I couldn’t ever get into Bob Dylan. Dunno why. In my effort to try to explore critically embarrassing and often psychically liberating bruises in the careers of Famous Musicians (Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies Man, The Eagles’ The Long Run), I listened to Street Legal last week. The back cover makes him look like Alice Cooper. I thought heroin was slimming, but Karl assured me that quasi-Renaissance leisure wear lends a look of gravity (well, just, “he’s not fat. just his shirt”). The only song I really like is “Is Your Love in Vain?,” which is horror-rock, in a sense. I guess it’s a thorn for Dylan lovers because it’s not poetically nuanced enough or something; it’s also one of the most wrong-headed and classically selfish sentiments I’ve ever heard, but he sings it with grotesque conviction (Karl said “I don’t want to ever hear that song again”; I couldn’t stop thinking about it). It’s like he threw up all the worst love letters I write; it’s like those ads–”If smoking did to your outside what it did to your insides, would you still do it?”