A Grab Bag: Making Music in Indiana! Hooser Filmmakers! Bob Dylan! Unreliable Narrators! American Short Stories!

I put together this post on February 3, meaning to do more with what I had found on these sites. Work, illness, recuperation kept me from doing more. I added some brief notes today.

Want to write a movie and want to see real scripts. Rian Johnson has posted his at rcjohnso / scripts.

 Why Bob Dylan’s COVID-Era Album Was the Real Nobel Lecture 

“Murder Most Foul” is, first, the story of a killing, which Dylan depicts as an execution, and, then, a catalog of the plangent reverberations for a nation—­as he later sings—­in “slow decay.” Dallas strictly speaking was dark when Kennedy arrived, rainy and gray, and from the outset Dylan embeds the assassination inside prior American cataclysmic cruxes: Native American ethnocide (referencing the Oglala Lakota saying, “a good day to die”) and Pearl Harbor, via Franklin Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. But 1941 was also the year Dylan was born, and his song is just as cannily personal as it is historical. His memoir Chronicles recounts his mother’s avid response to a Kennedy campaign visit to Hibbing, Minnesota, six months after Dylan left for Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota. “He gave a heroic speech, my mom said, and brought people a lot of hope,” Dylan wrote. “I wish I could have seen him.” Kennedy also figured into one of Dylan’s first public controversies when, on December 13, 1963, he ruffled his Emergency Civil Liberties Committee hosts in New York after they bestowed upon him their annual Tom Paine Award—­for civil rights efforts—­by remarking that “I saw some of myself” in Lee Harvey Oswald. More recently, Dylan included paintings of Oswald and Jack Ruby in his “Revisionist Art” series (2011-­2012), both modeled after reconfigured Life magazine covers. On his twenty-­first-­century albums, “Love And Theft” (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Tempest, Dylan circulated several conspicuously political songs, among them “High Water (For Charley Patton),” “Cry a While,” “Sugar Baby,” “When the Deal Goes Down,” “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Scarlet Town,” “Tin Angel,” and “Tempest.” During an interview with novelist Jonathan Lethem, he might jest, “You know, everybody makes a big deal about the sixties. The sixties, it’s like the Civil War days. But, I mean, you’re talking to a person who owns the sixties. Did I ever want to acquire the sixties? No. But I own the sixties—­who’s going to argue with me?” Still, on “Murder Most Foul” Dylan thwarts readymade nostalgia, an easy revisiting of the storybook sixties and his golden “spokesman” moment. Instead, mixing and juxtaposing voices, lingos, and tones, he traces the decline of America over the trajectory of his own lifetime through the kaleidoscope of the Kennedy assassination. 

  hoodox Hoosier documentaries that inspire. 

Hoodox is a nonprofit organization on a mission to support and share stories that connect Hoosiers, spark conversations, and inspire positive change in Indiana.

We believe Indiana’s future can be bright, and that amplifying true stories told by and for Hoosiers is one of the most powerful ways to help us get there. 

 The Musical Family Tree - Indiana bands

The Musical Family Tree archive was started in 2004 and serves as a crowd sourced archive of the Indiana music scene with a focus on the late 1970s through the 2010s. The MFT archive contains 1,720 musical artists and 22,311 recordings, almost none of which are found on traditional streaming services. Please explore the archive and contact us at team@musicalfamilytree.org with any questions.  

(Muncie bands - most of whose names I do not recognize, but Faith Band goes unmentioned. Indianapolis bands - too many to look through - but looking through the listing by name, I found my favorite Indy band from the early Eighties: The Future! No entries for Anderson. No Pedlar?)

Can you make a 5-minute film for $5,000?  (Mirror Indy)

Now, Hoodox has created a new opportunity for Indiana filmmakers, in partnership with Indiana Humanities, Free Press Indiana and Heartland Film. LIFT will give five filmmakers $5,000 awards to help them create short nonfiction films “to raise the spirit of Indiana,” Walls said. The films will premiere at the 2026 Indy Shorts International Film Festival in July.

“But a big part of this program is also the mentorship opportunities. We don’t want to just throw out an application and then give five filmmakers $5,000 and hope that it all works out,” Walls said. “We want the entire process, starting with the application, to be an opportunity for filmmakers to learn and grow.”

Adriane Leigh on Why We Are Living in the Age of the Unreliable Narrator (Crime Reads)

Social media encourages us to experience our lives not as they happen, but as they will be presented. Moments are filtered through the lens of potential content. Emotions are evaluated for shareability. Experiences are edited into arcs: struggle → insight → growth. In this environment, the self becomes a story rather than a state. And stories demand consistency.

The problem is that real people are not consistent. We contradict ourselves. We regress. We behave badly for reasons that aren’t flattering. We want things we’re not proud of. But social media trains us to hide these fractures, to smooth them over, to rewrite ourselves in real time.

Over time, this produces a subtle psychological shift. We don’t just lie to others—we start editing our own memory. We remember the version of events that performed best. We forget the parts that didn’t fit the narrative. Like classic unreliable narrators, we come to believe our own omissions.

“A National Art Form”: John Stauffer on Rediscovering the 19th-Century American Short Story, from Poe to Wharton  (Library of America)

LOA: The short story emerged as a distinctive American art form in the nineteenth century. What factors propelled its rise and development?

JS: The nineteenth century was marked by tremendous change and innovation in American writing, and the short story was at the center of that creative and intellectual ferment, fueled by the evolution of new printing technologies, the rapid growth of periodical literature, and rising literacy rates. Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), a collection of essays and short stories, became the United States’s first literary bestseller, offering a rebuttal to British critics who had long laughed at the paucity of US cultural achievement. Looking backward at the accomplishment of the American short story in The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1962), the celebrated Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor remarked, “Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully that one can say that it is a national art form.”

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