The Threepenny Opera

I don't know how Ray thought this story makes him look like a good journalist. "It was the most important story of my career" what, because one of the subjects was so flattered by it that they flattered you in turn and got you to be (one of) their court stenographers for a time? He's better than most Beatles writers but this story makes him sound easily bought and bad at his job, idk why he'd tell it.

Cultivating journalists was one of John’s best PR skills. He was very good at building relationships, encouraging loyalties, creating a dynamic where his interests became the journalist’s interests.

Ray Connolly is a good example. He met Paul first, reporting on the filming of Magical Mystery Tour. He was new to the job, and remembers “sitting meekly outside the crowd in the bar in the hotel, wondering how I was ever going to get to know anyone, when suddenly someone sat in the empty chair next to mine. It was Paul McCartney.” From this start, Connolly builds a working relationship with Paul and the other Beatles. But over time, he becomes closer to John and Yoko - because they put the work in. Paul is friendly to a shy journalist, and vaguely supportive afterwards. But John rings him up, pays attention to his writing, rewards him when he (and Yoko) like what Connolly’s doing.

Here’s the big turning point. On 27 November 1969, Connolly published an article headlined “1969: The day the Beatles died”. “In writing this article, I was, in journalistic parlance, flying a kite,” Connolly explains - writing up his own guess about what was happening. “In terms of my career, it turned out to be probably the most important piece I ever wrote – and at least one of the Beatles was delighted when he read it.” And here’s how he expressed that delight:

The day after this piece was published a white rose in a see-through plastic box was delivered to my desk at the Evening Standard. An attached card read ‘To Ray with love from John and Yoko’. The unwritten message couldn’t have been clearer. From that moment I was to have my own ‘Deep Throat’ in the Beatles organisation, leaking me a steady flow of information - John Lennon.

I laughed out loud when I first read that, because it’s just so perfect. The white rose turns 1960s flower power into the new, stripped-back, all-white JohnandYoko aesthetic. It keeps the imagery of peace and flowers, but moves them into the art gallery. The rose comes encased in plastic, another trademark (think of Plastic Ono Band, or John’s enthusiasm for the idea of performing in a giant plastic bubble in Get Back.) And the written message doesn’t say anything concrete: no specific praise, no comment on the piece. Instead of committing themselves, they leave Ray to join the dots.

Which he did. More than that, just look at how he reads the situation: he sees John as his source, rather seeing himself as John’s journalist. Within a month, John and Yoko are paying Ray’s first-class fare so he can fly to Canada to report on their peace campaign. Ray Connolly strikes me as one of the brighter Beatle-adjacent journalists - he kept his independence, and managed to stay on good terms with Paul as well as John - but he fell for that one hook, line and sinker.

May 16th 1968 - John and Paul arrive home🎸🎸🎸

On May 11th, 1968, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, joined by 'Magic' Alex, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans and Derek Taylor, travelled from London to New York to promote their newly formed company, Apple Corps🥀

Following a day of business meetings on May 12th and interviews on the 13th, a press conference was held at 1:30 pm on the 14th at New York's Americana Hotel🌵

There, John and Paul shared their vision and aspirations for Apple. After the press conference, they recorded an afternoon interview with New York's educational TV station WNDT / Channel 13, and made a special appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, hosted by Joe Garagiola🍃

On the evening of May 15th, John, Paul, and 'Magic' Alex returned to London, arriving in the early hours of the 16th. Nat Weiss, who had hosted them at his New York apartment, and Linda Eastman, upon Paul's request, accompanied them to the airport🍀

Paul was set to return to the US in June 1968 for promotional activities with Apple. This trip would also provide another chance for him to spend time with Linda💐

“It was at the Apple press conference [on the 14th] that my relationship with Paul was rekindled. I managed to slip him my phone number. He rang me up later that day and told me they were leaving that evening [sic - on the 15th], but he'd like it if I was able to travel out to the airport with him and John. So I went out in their limousine, sandwiched between Paul and John.” - Linda McCartney - from "Linda McCartney's Sixties", 1992🌼

Via Beatles and Cavern Club Photos on Instagram🎍

Living for the city

By a stroke of luck I caught the second episode of BBC2’s ‘Welcome to Lagos’ last night, and it was just as fascinating as the first. Last week the focus was on born-and-bred city people, but this time the thousands who migrate from Nigeria’s countryside to live in the city’s slums were in the spotlight. In the same way that the first episode looked at life on the rubbish dump, the lives of various people living in the slum of Makoko, built on stilts over the massive Lagos Lagoon, were examined. Chief among the many characters was Chubey – fisherman, entrepeneur, father of 18 children and master of the weekly Lotto, who served a linchpin for the other stories to revolve around. Highly intelligent, with plenty of what we Irish call ‘cop-on’, Chubey nevertheless was a firm believer in traditional sorcery and remedies, wearing what appeared to be a bird’s head around his neck and arranging for his son to receive an elaborate cleansing ceremony when he started running with a bad crowd. It’s not just rural ignorance that causes people to cling to such remedies – as Chubey revealed when he stated ‘We don’t have gates and guards like the rich men in the city, so we use our own protection’ – it’s also about asserting identity in a city where the haves and have-nots look at each other across such a vast chasm. Racial identity is also maintained through these practices – many people spoke of how traditional medicine was a uniquely black way of doing things, distinct and separate from the ways of white people. Makoko is like a slum Venice, made up out of thousands of small wooden huts supported on stilts sunk into the thick black sand of the lagoon bed. Inhabitants get around on small rowboats, often perilously overloaded with people, logs, sand, bricks and other bits and pieces. The presenter (refreshingly always behind the camera) astutely noted how ancient and modern coexist almost seamlessly in this place – the few medical centres provide antibiotics and tree-bark potion, everybody has a mobile phone but the primary method of disseminating information is still word-of-mouth. The patchy-to-nonexistent levels of service provided to the inhabitants was revealed by two deaths by electrocution of saw operators in the slum’s largest business, the Ebute Metta timber yard. Worn cables and a lack of protective gloves meant that even touching the wrong part of the wire connecting the huge electric saws to the power source led to instant death for two unlucky employees. The workers formed a makeshift union and demanded rubber shoes and gloves for safety, which appear to have eventually been provided. Also working at the mill were two boys of about eleven, who had left their rural villages behind and were saving to return home and build a house. How realistic their ambitions were remains to be seen. But as Chubey pointed out ‘If you come to Lagos and don’t have sense, you will get sense very quickly. You will never leave Lagos without getting sense.’ One person who seemed to be lacking in sense was Chubey’s teenage son Payo, who, as Chubey put it ‘is only good at going out’. Despite the traditional ceremony, he continued on his no-good-nik ways until eventually he was thrown out of the family home, along with his mattress and few belongings. Teenagers everywhere fall out with their parents and run away from home, but I don’t envy Payo trying to negotiate a life alone in Lagos’ slums. He maintained ‘I refuse to beg him [Chubey]’ but a few weeks out in the world might make him rethink his stubbornness. Female voices have been fairly absent from the series so far, probably due to to the fact that the central characters tend to be family patriarchs who would be unlikely to allow their wives (seemingly plural in Chubey’s case at least) and daughters to speak alone to the camera team. However the women of the slum were noisily present in most scenes last night, even if we didn’t get to find out much about their thoughts on life. One charged into the sawmill when she heard of the second electrocution, clutching an empty bottle of schnapps and roaring about how God had forsaken them. Meanwhile a couple of concerned sisterly types tried to persuade Payo to apologise to his father, but to no avail. Chubey – who despite his rather aggressively irascible manner, seemd fundamentally decent – eventually won the equivalent of £54 on the state Lotto, and the programme ended with his entire (and extensive) family celebrating. Another man, Paul, saved up enough money from his work at the timber yard to buy his own tiny home. Their ebullience and repeated assertions that money was making them extremely happy shows yet again that the bizarre mental trickery involved in separating money from a certain level of contentment is an invention of the affluent West. Again this super series provides a humanist, unpatronising view into the lives of people inhabiting a confusing, dreadful, fascinating and thoroughly modern city. I look forward to the next episode!

Victorian sexplorer and cross-cultural relationships

Richard Burton

Last night I watched a documentary on Richard Burton presented by Rupert Everett (The Richard Burton in question was the 19th century explorer, writer and translator of the Kama Sutra, not, as Everett put it, ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s fifth and sixth husbands’). Unsurprisingly, considering its lubricious presenter, the documentary focused on Burton’s exploration of sexuality in various parts of the world and his rejection of hypocritical Victorian mores.

I’ve seen Everett in presenter mode before, in a documentary on Byron a few months ago, and while he can be insufferably irritating, I’ve always quite admired his consistency of personality, This was even more evident in this programme, where he was filmed wandering around Egypt, India and Goa among other places. Whether talking to old ladies in the Indian streets, bantering with nuns in a Goa convent or quizzing an Egyptian masseur on his sexual preferences, Everett didn’t substantially change his personality or delivery to fit in with his surroundings. Even when quizzing an imam on the position of homosexuality in Islam (unsurprisingly, verboten!), he was still himself, understandably a heavily dialled-down version for his own safety, but essentially unchanged. The almost jarring sight of a Western person just being relaxed and normal in foreign countries shows us how most TV presenters (and many travellers) take on a fake, simplified persona to interact with ‘natives’. Does this spring from lack of confidence in one’s own personality, or a persistent Western concept of darker-skinned people as eternally ‘other’? Probably a bit of both.

Somebody like Everett, who is clearly an unapologetic egoist, simply doesn’t think to behave any differently – he does not seem hamstrung by post-colonial guilt, which ironically causes many British travellers to be more condescending to their former subjects than if they weren’t plagued by it. The only other TV personality I can think of who displays the same unselfconsciousness is Hector Ó hEochagháin, who shares Everett’s qualities of being intensely annoying and deeply engaging. I remember seeing him in a travel programme where he crossed part of the Sahara, and was struck by the ease with which he interacted with the men accompanying him, drinking and bantering around the campfire. It shouldn’t be striking to see a group of people from different countries interacting normally, but western attitudes and the disparity of wealth between the First and Third Worlds usually places a stranglehold on normality.

Burton found it very easy to interact in the various countries he lived in, mainly due to his skill in assimilating. Local prostitutes (male and female) and mistresses taught him about a world of sexuality miles away from the whalebone corsets of his upbringing. However the key issue of sexual relationships between people of vastly differing wealth appears to have changed little since his time. In the documentary, an unnamed Egyptian masseur gave insight into this as he tried to entice Everett into a ‘hard sex’ or ‘soft sex’ massage. Politely deflecting the proposition, Everett asked the man if he liked men or women, who replied that he preferred women. When Everett asked how he could perform sex acts on men if he was not homosexual, the man seemed confused and replied ‘it’s my job.’ Therein lies the key issue in relationships that cross these kinds of boundaries. Even outside the world of prostitution, how often do the people from the poorer countries actually love their richer partners, and how much of the attachment is driven by monetary need? Is their even a division in the mind of a very poor person between loving attachment and financial security? How much does the richer partner even mind if their lover really cares for them or not? Is a separate homosexual identity a purely western invention, when a married man with children living in a poor country sees no discord in performing sex acts on other men for money?

There’s no doubt that some cross-cultural relationships work very well, but it seems that in many of them a certain amount of delusion is required on the part of the richer partner that they won’t be abandoned if the money runs out. This sounds like an offensive cliché, but I don’t mean it that way at all – primarily it’s not cultural reasons that lead to this disparity in expectations, but simple economics. It’s impossible to underestimate the effect poverty has in shaping personality, and the same for wealth. Coming from a middle-class background, there are dozens of things I used to take for granted – the idea that people can follow any career they wish, that the norm for romantic relationships is financial and gender equality, that only ‘bad’ people commit violent crime – but these assumptions are founded on the comfortable base of coming from generations of professionals who worked hard to give me such an easy view of the world. There’s no shame in coming from such a background, but it’s crucially important to recognise that our views on life are often hopelessly narrow and things sometimes assumed to be universal are impossible for thousands of people, due to the financial inequality of the world. I could be biologically the same person but I would have vastly different views of the world, life, work, marriage and my sense of self if I had been born in Calcutta, Burundi or even deprived parts of Dublin.

The scandals involving the poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh and his Nepalese boyfriends showed how little has changed since Burton’s day. From watching the documentary, it seemed fairly obvious that few, if any of the young men would have identified as homosexual in the Western sense, but they were happy to play that role (and the role of obsequious, shoe-cleaning servants) for their rich white benefactor. Again, the lines between avarice and affection seemed blurred – the men were not in love with Ó Searcaigh, but they had affection for him nonetheless. From the poet’s point of view, it didn’t seem to matter a great deal to him whether they cared deeply for him or not. The documentary on Ó Searcaigh was keen to portray the Nepalese boys as helpless victims of an evil predator, but this was simplistic and condescending – it seems unlikely they were not at least partly driven by personal gain. The relationships were essentially exploitative, but not hugely more so than many so-called ‘equal’ Western marriages. Maybe the real scandal should be that an economic situation still prevails in the world that allows such relationships to thrive.

Strumpet City

Set in Dublin during the Lockout of 1913, "Strumpet City" is a panoramic novel of city life. It embraces a wide range of social milieux, from the miseries of the tenements to the cultivated, bourgeois Bradshaws. It introduces a memorable cast of characters: the main protagonist, Fitz, a model of the hard-working, loyal and abused trade unionist; the isolated, well-meaning and ineffectual Fr O'Connor; and the wretched and destitute, Rashers Tierney. In the background hovers the enormous shadow of Jim Larkin, Plunkett's real-life hero. "Strumpet City's" popularity derives from its realism and its naturalistic presentation of traumatic historical events. There are clear heroes and villians. The book is informed by a sense of moral outrage at the treatment of the locked-out trade unionists, the indifference and evasion of the city's clergy and middle class and the squalor and degradation of the tenement slums.

Bull’s-eye view

The camera lens as a ruthless eye – it’s a well-worn cliche, but one that keeps demanding to be used. Photographs, even the most carefully shot, can reveal elements utterly unplanned by the photographer and the subject, from an previously unnoticed tower in a landscape to the lines in the face of a movie star clinging to youth. Since its invention the camera’s capacity to invade privacy has been readily exploited, leading to excitement and anxiety in equal measure.

Another common, but apposite cliche, is the idea that the photographer somehow violates their subject – even if the latter is willing to be photographed – by capturing their raw, unmediated image. As Henri Cartier-Bresson put it: ‘The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.’ Referring to the subject as ‘prey’ sounds slightly terrifying, but is probably a sentiment familiar to many photographers. Even inanimate objects and views become a kind of prey in the avaricious aperture of a camera.

It’s the camera’s invasion of human privacy that is the focus of an exhibition beginning at the end of the month in Tate Modern, entitled Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. Grouped under various themes that range from the obvious (sexually explicit or graphically violent shots) to more subtle examples of voyeurism like government surveillance and street photography, the sample of images available online indicates an exploration of humanity’s secret moments. Some are shocking, like the terrified face of a young South African man clinging to the side of a building while a jeering crowd urges him to jump, some are unsettlingly banal, like the couple kissing at the New York Tortilla Factory, but all share that strange intimacy that comes when a photography ‘steals’ a moment that a subject would never intend to be recorded.

One photograph from the exhibition that captures a thing rather than a person is a powerful image of a British army watchtower at the Crossmaglen security force base in South Armagh. On an otherwise normal-looking street the watchtower looks utterly unnatural, bristling with wire fencing and multiple aerials. Obviously this photo was illicitly taken, and yet the tower looks somewhat ridiculous, rather than threatening. Its incongruity highlights the unnatural political situation that gave rise to its creation.

Ideas of reality and artificiality are thrown into relief in Walker Evans’ 1927 Street Scene (above), where the hatted man viewed from above, bathed in intense shadow, look like figures from the set of a film noir. The fetishisation of the past in film and art often means that genuinely contemporary images end up looking like pastiches.

The value of this exhibition is not just the interesting images that will be on show, but the questions it raises about the function and power of photography, which are even more relevant now than in the past, considering we are under more surveillance now than ever before.

I was enjoying the wackiness of the beautiful possibility podcast/blog; I didn't buy into the truly wild & sweeping claims she made about mclennon healing the world or whatever but I liked the mythopoetic themes and the sort of structured insanity of it. I also admired that she's insistent on doing serious mclennon research under her own name etc (although her wider theories are likely to put casual readers off, not to mention problems of confirmation bias in her approach etc).

With all that said, I've been totally put off by some recent episodes' parasocial insistence that paul is a little scared uwu baby that must be encouraged (by her?) to "tell his story", and indeed that he may be listening to the pod for just that purpose??

A chronic case of Too Much Fanfic brain, I fear.

Good analysis of LJ. I don't remember overt Paul disike but I do remember a lot of Linda dislike. Tho that seems to have been part of a sort of reflexive lack of solidarity between women in the rock scene at the time, encouraged to see each other as threats or something. There's even a weirdly bitchy aside about Joni Mitchell of all people.

The Lost Weekend doco is prob more mature in that way & more positive to Paul+Linda, tho it seems revisionist in that John's violence & periodic dumping of May is played down, & the "paul bringing a message from yoko" forms part of her story by then even tho it's clear from the book that she knew nothing about this at the time. Not dunking on May or saying she's lying - it's just another example of how memories get softened with time, and augmented by stories from others.

Anyway my favourite part of Loving John is John and David Bowie queening out over Elizabeth Taylor, please someone put that in a fic

finished loving john and am turning it around and around in my head. may pang is not without her biases but it's pretty easy to flag where they are and what they're colored by. it is clear to me that she didn't like paul very much, and im not sure whether that's because of the way john presented him to her amidst the business troubles or because she perceived he didn't like her with john. the way may presents the johnandyoko reconciliation, it's entirely caused by yoko's hypnotherapist. but we know that's not entirely true and i dont know if at the time of writing she knew about paul telling john in LA that yoko wanted him back. there's a lot of instances where john and may are conspiring against yoko: keeping secrets and telling lies to pacify her. i dont know if may considered the two of them might have been doing the same to her. it seems easier for her to blame yoko for the whole thing, both the start and end of the relationship, and while she certainly deserves quite a bit of blame it's also john who won't take no for an answer when he first tries to sleep with her and it's john who chose to go back to yoko. yoko knew how to use the deepest parts of his psychology to convince him, but is was still HIS psychology. and honestly as an outside observer even though may had an incredible strength of character at such a young age i dont think anyone was really a match for the depth of trauma john had and it's entirely possible something worse may have happened had he stayed with her longer. and he did almost kill her.

"You must take up your well-shaped oar and go on a journey until you come where there are men living who know nothing of the sea, and who eat food that is not mixed with salt, who never have known ships whose cheeks are painted purple, who never have known-well-shaped oars, which act for ships as wings do. And I will tell you a very clear proof, and you cannot miss it. When, as you walk, some other wayfarer happens to meet you, and says you carry a winnow-fan on your bright shoulder, then you must plant your well-shaped oar in the ground, and render ceremonious sacrifice to the lord Poseidon, one ram and one bull, and a mounter of sows, a boar pig, and make your way home again and render holy hecatombs to the immortal gods who hold the wide heaven, all of them in order. Death will come to you from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end you in the ebbing time of a sleek old age. Your people about you will be prosperous. All this is true that I tell you.” The Odyssey