esoteric cinephile

Paul came across in 1963 as a fun-loving, footloose bachelor who turned on his charm to devastating effect when he wanted to manipulate rivals, colleagues or women he fancied. (...) He had enormous powers of persuasion within The Beatles. He would get his own way by subtlety and suaveness where John resorted to shouting and bullying. John may have been the loudest Beatle but Paul was the shrewdest. I watched him twist the others round to his point of view in all sorts of contentious situations, some trivial, some more significant, some administrative, some creative. George told me that when he joined Paul and John in the line-up of The Quarry Men in 1958, Paul was already acting as though he was the decision-maker in the group. According to George: "I knew perfectly well that this was John's band and John was my hero, my idol, but from the way Paul talked he gave every indication that he was the real leader, the one who dictated what The Quarry Men would do and where they should be going as a group." This made sense to me because, from what I saw for myself in 1963 and later, Paul's opinions and ideas tended to prevail with The Beatles, particularly on matters of musical policy such as whether a new number was worth recording or whether the running order for the group's stage show needed altering slightly. I didn't see any of the others resist him. They seemed to welcome Paul getting his way by winning arguments with John. When Paul wanted something badly enough from Brian Epstein he would speak softly, wooing the man rather than intimidating him. Epstein's defences would melt away as Paul looked him straight in the eye. In terms of song lyrics, Paul's idea of romantic was 'Michelle', John's was 'Norwegian Wood'.

Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the question of African liberation was not just a question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of the white colonialists, if they didn’t rid themselves of the capitalistic economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by Black neocolonialists. There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, there was not a single liberation movement in the whole world that was fighting for capitalism. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.

I have to go to the library so that they can laminate my penis for free