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So what can we learn from all this? For one thing, it seems that men have a need to remove women from origin stories.

Charles Fox worked very hard, unsuccessfully, to remove Lori Lieberman from a song they wrote together about her own lived experience. Which is particularly ironic, because the title phrase “killing me softly” was actually borrowed from the 1966 English edition of the novel Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar.

Meanwhile, Suze Rotolo was the inspiration for the song Bob Dylan wrote in 1962, closely based on a song recorded two years earlier by another artist. And both of those songs are musically quite similar to a 1973 Fox/Gimbel song that Charles Fox is suggesting Robbie Williams copied from him in 2024.

And in this year’s Dylan biopic, Suze Rotolo’s name has been changed to a pseudonym, because Dylan said that Rotolo had been a private person who would not have wanted her name to appear publicly. And yet Rotolo had taken the trouble to write an excellent and widely read memoir, which doesn’t seem like the act of a person who does not want to be publicly known.

So why do men keep trying to keep women like Lori Lieberman and Suze Rotolo from appearing in their own origin stories? After all, it just ends up making the men look bad, and everyone finds out the true story anyway.

Frankly, I have no idea why men keep trying to do this. But hey — don’t think twice, it’s all right.

The reason that Suze Rotolo is on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is that she was his significant other when he was writing those songs. In fact, the song Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right is about her.

Rotolo went to Perugia Italy to study art, and Dylan was unhappy that she extended her stay there. That song was his way of expressing his annoyance. You can read the details in her wonderful aforementioned memoir A Freewheelin’ Time.

But the story of Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right is even more interesting. It turns out that it’s not really an original song, but rather a brilliant adaptation.

It’s a riff on the traditional song Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone, and Dylan learned it from fellow folksinger Paul Clayton. In fact, in 1960 Clayton had already recorded his own adaptation called Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone?.

Dylan’s version, in addition to borrowing the music, also borrowed key lyrical phrases from Clayton’s song, including his opening line as well as that great lyric “I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road.”

So there’s that road imagery again, later used in I’ve Got a Name and then again in Forbidden Road. Musically, all of these songs are highly similar, and it’s not clear where the credit should go, since the author of the original inspiration — Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone — is unknown.

But I think there are lessons to be drawn from all this. More tomorrow.

As it happens, when I’ve Got a Name was released in 1973, it had already been a full decade since the release of a very similar song. Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right was written in 1962 and released in 1963.

It’s impossible to listen to the two songs without noticing their uncanny musical similarity. Also, like Forbidden Road, both the Bob Dylan song and the Fox/Gimbel song prominently feature the imagery of roads:

I walked along a forbidden road
I had to know where does it go
Like birds that fly into the sun
I had to run, I’m not the only one

— Forbidden Road (Williams 2024)

Like the pine trees lining the winding road
I got a name, I got a name
Like the singing bird and the croaking toad
I got a name, I got a name

— I’ve Got a Name (Fox/Gimbel 1973)

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well

— Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (Dylan 1962)

The enormously influential album that the Dylan song appears on is called The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, and Suze Rotolo appears on the cover. There’s a good reason for that.

More tomorrow.

The connection between Suze Rotolo and Forbidden Road may not be obvious, unless you are a pop music geek. Here’s a little back story.

Charles Fox, who is now 84, is a prolific composer of popular music. I first about him many years ago because he collaborated with Lori Lieberman and Norman Gimbel on Killing Me Softly with His Song, which was based on Lieberman’s experience in 1971 hearing Don McLean in concert sing his beautiful song Empty Chairs (one of my favorite songs).

Fox and Gimbel managed to deny Lieberman writing credit for the song (and therefore millions of dollars in royalties). Over the years they also tried, very unconvincingly, to deny her contribution.

Another Fox/Gimbel song was I’ve Got a Name, which became a posthumous hit in 1973 for Jim Croce. And that’s the reason the Robbie Williams song Forbidden Road was recently removed from the Oscars shortlist for Best Original Song.

Fox, who is currently a member of the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said that the Robbie Williams song was too similar to I’ve Got a Name. Which is quite arguably true, but which also leads us back to Suze Rotolo.

More tomorrow.

I remember back when I read A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, the artist Suze Rotolo’s memoir of the time when she and Bob Dylan were dating in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. Her book made a huge impression on me, as a clear eyed and perceptive window into the Village folk scene.

I was delighted to later learn that while I was reading that book, she was teaching at the Parson’s School of Design, just across town from NYU. In the back of my mind, I imagined that I would one day run into her.

Alas, Suze passed away in 2011, and I never did get to meet her. But I did think about her yesterday morning, when I learned that she was represented as a character called “Sylvie Russo” in A Complete Unknown, the newly released docudrama about Dylan in the 1960s. Apparently Dylan had requested that the film not use her real name.

Coincidentally, yesterday evening I read that the Robbie Williams song Forbidden Road was just removed from the Oscars shortlist for Best Original Song, because it sounds too much like a certain other song. And that immediately made me think of Suze Rotolo.

More tomorrow.

Al Jolson Danny Kaye Eddie Cantor Fred Astaire George Burns Hedy Lamarr Jack Benny Jerry Lewis John Garfield Judy Holliday June Allyson Kirk Douglas Lauren Bacall Milton Berle Natalie Wood Peter Lorre Tony Curtis Veronica Lake

Asa Yoelson Benjamin Kubelsky Bernard Schwartz Betty Perske Constance Ockelman David Kaminsky Edward Iskowitz Eleanor Geisman Frederick Austerlitz Hedwig Kiesler Issur Danielovitch Jacob Garfinkle Joseph Levitch Judith Tuvim Laszlo Lowenstein Mendel Berlinger Natalia Zakharenko Nathan Birnbaum

As we work on the planning for our lab’s Siggraph 2025 project, I am aware of how much can go off the rails at the planning stage. We want to have something fun and interactive and immersive — and ideally inspiring and enlightening — for people to experience together, yet we know that things which are easy to describe in words can be very difficult to execute in practice.

Participants will not be aware of all the technical and design challenges involved in creating this experience, but their experience will most definitely be negatively impacted if we get any of it wrong. So as we design this, we always need to keep in mind what is easy, what is hard, and what is just plain beyond the reach of our timeline or resources.

As a wise person once said about anything new that you would like to bring into this world: Conception is always easier than delivery.

Back in the day, when it was still on Netflix, I used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a regular habit. Whenever I would get to the end of season seven, I would start again from the first episode of season one.

It was like rereading a favorite novel — Lord of the Rings or The Once and Future King, but on video. In this way, I managed to get through over 30 seasons of Buffy before Netflix finally pulled it.

The thing about BtVS, as you may know, is that it ushered in the concept, within the U.S., of a TV series as a single coherent story with a narrative arc, a novel in serial form. Charles Dickens had done it in England in the mid-1800s for books. But in all the time since, nobody had ever really done it properly for American television.

And the great thing about that is that every time I rewatched it, I would understand it better. Ideas that were planted in seasons one or two might finally reach their fruition in seasons five or six.

Recently I purchased a DVD player for my MacBook, and I’ve started watching it again — from the beginning. And I am reminded all over again what a groundbreaking work of genius it is.

This evening I had the pleasure of seeing the final projects of the 42 students in my graduate computer graphics class. There was no set assignment for this final project — everybody was asked to build on what we learned during the semester to create something that was meaningful to them.

Of course some projects were better than others, as expected. But the very best projects were so awesome that they took my breath away.

At moments like this, I really enjoy being a teacher.

Our lab, in collaboration with another lab at NYU, is working on a project to be presented the ACM/Siggraph 2025 conference. It will be multi-participant blended reality, and it will be very cool.

One of the first things we need to do is create a presentation of the project. We need to do this before we actually implement the project itself.

Of course we need to do this as part of our planning and production. But we also need to do it to fund the project.

Essentially, this presentation is a prospectus that we shop around to various high tech companies. We invite them to give us money, and sometimes they say yes.

They don’t do this because they like to give money away, but rather because it is an accepted way to create a bridge to our academic research. And if all goes well, they will end up discovering which of our highly talented grad students they want to hire.

So everybody wins. Also, we all get to prototype the future. 🙂