No Easy Answers

Documenting Dylan's prickly dealings with the press. Plus: Jack White's latest

May 16, 2006

BOOKS: Before he turned into a crotchety old dude with his own just-debuted show on XM radio, Dylan was a crotchety young dude. Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews collects 40 years worth of often stingingly adversarial Q&As—including many gems from the sixties, plus Nora Ephron's 1987 piece, which Sam Shepard later turned into a one-act play. Also this week, former New York Daily News gossip Mitchell Fink shows what he thinks of subtlety with The Last Days of Dead Celebrities, which details the final moments of Orson Welles, Muriel Hemingway, and Ted Williams back when his head was still attached.

MUSIC: They've been dubbed "Jack White's Tin Machine" in some quarters, but the Raconteurs have one key element Bowie's eighties side project didn't—melody. Key track: "Level." Had things gone differently, Greg Dulli might have been the Jack White of his day. Instead, the former Afghan Whigs singer has been laboring in relative obscurity. Powder Burns, his fourth album with the Twilight Singers, deserves wider attention. Also worth a spin is The True False Identity, the first studio album in 14 years from O Brother impresario T-Bone Burnett.

TV: He was joking in Malibu's Most Wanted, but Jamie Kennedy (above right) seems half serious about making it as a rapper in MTV's Blowin' Up, which debuts tonight. Just as unlikely to produce a hit track is Supergroup over on VH1, which puts five grizzled metal dudes (including Sebastian Bach and Ted Nugent) and some recording equipment under one roof. Family Guy fans will be pleased to learn that its fourth season ends with a 90-minute finale—until, that is, they realize it's just a cleaned-up version of Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, which came out on DVD last year.

MOVIES: Neither Opus Dei nor Tom Hanks's hair (mercifully unpictured) seem capable of derailing the Da Vinci Code juggernaut, but it's not the only film out this week. Gael García Bernal and William Hurt star in the revenge drama The King, while L.I.E. director Michael Cuesta unleashes his latest, 12 and Holding.

WEB: However you feel about current international entanglements (or graphic novels, for that matter), Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman's dystopian, hipster-skewering Shooting War begs for a click.