bodhbdearg

"I look at early pictures of meself, and I was torn between being Marlon Brando and being the sensitive poet - the Oscar Wilde part of me with the velvet, feminine side. I was always torn between the two, mainly opting for the macho side, because if you showed the other side, you were dead." John lennon - The Last Rolling Stone Interview: By Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone Magazine 1980

The fag of the day is Paul McCartney!

Wassily Kandinsky

Dear Friend/Throw The Wine/I'm In Love with A Friend of Mine

This phrase from "Dear Friend" is intriguing for a number of reasons, but one of them is: what is going on with this wine? Is this an oinomancy, the practice of fortune telling through wine spill patterns, sediments, etc?

Is "I'm in Love with a Friend of Mine" Paul's prophesy, the truth revealed from this reading?

"Melted tin beads cast your fortune /In a glass of wine" he writes in the title track for the film Vanilla Sky (2001).

David Hockney was a friend and an incredible painter. I knew him during the 1960s and kept a friendship going until he died on Thursday, the 11th of June. He was very clever witty and fun to be with.

His paintings often gave off a feeling of great joy. Nancy and I enjoyed visiting his studios in California where we took a drive along Mulholland Drive which he made famous all over again in his sensational paintings.

Or in his London studio. The rooms were filled with paintings. Often some of the most recent pictures that he had done. He would talk about them and his very particular views on art. He felt that it was important to see correctly. He wasn’t a great fan of perspective and was always involved in inventing new ways to view the world. His many paintings, drawings, films and other media like iPad drawing he took readily to and mastered.

He was a serious Chain Smoker and believed it was everyone’s right to smoke like the days when he and I had been brought up in smoke filled rooms. We visited him once in Bridlington, Yorkshire. He met us at the train station and drove us to his house in a smoke filled car.

We will miss his fabulous personality, his laconic wit and his erudite views on how to look at the world.

Rest in peace, David. We love you.

Paul

A Bigger Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden (2017)

or: What’s going on in this Lennon song, and why does McCartney not like it?

As part of an album full of repudiations ("I don’t believe in Beatles!”) and reckonings (“My Mummy’s Dead!”) the litanies of "you" in "Working Class Hero" deserve closer inspection.

Paul's commentators have noted how he switches from first person singular "I" into first person plural ("we") or third person "he or she." This is a defense mechanism when things get emotionally vulnerable.

Meanwhile, John shifts pronouns away from himself into second person. Look at what he does in "You've Got to Hide You're Love Away," withdrawing from the exposed "Here I stand, head in hand, turn my face to the wall" to the safety of "you've got to hide." It draws the listener close as it blurs the focus on his own feelings.

Firstly, is he saying that a ‘Working class hero’ is something to be, or not to be? Is this one of the identities he no longer wants to claim because the victories weren’t/aren’t worth it?

What did The Beatles get from becoming Carnegies of rock? They got all this money, fame, power, idolization.

But it was like drugs, enthralling; they were "still fucking peasants" with agency an illusion, elusive. They had “no time” that wasn’t supervised.

“If you want to be a hero, well just follow me” He is using sarcasm to ridicule the aspirational goals that had governed his life up to that point as false, as folly. Rethinking those ambitions expunges his shared past with Paul. “Follow me,” like he is still leading a band. He is asking himself and the listener: “What can I do for good with all this power, fame that I earned jointly. If being a survivor of structural abuse/class-based injustices is the price of leadership, I don't know if I want it. None of my efforts has gotten me what I really want.” No wonder he thought heroism was dehumanizing. These profound self-doubts come with hindsight as he lays blame for his present state of mind.

"They hurt you at home, and they hit you at school.” “They despise a fool" are all lines that might well allude to Paul. And/or himself.

The Folks on the Hill

“The Folks Who Live On the Hill” was written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II in 1937 (during the US Great Depression). It is about a couple who get to live the dream - a cozy, loving, married family together their whole lives. The lyrics bear some similarity to “When I’m Sixty-Four” in that “smaller games” are valued over “lofty aims." The song is not about wanting to have the best house in town and lord it over everybody else; it is about ranking love over wealth.

(Hammerstein, Oscar. The complete lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008.)

This sort of "Working Class Hero" bit

Fast forward past 12/8/1980. Someone who never wavered from his loyalty to representing a-working-class-hero-as-something-to-be is Paul.  It is no coincidence that he rarely criticizes John’s work but occasionally makes his discomfort with “Working Class Hero” known. Paul sees “Working Class Hero” as a dig. Paul brings it up in the Liverpool Oratorio documentary to dismiss Lennon’s bona fides while defending his own. "This sort of "Working Class Hero" bit, it’s not quite true" he tells conductor Carl Davis, as if it is theater. However, McCartney still valorizes the working-class hero. “Not for ourselves alone but for the whole world are we born,” he writes in the oratorio’s libretto, placing civic duty on a pedestal above personal fulfillment. Paul alludes to John’s song again in the title of the subsequent classical album Working Classical (1999).

Part of his sense of dignity comes from The Beatles as a rags-to-riches narrative. He writes in 1964: Eyes of The Storm about The Beatles ‘conquest’ of America: “Common people…. are my people…This is where I’m from. I grew up in a working-class family” and, later, “as someone who came from a working-class estate in Liverpool, I’m proud.”

The ex-Beatle rushed to help pull an unconscious 14-month-old girl from the mangled wreck of her pram, which had been slammed by a speeding car.

He then comforted the girls dying Japanese nanny for half an hour until the ambulance arrived.

“It occurred in October of 1980 in the tiny village of Tenterden, in Kent. Wings had been rehearsing in a manor house rented from prominent London publisher Martin Miller when they heard the terrible sounds of a car crash outside the main gates.

Laine recalls: “Apparently, this young Japanese au pair girl who worked for the Millers was taking their infant daughter, Cara, for a walk in her pram when this supposedly drunken driver tried to overtake another car and knocked them both down. The baby flew up into the air and landed unhurt by a hedgerow, but the poor au pair was very badly injured.”

“I was actually the first to reach her, but Paul dove right in and started nursing her, trying to do what he could.”

“Paul was just saying things like, ‘It’ll be alright, luv, don’t worry,’ but we were getting no response. At one point he glanced over at me and slowly shook his head. He knew. We both knew. Still, he just sat there stroking her long black hair, talking and sometimes even singing softly as she lay there dying.“

Apparently out of respect for the victim of the crash and family Paul had his team enforce a tight media ban on his involvement.

Much more detail here! (Warning for graphic descriptions of injury and death) I generally take Giuliano with a grain of salt but it appears to be corroborated in several places, this clipping and a blog post from an acquaintance of the child’s family.