Bob Dylan

How sweet is life when you live next to a celebrity in Malibu? Outside Bob Dylan's house, the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind. That's what some of the singer-songwriter's neighbors are charging in an increasingly odoriferous dispute over a portable toilet at his sprawling ocean view estate on Point Dume. Residents contend that the nighttime sea breeze sends a noxious odor from a portable toilet on Dylan's property wafting into their homes.

Bob Dylan is among the artists nominated for a W.C. Handy Award for blues song of the year. Dylan, better known for his folk and rock work, was nominated for his first Handy Award as songwriter of "Stepchild," recorded by Solomon Burke on the album "Don't Give Up on Me." The Blues Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes the genre, announced the nominations in 25 categories Monday. Shemekia Copeland and Magic Slim & the Teardrops led the list with five nominations each.

The Glendale band Biirdie has a layered, tremulous new song about the alienation of separated lovers and a vagabond life: L.A. is Mars Where the wind blows money and stars You are the peak of the mountain top. In those lyrics, Biirdie member Jared Flamm was channeling feelings familiar to any heartsick East Coast transplant, but the actual history of the song -- and his band -- is far more unusual.

Bob Dylan, the cipher who was as conscious of his image as he was inconspicuous in its cultivation, is the subject of "Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966" -- an array of images charting his rise from Greenwich Village folk urchin to '60s super-troubadour. The first lecture in the concurrent "Talking Dylan" series, "Dylan's Image and Identity," presents John Cohen and Daniel Kramer, two photographers featured in the exhibition. 2 p.m. Sun., Skirball Cultural Center. $5, (866) 722-4849; www.

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, is that the actual tambourine that Greenwich Village guitarist Bruce Langhorne owned, the one that inspired the song? And how about the 1961 concert poster advertising Bob Dylan tickets for $2? That lyric from "Walkin' Down the Line" comes to mind: "The money comes and goes and rolls and flows. . . ." Dylan is museum material now, and the Experience Music Project's traveling show "Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966" has come to town for its final stop.

Who would ever imagine recordings by Billie Holiday, the Clash, the Sons of the Pioneers, Aretha Franklin, Charles Mingus and the White Stripes all on the same album? If the mixture of jazz, punk, country-western, soul and rock sounds radical in an era of rigid musical segregation on commercial radio, it's only fitting that we have a genuine musical revolutionary to thank for the new package: Bob Dylan.

NEW YORK -- It was one of the most iconic record album covers ever released, and Suze Rotolo was part of it: On a snowy day in 1963, she snuggled with Bob Dylan as the two walked down a Greenwich Village street. "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" went on to become one of his best-known records, but the long-haired girl on his arm was always a mystery.

I'm Not There The Weinstein Co., $29.99 To find out whether you prefer more of a "Cate Blanchett" Dylan or a "Richard Gere" Dylan, you'll have to consult Todd Haynes' freewheelin' big-screen riff on the legendary singer-songwriter, in which six actors embody different aspects of a Bob Dylan character, conveyed in a jumble of anecdotal incidents and impressionistic musical numbers.

Bob Dylan's latest collection of material from his musical back pages, "Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8," is a rich, revealing look at how this master songwriter put together one of the most dramatic creative renaissances in pop history. When Dylan set aside his songwriting in the early 1990s to record two albums of vintage folk, country and blues tunes, many fans thought his long, remarkable career was nearing an end.