That’s me. My name, spelled out by the reservations clerk over the phone last week.

It could also be the Julie Roberts character line in Larry Crowne. Campus lush to Juliette luscious in two easy hours of movie magic.

Or, make it a writing challenge: use whisky-echo-bravo-echo-romeo in a song set in Dodge City 1848, sans cliché. Good luck.

Dylan’s songs let us in. They are his butler, impeccably dressed, astute, well versed in the bard’s wishes. Oddly, this butler lets anyone enter who rings the bell.

CLEVELAND (March 9, 2011) Susan Weber’s artist profile is now available on Ping, Apple’s new social network for music.

Ping provides a convenient way to follow a favorite artist’s music recommendations and add comments to join the conversation. Followers of Weber’s music on Ping can view updates, reviews and playlists she posts to her artist profile as well as selected photos, videos and audio tracks.

A little kid at my school assembly grinned up at me after the show. ‘You remind me of somebody I know!’ he chirped. ‘Who?’ asked I. ‘My Gramma!’

It wasn’t the first time my internal chronometer got a jolt of sudden aging. My dad’s friend told me one day I looked more and more like Frieda, my paternal grandmother he’d known as a child.

All this grandma talk can get a girl cranky in the bones.

My dear father knows a great deal about frugality, magnanimity, cheese and bees. He can distinguish himself in a card game, tossing out helpful tips and random quips, all the while creaming his opponents. He’s aggregated funny and wise, humble and proud, stoic and wry into his crossword puzzler’s brain over ninety plus fruitful years.

A 34 year old Yale paleontologist appreciates good music as he scrutinizes origins:

“For inspiration I listen to Dylan while reconstructing fossils.”
Nick Longrich, Discover December 2010

CLEVELAND (February 23, 2010) Walt Campbell, CEO of Campbell Artist Management (representing Susan Weber), attended the 22nd International Folk Alliance Conference in Memphis, TN in February. The conference affords performers and music business professionals an opportunity to network, update their knowledge of technical and economic changes in the industry, and showcase new and established talent.
 

Why do boys and girls in schools I visit want to help me pack up when I’m finished telling lavish tales? You know, stories that take us places. There’s a certain reverence to the kids’ soft gestures as they stow my props and paraphernalia. Their desire to lend their service to the magic touches me.

The story goes that when young Bob Dylan asked his Newport audience, ‘does anyone have an E harmonica?’ a cacophony of well-aimed mouth harps flung from pockets hit the stage around him. Late last week, the elder Bard of Hibbing brought this home.

I witnessed my first Bob Dylan concert at Canton’s Memorial Civic Center Thursday night. Never underestimate the power of witness.  In the course of 14 songs and three encores, I was in a state of squeaky clean, ‘I thought this didn’t happen ‘til the life hereafter’ grace.  

Tell me how this happened to a lyrics lover who didn’t understand a single word of the show. My brain was not particularly involved in the night’s proceedings, except for a punch drunk awareness that what I never thought possible was happening then. In a wooden stadium seat on a wet November night in downtown Canton, I was unconditionally sated by a work of art.

If any member of the band had called out in need of anything I had to give, my feet would have levitated me to within throwing range. No question. So this is the sublime power of art. Ever since my visit to the great beyond made manifest by six elegant maestros, I’ve heard a sleek internal beauty ask the best I have to offer.

The children understand agape.

Elsewhere I’ve tracked the rational act of making this video.  Here you’ll find the visceral exposé. 

I’ve been Paul Fresty’s friend since our paths crossed in a songwriter circle many moons back.  Suddenly last summer, my imperious muse bade me go see Paul’s Beatles cover band (Revolution Pie) perform for a crowd of groovers and shakers.  Beatlemania was palpable as the stars, settling over the lovers of magic like a sweet dream.  My hand knew not whither to aim the lens in the midst of this wide angle lovefest.

What you see here, to the sound of one fine band and its devotees, is how one of those Beatles tunes moved me.  To film it.  To seek out images worthy of its joy.  To combine, revise, revisit, refine - and finally send it all up to the webiverse for you and your fond friends. 

Anyone who’s edited video knows you floss your ears many times with the audio tracks in play.  Thanks to Revolution Pie, mine was a happy duty.  As for the visuals, well, what better excuse than classic McCartney-Lennon to delve for the best in humanity?

Beethoven composed elegance, vast and beautiful.  Listeners of the day had to warm to his passionate scores.  Because they did, his masterpieces live on.

With songwriting, brevity is key.  Gone are the days when the bards preserved whole histories through song.  People don’t stick around for that sort of thing.  We have books now, and Google.

Having just read such a book, filled with storied minutia about how print and broadcast media (dying life forms?) came to be, I’m charmed by the author’s élan.  The LA Times, CBS and Time, Inc. are the protagonists of David Halberstam’s gripping saga, The Powers That Be.  Power, politics and greed disregard justice or conscience and repeatedly give short shrift to a citizen’s need to know.  It’s the old story of democracy dashed on the rocks of the bottom line.  But the details, like notes in a Beethoven sonata, make the story live.

The book is a worthy, time consuming read.  Mr. Halberstam melds a composer’s lush ethos with a songwriter’s cut to the chase in segments like this:

Reporters and editors were at their best when motivated by instincts of social conscience, and belief in justice.  But those very instincts, given the curious value system in America, often made them stars.  It was heady stuff, this new touch of the bitch goddess.
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

Our best instinct leading to our worst inclination: hardly a new phenomenon.  Ironically, it was the ever increasing reach of the media that magnified celebrity, goading even its best reporters and editors to follow fame’s fancy, to the detriment of honest reportage.

The Powers That Be predates Facebook, Youtube and the like.  Today’s web media give the impression that all of us have a shot at the spotlight, robbing the bitch goddess of her six inch nails.  Surely the saintly blogger can be trusted to honor truth?

Maybe someday, when we, the new journalist-citizenry, yearn to ride herd on our own rude hubris.