The neighborhood was also a hotbed of poetry and theater, with figures like Langston Hughes and production companies like the National Black Theater, the Harlem Suitcase Theater, and the American Negro Theater staging the best in African American plays. In its heyday, when over 125 venues vied to entertain those between Lenox and Central Avenues, Harlem was the undisputed home of jazz, with legendary clubs and lounges like The Apollo Theater, The Cotton Club, the original Lenox Lounge, Minton's Playhouse, and the long-gone Savoy holding complete sway over the music scene. Like Greenwich Village in the '60s and the Lower East Side in the '70s, that period may be Harlem's best profile, but it's far from the only one. Visitors to New York may have a vision in their heads of Harlem as it was during the 1920s and '30s, a vibrant era known as the Harlem Renaissance, when jazz and bebop took a torch to the rulebook of mainstream music and paved the way for the Beat Generation. While many of New York City's neighborhoods have histories that reach back to the settlement of the East Coast, Harlem is perhaps the neighborhood that best encapsulates the 20th century, a dynamic place with ever-changing demographics, always moving with-or a step ahead of-the country's cultural and sociopolitical pulse. Visitors to New York may have a vision in their heads of Harlem as it was during the 1920s and '30s, a vibrant era known as the Harlem Renaissance, when jazz and bebop took a torch to the rulebook of mainstream mu. Many consider Fifth Avenue the dividing line between Harlem and Spanish Harlem, but much like the West Village is simply a division of Greenwich Village, we will not make the distinction here. For our purposes-and we should know-Harlem extends north from 110th Street (the northern edge of Central Park) to 155th Street and from the East River west to the Hudson River, with the notable exception of Morningside Heights, the bubble around Columbia University that carves out a considerable and beautiful portion of Harlem to the west of Morningside Avenue and south of 125th Street. There are also echoes of vulnerability (weakness) and some self-consciousness (she is not white, which is why his pale skin is significant) as pointed out by other posters.Like any neighborhood in New York, Harlem's boundaries are often contested. That's when he decides to visit her and get his palm read. He says, "will I be touching you, so I can tell if I'm really real?" and "I know I'm 'round you but I don't know where" (he can feel her presence in Spanish Harlem, but he doesn't know exactly where she is at that moment). "I been wonderin' all about me, ever since I seen you there". The third verse is actually the moment he first sees her (this is the beginning chronologically). "Let me know babe, I got to know babe, if it's you my lifelines trace." He wants to know if she's in his future, and he really doesn't care about anything else. It seems to me that he really doesn't buy the fortune telling, he just wants to be with her in a dark room and watch her talk. The second verse is him really falling for her when she touches his face and hands. In the first verse, he's describing her in poetic language: she's so freaking hot, she even heats up the pavement of steamy Spanish Harlem (Harlem is no comparison to how hot you are, two meanings for the word "heat.") He convinces her to read his fortune "let me know, babe, about my fortune, all along my restless palms." The song is much easier to understand if you don't assume it's in chronological order (this is Bob Dylan, after all) In the intimacy of that moment, touching hands, he feels erotic lust, love and mysterious curiosity for her. It's pretty simple: it's about a man who goes to a fortune teller in Spanish Harlem and gets his palm read. I think everyone so far has been a bit off on this Dylan song.although I don't believe Bob Dylan doesn't know what this song is about.
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