mark lewisohn and tune in

So ten years after it was published I am taking the deep dive (cliché, sorry) into Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, the (audiobook version of the) 1000 page history of the Beatles up to I guess they record 'Love Me Do' or something. TBH I was less interested in the story as I was in Lewisohn's famed comprehensiveness and claims to have uncovered unknown material, though actually I don't know enough to really know what this is (he doesn't flag it). (Similarly, and I appreciate this more, he doesn't constantly point out what the future held for them, which keeps the reader mindful of the extraordinary unlikeliness of them ever doing anything with their lives, let alone becoming megastars). One thing that strikes me about this narrative (I'm up to about mid-1960; the book goes to 1962) is that they are convinced they are extraordinary, but that there isn't a huge amount of evidence at this point that it's true - the only really interesting thing about them is that they write their own songs, although when they perform live they don't play a lot of their own songs, and their meagre triumphs/attractions/celebrated talents are the ability to mimic others. Other players come and go and are generally only barely tolerated. 

Lewisohn is a good writer* and I like his bolshie pro-research, pro-history arrogance. Does this make me want to read his biography of Benny Hill? Yeah, actually it does. 

Note: curiously I originally chose to illustrate this tiny thought with an image purloined off eBay of some child's drawing of the Beatles from eBay. I didn't credit it because there was no name attached, just captioned it as that - a child's drawing from eBay. Blogger refused to publish it, issuing me with a ban notice and instructing me to read all about what was prohibited from Blogger, suggesting I knew very well what I'd done. I suppose I'm still not entirely sure that it was the drawing or its caption which upset the bot - I guess I never will know (posting the drawing again below, sans caption). The above image by the way is AI, the prompt being 'The Beatles as schoolchildren cats'. 

* A good mainstream writer able to write for broad appeal. 

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OK, I brought this one on myself obviously, and shouldn't complain. I had got some kind of sense through the ether that this book would be different and it was critically acclaimed etc. Also, all I really wanted was, as per the Late Shift book, something I could listen to that would fill the gaps between my usual podcasts. But to my mind Brown makes some really big stupid errors early on that completely put me offside (let's put aside the fact that this book is read by three people and they all put on funny German, Liverpudlian etc accents - that's on Audible not Craig Brown). Obviously if I was to be utterly fair to CB I would invest the full 18 hours 46 minutes I still have to go with this work and then make a pronouncement. Instead, these are the reasons I'm writing this one off and going on to something else (btw Audible now makes it impossible to delete things - you make one purchase you live with it forever apparently): 

(1) I don't know how far I am in to the work but over an hour and already he has committed, well, not a cardinal sin but one of the stupidest errors anyone writing history can do, IMO. Relaying the various (admittedly fairly famous, so maybe you figure you have to do something with the incontrovertible facts of the biographies of the Beatles) milestones in Beatle lives, he has so far posited two 'scenario A' and 'scenario B' situations where, for instance, Paul passes Latin at school and goes on to a university career, or, Paul doesn't pass Latin and stays down a year (that's what happened) and is suddenly in the same year as, and befriends, George Harrison. I would like to posit a scenario C: the comet which created the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event hits another piece of space rock in the asteroid belt instead and smashes to bits there, and so evolution on Earth is not impacted by mass extinction in the way that the Earth experienced it in our current timeline, and Louise Harrison gets rostered on to work at the shop on the night of June 1942 when she and Harold would otherwise have conceived a boring and grumpy guitarist. The impacts on the Travelling Wilburys are minimal. 

I understand (I think) why Brown goes for this stupid approach - he wants us to understand that the universe is random whimsy. But once you unleash that genie you are fucked, Craig. There are literally infinite ways to go. 

(2) The early part of the book is an account of CB going to visit Lennon's and McCartney's childhood homes, wherein CB goes on a big riff on how stupid it is that the National Trust UK has accumulated representative household items from the 1950s-60s to make the houses look as they did the day the lads wrote 'I Saw Her Standing There' (or whatever). It is not clear what he would have preferred, but the message is seems to be 'this isn't history unless this is really Mimi's wooden spoon'. He goes into big detail about the Beatles industry (like he's not, and we his readers are not, buying into that shizzle here and now) and then relates his unease about being caught surreptitiously recording the tour guides and then how he then decides to take notes and gets told off for it. Hey, since I am not going to read/listen to the rest of the book, I shouldn't pronounce but seriously the disrespect he has for the whole situation and the people involved does not make him come out shiny and pristine. 

Btw he then goes to Hamburg and does another Beatles tour and this time we get (as mentioned, this is not CB's fault) interminably extensive parody German accent as some guy who's been making a living (presumably) from being a Beatles in Hamburg tour guide for fifty years (not an exaggeration, he's been doing it since 1970) goes through the motions. This is where I stopped. 

Now I've written it down I feel maybe I'm missing out on a very fine set up for something bigger but fuck it even though I just wanted something to listen to while I stacked the dishwasher I can't take it anymore. Particularly the accents. 

this post has nothing to do with my cats or any cats, but these days I feel the need to provide a picture of something just to lull you into forgetting how dumbed down everything is by pictures of for instance cats

Not that things aren't dumbed down, way down, enough here.

So I have interlinked dichotomies re: health, pain, fitness, weightloss etc which form a kind of ker-plunk situation probably not uncommon in the almost-56-year-old-men demographic. I have the pain, which I have whinged about previously; I finally made it to the doctor’s on Wednesday unless it was Thursday and she figured I had a slightly (maybe she didn’t say slightly) inflamed (or similar term) vertebrae. The trick, she says, is to strengthen the muscles around it so as to keep it in place and not sticking out hurting me. She recommends physio and that is I suppose something I have to do. But in the meantime, I just joined the gym again after a year away and no bull, I hate it but I am really keen to start going there again on a very regular basis. But I don’t want to, you know, hear a pinging sound and see that disc bouncing out onto the wall. As mentioned previously (thanks for caring) yes I can maintain 10 000 steps a day and my daily average for 2021 is in fact slightly over and I aim to keep that going. Sorry to bring it up but I know that is what diaries are for, and if you want to read my diary, well gee whiz you get what you get because, news just in, it is what it is.

 

Speaking of which in the last week or so I have had password hell with two media orgs I subscribe to, Slate Plus (longtime member) and Crikey (recent convert). Slate Plus has always been a bit iffy with proper labelling of its podcasts on its site, so you kind of take a stab in the dark whether you get the ‘Plus’ version (longer with a coda) or the regular version which has ads. I can’t stand the ads. Of course, being in Australia they almost never have anything at all to do with me, things I couldn’t buy even if I was inclined. So it is galling to have to listen to them. But now when I try to access the ‘Plus’ version of the podcasts (or ‘Dear Prudence’, the text advice column, which frankly I am addicted to) I have to go through a rigmarole of logging in and then the humiliation of being admitted to something I should not have log in for but at the same time being told that I could not, at this point, make the transaction. UGH.

 

Crikey has just been sending me on a change-your-password-thanks-your-password-change-is-successful-oh-who-are-you-change-your-password trek which sucks and also as some would say blows. OK I managed this one by complaining to them (sorry, I would have complained to you first but I’ve been busy) and they sent me what I assume is a generic password for Crikey which I’m just going to keep using until I can’t anymore. 

 

If you know anything about the two above you’ll know that they are left-leaning online journalism sites from the US and Australia respectively. I have been a Slate adherent for 8 or 9 years. I bit the bullet and took on Crikey a few months ago and while at first I was doubtful (perhaps, I now think, not much was happening over summer) it is paying off in terms of in-depth actual news, political news, which I enjoy. My leftist world view was created by my parents being intelligent from the mid-1960s and exposing me to the appropriate views, proof, rhetoric. I was leftwing before I knew what it meant, like supporting a football team, but when I found out what it meant I realised it was appropriate to what I actually believed, lol. I remember a long series of arguments with my Auburn South Primary School friend John Parncutt about Liberal vs Labor at a time when I could barely often recall (those two words do seem kind of similar – was that deliberate on the part of the Liberals?) which word stood for my alignment. John would ask me why I thought Labor was the best party to lead the nation and fuck it, I was ten, I had no idea of anything at all, of course, except that Enid Blyton was exciting and ABBA were grand. Looking back I now suspect that had I actually posited anything like a reasonable response he would have shat and died, because he certainly (in my memory anyway, maybe blocked it out) didn’t have a policy position on anything except that the Liberal Party was his family’s football team. In any case, I have always essentially voted Labor (yeah, I have actually often voted Greens, particularly in Broadmeadows where it feels like Labor’s so rusted on anything that puts a bit of a sad old damp firework under it might be useful) and, unimaginative as it might seem, I kind of like them. I have no special idealism and I don’t even, really, care about people above everything (I care about people I care about, but I also care about animals I care about, I also, I am sure I’ve mentioned this, question the whole notion of a world-view concocted as though what you/I care for really matters). 

 

Last night I recorded two hours of lecture to my computer to be released unto students on Tuesday. By the end I was very croaky and in that weird state – I have to say it is almost pleasurable – of feeling like I’d run out of vocabulary, just a general exhaustion of verbality. My lectures, by the way, are not written so much as commentary to a series of assembled slides. I try to have a summary at the beginning, but I tend not to have a summing up, and usually that’s because I like to keep things open-ended. I don’t believe there is a neat ending, and to imagine one is to cut yourself off intellectually. Everything bleeds into everything else. I spend hours telling students that mid-century modernism* is still heavily affected by some of the concerns of the late 19^th century, and then I say ‘so to wrap that up, no-one is prey to their formative influences anymore, year zero came along and the reset was entirely successful’ - ?!

 

Today I have to write another lecture, almost completely from scratch (there will be some callbacks to the first week of lectures – this is for undergraduate students who are not dumb but I think do need a little bit of hand-holding, JUST NO SPOONFEEDING, early on). It will be great, I have good material, but the composition of it will be arduous. Fortunately, as I always tell everyone in my usual smug way, I really enjoy my job. 

 

*By the way it occurred to me while I was talking about that that the mid-21^st century is looming on the horizon; a book I was reading for review this week which claimed to be about ‘mid-century’ began its narrative in the 19-teens.