The new Julianne Moore film, The Prize-Winner of Defiance, Ohio, did not make the list of box-office winners this weekend. Aside from a sharp-eyed review by Stephanie Zacharek in Salon on Friday, a lot of critics seem to have missed the film. Pity. It’s a small film but deeply resonant for anyone who grew up in the fifties with too many siblings and too little money. Most importantly, it is a tribute to mothers everywhere who try to shield their kids from life’s more unpleasant realities while instilling them with a sense of wonder and possibility.

It made me think of my mom.

Moore’s character is an extreme example of that when-life-hands-you-a-lemon-make-lemonade heroine. Based on Terry Ryan’s memoir of her mother, the Prize-Winner recalls a lost era in American advertising, when companies sponsored countless contests that took actual skill: write a jingle extolling the virtues of Dr. Pepper. Fill in the blanks of this pop song celebrating a sandwich. Countless moms tried their luck in pursuit of prizes ranging from free appliances to cars and trips to Switzerland. (Some of the funniest scenes come when Moore meets a society of homemakers all doing the same thing, who critique each other’s work: it’s a sort of commercially driven poetry salon, but the prize their eyes are upon is a lifetime supply of Jello, instead of the Pulitzer.) In a pre-Betty Friedan age of housewife drudgery these women with brains and talent and nowhere to express them found each other, while pursuing the bright elusive butterfly of material nirvana.

For Moore’s character though it was a matter of survival. While Dad (played by Woody Harrelson, with a pot belly and a pair of nerd glasses) drank his paycheck, Moore kept the wolf at bay by cashing in all those luxury vacations and selling the sports cars. Harrelson gives a performance on a par with Moore’s, lending complexity to an unlovable, self-pitying alcoholic. Our dad was not prone to self-recrimination — his ego was too huge to allow room for that — but his screaming, physically abusive side sure looked familiar. The scene in which one of their ten children is afraid to walk near him as he rages over a baseball game was a page from my life. Dad would sit, cold Burgie in hand, watching the Gillete Cavalcade of Sports and lord help the child who got between him and his fight.

Our mother did not enter any contests that I recall but she clipped her share of coupons and tried hard to make our poverty tolerable by pretending our survival was part of some great adventure. Hey, let’s go pick black berries in Grant’s Pass! Buckets and buckets of them that then found their way into pancakes, muffins, cereal, jam — to the point where I couldn’t stand to look at black berries when I was older. When we had nothing to eat in the house but waffle mix and ice cream she combined the two to make a nine-year-old kid’s idea of a dream dinner. And when we couldn’t afford to buy toy weapons to enact our games of Viking, pirate etc. she used tin foil and cardboard to forge swords and shields, some with emblems and coats of armor taken from history books.

It’s important to be happy, she told us, even when she wasn’t herself. I still use my imagination to forge the armor I need in this world. And I still thank my mother for that.

I Tivo’d the first part of Scorsese’s Dylan bio on PBS and ended up watching it the next day just before Part II — the documentary equivalent, in length if not incoherence, of Dylan’s whacked out director’s cut of Renaldo & Clara. By the time it was over my hair had gotten kinda curly and my voice had become kind of nasal and I was droppin’ my g’s and sayin’ things like, “I’d like to empty the dishwasher but my hands are on fire.”

You ever get the feeling that, at least some of the time, Bob must be a real pain in the ass to be around? I know, I know — he’s Bob Dylan and he could be a major asshole all the time and get away with it if he had just written “Visions of Johanna” or “To Ramona” or “It’s Not Dark Yet” or about another hundred songs I could list (if not sing) at the drop of a Stetson hat. (My brother Ethan just sent me some samples from the new Rodney Crowell album, including a song called “Beautiful Despair” that opens with this couplet: “Beautiful despair is hearing Dylan drunk at 3 am/And knowing in a million years you’ll never write a song half as good as him.” And Rodney’s not alone.)

No, Dylan has the right to be as big a jerk as he wants and with the archival material at his disposal, Marty showed us just how much of a jerk he was — though as Davie Yaffee noted in his Slate review, this was an authorized biopic which left some of the rougher edges on the floor. The footage of him and the Band touring the UK in 1966 was taken from DA Pennebaker’s Eat the Document. It’s supposed to be unavailable but you can find a copy at Kim’s Video on St. Marks and probably about a hundred other places around the country. In it you will see the same funny scene Scorsese included of Dylan riffing off some sign outside an apothecary’s, making nonsense poetry out of the words — “I need someone to bathe my bird, knit my soul…” What you don’t see is Dylan and Richard Manuel, on the same early morning stoned stroll offering some starstruck fan a leather jacket for his girlfriend. Haha. That Bob.

You did see Joan Baez vent, all those years after the fact, about following Bob around on another UK tour, the one documented in Don’t Look Back, and never being asked to join him on stage. After all she had done for him! An unseen interviewer asked Dylan about it and for a moment he looked authentically embarrassed, human as all of us. “It’s hard to be wise and in love at the same time,” he finally says and I say give the man a cigar. Or something stronger. As he demonstrated in the remarkable first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan has been far more self aware all these years than his critics have given him credit for. If he didn’t choose to let this film be a Bob bashing session, can you really blame him? And would you want to be on the other side of a pissing contest with Dylan, anyway? The master if the fuck-you song — “Positively Fourth Street,” “Idiot Wind,” et al — Bob has proven he can take it and dish it out. Even at 3 AM.

The cover story in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine is adapted from Joan Didion’s forthcoming book, The Year of Magical Thinking. It is about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and Didion’s subsequent actions and reactions. Dunne died of a heart attack before his wife’s eyes on December 30, 2003, sitting at the dinner table in their New York home. Her description of the event — the arrival of the parameds, the trip to the hospital — seems oddly familiar, not because we have heard or witnessed this story before (some of us have) but because the trademark Didion style makes it seem familiar. She witnesses her witnessing with a sense of detachment, as usual in her reporting. As the social worker at the hospital remarks when she beats the doctor to the punch in announcing Dunne’s death, “She’s a pretty cool customer.”

What is more surprising, to reader and writer alike, is the depth of the grief that follows. She explores her grief as if it were a cave, using her intellect and her skills as a writer to illuminate the murk. They were married for almost 40 years and it is his absence as much as his presence that she devotes her narrative to.

Did I mention that their daughter was in a coma at the time of Dunne’s death?

Just last week I was reading to my students from her essay “The White Album” (1979) in which she described an ambivalent diagnosis of MS she received from a doctor — “an exclusionary diagnosis [that] meant nothing. I had at this time a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become probable, the norm. Things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind. ‘Lead a simple life,’ the neurologist advised. ‘Not that it makes any difference we know about.’ In other words it was another story without a narrative.”

Different story, different stranger, same knife.

I like Neil Young in all his guises — rocker, folker, confused and angry patriot, confused and angry protestor, dad, and just all around Jeremiah railing at the everything — but now that he’s become a media critic as well, I think we all have to start watching our backs. As reported in the Chicago Tribune this morning, Young lambasted the paper for a story it did on Farm Aid last week that cast aspersions on how funds from the annual benefit were distributed.

“We are not purely raising money for farmers,” he fumed at a press conference before the concert, “that’s a small part of what we do… The people at the Chicago Tribune should be held responsible for this piece of crap.”

Here the protean artist sometimes known as Shakey invoked one of his own Crazy Horse songs:

Saw it on the tube
Bought it on the phone
Now you’re home alone
It’s a piece of crap

Hey, he’s not only describing just about everything you ever bought for yourself or your kids, he’s talking about your newspaper too. Neil’s ability to be all things to all people includes the role of consumer advocate and small wonder. Seeing him in concert in Pittsburg of all places a few years ago I was struck by the range of the songs he performed — the sweet, open-hearted “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” the Homeric “I’m the Ocean” — and the motley crew he performed them for: bankers, bikers, Deadheads, regular dads with their kids. You’ve got to love a guy who can be caught screaming at the traffic one day and doing fundraisers for his kid’s school the next. At least I do.

It was odd seeing Bush standing in front of St. Louis Cathedral in an emptied out Jackson Square last night, delivering his speech to an audience of crickets (the ones that haven’t deserted the city) and Secret Servicemen. “I am speaking to you from the city of New Orleans, nearly empty, still partly under water and waiting for life and hope to return,” he said to a deafening silence. The church itself, which fronts one end of Jackson Square, looked like a prop; here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and where are the people?

The president himself chose his outfit from the working-man side of his wardrobe: his sleeves were rolled up, his collar was unbuttoned, he was ready to get the job done! Unfortunately he was a week or two too late, as the ever-rising bloated body count continues to remind us. Photos of Bush disembarking his helicopter earlier showed he was also wearing his work boots. He was ready to get his feet dirty, too.

Such props and costumes are the stuff of politics, of course. Kerry was mocked for wearing hunting clothes (even though he was going hunting at the time) and after Dukakis’s tank ride it’s safe to say that few presidential candidates will risk putting on a helmet again. But even while Bush has been spared the same ridicule when he goes out to cut some brush on his ranch, here in the city his administration forgot his attire seemed rather grotesque. Was he about to go digging through the mud in search of survivors? Or was it his dying presidency he hoped to revive?

Jackson Square has pleasant associations for almost anyone who has been to NO and I am no exception. I proposed to my wife there; William Faulkner lived a stone’s throw from the spot where Bush stood. To see a living locale reduced to backdrop status is sad especially when the man in the foreground so utterly failed the people who once lived there. People will return to New Orleans, of course, just as Bush will return to the White House. Whether he can get anything done there in the years to come remains to be seen. The Katrina disaster has revealed the theatrics for what they are and coast to coast, in states blue and red, a lot of people were left wondering who the hell was in charge. The city is real, it’s the man who is a facade.