Everytime I Read This Story I'm So Disturbed By Yoko's Manic Participation, Like She Was 38 At This Point.

A couple of fics I wrote

I got an ao3 account this year and have 2 3 fics in the Beatles fandom that I'm a little proud of. Both character studies focused on late 1970s John in NYC. Have a read if you're so inclined. Username bodhbdearg.

Where I would be: Househusband era John is very depressed and disengaged from music, but is nudged out of it by folksinging lesbians & NYC queer culture.

Singing a song of ruin: Writing DF-era John is no longer depressed, and spends a night trying to talk someone out of jumping off a bridge.

Update, new WIP:

3. Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs of her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990.

hi pope leo can u drop the skincare routine pls

Another regular conversational pit stop during our calls was the guests I was interviewing on my radio show on any given week, especially if they were rock stars. Inevitably, John would have some spirited opinions to share about his competition. One time, for instance, I casually mentioned an upcoming booking with Mick Jagger.

“Why are you interviewing him?” John asked.

The truth was, I was interviewing Jagger because he was holding a concert in L.A. to raise money for victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. (His wife, Bianca, was Nicaraguan.) But for some reason I foolishly blurted out, “Because the Rolling Stones are probably the greatest live touring band in the world.”

“Isn’t that what they used to say about us?” John coolly replied.

“But the Beatles aren’t touring anymore,” I said, stepping on a landmine. “The Beatles as a group don’t exist anymore. And the Rolling Stones are as important a presence as anybody in rock ’n’ roll.”

“The Rolling Stones followed us!” John shouted. “Just look at the albums! Their Satanic gobbledygook came right after Sgt. Pepper. We were there first. The only difference is that we got labeled as the mop tops and they were put out there as revolutionaries. Look, Ellie,” he went on, “I spent a lot of time with Mick. We palled around in London. We go way back. But the Beatles were the revolutionaries, not the Rolling Pebbles!”

Excerpt From, ‘We All Shine On’, Elliot Mintz

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.

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🎍

Welcome to the continent

BBC are having an Africa season of sorts – probably reflecting renewed interest in the continent in the light of the upcoming World Cup. The latest instalment is An African Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby, in which the veteran reporter explores life and culture in Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Kenya, Ethiopia, Congo and SA, among others. I caught part of the second instalment, when he visited Ethiopia and Kenya. (On a side note, when will the BBC iPlayer become available in Ireland?? I’d gladly pay! And it seems bizarre that the BBC radio iPlayer is freely available, but not the television one! But that’s another entry).

I was reminded again of my earlier thoughts on Rupert Everett and Hector when witnessing Dimbleby’s complete inability to just act normal around his African interviewees, but he wasn’t the worst example of western awkwardness either. Like in Welcome to Lagos, the people defied stereotypes of unrelenting misery – most people had tough lives but like anyone would, tried to make the best of it. The role of technology was an interesting side note – in a continent where many countries have sporadic communications infrastructure, the mobile phone is an essential item. Cultural purists might balk at the sight of a Masai tribesman leaning against a tree chatting into a Nokia, but, as he explained, the device was an invaluable help to them in maintaining their traditional way of life, advising their fellow tribesman where to bring their animals for water and arranging meeting places to swap information. Like the best forms of technology, the mobile enables the Masai to continue living their traditional lives, only more efficiently than before – it becomes an invaluable, almost invisible part of life.

An overriding theme in any programme about Africa is the almost dizzying level of entrepeneurship displayed by even the most uneducated of people. This is hardly surprising – many African nations have been betrayed by their own leaders so it makes perfect sense that people take their financial matters into their own hands. Some sniffy commentators in the west complain that this displays a sort of ingrained ‘me and mine first’ culture that will forever paralyse Africa until better ways of organisation are imported from abroad, and correlate the obnoxious wealth-grabbing of various presidents to a street seller making enough to buy a mobile phone. This is a manifestly silly idea, since it pre-supposed some kind of inescapable destiny of behaviour that doesn’t stand up to even the most basic scientific analysis, and doesn’t take into account the simple fact that people will always make the best of whatever situation they find themselves in. Many Africans find themselves in situations where their leaders do nothing for them, so they help themselves and their families as much as they can. Anybody would so the same. Strong societies and communities don’t evolve overnight, especially when the conditions are unfavourable, and ordinary human self-interest is not some kind of incurable hamartia.

One enterprise on show was a kind of Western Union service in Kenya called MPusa where people send money to relatives and receive a text to confirm the money has arrived – incredibly simple, incredibily useful. Dimbleby also visited a call-centre and the set of a soap opera promoting unity between Kenya’s tribes. A focus group audience for the soap confirmed that tribal conflict in 2008 was strongest among the uneducated, but the more people were educated, the less conflict there was. Again, the simplest answer is the correct one, rather than the dark mutterings about ingrained African ‘tribalism’ that blight the conservative (and often the notionally liberal) western press. The 2008 violence in Kenya was multifaceted, but it was certainly not simply the inevitable result of bloodthirsty tribes seething at each other.

These recent programmes on Africa have been really cheering. Seeing people just getting on with their lives as society at large gradually evolves around them dispels the negative stereotypes that are pumped into our brains in the west by media, charity organisations and self-styled ‘experts’. I don’t mean that in a patronising way ‘look at them there with their little businesses’, and of course it’s obvious Africa has lots of problems to overcome. It would be naive to assume that a fully modernised African society will exactly mirror the West – there are too many dramatically different cultural features to African life for that to happen – but it looks more and more each day that Africa will eventually become a thoroughly modern continent on its own terms, which is the best news of all.

go read the first chapter of my dumb mclennon britpop au hooray

Builders of the future

‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime’. The old saying, traditionally attributed to Balzac, is as striking today as ever. In fact, in today’s atmosphere, it rings even more true. We may admire the wealthy, the powerful, the self-made, but deep down we can’t help but believe that a millionaire must be, if not quite a criminal, than at least criminally exploitative. It’s this assumption that fires the script of The Social Network, a movie about the events that led to the founding of Facebook and the gazillion-dollar lawsuits that followed. Mark Zuckerberg, the driving force behind the site, is the world’s youngest billionaire, and it is The Social Network‘s aim to uncover the crime(s) that led to those billions.

Based on the book The Accidental Billionaires, the movie portrays Zuckerberg as a Harvard-attending socially inept weirdo whose immense sense of entitlement causes him to react furiously to a girl’s rejection. After calling her a ‘bitch’ on his blog, he creates (with the help of his geeky roommates) a site called FaceMash that calls up random pairs of photos of female Harvard students with a ‘hot or not?’ button underneath. The site is an instant hit, and Zuckerberg is courted by uber-WASP twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to help them build a Harvard dating site. Zuckerberg agrees, but after stringing them along for a few weeks, creates a more sophisticated version of the idea – the Harvard-based prototype for Facebook. The twins are furious and make the (frankly rather dubious) claim that he ‘stole their idea’. Meanwhile The Facebook (as it’s originally called) takes off like wildfire. Zuckerberg refuses to let co-founder Eduardo Saverin bring in advertising for the site, and on the encouragement of Napster founder Sean Parker, moves the operation to California. He freezes Eduardo out of the business altogether, leading to the second lawsuit that frames the story.

The plot is pacily executed, with the Winklevoss and Saverin trials against Zuckerberg used as a framing device. As the characters remember events the action jumps back in time and the story unfolds. There’s a lot of the kind of ‘lightbulb’ moments so beloved of film-makers trying to evoke a creative process, complete with shots of Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg dashing across Harvard towards the nearest computer to encode his latest revelation. Some of these revelations seem simplistic, but Zuckerberg’s assertion that Facebook is a viable idea because ‘anyone can look at pictures of hot girls on the internet – what they want is to look at pictures of people they know’ is bang on the money and exactly the reason Facebook took off in the way it did. What doesn’t ring true is the script’s constant assertions that Zuckerberg’s primary motivation in setting up the site was to impress girls and increase his social standing in Harvard, with its rigid hierarchies and elite clubs.  The real Zuckerberg hasn’t said much about the film, but he did comment recently that he particularly disagreed with the script’s interpretation of his motives. As he put it: “They [the film's creators] just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things”.

I believe that that is the film’s key weakness. Plenty of people are motivated by emotional damage, but the current idea seems to be that any great acheivement must be underpinned by some terrible lack within the achiever. It’s almost as though the modern world is suspicious of anyone who achieves ‘too’ much, who uses their gifts to their absolute limit and attempts to be the best they can be. Single-mindedness is seen to be the same as destructive obsession, pride in doing well at something is seen as being interchangeable with grasping ambition. After efforts are made to understand those who do things for the wrong reasons, a dangerous assumption seems to be rising in storytelling that implies that no-one ever does anything just for the sake of it. This ties in well with an era in which university courses are rated only on their ‘practicality’, and hobbies are something to enhance a CV with. If you’re not emotionally damaged, you’re nakedly seeking profit; either way, high achievement is suspect.

I don’t know if Mark Zuckerberg is a nice person or not; certainly you don’t get to his position without a tough hide and a willingness to make enemies. What he undoubtedly is is a programming genius and a hard worker. Is he emotionally damaged? He could be, who knows? Whether he is or not, it’s not the reason he invented (or co-invented, depending on who you talk to) Facebook. His statement that he built it because he ‘likes building things’ is the simplest, and therefore most plausible explanation. All over the world, people are creating, inventing, building, designing and investigating all manner of things simply because they are interested in them. People are working day and night, going without food and sleep, not because they are damaged, but because they passionately care about what they do and want to do to the best of their ability.

Most of us are average in our skills and our abilities, and undoubtedly that leads to an easier, more balanced life. But we shouldn’t pathologise geniuses and grafters; they are the ones who take the ‘giant leaps’ that help us all walk faster. Facebook has its good and bad sides, but it can’t be denied that it has changed the world. Even if Zuckerberg is as unpleasant and odd as The Social Network suggests, that’s not relevant to his role as one of its creators.

Construction no.128 (1920)

"There are so many interesting things to do in life. And we waste our time emptily and keep dreaming about something...And this dream isn’t worth anything. But what’s been actually done, even poorly – is worthwhile"

Aleksander Rodchenko