It was two grand old icons in their late model glory.

The theater, a grand birthday cake of architectural exuberance from the Twenties, whose Moorish Rococo witnessed vaudeville, only to be replaced by moving pictures, only to be replaced by Rev. Ike’s campaign to fleece the poor, only to be replaced by rock n roll.

 And Bob Dylan.

 There he was, still there, still skinny, still rocking, still His Bobness all these decades later.

 This is not the space to explain Bob Dylan. I could write a book about it. Actually, I did. (Oh, My Name It Is Nothing. The unsung words of Bob Dylan)

 This is a place of short, pithy observation. So what shall we observe of the man who is the foundation upon which rock is built? The man who is the oxygen within which rock n roll has breathed since 1964?

 He brought intellect, poetry, hipness, bohemian culture, ferocity and surrealism to the great American jukebox. He made an art form out of a bubblegum genre manufactured for adolescents. He could have left us in the Woody Guthrie folkie phase, walking the streets of Greenwich Village in boots and ragged jeans. He could have left us as the towering icon who, as one critic described it, “berserked himself into genius” and produced Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Re-visited and Blonde on Blonde all within 16 months, an upheaval of creativity that changed how we write, sing and hear music forever. He could have left us in the country-gentleman family-man phase he retreated into after the drug-addled fame that could and should have destroyed him. He could have left us as the born-again Christian only a nice Jewish boy in a lot of trouble could have become. He could have left us as the preternaturally weird, forgotten, mocked former Sixties icon in the Eighties, worshipped now only by a few in the US and more in England. He could have left us after his final resurrection into his greatest phase of commercial success.

 But he didn’t. He just stood there swaying fifteen rows from my son and me on the stage of the United Palace Theater, growling happily, banging on the organ, fronting “the best band in the land.”

 He had even outlived Rev. Ike, whose final justification sits on a sign in the opulence of the lobby. “I am not the opinions of others.”

 I wrote an inscription in a book for my son when he was born: “When’s he’s sixteen, may a Bob Dylan come along for him too.”

 It did. It just turned out to be Bob Dylan.

Tags: Bob Dylan

Funny is distance. To be funny, you must have distance on yourself and the whole creaking project of your personal vanity. You also must have distance on the clichéd mental machinery of our daily narrative.

Funny is Woody Allen saying: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”

Funny is Steven Wright saying: “I have large collection of seashells. I keep it on beaches all over the world. Maybe you’ve seen it.”

Funny is Calvin Klein’s daughter saying: “How come every time I have sex, I have to read my father’s name?”

Funny is a young Larry David saying: “I want to break up with my girl friend but I don’t want to hurt her feelings, so I’m waiting till she dies.”

Celebrated people who aren’t funny lack such distance. They are just too busy being themselves. So when one of the famous but unfunny utters something amazingly witty, it is a moment worth celebrating.

Howard Stern isn’t funny. Howard Stern is a fourteen-year-old-in- Queens operating in a fifty-five year old body. I know what this means because I was once a fourteen-year old in Queens. But that changed. It changed when I turned fifteen. But for Howard Stern, it never changed, and he has turned the unfunny adolescent vulgarity of fourteen year olds in Queens into pure gold. But he did once make an enormously funny observation about rock n roll musicians.

He said bass players only have to play four strings, but they get laid just as much as guitar players.

Tina Brown isn’t funny. She’s simply not brilliant enough, beautiful enough or dazzling enough to become what she so desperately aspires to be: the wow girl at the throbbing heart of the media universe. She began as a hyper-ambitious British gossip girl who married well and stormed New York in the eighties. She successfully elevated Vanity Fair to a niche in the buzz pantheon and managed a controversial but not unsuccessful stint as editor of the hallowed New Yorker magazine, eventually leaving that mecca of wit and writing panache without having permanently damaged it. Then she floundered, and is floundering still, trying digitally and desperately to be the “innest” of them all. Desperation is not funny, especially British desperation. But she did say something funny once.

George W. S. Trow, author of a bizarre and quirky cultural commentary called In the Context of No Context (which is an inspiration to this column) was one of the posse of posh and precious writers around the New Yorker who saw her celebrity-obsessed ascendancy as the death knell of The New Yorker. So he quit. Whereupon Tina Brown sent Trow a note: “I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.”

Frank Sinatra wasn’t funny. His swinging songs and “Ring-a-ding-you-bet-your-bippie-send-in-the-broads” swagger was a million miles from genuine humor. But once, as a young architect working on a casino in Atlantic City, I heard his performance at Resorts International and he told the following joke.

A man enters a monastery where he must take a vow of silence, but every seven years he’s allowed to say two words. So he labors silently in the garden for seven years, whereupon they tell him he can say two words. “Bed hard,” he says. They nod and he returns to work, another silent seven years and they tell him he can say two words. “Food stinks,” he says. They nod and back he goes for another seven years of silent labor. Finally they say he can say two words, and he says: “I quit.” “We’re not surprised,” they tell him. “You’ve done nothing but complain for 21 years.”

Donald Trump isn’t funny. Only in America could a real estate developer become a cultural celebrity, and not a good real estate developer at that. After all, he never masterminded a Rockefeller Center or a United Nations or a Central Park, or even a South Street Seaport. He never built a building of any architectural distinction or helped an iconic architect plant a treasure in the skyline of New York. He simply made his name and made money. Some even dispute that, but figuring out Donald Trump’s pay grade is way beyond mine.

But Donald Trump did say something funny once….wait a minute. He never said anything funny. Sorry.

Technology confuses as often as it clarifies.

Take blogs.

A bizarre word that only the Internet could have given birth to, blog is a shortening of the word Web log. Meaning it is a log, or diary, or personal commentary that happens to take place in a digital medium.

But no matter where a piece of copywriting appears, the rules and demands of persuasive and vibrant writing are the same. So while their odd name and the digital medium make blogs appear something exotic and special, demanding some sort of newfangled writing rules, they’re not and they don’t. They’re just copywriting. And they obey all the rules of copywriting.

All copywriting must use living language rather than dead language. That means – OK I’ll make it real complicated – fresh, colorful, precise and unexpected words: GOOD. Dead, clichéd, tired and imprecise words: BAD.

All copywriting must be animated by a clear purpose and a central theme. Flabby writing means flabby thinking. A central theme organizes writing the way iron filings line up in a magnetic field. You start the reader with a premise at Word One, you take them on a trip, then you kiss them goodbye, and you’ve led them on a clear and single-minded journey. That is good writing.

Finally, all copywriting must have the reader in mind. And that’s where a blog can get a little complicated. We all know that an ad or brochure has the mission of persuasion, so it’s obvious it must be about the reader. When an ad is about the writer having fun, enjoying creative freedom and delighting in the whimsy of words, he or she is writing an ad that fails.

So why would a blog follow the same rule, when a blog isn’t an ad, with the mission of persuasion? A blog is a personal “log” or commentary, right? The answer is: a blog is an ad.
Wow. That is a profound thought. Everything you write is advertising something. It may be your point of view, your belief, your argument, your experience, but you are advertising it, because you want to control the reader’s experience. You are intended and precise about the takeaway in the reader’s mind. And so, the content of the blog is about you. But the writing must be about the reader, or they will get blogged down. And leave.

The laws, rules and secrets of turning words into lethal weapons are described in entertaining detail in my book Maximun Strength Copywriting. But one of the central revelations must be stated here: media may vary. But the laws of persuasive writing don’t.

So go ahead and blog away. Talk about your day, your dog, your political opinions, your experiences as a whitewater kayaker, anything you want. You will be joining what blog search engine Technorati estimated as 112 million blogs by the end of 2007. Everybody’s got an opinion, and everybody’s got a story.

But as you write your blog, keep your emphasis on the writing part. Because a blog is writing. With a funny name.

Tags: Blogs, Writing