9-05-06, 9:03 am

Bob Dylan's latest album, Modern Times (Columbia Records), is an immaculate production, precise in its arrangements and intensely lyrical. While it resurrects the traditional Dylanesque themes of new love, lost love, desire, material loss, hard times, self-indulgence and self-pity, Modern Times is a beautiful, well-crafted blend of realism - even politics – couple with emotional sensitivity.

For instance, in what is to me the best song on the album, 'Workingman's Blues #2' (what happened to workingwomen by the way?) and perhaps one of the better songs written by anyone in a long time, the singer invokes both the class struggle and the search for love in nearly sequential thoughts: The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down Money's gettin' shallow and weak but, You are dearer to me than myself As you yourself can see There is also a hint of the Woody Guthrie Depression-era hobo: While I'm listening to the steel rails hum Got both eyes tight shut Just sitting here trying to keep the hunger from Creeping it's way into my gut But there is also the lover and philosopher: I'm tryin' to feed my soul with thought... In the dark I hear the night birds call I can feel a lover's breath There is even a suggestion that the singer wants more than 'rice and beans' or to take lyrical pot-shots at his class enemy: Meet me at the bottom, don't lag behind Bring me my boots and shoes You can hang back or fight your best on the frontline… As is a typical theme of the tradition of the blues, there's more to this workingman than just the bitterness of hard times.

In 'The Levee's Gonna Break,' traditional blues themes are also represented, but after hurricane Katrina, those blues are more than simply an exercise in craft. While the Bush administration claimed that no one could ever have predicted the levees that protected New Orleans from flooding would be breached, this classic blues lyric predicts, even without the use of satellite imagery or engineering training, that: If it keep on rainin', the levee's gonna break The singer 'worked on the levee' and knows it's about to collapse. To him, the thought that 'everybody saying this is a day only the Lord could make' seems ridiculous.

After the levee is breached, 'Some people on the road carryin' everything they own/Some people got barely enough skin to cover their bones.'

Richly ironic: 'Few more years of hard work, then there'll be a 1,000 years of happiness.'

But the song isn't merely a lament or comment on hard times. There is something blowing in the wind: 'Some people still sleepin', some people are wide awake.'

Embedded in the blues tradition, Modern Times, takes off where Dylan's previous album Love and Theft, left off, but with more originality, more poetry, and more relevancy. If you buy one CD this year, this has to be it.

Inside Man (director, Spike Lee)

All is not what it seems in Spike Lee's 2006 crime thriller, Inside Man, newly released on DVD late last month. A small group of well-organized, disciplined bandits storm a Wall Street bank, disable the surveillance equipment, and imprison dozens of bank employees and customers. The hostages are quickly forced to don overalls and masks just like the robbers in order to confuse everyone's identity. Just another bank robbery with hostages, you say. The cops find a way to end the scenario and bring the bad guys to justice, right?

Wrong.

The robbers aren't after the millions in cash in the safe but something far more valuable: secrets that could bring down on eof the richest men in America. While the truth of what’s really going in that bank may be 'above the pay grade' of cynical, past-his-prime and slightly corrupt Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) -- he really is a little too smart to be a cop, as chief bank robber Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) tells him at one point -- Frazier quickly learns that there is more going on HERE than a simple bank heist, and that the real criminals may not be in the bank at all.

This film is brilliantly written (Russell Gewirtz) and directed (Spike Lee). It is a tale of the corruption of capitalism, the threads of racism that continue to ensnare American society, and the struggle for survival by all those caught in the middle of the struggle for wealth and power waged by elites. With beautifully arranged music and driven by a plot that subverts the traditional cops and robbers scenario, Inside Man is a movie you can't miss.



--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at