No sooner had I put up my last post when the website to which I linked, Dylan Hears a Who, was taken down. No explanation but I suspect that the estate of the late Dr. Seuss (the site featured a “lost” Dylan album, with full cuts of Bob singing “Green Eggs and Ham” etc. complete with Hammond organ and old LP scratches and pops, and one of the funniest graphics — Carnaby St. era Bob in a Cat in the Hat hat) demanded it’s removal. Seuss’s widow Audrey Geisel has been quick to quash parodies and such that infringe on the Seuss legacy in the past. Which would be all well and good had she not given her blessings to the loathsome Mike Meyers film of the Cat in the Hat. That featured a scene of the Cat ogling a Playboy-style fold-out of the kids’s mother, meaning I suppose its okay to imply that this beloved childhood character — who is, you remember, a cat — wants to shag your mom but not to let some Dylan parodyist sing your beloved husband’s rhymes.

O the thinks that you’ll think.

Also, Charley and Stephanie were not going to see the Bunuel film Exterminating Angel but rather the contemporary exercise in French soft porn, Exterminating Angels. No word back from them yet. Charley and Stephanie, that is. Not the angels.

The beauty of Dylan Hears a Who went beyond the funny concept. What made it note (or link) worthy was the loving detail that went into its production. It was a labor of love by someone who clearly DID love Dylan and Seuss equally — just as the similarly litigation inspiring Grey Album was made by a deejay who loved Jay Z and the Beatles.

The web of course is rife with change: I threw the I Ching yesterday (a line that Dylan, speaking of who, threw out of his first version of “Idiot Wind”) and consulted the same I Ching site I had recommended in this space last year. But where once there was a fairly full and faithful rendering of the Bollingen Series’ Wilhelm translation of the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, what’s left looks like a handful of fortune cookies. Tossing the virtual coins I came up with hexagram seven, The Army with this explanation:

The army encamps to the left.
Without fault.

There is not much work to do, so one steps back. Nothing wrong with that.
(“Encamping to the left” means that the army encamps while it has no war to fight.)

Compare this to the five page reading Wilhelm gives the same hexagram (“The attributes of the two trigrams are danger inside and obedience outside”) is enough to send you back to the library. See you there.

News of funny stuff travels fast on the internet, even when people don’t use email to spread the word. Franny and I were having dinner at a place called Go Sushi in Greenwich Village on Thursday night, amusing ourselves by watching the teeming masses that converge at the corners of Sixth and Eighth and Greenwich and, yes, Gay streets at rush hour when Charley Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek spied us through the glass. Living four blocks from me in Brooklyn, I never see them and have to run into them in Manhattan. They were having your average film critics’ night out — meeting a friend at a bar and then going to see Exterminating Angel — when Charley asked what would become the question of the moment:

“Have you seen Dylan Hears a Who?”

I got home to find the link in an email from Steph, followed by another — subject line: Click immediately — from my friend Jeremy Epstein. I won’t ruin the gag for you except to say that it has nothing to do with The Who.

People have been parodying Dylan pretty much since he started singing, and small wonder. As former Bowie sideman Mick Ronson, who toured with Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue once remarked, “He sounds like Boo Boo Bear.” That’s not completely fair, of course, though it is funny. Sort of like my son remarking upon hearing Tom Waits for the first time, “Is that the Cookie Monster singing?”

To the delight of us diehard Dylan fans everywhere, Bob is still having the last laugh: recording some of his best albums in his sixties, writing one of the best rock star bios to date (and it’s just volume one!), and hosting the delightfully bizarre Theme Time Radio Hour on XM. Some scoff that his is not a voice for radio but whose was? Wolfman Jack?

I’d like to know what Dylan thinks of Dylan hears a who. For that matter, I’d like to know what Alicia Keys thinks of being name-checked in a Dylan song. The answer is out there, I’m sure. Email me if you know. Word travels fast on the internet.

Yesterday, for the second time this week, Rudy Giuliani’s face came through my mail slot and it was enough to give me the heebie jeebies. First there was NY magazine’s alarming cover story, What America Sees in Rudy and yesterday came Newsweek’s take on the phenomenonThe Real Rudy. Both stories were fueled by polls showing the former mayor winning a primary race against his GOP contenders (as McCain is starting to look like Bogey in The Caine Mutiny and Romney a total chameleon) and even a squeaker against Democratic hopefuls Clinton, Obama and Edwards.

Frightened yet? Maybe it’s because you don’t live here. I’m addressing anyone who reads this space who does not live in NY and has a chance of voting in a primary election that might mean something. The chances of you voting in a Republican primary are slim, granted, given my dyspeptic rants against the evil incompetence of Bush et al, but like the cancer that Rudy successfully fought, the must be dealt with early.

According to Stephen Rodrick’s piece in New York (the better written and reported of the two features), Giuliani has a little trouble in the hinterlands where his native accent and demeanor (fuck you and the cab you came in on) present a hurdle — until he starts invoking 9.11 ad nauseum and then everyone from grannies to truck drivers tear up and start writing checks. I can remember the aftermath of that day quite clearly, thank you: our daughter’s best friend lost her father, some close friends of ours were downtown and severely traumatized. Some of them even left town. And I remember how the rest of the nation felt. In October 2001 I was on assignment in Minnesota and the photographer I was with asked me to stop telling people I was from NY because it made everyone stop and pray and say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Since that moment of heartfelt national unity we have seen unspeakable attrocities committed and an unconscionable war waged, all under the guise of payback. Our rights are being undermined and we have been treated like mushrooms (left in the dark and fed shit) by the media, all in the name of patriotism. After six years and counting of bullying and modern McCarthyism we do not need another tough guy in the White House. I’m no fan of Hillary but I think we could do a lot worse than to have a president who bases her campaign on listening instead of shouting people down.

Aren’t you glad Joni Mitchell is back? ‘Twas she who sang, “What time is this/To trade the handshake for the fist?”

I was driving back from Bay Ridge last Saturday, getting ready to listen to WFMU’s lovably inane Fool’s Paradise — “a two hour excursion to nowhere featuring vintage rockabilly, R&B blues, vocal groups, garage, instrumentals, hillbilly, soul and surf” — when I chanced on an interview with one-time Buddy Holly sideman Sonny Curtis. Sonny missed that last plane ride with Buddy, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens and went on to write an eclectic collection of enduring rock staples. Sonny would be assured a pretty good table in that big club in the sky if he had written nothing other than “I Fought the Law,” but if you throw in “Walk Right Back” and “Love Is All Around” (aka the Mary Tyler Moore theme, famously covered by the Replacements), you’ve got bonafide rock royalty.

Not that you’d know it to listen to him. What struck me most about Sonny (I had no idea he was alive, let alone making phone calls to punk stations in New Jersey) was his humility. We’re not talking phony showbiz without-the-little-people-who-would-I-be kind of cheese; Sonny is a guy who feels fortunate to have eked out a career making the music he loves, and that he arguably helped invent, and sounded authentically flabbergasted to hear DJ Michael Shelley refer to him as a legend. To hear Sonny tell it, he just caught some good breaks. It was all about work, an endless hustle, one that led him down commercial alleys to put processed bread on the table (he wrote jingles for MacDonalds to the “You Deserve a Break Today” theme). He’s playing next month in Connecticut with some semblance of the Crickets. Bring the family.

This is a guy who, as a teenager, wrote “Rockin’ Around with Ollie Vee” for Holly. It’s the first song you hear the Crickets play, at a skating rink, in the Buddy Holly Story, and one of the first old rock songs I discovered in high school, when the Blind Faith version of “Well All Right” led me back to the original, a Holly song that svengali/sleaze bag Norman Petty conveniently claimed to have co-written — and Sonny wouldn’t even say nothing nasty about Norman Petty, which is easier than taking shots at Colonel Tom Parker.

And how can you argue with the logic of lines like “I needed money ’cause I had none”? When Bobby Fuller sang “I Fought the Law” it had a kind of wistful fatalistic quality while the Clash cover ripped the doors off the jail cell as Joe Strummer led a doomed prison break through the joint, Hate and Love tatooed on the knuckles of his hands, taking no prisoners. It was Sonny who gave them — and Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead and who knows how many others who covered that song — the tabula rasa to write their confessions on. And rather than feel resentful for not basking in the glory, Sonny just sounds like he’s happy to be around and playing. He deserves a jail break today. Call him a free man.

We flew to LA via Jet Blue over Presidents’ Day weekend — shouldn’t we just start calling it Presidents’ Weekend? Having a Wild Weekend with Two of Our Better Presidents? — and returned just as the airline was announcing its new passenger bill of rights. Roiled by the disastrous Valentine’s Day snowstorms of last week, which disrupted hundreds of Jet Blue’s flights and left many NY passengers stuck in planes on the tarmac for over eight hours, CEO and founder Dave Neeleman got over the soul searching and beat Congress to the punch by limiting the hours passengers can be stuck on the ground, guaranteeing refunds for cancelled flights and in general promising to treat people better than cargo.

I was watching Brian Williams break the news on my seat-back TV when a Jet Blue flight attendant stopped to ask me about it. She had been at JFK last Wednesday and had sat on the tarmac for four hours with stranded passengers, seen the anger and frustration up close. “Do you think people will forgive us?” she wanted to know and (speaking for Jet Blue loyalists everywhere) I said I thought people would be impressed at how quickly the company reacted…after blowing it for several news cycles. And it might just shame the rest of the airlines to take similar measures (something consumer advocacy groups have been suggesting for years).

“That will just give them another reason to hate us,” she said. In her opinion, and she had apparently been with the company for a while, Jet Blue had grown too fast, adding hundreds of flights and new destinations without any regard for the impact that expansion would have on the airline’s infrastructure. “A lot of us were warning them this would happen on the Speak Up cards they give us,” she said — but she blamed middle management, a sea of bureaucrats that separated Neeleman from his once satisfied customers.

Maybe he was just distracted, I told her; I had read he was ADD. “He’s just like a little boy,” she said. “But sometimes he needs to take his Ritalin.” Nothing like a multi-million dollar PR disaster to get you back on your meds.