I have spent the last week dodging V8-Interceptors and armored All-Terrain vehicles of every stripe and manufacture in my daily back and forth excursions to Heritage Auctions where I am assisting in the Comics and Comic Art Department as a cataloger of treasures from a bygone era.
I’ve done this before, but it’s been several years. However, I’ve got an expensive surgical procedure in my near future and I will need all of the currency I can scrounge together, and so...into the hellish roads of the Metroplex I go, taking my life into my own hands twice a day as I attempt to make normal lane changes at reasonable speeds, to the consternation of literally everyone around me, many of whom seem to be actively training for a career as Formula One drivers and stuntmen for the reboot of the Smokey and the Bandit franchise.
The reward is worth the risk. Here’s the administrator holding several million dollars in his lap, trying very hard to look cool.
K9 Division Update
The bunker mascot would like everyone to know that the meds she is taking have improved her mobility and her leg strength and she continues to test the limits of these ministrations by cavorting about in the grass like a heathen.
We have not tried getting into the car without assistance or navigating the bunker stairs, but those tests are imminent and we will report on their efficacy as needed. Thanks all for the well-wishes and for the treats and attention that have been remotely administered.
In Other News...
My return to fiction writing has been slow this year; I’ve only written a few things, but I’m pleased to note they have all sold. I recently had a fun story appear in the 50th issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and it got a little notice right here in Tangent Online.
Reviewer Victoria Silverwolf said about “The Carnival Job”:
Written in a cynical, wisecracking style, this story reads like a combination of fantasy and hardboiled crime fiction. The combination is a refreshing change from the magazine’s more traditional tales.
Cool! That’s what I was shooting for. If you want to read the story for yourself, you can access it right here.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Get Back (Disney+)
It's always easier to recognize genius when we do it for ourselves. I grew up in the 1970s, being assured by an uncountable number of radio Deejays that the Beatles were not only geniuses but also the greatest rock and roll band of all time, usually right after playing "Hey Jude" or "Yesterday." They would then chase that song with something like "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" or some as-yet-undefined offering in what would come be known as “yacht rock.”
In the intervening years, I'd catch a random bit of "Octopus' Garden" or "Yellow Submarine" and think, "Geniuses? Really?" My generation has made a career out of doing the opposite of what our Baby Boomer parents told us, right up to and including liking the Beatles because they told us to.
All this is to say I'm not not a Beatles fan. I like them enough to have an opinion about what phase of their musical career I prefer: their earlier, rocking stuff, as opposed to their Transcendental phase. But no matter what I think of Sitar music, certain songs in their later period are undeniable and inarguable classics, and even if you don't like the Beatles at all (and what the hell is wrong with you, anyway), you have to acknowledge their greatness as songwriters and performers, if nothing else. Songs like the ones found on Let It Be, for instance.
There’s a lot of mythology surrounding Let It Be, from the way it was recorded to the breakups, from the Concert on the Roof to the film shot for the aborted multi-media project. It’s all part of the repository of folklore that surrounds the Beatles, and while much-ballyhooed, it’s all been accepted as common knowledge for as long as I’ve been alive.
All that just got blown up by Get Back, a three-part documentary directed by THAT Peter Jackson, who used his considerable resources to painstakingly clean up the mountain of film and digitize it and all of the sound recordings to cut them into a chronicle that’s as much a deconstruction as it is a reconstruction. This documentary is the Unforgiven of the Beatles career in that it spends most of its run time deconstructing their myth, and in the last act completely builds it right back up again.
You can’t be a Beatles fan and not watch it. It’s impossible. You’ll want it for no other reason than Peter Jackson manages to bring Lennon and Harrison back to life, and not just their pop cultural amalgamated selves, but the real people, who smiled and breathed and smoked and made bad jokes and wore their emotions on their faces and especially in their eyes. You can’t not watch them.
But even if you’re not a Beatles fan, I would recommend this to anyone who fancies themselves a creative in any capacity. There is a master class in songwriting taking place in this documentary if you can make yourself see it; it’s hard to connect to sometimes, because of Jackson’s focused narrative that he had to implement in the documentary. But there’s plenty of footage of the band working out several songs, and there is something both humbling and awe-inspiring watching two of the most lauded songwriters in the history of rock and roll stumbling around trying to find the right phrases to insert into the lyrics of “Get Back.”
There are people in world (people you know and deal with every day) who think writing is simple: you just sit down and type up some words that rhyme and then that’s pretty much it. They’ll tell you that verbatim, in fact. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that everyone’s process is different, but we all have some things in common; namely, we all search for the right words. Paul and John sang nonsense in time to the melody. I make lists of words. You probably do something else entirely. At one point, Lennon tells George Harrison to just “say whatever comes into your head each time ‘Attracts me like a cauliflower,’ until you get the word, you know.” God, that was both refreshing and illuminating, to hear John Lennon talking about writing as a mechanical process.
Watching four to five hours of their creative process, squeezed in and among Paul McCartney steamrolling his bandmates, watching Ringo being eaten up inside by the strife between his friends, seeing George Harrison’s disillusionment and despair, and watching them all, amid their interpersonal gripes coming together as a unified front against the suits, only increased my appreciation for the songs we got from them. Not just “Day Tripper” and “Paperback Writer,” but the big ones, too. “Let it Be” affects me like “Ave Maria.” Catch me on the right day and it’ll reduce me to a sobbing, spent heap.
They really were geniuses. Flawed geniuses, the kind I like and respond to most emphatically. Kudos to Peter Jackson for bringing that into the documentary, along with the humanizing drama. Several times you can see other people in the room staring at what’s going on, and you realize that they realize they are in rarefied air at that very moment, and whether or not they know they are witnessing rock and roll history in the making, you’re certain they see the situation for the singularity that it is.
Get Back gets my highest possible recommendation. But whatever you do, don’t take it from me. Watch it for yourself.
I just finally saw a clip of that last night and it was electrifying because it was so immediate. I've grown up with an impression of them as rather remote gods, and while I have my Beatles songs that I like, they've never felt like one of MY bands - though I'm very conscious of the influence they've had on some of my bands. But the clip seemed to cut through all of those well polished anecdotes, and I just saw people, artists. And that's the part I'm curious about.
Oh you will love the doc, then. It’s six hours of that. And then when they become the Beatles on the rooftop…