You Can't Have A Man Who's Been To Workmans Playing Paul Mccartney. A Man Who Knows What Wowburger Is?

Edited to add: him and Linda's mealymouthed explanation "It's not fair on the children! the bosses and workers should just work it out rationally!" is easily explained when you remember that this is a person who never had a real job and therefore doesn't have a CLUE. Not that he didn't work hard, but that he never had the experience of being an ordinary person with a boss (a few weeks winding coils doesn't count). All the sending-your-kids-to-state schools in the world won't change that fact: it makes you out of touch with most people. Not a crime, but it leads to nonsense like this.

What did goddess mean by this?

Reload! Blogging again....

John Lennon & Paul McCartney on the set of television special The Music of Lennon & McCartney at Granada Studios in Manchester, England | 1 November 1965

(Monthly Book, November 1963)

melody maker letters as the burn book from mean girls

So you think 'Imagine' ain't political? It's 'Working Class Hero' with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn't dig the words. Imagine! You took 'How Do You Sleep' so literally (read my own review of the album in Crawdaddy.) Your politics are very similar to Mary Whitehouse's -- 'Saying nothing is as loud as saying something.' Listen, my obsessive old pal, it was George's press conference -- not 'dat ole debbil Klein' -- He said what you said: 'I'd love to come but...' Anyway, we basically did it for the same reasons -- the Beatle bit -- they still called it a Beatle show, with just two of them! Join the Rock Liberation Front before it gets you. Wanna put your photo on the label like uncool John and Yoko, do ya? (Aint ya got no shame!) If we're not cool, WHAT DOES THAT MAKE YOU? No hard feelings to you either. I know basically we want the same, and as I said on the phone and in this letter, whenever you want to meet, all you have to do is call.

John Lennon's letter responding to Paul, published in its entirety in Melody Maker

literally the ramblings of an insane person I am GAGGED

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.

A couple of fics I wrote

I got an ao3 account this year and have 2 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.

Social conditioning is so strong that many people here seem so honored that a white man cared enough to steal their ideas. Instead of, you know, wondering why they don't have the opportunity of publishing such material themselves.