174. At first sight

I.

While reading Chronicles, Vol. 1, I notice how Bob Dylan captures people in just a few brushstrokes. “His voice could jar a corpse,” he writes about Roy Orbison. “Always leaving you muttering to yourself something like, ‘Man, I don’t believe it’.”

On Noel Paul Stookey (the American singer-songwriter who was part of Peter, Paul and Mary): “Stookey looked like someone torn out of some ancient magazine.” Good luck topping that.

One day Dylan is sitting at Bono’s kitchen table. Apparently that happens sometimes. You can tell Dylan is impressed by the U2 frontman. “Bono says things that can sway anybody. He’s like that guy in the old movie, the one who beats up a rat with his bare hands and wrings a confession out of him.”

Bob Dylan must have had fun writing these descriptions. He’s generous with his admiration and isn’t afraid to exaggerate a little while he’s at it. Robert Johnson “seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.”

You find that same affectionate (and witty) way of writing in his most recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song — an ode to his favourite songs. In it he writes like a music teacher who explains crystal-clearly what makes a song work so well, without piling on too much fuss. Sometimes he can’t help himself, though. Take what he says about Johnnie Ray, for instance: “It is the voice of a damaged angel cast out to walk the streets of the dirty cities, singing and squealing, crying and cajoling, banging mic stands and piano stools.”

In Chronicles, Vol. 1, Bob Dylan also reflects on the descriptions others gave him. Legend, icon, enigma. “Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite,” he writes. He had no problem with that one. But he identified less with terms like prophet, messiah and saviour. Eventually, being called the voice of a generation really started to bother him. “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.”

Then he also captures himself in his younger years. “A folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in luminous haze.”

II.

After Chronicles, I pay extra attention to how characters are introduced. Patti Smith writes in her incredible memoir Just Kids about how she met Saint. “My guide, a black Cherokee with one foot in the street and the other in the Milky Way. He suddenly appeared, as vagabonds will sometimes find one another.”

If a cat has nine lives, Patti Smith must have twenty. She’d already been through quite a lot before she even left for New York to become a poet and singer. She’s 79 now, almost 80, but when I saw her dancing on stage at Tivoli Vredenburg this week, she looked a lot younger.

I’d wanted to go to one of her concerts for years, but it never happened. This time it was a home game, in Utrecht. I saw in Patti Smith a passionate woman who hadn’t lost any of her fighting spirit. Before she’d even sung a note, she took a jab at the nasty world leaders sowing division. “Let’s choose connection in this room,” she said.

She then opened with Ghost Dance, a title named after a nineteenth-century Native American dance meant to restore their world. It’s a beautiful song for getting everyone on the same page. The chorus is an incantatory repetition of the words: “We shall live again.”

Smith of course played Because the Night (the song Bruce Springsteen gave her) and Gloria: In Excelsis Deo, which opens with the gorgeous line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” The song comes from her album Horses, a dream of a debut.

At 79, she still plays her songs with a power her distinctive voice hasn’t lost an ounce of. Think of songs like Nine, Dancing Barefoot, Fireflies, Pissing In a River. Smith doesn’t release new music anymore, but why would she, when she’s already written songs like these? She also remains just as politically engaged as ever, with the fighting spirit of the sixties still intact. It’s no coincidence she closes with People Have the Power.

PS.

The trailer for Hope looks like good old fun. From South Korean director Na Hong-jin.

Robin Sloan is rewriting his short story Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, on which he later based the novel of the same name (a good one): “I’m very proud of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, both the short story and the novel, but/and they are not the stories I’d write today. I don’t only mean that the interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them — although, yes, that’s part of it — but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.” I’m annoyed I missed this collection.

Refreshing in 2026: software you can buy and then own forever.

We’re losing the ability to discover things we didn’t even know we needed to ask about, neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in The New York Times. More and more, we google something and get stuck on the AI-generated answer. “In short, curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity — not just for the specific thing you want to know but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.”

Animated data portraits of World Cup matches. Awesome. And this week I also saw another data-based tour de force. This bizarre analysis of Seinfeld. Holy shit.

This Nintendo Switch 2 game looks like an old anime series and it’s fantastic.

The Rolling Stones are back with a new album. Possibly their last. Doesn’t sound bad at all. The final track is a Chuck Berry cover, as Volkskrant journalist Menno Pot notes. The band also once opened their debut with a Chuck Berry cover. A deliberate choice to bring things full circle? Mick Jagger: “If that’s how it turns out, that would be nicely symbolic, don’t you think?”

You just read blog №174, written in the week of 6 to 12 July 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll receive it in your inbox every Sunday, free of charge.