“I played a part in a movie, wore cowboy duds and galloped down the road,” writes Bob Dylan in Newsweek‘s excerpt from his forthcoming autobiography, “Chronicles, Volume One” (Simon and Schuster). He’s talking about his performance as “Alias” in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (’73), for which there was “not much required” and about which “I was probably naive,” the poet-troubador writes. But here’s the real drill-bit excerpt, printed on the lower right side of page 56: “Sometime in the past I’d written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn’t know if I ever would again and I didn’t care.” Dylan said the same thing more profoundly in a song from Nashville Skyline: “Once I held mountains in the palm of my hand/and rivers that ran through every day/I must have been mad/I never what I had/until I threw it all away.”

MCN columnist David Poland’s recent take on the presumed potency of Mike Nichols’ potentially Oscar-worthy Closer (Columbia, 12.3) has been, I have to admit, one of his more astute calls. The fact that it’s said to play “a little cold” is an indication, he believes, that producers of other presumed Oscar-calibre films are a bit scared of it. “When people start lining up to smear a film this early, that film has some power,” he wrote earlier this week. “And that is why bad buzz can be a good sign.” My own view is that the Patrick Marber play it’s based upon is a little bit cold (i.e., it reads that way), but it’s also a devastating, well-cut diamond. The Godfather, Part II is a little bit cold also, but if Francis Coppola had warmed it up he would have totally screwed it up.

Will “security moms” be watching the first Presidential Debate on Thursday evening? Or have they pretty much made up their minds at this stage? The reason Bush is said to be leading in the polls right now is that these hinterland-residing, marginally educated swing voters (i.e., family women who are deeply concerned about domestic terrorism) believe Dubya will be studlier and more sheriff-y in preventing the next 9.11. But of course, if a perverse determination had been made by a sitting U.S. President to try and deliberately provoke another terrorist assault in the wake of the 9.11 attacks, it’s hard to imagine how this could have been done more effectively than by way of Bush’s Iraqi War policy. Is there any Middle East watcher anywhere who doesn’t believe that anti-American hatred levels over there are much higher now than they were before 9.11? And yet the security moms are inclined to re-elect Bush because he makes them feel safer. Got it. Couple this with the general tendency of swing voters to vote for a Presidential candidate based on “Dating Game” standards (does he seem like a nice guy? would you want to have a beer with him?), and all I want to do is go out and have a few beers myself. Make that several.