Suze Rotolo RIP and a tale of the gap in my education

Who?  Even I know she was the muse of Bob Dylan for a period and the woman pictured with the singer on the ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan‘ album.(Pictured)

What I hadn’t heard about before was a “Suze Rotolo lipstick holder”.  This item came up in conversation when we were discussing last night the death of Suze Rotolo.(wiki Obits at the end if you want the links.)  Being a second decade of the 21st Century type of guy I even posted a Facebook status update:

Hmmm clearly my education is incomplete I don’t know what a Suze Rotolo Lipstick case(sic) is, or what it’s for. Suze Rotolo RIP.

Clearly I am not alone in this gap in my education as a relative responded:

I’m with you Andrew, but I am sure it costs oodles of money and therefore chic

JTO went to the shelves that contain both our record collections to get his eponymous first album which on the sleeve notes has the following:

Dylan had never sung In My Time of Dyin’ prior to this recording session.  He does not recall where he first heard it.  The guitar is freted with the lipstick holder he borrowed from his girl, Susie Rotolo (sic), who sat devotedly and wide-eyed through the recording session.

So the question of what a Suze Rotolo lipstick holder is has been answered.  It is something which holds a lipstick that belongs to Suze Rotolo.  But it was assumed that as a person who played a guitar a lot in my youth I would understand the sentence but I didn’t know what ‘freted’ meant and I had never done it with a lipstick holder, belonging to Suze Rotolo or anyone else.  A search using Google returned many debates about whether a freted or fretless bass is better and two bands named either Freted or FRETeD.  I know the fret is the metal bar that crosses the neck of a guitar to delineate the different notes.  Having read about ‘how different cords are freted’ as another result of my search, meaning where the fingers are placed on the notes to make the different chord sounds when a guitar is strummed.  So presumably Mr Dylan was using the lipstick holder to block off strings when forming chords.  The second picture is Suze Rotolo with the director of the Bob Dylan film “I’m not there“, Todd Haynes.

Obits – Mail, CBS, Guardian, BBC, Yahoo, MSNBC, and Rolling Stone.

Back bollocking

Well that’s some absence, more than a month since the last post. Not good for building a readership I’m told. You have to post frequently so people know to come back. I know it true. But my response is a bit of cussed obstinacy , It’s my blog and I’ll write it when I want to. There’s also the ambivalence about claiming not to want an audience, but then my pleasure on getting comments shows that I do. Anyway I didn’t write for a month and now I am again.

In the last month work has gone crazy at the same time as there were visits to Andorra, Toulouse and Lyon and then another week in Madeira. We’ve had the Easter, Workers Day and Anniversary of the end of the Second Wold War holidays, which allowed a lot of the traveling to happen. I’ve seen Bob Dylan, Zaho and Gregoire in very good concerts, Manchester City are out of European competition and have two games to try and get back for next season. Le Racing are second and still on course for promotion back to League 1. The cricket season has started and has gone comparitvely well for Lancashire. We’ve had some wonderful weather. The last weekend saw a visit to Germany for the holiday to celebrate the end of WWII, Saturday afternoon spent with my cricket team teaching cricket to the Fench and then the film ‘the Rocking Boat’ on Sunday. Last night was the first semi-final of the Eurovision, tomorrow is the second before we have the joy of the final on Saturday. Before that there is a long walk in the Vosges on Saturday and afterwards is an early departure for the train to Stuttgart then a flight back to Belgrade. Not to repeat the visit from February in better weather but in order to catch the sleeper train to Skopje to get another capital and then to visit Pristina, although it isn’t really yet a European capital just tocover allour bases, in case anyone might want to say anything about our not having visited it in the future. That’ll do for my return.

Blowing in the wind

A previous post had talked about the freeze and included pictures of

steam rising

Strasbourg in the frost.  It also talked about the cold weather breaking.  Well, when it freezes sometimes things happen and it being frozen covers things up, you don’t know there was a problem.  The picture on the right shows a pool of hot water which has risen to the surface at the side of the road.  In the basement of the building not seen on the left of the picture there is what is clearly a laundry.  It would seem there is a problem with a pipe taking away to the drains the water used to clean the clothes, possibly which was caused by the freeze, and it was frozen whilst there was a freeze so it wasn’t known about.  Now that things are no longer frozen, like the tides moving back to reveal some long forgotten wreck, we can see the problem.  Thankfully, I passed the site later in the day today and it seemed that the problem had been resolved and the steam had gone, without the road having to be dug up, traffic halted etc. so that’s a good thing.

It’s a long way back to Germany

From a quote from a Bob Dylan song to the Ramones (Particularly here), this blog takes them all in.  The predecessor site to this talked about how much better the French were about urban living.  I illustrated the post with someone moving from an upper floor of a building and the contraption that existed to do it, in this case a mechanical lift that collected things from the upper storeys of buildings and delivered them down to be taken away.  On my return from work I saw this happening, a group of men struggling to get a ladder up to an upper storey window.  The ladder did seem to have some sort of pulley system to lift the items up to the window of the flat they were clearly being moevd to, but I could not see how the ladder would be fitted to the window of the flat.  You cannot see in the photo that the possessions of the people moving in are on the roadside, waiting for the movers to get their ladder up to the required floor.  This group of German removals might be cheaper, their vans were clearly from Germany, but it’s causing them trouble to get the ladder up to the window.  The French automatic ones seem to work much better.