New Yorker Contributor Asserts Lockean Right to Write Recycled Claptrap
So Mollie Wilson took issue with John Colapinto’s article, “When I’m Sixty-Four,” a Paul McCartney profile riddled with the kind of spoon-fed, been-there-done-that tone of a bona-fide hack. Why, asked Wilson, would The New Yorker, one of the top magazines in the country, revisit the same tired legends? Any remotely educated culture vulture knows very well that “Yesterday” started off as “Scrambled Eggs.” Further, Colapinto idiotically suggests that some hard-core fan asking for an autograph “could have been another Mark David Chapman” and then has the temerity to put this social gaffe in his piece!
But the story gets even stranger. Colapinto began leaving comments on Wilson’s blog, including this morsel:
As for my re-telling of the often-told tale of “Yesterday” beginning with the nonsense lyrics about scrambled eggs: any true Beatles fan would know that the point of re-telling that story was that Paul has added vital new info–something of which he’d only lately been reminded: that the actual lyrics to Yesterday were written while on a 3 hour car trip from Lisbon to southern Portugal with Jane Asher.
I’m a true Beatles fan. And Colapinto is dead wrong. The information concerning Jane Asher has been floating around for some time. And while my Beatles books are currently still packed, I do know that this information has been reported since at least 2003. (e.g., see “McCartney’s Yesterday had a nudge from Nat” by Maurice Chittenden, The Times, July 6, 2003). In fact, the far more interesting question, which came up around the same time, is how close “Yesterday” is to Nat King Cole’s “Answer Me.” Then again, since Colapinto is less concerned about the musical origins of one of the most remembered pop music ballads of the past fifty years and more interested in who McCartney was fucking when he wrote “Yesterday,” one shouldn’t look to Colapinto for compelling arts criticism.
This is by Colapinto’s own admission:
You, instead, wanted an essay on the subject. And that’s why you’re a blogger and not a writer. And, if you can handle hearing this, it’s why you’re barely a reader. You should also understand that the New Yorker is divided into sections; there are feature stories, like the kind I write, and there is the critics, at the back; I do not and never will be a critic. I don’t like them. They’re usually up-their-ass on precisely the matters you and I have been discussing here.
So there you have it. A New Yorker writer, vastly uninformed about the origins of “Yesterday” and their ubiquitous availability to any Beatlemaniacs, isn’t interested in writing, much less reading the kind of in-depth music features that you and I might be interested in. This is arrogance of the first order. And I’m truly stunned that the New Yorker would be dumbing down their features by assigning them to clumsy thugs like Colapinto.
If a 5,000 word essay that goes out of its way to investigate in a way that nobody else has tackled the subject makes one a blogger and not a writer, then call me a blogger any day of the week. Even if my “blog post” is published in a newspaper or a magazine.
Let it Be on YouTube
Part One, Part Two, Part Three.
It doesn’t appear to be the whole film, but if you’re a cultural apocalyptic sort, I can think of no better panacea for your whims than witnessing the end of the Beatles.
All You Need is .MOV
Mabuse on Music
1. I have recently discovered The Avalanches. If you enjoy goofball hip-hop with a wide range of samples and influences, then I highly recommend their album, Since I Left You. If you’re interested in sampling the Avalanches, “Frontier Psychiatrist,” one of the album’s grand highlights (with something in the area of 50 vocal samplings), exists as a highly inventive music video that truly needs to be experienced. Strangely enough, these folks originate in Australia of all places.
2. I’ve loved Weller from the Jam onwards, but Paul Weller should probably not be experienced live. He is (or, at least, at the Warfield, he was) an extremely bitter performer with a generic-sounding blues band who showed remarkable contempt towards an audience that demanded that he perform Jam and Style Council songs. Let’s put it this way. He smoked two cigarettes on stage just before performing “That’s Entertainment,” did a lifeless cover a full stop below the recording, and then threw his guitar down at the end. I don’t blame a performer for getting annoyed when they perform their back catalog. But Weller could have easily reinvented the song and found a way to love it, the way he reinvented “English Rose” for his “unplugged” album, Days of Speed, and actually enjoyed himself in the process.
3. M. Ward (who I saw not too long ago with the magnificent Tito Perez) puts on a nice no-frills show, but I’m not sure if I like his baseball caps. Then again, I have a problem in general with baseball caps. So I’m sure it’s just me.
4. Elbow, the Manchester band that sounds dangerously like Coldplay but thankthegoodlord is not Coldplay, has a new album out called Leaders of the Free World. Alas, like the BRMC’s recent move towards undistinctive acoustic blues, this new album represents an unfortunate shift from the nuanced inventiveness of Cast of Thousands into the unfortunate territory of Travis/Coldplay clones. Do we really need any more? Even Guy Garvey’s voice suddenly sounds like Chris Martin’s. And the lyrics have shifted away from riffs on “sex toys” and are now more straightforward whinings about lost love. A shame.
5. Rick Moody wonders if rock ‘n roll is still for him at the age of 44. The real question is whether such a question can be answered when he genuinely believes that “the new Rolling Stones song has some pep.” But I’m sure he meant to write that the new Rolling Stones has one reaching for Pepto-Bismol.
6. And while I haven’t yet heard it, the new Paul McCartney album, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, is of interest because McCartney, in an effort to try something different, enlisted Nigel Godrich (producer of OK Computer) to produce this album. While Mick and Keith have demonstrated time and time again that they are incapable of growing old gracefully, it’s interesting to see rock icons attempt reinvention when they’re financially solvent.
Insomnia
- How to make a lightsaber dildo
- The Daily Dancer: “I am Daily Dancer, a computer geek who loves to dance! Every weekday morning, you can watch me dance to a different song.”
- Reflectoporn: The infamous eBay image kick starts a new movement.
- Classic Good Girl and Romance Covers
- Seventies’ Greatest Album Covers (with histories of design conception)
- Beatles TMI
- Twins deliver babies on same day
- Forget Me Not Panties: obviously for those who don’t build relationships on trust.
And the Worst Thing is That He Can’t Stop Talking About the Fuckin’ Beatles
There’s a guy from Liverpool in our apartment at the moment whom we haven’t seen in six years. (Yeah, we’re just as mystified as you are.) Between this and the planned Memorial Day debauchery, what this means is few, if any, updates until June 1.
Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
