[Bob] Dylan is a contemporary Don Quixote, at once besotted by the promise of America and yet also undermining it.

The most recent incarnation of [Bob] Dylan has been the traveling journeyman/ charlatan who sings roots music, snarls dark lyrics that make "All Along the Watchtower" sound like a Disney tune, hosts an old-school radio show, and turns up in some unusual places, like ads for Chrysler and Victoria's Secret.

After an initial solo album in which the young [Bob] Dylan was just finding his voice (i.e., reinventing himself from the middle-class Robert Zimmerman into a pseudo-hobo Woody Guthrie), Dylan put out two acoustic albums that forever changed popular music.

In late [Bob] Dylan, music is the key to immortality, even though the summer days are long gone.

People should support equality because of their religion not despite it. These are the values that openness, inclusion, diversity promote. And they're directly opposed to the kind of enforced closet of certain interpretations of religion.

[Bob] Dylan would cut out phrases from magazines and then paste them together.

There has been a ton of excellent music in this period (along with a few misses), evoking scenes like a bar-room brawl at a border-town dive, a washed-up singer in a smoky lounge, and the scenes of violence in Bob Dylan latter-day music videos.I think the ethos of this period is best summed up in the 2001 song "Summer Days".