Bob Dylan’s latest album, Christmas In The Heart, is an unusual collection of Christmas standards. All proceeds from the album will go to support homeless services. Dylan granted an interview exclusive to members of the North American Street Newspaper Association to talk about the album.

Bob Dylan has at various times revolutionized folk, rock, country, and gospel music. However, any Dylan fan who claims not to have been surprised that Bob has released an album of traditional Christmas songs is pulling your leg. Christmas In The Heart is another surprising move by an artist famous for surprises. Yet when you hear Dylan’s direct and obviously sincere readings of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Little Town Of Bethlehem,” and “The First Noel,” this unlikely exercise seems of a piece with the rest of Dylan’s work.

From the very first, this was an artist who made us look at the familiar with new eyes and ears. While some critics tie themselves into knots analyzing Dylan’s motives, it has usually turned out that Bob Dylan means exactly what he says. Featuring members of his touring band along with Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and Chess Records vet Phil Upchurch, Christmas In The Heart is Bob Dylan’s celebration of family, community, faith, and shared memory. And a timely celebration it is. Recognizing the worldwide problem of hunger, Bob Dylan has donated all of his proceeds from the record, in perpetuity, to organizations around the world to help with hunger and homelessness.

We sat down to talk in the Waterfront Plaza Hotel in Oakland on a rainy, windy, October day.

To read this article in full, get a copy from a local Street Sheet vendor. If you’re not in San Francisco, there’s a good chance your local street paper is running the interview.

It is very easy to view homelessness as an issue simply about the supply and demand of housing, but I believe that it is a more complicated wealth vs. poverty issue. Real estate and access to it is one of the most tangible, dramatic, and visible symptoms of the “equality gap” between wealthy people and poor people, in the US of A, these days. HUD has been an agency of the US Government that has supervised the redirection of a portion of America’s vast wealth towards the housing needs of poor people in America. However, HUD did not create its own wealth, nor was it ever structured to generate revenue: It was dependant on funding from the Federal budget. As the amount of wealth HUD was allowed to receive was reduced, HUD’s ability to house poor people was reduced. This is where, at the institutional level, contemporary mass homelessness began, and is allowed, by our elected leadership, to continue.

(more…)

Admit it: Despite yourself, the movie, The Pursuit of Happyness seduced you. What’s not to love? An eager, energetic, down-on-his-luck—and briefly homeless—father, Chris Gardner (Will Smith), takes his adorable five-year-old preschooler, Christopher (Jaden Smith), by the hand, guiding him on a dangerous odyssey through San Francisco’s labyrinthine streets, subways, and skyscrapers, and modeling for his little son the grit and determination that culminates in his final tearful realization of the American Dream.

Who wouldn’t be touched by the total loyalty and trust between Christopher and Chris: a father who pledges never to abandon his son as his father abandoned him, especially when played by actors who are actual father and son?

(more…)