Jaan Uhelszki, as you may have seen in the current issue of Uncut, recently spent some time with Bill Callahan at his home in Austin. One of Jaan’s great skills is her ability to conduct a forensic sweep of any environment she finds herself in, and on Callahan’s bookshelves, she notes, are “Bass Playing For Dummies… a King Tubby DVD… Learning Spanish by Michael Thomas, ‘The Language Teacher To The Stars’… a Stephen Crane reader.”
Wadjda is the first full-length feature film shot entirely inside Saudi Arabia, a conservative Islamic country where women are denied civic freedoms or any public role. It’s director is Haifaa Al-Mansour, a Saudi-born female filmmaker who now lives in Bahrain. While shooting on location in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, Al-Mansour had to hide in a production van, directing her actors via walkie-talkie, because she could not publicly mix with her male crew.
The guitar Bob Dylan played at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 is to be sold at auction.
The 1964 sunburst Fender Stratocaster will be auctioned later this year after Dawn Peterson, who has owned the guitar for 50 years, decided to part with the iconic musical memorabilia. Peterson appeared with the instrument on US TV show History Detectives earlier this year and has been informed that she is likely to make a minimum of £333,000 from the sale.
From Uncut's September 2002 issue: In one of the most revealing interviews of his career, Bruce Springsteen talks exclusively to Adam Sweeting about his new album, The Rising, much of which was written in the aftermath of September 11, and which reunites him with the E Street Band for their first studio album since Born In The USA.