TagBob Dylan

Is Ozymandias from Watchmen based on David Bowie?

David Bowie & Watchmen

Ozymandias

So here’s a question/ observation – Ozymandias is based on David Bowie, right?

Maybe slight explanation – after going on a Bob Dylan binge at the end of 2008, and it really threw Watchmen into a new light for me. Watchmen is two creators in dialog with Dylan’s work – it’s as much an element of the piece as the Charlton characters. Aside from being littered with references to Highway 61 Revisited and Bring It All Back Home, the tone of the book owes almost everything to “Desolation Row”, all sickly mocking the apocalypse as it breathes down your neck and nervously cackling as the fires start across the street. Watchmen’s treatment of Dylan’s influence is a lot like the relationship between the Velvet Underground and The Sprawl Trilogy, less an influence but a dialog. So why wouldn’t the villain of the piece be David Bowie?

Read More – Supervillain: Stray Thought

RAB’s comment is key.

(via Blustr)

The Pirate’s Code

When Bob Dylan sang, ‘To live outside the law you must be honest,’ he probably wasn’t thinking of seventeenth-century pirate captains. Nonetheless, his dictum seems to apply to them. While pirates were certainly cruel and violent criminals, pirate ships were hardly the floating tyrannies of popular imagination. As a fascinating new paper (pdf) by Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, and ‘The Republic of Pirates,’ a new book by Colin Woodard, make clear, pirate ships limited the power of captains and guaranteed crew members a say in the ship’s affairs. The surprising thing is that, even with this untraditional power structure, pirates were, in Leeson’s words, among ‘the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.’

Full Story: The New Yorker.

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