I took the day yesterday to get caught up on some of the new exhibits in LA’s multi-cultural quilt. When I woke up today, I realized I was “tangled up in keys.”

Noted as the second weirdest shout-out in music history, per Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan’s exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center had me thinking about the lyrics from his 2006 Modern Times track, “Thunder on the Mountain”:

“I was thinking about Alicia Keys, couldn’t keep from crying. When she was born in Hell’s Kitchen, I was living down the line. I’m wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be. I been looking for her even clear through Tennessee…”

Slate.com ran an article in 2007 titled Tangled Up in Keys. The author points out several notable links that suggest Dylan was really talking about Alicia Keys (the 27-year-old performer). For example, Keys was raised in Hell’s Kitchen and Dylan used to live down the subway line. The author then went on to point out that Dylan has long been smitten with black female singers:

“Dylan has long worshiped at the shrine of the black female voice, a source of musical inspiration, erotic obsession, and even religious conversion.”

This desire led me to think about another exhibit I saw yesterday in LA: Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love at the Hammer Museum.

Through silhouettes, Walker comments on race, slavery and liberation, sexual attraction and exploitation, discrimination and modernity. She uses the scissors with such eloquence and purpose that the line between passion and anger is blurred for the viewer to interpret.

Both exhibits may be entirely different, but there are connections (or Intersections, if you will) that allow the mind to wander and wonder about the cultural framework and moral sensitivities of our nation’s past, present and future.

And there’s only one place in the world that offers such a diverse stage for the mind to cut through a deluge of thought-provoking exhibitions — Los Angeles.