Perhaps it was a good omen for the day. An auspicious frog introduces the highest day in Spring.

The Birth of Ganymede

The production of the new music video GANYMEDE has been epic. About 2 years ago I had visited Skylands and wrote this storyboard. It was these forlorn and windswept guys (the band) walking in the grounds of this unfathomable estate. They walk up to the window and see a party, with they themselves in it! A beggars banquet in an Elizabethan house.

Leave it to director Alex Engel to take it further: Anne Boleyn as Ganymede tries to outrun her fate. Looking in a window she sees the band playing a beggars banquet. And she sees herself! Ganymede becomes immortal but loses her humanity.

The video chronicles this suspension of reality actually quite well. The first day begins at 6:20 in the morning and I am standing on the street corner somewhere north of Chelsea...

Randomly, people standing on the street corner are picked up by the van. I have never seen them before. And the next thing I know we are swept off to Skylands.



I met Caitlyn and the crew. Filming took the entire day.

Viva Viva in London Under Attack

I got a letter from a club in London. They are having troubles with rusty old neighbors and legal councils who can't seem to handle merry-making of any sort. I sent them this letter:

Dear Eve, Council, Friends & Foes Alike,
Can’t we all just get along without killing the arts and bludgeoning people’s joy-making down to listless monotone? It grieves me to see that the attack on music and art is happening in London too. Here in NYC we have had smoking bans, which resulted in closures of countless clubs, bans on actually dancing – if you can imagine – moving your god(dess) given body (that one is being lifted I hear), forced closures of numerous music clubs from CBGB, Brownies, Continental, Luna, C-Note, Bottom Line and others. Add to that the skyrocketing rents that force out the artists that made the formerly dismal neighborhoods inhabitable in the first place.

Do we really want a Prozac Nation? Even tempered tan leisure-suited men drolling on every corner? Doe-eyed social pacifists doing whatever they are told, pumping their Starbucks and petrol and spouting slogans? Soon the only “party” will be the Republican party! Pretty soon the useless yammerings-on about pleasing their bosses will dull down the English language to the grunts and clicks of fanny-tanned arse-wriggling agreements and nervous-tic head-nodding. Are the legislators and public officials charged with protecting the common wealth of society in hock to their corporate friends enough? Or must we rent out our grandmothers too?

This war on the Arts has got to stop. Art, music, literature – this is the Humanities which is under attack. It used to be different factions knew how to get along in civil society. They compromised. They managed their differences and arrived at agreeable working solutions. They acted like human beings.

Please, those of you with some say over pubs and clubs and places where people gather to enjoy music and edify themselves over art and leisure: you were once young too, and don’t necessarily have to relinquish whatever you have left to the stodgy deafness and over-calcified lichen-infested creakiness of old age. Don’t resent the young and young at heart their vibrancy and love of life. Bend a little, like a living thing. And work to coexist.

Dylan Nirvana & The Bad Flowers
New York City
http://DylanNirvana.com
http://myspace.com/dylannirvana

I am on my bike in Greynolds Park in this mountainous terrain tearing up and down these hills on a narrow path. Whizzing past trees with a ravine on one side that plunges into a black stream I blurred along at breakneck speed. And it was such like flying. In the dreams I went from one to the other,  bicycling the narrow paths at Greynolds to flying above the trees into the clouds. It was much the same sensation.

And music is much like that. A sensation of flying. I remember "deciding" between them. First it was my skateboard - and the guitar. Then, my bicycle - and my guitar. 

I had a Schwinn Varsity. Until it got stolen. Now I have a Les Paul, an SG and a Strat.

This is the story of the Electric Lifetime. Or, it IS the Electric Lifetime itself, where dreams take off from so-called Reality, the colours of life get typed out in the ink of black and white, and the sparkling pollen of light laughingly shows the joining of inside and out, memory and becoming.

So welcome. Music... And to quote Miles Davis here, "Turn it up. Or turn if off!"

Cheers!

Dylan

Music from Anne Boleyn

Dylan Nirvana on radio Novus Ordo

Dylan Nirvana gets radio play on syndicated show Novus Ordo. “Embodies the spirit of punk and the sensibilities of the UK with edginess of the Lower East Side” - Radio Crystal Blue. Listen for the song Ganymede from the new record Anne Boleyn.

Also on the show, Imaginary Johnny Between The Days, Arbor Day Drive Into The Fire, Partly Cloudy But to me it's everything, Swoon Parallel, Two Loons For Tea Tragically Hip, David Martin I Can't Imagine.

Anne Boleyn

Tonight, Devon and I went to see the movie about Anne Boleyn and her sister Mary, The Other Boleyn Girl. A fair retelling. Except for the somewhat glaring error that she did not operate alone. It placed too much weight on Anne and her family's personal ambition. That rather ignores the absolute tide of change: medieval Rome was dealt a death blow by Humanism. And the Age of the Renaissance and Reason was about to begin. 

Like the Woodstock of the 1960's this was a brief period of flowering where people believed in the nobility of the individual and did not suck up to the powers of popes, were not slaves to dead ideas, and dared to imagine they did not need heaven. 

The new record Anne Boleyn is now available  in stores and online at CD Baby and iTunes.