Tag Archives: Liverpool

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John & Poe

October & the City Link
the Walrus & the Raven

Edgar Allan Poe (d. Oct. 7, 1849, Boston) and John Lennon (b. Oct.9, 1940, Liverpool) would’ve likely enjoyed each other’s company. One could even picture them sharing a coffee in Greenwich Village, just a few blocks from where they both lived briefly in New York.
Sharing a certain sensibility, they’ve twisted rules and noses with their talent and non-conformism. While Poe’s genius was acknowledged mostly after death, Lennon’s was still shaping his own times when life was brutally taken away from him. Despite their enormous sway over our era, they’ve both died at 40.
Their status as two of the world’s most recognized pop icons often obscures the depth of their art and endurance of their legacy. And maybe their irresistible appeal owes more to a contemporary deficit of revolutionary artists than to their particular take on human expression.
Or it may be that we’re so desperate to find paradigms upon which to pile our frustration about the world, that a walking wound such as Poe, or a talking head like Lennon, may offer the conduit we seek to connect and placate our own shortcomings. Just like it ever was.
They couldn’t help it but being such tragic heroes, either, with terrible upbringings and disturbing deaths to boot. But that’s when shallow similarities between the two begin to falter, and no longer serve us to rescue their relevance out of the amber it’s been encased.
THE MESMERIC & THE MAUDIT
Poe, who lived in three separate places in Greenwich Village, New York City, before moving to a farmhouse uptown where he wrote The Raven at age 36, is the only American writer routinely mentioned along the French poètes maudits.
The Paul Verlaine-concocted term encapsulated the romantic ideal of the artist as a tragic hero, not suited to this world, who inevitably self-immolates. We won’t get into how flawed and self-indulgent it is such a notion, but the literature the group produced transcended it all.
Perhaps the best known among those poets was Charles Baudelaire, who championed, translated, and wrote essays about Poe, (more)
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Read Also:
* Murder & Unkindness
* Dear John
* Hallowed Ground

Continue reading →

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Every Man

Nobody Told Us That There
Would Be Days Like These

Some of us will complete Friday the four decades separating us from John Lennon’s last birthday, on Oct. 9, 1980. His life had been so intense up to that day that the same length of time following it seems now warped and emptier in comparison.
In his last two months, the man was full of hope, ready for a comeback that’d be only partially realized. Whether his best work was really behind him there’s no way of knowing, but since then, we’ve been badly missing whatever was that only he could’ve delivered.
And he has indeed given us plenty, enough to keep us busy going over it even now, so many years later. Just like a post we’ve published about a particular moment in 1967, documenting what wouldn’t have had any imprint on all of us hadn’t been for him.
Like another way of marking a date that still holds us under its spell. Even without knowing that the next two months were his final countdown, John lived his life with the intensity that only those who know they’ve got just this one chance to do it, really do it.
He’d have been 76, that time around. Instead, he’ll never age a day older than 40. Amazing to learn that many born since then consider him a friend, and his songs, a guide to living intensely and grow wiser. Happy Birthday, John. Thanks for everything.
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(*) Originally published on Oct. 6, 2016.

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John & Poe

October & the City Link
the Walrus & the Raven

Edgar Allan Poe (d. Oct. 7, 1849, Boston) and John Lennon (b. Oct.9, 1940, Liverpool) would’ve likely enjoyed each other’s company. One could even picture them sharing a coffee in Greenwich Village, just a few blocks from where they both lived briefly in New York.
Sharing a certain sensibility, they’ve twisted rules and noses with their talent and non-conformism. While Poe’s genius was acknowledged mostly after death, Lennon was still shaping his own times when life was brutally taken away from him. Despite their enormous sway over our era, they’ve both died at 40.
Their status as two of the world’s most recognized pop icons often obscures the depth of their art and endurance of their legacy. And maybe their irresistible appeal owes more to a contemporary deficit of revolutionary artists than to their particular take on human expression.
Or it may be that we’re so desperate to find paradigms upon which to pile our frustration about the world, that a walking wound such as Poe, or a talking head like Lennon, may offer the conduit we seek to connect and placate our own shortcomings. Just like it ever was.
They couldn’t help it but being such tragic heroes, either, with terrible upbringings and disturbing deaths to boot. But that’s when shallow similarities between the two begin to falter, and no longer serve us to rescue their relevance out of the amber it’s been encased.
THE MESMERIC & THE MAUDIT
Poe, who lived in three separate places in Greenwich Village, New York City, before moving to a farmhouse uptown where he wrote The Raven at age 36, is the only American writer routinely mentioned along the French poètes maudits.
The Paul Verlaine-concocted term encapsulated the romantic ideal of the artist as a tragic hero, not suited to this world, who inevitably self-immolates. We won’t get into how flawed and self-indulgent it is such a notion, but the literature the group produced transcended it all.
Perhaps the best known among those poets was Charles Baudelaire, who championed, translated and wrote essays about Poe, (more)
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Read Also:
* Murder & Unkindness
* Hallowed Ground
* Life W/O Lennon
Continue reading →

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Twas 50 Years Ago Today


Sgt Pepper Made the
World Incredibly High

It’s just a date, it’s just an album, it’s just music. But boy how important it all seemed then, and how badly the world misses that feeling today, that hope and joy The Beatles put out on Jun 1, 1967, smacked in the middle of the so-called Summer of Love, no less.
Now it all may sound tame, irrelevant, outdated. As if the world has no longer a few generations of the young and the glad still alive, still capable of bringing it again to a moment of pure enlightenment. And indeed they are, while what it’s now a minority reminisces.
And yet, we can all drink from that ageless well of songs because they were never written to be crystalized at one point in amber time. In fact, the universe they were drawn from couldn’t even be called rock and roll, even as none of them would be possible without it.
For they were for the twenty-somethings of the day, yes, but also to the over 60, and the under 10 too. They rocked and they waltzed, they twisted and meditated. And in the end, they won the day, one in everyone’s life, and more. A morning, afternoon, and night where some of the best in us exists.
The Beatles did it, and as far as myths go, they made a mark as deep, healing, and hopeful, as any religion still promises to do. But without the toll of division or the need to prove loyalty to an invisible concept. For at the end of that very special day, there was the music.
Not John, Paul, George, or Ringo. Not a band that rode the crest of counterculture even when it was not aware that it was happening. Not a fake combo, led by a mustachioed band leader. The only thing that was real then as it is now is the music, lyrics and melodies.
And really, that was really all that those four working class boys ever wanted. So much so that when it was not fun anymore, they got rid of everything else that grew attached to their image, and threatened to suck the spontaneity they’d worked so hard to preserve.
They were the rarest example, that of the champion who does walk away from everything. And remains champion forever. Evidently because they could. But so could every other star, even as most of them have faded long ago and refuse to acknowledge they’re no longer needed.
So don’t feel coy today if you play this album one more time. And if you are part of that surprisingly small group who never gave it a try, today’s the day. No need to ‘Like’ it or send links to friends you hardly know. Make it as an intimate experience as others only you have had.
The rest of you may just shake your now proverbial gadgets. For alone or with others, the vow that The Beatles have committed to, half a century ago, remains as truthful as always: a splendid time is indeed guaranteed for all.
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Read Also:
* Newspaper Taxis
* Would You?
* Album Art

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Every Man

Nobody Told Us That There
Would Be Days Like These

Four years from now, some of us will complete the four decades that separate us from John Lennon’s last birthday, on Oct. 9, 1980. His life had been so intense up to that day, that the same length of time following it seem now warped and much emptier in comparison.
In his last two months, the man was full of hope, ready for a comeback that’d be only partially realized. Whether his best work was really behind him there’s no way of knowing, but since then, we’ve been badly missing whatever was that only he could’ve delivered.
And he has indeed given us plenty, enough to keep us busy going over it even now, so many years later. Just like a post we’ve published four years ago, about a particular moment in 1967, that wouldn’t have had such an imprint on all of us hadn’t been for him.
Like another way of marking a date that still holds us under its spell. Even without knowing that the next two months were his final countdown, John lived his life with the intensity that only those who know they’ve got just this one chance to do it, really do it.
He’d have been 76, this time around. Instead, he’ll never age a day older than 40. Amazing to learn that many born since then consider him a friend, and his songs, a guide to living intensely and grow wiser. Happy Birthday, John. Thanks for everything.

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Shh… Hear That?

Gunshots? Feisty Couples? Nah.
A Hum Is Robbing Folks of Sleep

People who live in war zones and disaster areas have learned it long ago. And so have those of the fickle slumber kind. For the great majority of mankind, the quest for a silent night of sleep gets harder every day. And then there is that humming.
What used to be called the Bristol Hum has now been reported all over the world, and well-rested ears are finally tuning in. As thin walls or jumpy imagination are not longer blamed for it, a reasonably sound explanation may settle the mystery.
Conclusive research have proved how lousy sleepers we’ve all become, at least since the bulb came to light (sorry). As more is learned about the depths of our unconscious state, less is known about how much we’ve lost trying to be up and running at all hours.
People and animals show considerable loss of performance and overall quality of life, when sleep is restricted. There are many fascinating studies on the subject, but it’s better to put that to rest for now, so not lead everyone into a loud snore.
Is not that insomnia is more prevalent, even if it is, or that we’ve all been dreaming about a good night of sleep, or so we should. It’s our days, crammed with so many chores rammed up deep into penumbra territory. When we’re finally done, it’s already time to get up.
Some try Zen and the art of not giving a hoot about an ever ‘on’ world, full of lamps, neon, and TV sets. If not that, then the vain effort of carving extra hours from the canyons of the night, to jam them with big blobs of extra wakefulness.
The Worldwide Map of the Hum (Glen MacPherson)
THINGS THAT GO HUMING INTO THE NIGHT
No wonder. Not just external noise is increasing, hammering our heads with insane bangs and clangs, but also low noise, the almost imperceptible humming of billions of electronic appliances and, if one’s to believe some Internet sites, the aliens’ very own breath.
Research conducted by geoscientist David Deming since 2004 may have broken the puzzle, and to many, all the fun: surprising absolutely no one, but making a lot of sense, he concluded that Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio waves, between 3 and 30kHz, are the culprit for the hum.
It’s the frequency used by, you guessed, the world’s military to communicate with submerged submarines, via industrial-strength land-based and airborne transmitters. It’s powerful enough to penetrate a solid inch of aluminum. And drive light sleepers insane.

THE DEEP SEA WHISTLE HEARD FROM SPACE
Speaking of which, not all theories invoked to explain the phenomenon were by conspiracy-driven nutcakes. For the Earth does make sounds the human ear is not equipped to detect, and the wind, well, it blows and sings and haunts and everything else.
An intriguing study, by University of Liverpool Chris Hugues and his team, for instance, found that the Caribbean Sea (more)
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Read Also:
* Singing Suns

Continue reading →

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John & Poe

October & the City Link
the Walrus & the Raven

Edgar Allan Poe (d. Oct. 7, 1849, Boston) and John Lennon (b. Oct.9, 1940, Liverpool) would’ve likely enjoyed each other’s company. One could even picture them sharing a coffee in Greenwich Village, just a few blocks from where they both lived briefly in New York.
Sharing a certain sensibility, they’ve twisted rules and noses with their talent and non-conformism. While Poe’s genius was acknowledged mostly after death, Lennon’s was still shaping his own times when life was brutally taken away from him. Despite their enormous sway over our era, they’ve both died at 40.
Their status as two of the world’s most recognized pop icons often obscures the depth of their art and endurance of their legacy. And maybe their irresistible appeal owes more to a contemporary deficit of revolutionary artists than to their particular take on human expression.
Or it may be that we’re so desperate to find paradigms upon which to pile our frustration about the world, that a walking wound such as Poe, or a talking head like Lennon, may offer the conduit we seek to connect and placate our own shortcomings. Just like it ever was.
They couldn’t help it but being such tragic heroes, either, with terrible upbringings and disturbing deaths to boot. But that’s when shallow similarities between the two begin to falter, and no longer serve us to rescue their relevance out of the amber it’s been encased.
THE MESMERIC & THE MAUDIT
Poe, who lived in three separate places in Greenwich Village, New York City, before moving to a farmhouse uptown where he wrote The Raven at age 36, is the only American writer routinely mentioned along the French poètes maudits.
The Paul Verlaine-concocted term encapsulated the romantic ideal of the artist as a tragic hero, not suited to this world, who inevitably self-immolates. We won’t get into how flawed and self-indulgent it is such notion, but the literature the group produced transcended it all.
Perhaps the best known among those poets was Charles Baudelaire, who championed, translated and wrote essays about Poe, (more)
_______
Read Also:
* Murder & Unkindness
* Hallowed Ground
Continue reading →

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Would You?

They Asked Us, Please, Please Me
& We Were All So Pleased to Oblige

It was half a century ago – Sgt. Pepper still a cultural revolution away – when The Beatles released their first album. Despite how fast it was recorded, and the band almost total anonymity outside the U.K., it became a landmark of pop and rock music like no other.
Please Please Me, an almost live recording of their Cavern Club act in Liverpool, had already the combination of originals, classic American rock, and songs by composers outside their immediate realm of influence, that marked their early output. And, of course, those vocals.
By then, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison had already honed their performing skills, and the late addition of Ringo Starr seemed to have only helped usher their meteoric rise. The album shot up to #1 in both sides of the Atlantic, and within three years, they were indeed more popular than you-know-who.
At this stage, they were still better as a cover band than at writing their own material, as most of the songwriters they’ve used, including Carole King and Burt Bacharach, were already established household names in the U.S. That was not to last, as we all know how it turned out.
However, Lennon and McCartney’s I Saw Her Standing There, the title song (released earlier as a single), and Love Me Do owed nothing to the Continue reading →

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Number 32 Dream

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Scousers

Liverpool Fans Sing
 The Beatles (in 1964)

And in following a Reds’ time-honored tradition at the KOP, they may just have another go at it.

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We Rest Our Case

Can’t Grasp Their Soul?
Bid for Their Toilet Bowls

First it was J.D. Salinger’s unwashed toilet bowl that showed up on eBay a few weeks ago for a $1 million asking bid. Now, it’s John Lennon’s, for $500 thousand more. What’s next? Nothing else, that’s what should be next.
Hey, we’re as open minded as the next nun, but enough of this, er, garbage. Either scatology is the next black in the auction markets or more people are willing to get down and dirty to make a buck or connect to their favorite celebrity than we were ready to admit. In any way, we insist, this whole business stinks.
In the same lot of Lennon’s blue porcelain commode, there’re real treasuries. Like the limited mono edition of “Two Virgins,” his first public collaboration with Yoko Ono; a small harmonica that belonged to his son, Julian; a black and white picture of a young Paul McCartney; Beatles autographs and other memorabilia, all worth some good money.
But it’s the bathroom bowl of Lennon’s Tittenhurst Park residence that’s been getting the most, un-kosher attention. It may go back to the closet where it’d been stored for 40 years, if it’s not sold, and it’s just as well. At least, it may take us that long to understand why it was even put up for sale.
But before that, wanna know one last meaningless, creepy piece of shoddy coincidence related to the sale of these bowls? The man who shot John Lennon was holding a copy of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”. What? We said it was meaningless.

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Yesterdays

Beatles Hit Their
Half Century Mark

It was 50 years ago yesterday. The Beatles played their first concert at the Indra Club, Hamburg, West Germany. The scruffy lineup included John, Paul, George, soon-to-be-replaced-by-Ringo Pete Best, and the late Stuart Sutcliffe.
Paraphrasing Lennon, the Beatles were born in Liverpool but grew up in Hamburg. For that first paid gig, and the almost 300 that followed in the city over two years, prostitutes and sailors were their primary audience, and concerts could last up to 12 hours, Continue reading →

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Dr. Winston O’Boogie

It’s Johnny’s Birthday,
Would You Care to Join Us? (*)

* John Lennon would’ve been 70 Saturday and New York – where his widow Yoko Ono and son Sean live, and where he was assassinated in 1980 – led the celebrations, along with his birth city Liverpool. Screenings, shows, exhibitions, the relaunching of his and the couple’s albums, and a variety of events marked the former Beatle’s life and times around the world.
Yoko herself went to Reykjavik, Iceland, to perform with the Plastic Ono Band at a peace concert and, as she’s been doing for some time every Oct. 9, light the Imagine Peace Tower ceremony. And pretty much every Beatle fan and Lennon’s relative turned the day into a special occasion one way or another.
* Media coverage in almost every tongue known to man has reached saturation levels and, with all the above plus analysis, interviews, articles, critical portrayals and adulatory tributes going on in the past few weeks, there’s no need to add anything else, except to share something short, exclusive and, most likely, obvious.
What were you doing when you heard that John Lennon had been shot?
By now, few doubt that this was one of those events powerful enough to disrupt the fabric of the plausible reality and immediately bend it, wrapping everything else around it.
Some memories turned quickly into oblivion, while others got a hold of all recollections of that moment when, suddenly, there was a world without John Lennon out there.
* Our band had a busy week ahead. Before Continue reading →

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Bloody Christmas

30 YEARS AGO TODAY

When the World Lost John Lennon

– Where were you when you heard about it?
His family and close ones will always prefer to remember his birthday in October, specially this year, his 70th. But the world will always think about his brutal death, outside the Dakota in New York City, and the crushing end of so many dreams, however unrealistic they may’ve been.
John Lennon’s death, with its profound resonance for millions of fans around the globe, was almost as unexpected as it was deeply unjust. His songs, his music, his art and awareness of Continue reading →