Salon.com > Dan Brekke

Tangled up in Seuss

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 12:35:00 +0000

Kevin Ryan doesn't want to talk about his recent fling with Web stardom. He's a bit rueful and more than a little nervous about it, in fact, and wishes the whole thing would just go away.

If you missed his star turn, here's what happened: Ryan, a 33-year-old Houston music producer and author, went into his home studio and engineered a sort of retro mash-up of two of his favorite artists, Bob Dylan and Dr. Seuss.

Ryan took the text from seven Seuss classics, including "The Cat in the Hat" and "Green Eggs and Ham," and set them to original tunes that sounded like they were right off Dylan's mid-'60s releases. He played all the instruments and sang all the songs in Dylan's breathy, nasal twang. He registered a domain name, dylanhearsawho.com, and in February posted his seven tracks online, accompanied by suitably Photoshopped album artwork, under the title "Dylan Hears a Who."

"Green Eggs and Ham" was set to a tune and arrangement somewhere between "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Subterranean Homesick Blues," complete with Dylan's rushed, occasionally sneering phrasing. Familiar passages are run together in impatient run-ons:

Stardust memories

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 11:29:00 +0000

I flew down to Las Vegas last week to see a historic 32-story casino dynamited. I thought I could extract a little universal meaning from the event. Although I hail from the peace-loving town of Berkeley, Calif., I've also seemed to inherit that American male gene that makes us love seeing stuff blown up. Apart from whatever deep thoughts the experience might provoke, I was sure I'd love the show.

I did enjoy it, though the hours of standing around in the Strip's outdoor haze of cigarette smoke and diesel fumes didn't seem like a fair trade for 30 seconds of hot man-on-building action at 2:30 in the morning. The climax, after a four-minute fireworks show, was two quick rounds of explosions that sent the hotel tower and an adjoining nine-story inn at the old Stardust resort crashing to the desert floor. All that mass slamming to earth made the ground shake and unleashed a roiling cloud of cement dust. The throng, such as it was -- a smattering of bereaved Stardust fans and former employees, plus a few random stragglers who had wandered up the Strip for the night's best free show -- scurried away. Sporting a dust mask I'd bought for two bucks from an entrepreneurial fellow spectator, I trudged back to my smoke-free hotel, looked at the pictures and video I'd shot, and went to sleep.

A tough guy called Sweetness

Tue, 02 Nov 1999 10:00:00 +0000

Nov. 20, 1977, was the greatest day a National Football League running back ever had. The Chicago Bears' third-year halfback, a flu-ridden Walter Payton, entered the game against the Minnesota Vikings at Soldier Field and ran and ran and ran. On the last of his 40 carries -- a fourth-down sweep called by a coach who lacked the imagination to try anything else (even at chip-shot field-goal range, even with the game nearly over) -- he slammed and stumbled 4 yards. Payton's total for the day: 275 yards -- a couple better than O.J. Simpson's mark, and an NFL record to this day.

Payton kept running for a long time after the clock ran out on that game, but the number on the scoreboard that afternoon remained emblematic of the ironies of his career. The Bears had won, but they had scored a meager 10 points. A minor tragedy compared to Payton's death of a rare liver disease and cancer on Monday at age 45, but a tragedy nonetheless: Payton's career was spent with a team that always seemed to find a way to make the least of his enormous talents.

Michael Jordan's final act

Thu, 14 Jan 1999 20:00:00 +0000

So Long, MJ. Goodbye to the Greatest Ever. The Perfect Departure. Never Mind Who's Next -- He's Irreplaceable. Tough Luck for the NBA.

Thirty-six hours of instant analysis/eulogy/postmortem/ deification. Enough. Listening to the awed tones of Frank Deford and a thousand and one other commentators, reading the front-page requiems and career wraps, looking at the highlight clips -- they all end with the perfectly scripted exit: the championship-grabbing steal and jumper against Karl Malone and the Jazz last June -- finally made me see it.

This is all wrong.

It's not time for Michael Jordan to leave. Forget the National Basketball Association for a minute. I'm not ready. The world's not ready. I reject his resignation.

I say this not as someone who has followed every step of Jordan's career -- though I've gotten in the way of enough media over the last 15 seasons that we could talk about everything from Michael's late-blooming high school career to his late nights in Atlantic City. Nor do I weigh in as someone who has haunted pro locker rooms and can tell you what Michael's sneakers smell like -- though we know, don't we, that he's got more of them than anyone and they've got a sweeter odor than yours or mine.