Darth Real Life is battling me, which is why I'm still behind with the replies etc, but have two links:

Angel:

Why We Fight: An Essay on Truth and Purpose: meta on the season 5 episode Why We Fight in the broader context of the show. Why We Fight is unpopular in the fandom when last I looked, but I always liked it - it does some genuinenly original things with its WWII setting, for starters, and it contains one of my favourite scenes between Angel and Spike. (Spike, in conclusion to Lawson's fate and the fact Angel just made him swim the rest of the way to the coast: "You really are a dick." Angel, with a gesture that makes it clear Spike will have to swim, too: "Yes, I really am.") This is a very good post that reminds me of ye olde days when there was good AtS meta to be had in addition to BTVS meta.


Breaking Bad and The Other Sixties Band (sort of):

Behold Hank, Jesse and Keith Richards in the same room, here. Okay, the actors and He Who Will Survive The Apocalypse, but come on, this is begging for crack fic. What scenario would bring Jesse Pinkman, Hank Schroeder and Keef together?

ponygirl2000 kindly pointed this out to me: Chuck Berry's song Brown-eyed Handsome Man as covered by John Lennon on a tape in the late 70s. It's a good cover anyway, but, as Ponygirl says, the thing that pushes it into squee territory is that John randomly mashes it with Get Back, of all the songs. (Thus outranking the tape where he sings Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey on his 31st birthday, but not the clip for Sean sings With a little help from my friends for him, calls it his favourite song and John is glowing in nostalgia about how he and Paul sang back-up for Ringo on that one while simultanously giving interviews denying Sean ever heard a single Beatle tune.)

Speaking of rarities, YouTube has Soily, which was the hard rock number with which Wings used to end their concerts and which was strictly a "live" song, meaning it's not on the regular records except the live "Wings over America" album from 1976. It's a screamer in the tradition of "Long Tall Sally" or "I'm Down" and very handy if someone comes up with the old "Paul only wrote silly love songs in the 70s" cliché.



One thing that I find striking (in a positive way) about the 60s generation of musicians - especially the survivors - is that yes, flawed as hell as people, but how really generous and supportive they were/are of each other, in addition to the more expected competition with each other.

( Stories and quotes from and regarding The Who, Brian Wilson, Marianne Faithfull, Bob Dylan and David Bowie )

A quote I didn't include among my collection of contradictory John Lennon quotes, mostly because it's more of a JohnandYoko contradictory issue, not a statement, but it's a little gem nonetheless: on page 224 of her memoirs, May Pang, who, remember, worked for both Yoko and John for two years at the start of the 70s before becoming John's girlfriend, informs us: Wives and girlfriends were not welcome at John's sessions. Yoko had said, 'The studio is a place to work.' The result of her dictum had been an unofficial rule banning all women except her from the studio while recording was going on.

....

Meanwhile, back in the 60s: ever since Anthology got released, so did a lot of studio chatter. This is one priceless bit during Hey Jude rehearsals. "Err, Paul, it's very hard to sing this, you know." :) :) :)


On another note, but still in the survivors of the sixties club, there's a great review of Keith Richards' memoirs in form of an imaginary reply by Mick Jagger. Imaginary!Mick comes up with such great observations like "I thought we both learned that there is no point in sharing anything at all with the press, save for a few tidbits for the upbeat The Stones are back in top rocking form! article that accompanies each of our tours. I think Keith never appreciated the tedious hours I have to spend with Jann Wenner to accomplish that". Or: "I am forced into the role of martinet, the one who gets blamed for silly arbitrary rules. Like, for a show in front of 60,000 people for which we are being paid some 6 or 7 million dollars for a few hours work, I like to suggest to everyone that we start on time, and that we each have in place a personal plan, in whatever way suits us best, to stay conscious for the duration of the show."


Moving on to more fictional territory, the preliminary list of Yuletide fandoms is out. Babylon 5 didn't cut it, which I'm told is my fault along with some other suspects, but that's not fair. I so nominated it! Otoh, Crusade made the cut. So - new Crusade fic this year? (Hopefully not about Galen?) Also, Nowhere Boy and Two of Us are both there. If, you know, someone in theory happens to have a hang-up writing about certain people who are still alive but on the other hand can circumvent that by writing about completely fictionalized versions of them. Theoretically.

Merlin fanfic rec:

Portrait: of Gwen, that is, in her relationships with Merlin, Morgana and Arthur, respectively. Season 3 spoilers until Eye of the Phoenix. I love Gwen, and the author here captures her BFFness with Merlin, the changes with Morgana and the awkward tenderness with Arthur very well indeed.

Treasures you find at YouTube, #14533: the original promo for Something. Which is... something. Apparantly whoever shot it - the busy Michael Lindsay-Hogg, or was he too busy being traumatized by the rough cut of Let it Be at that point? - had the bright idea that since this is a love song, the four Beatles should pose with their respective significant others (at that point: Yoko, Linda, Pattie and Maureen) and demonstrate the joys of romance. Now, the ladies are doing just fine in the result, but the guys... George, whose big song this is, glowers throughout as if someone just told him Frank Sinatra called it his favourite Lennon/McCartney tune. (Or as if Eric Clapton just broke the news of being in love with Pattie, but I think it's a bit too early for that.) John is stone faced throughout, with a very brief grimace of an exception. Paul by contrast tries desperately to look jolly and cheerful and only succeeds looking like a crazy axe murderer (the beard helps). Ringo looks like he's thinking "are we done shooting this yet so Mo and I can go home?" Though he and Maureen win the most convincing on screen couple stakes. Judge for yourself:



How is this for a depressing thought: more than half of the people in this video are dead now (John, Maureen, Linda and George), with Yoko, Paul and Ringo as the sole survivors. On a related but brighter note, this reminds me of something I've been meaning to post. Pattie once joked that dating a Beatle, let alone marry one, was like joining the French Resistance, and she wasn't completely wrong. At least at the beginning of each relationship, fannish hatred was certain to be yours. Cynthia Lennon was the only one who went through the indignity of being hidden away and having to pretend she didn't exist at the start because Brian Epstein thought John being married would be a detriment to fannish hopes. (To say nothing of Brian's hopes, biographer Bob Spitz adds a bit cattily.) It didn't last long, not with the amount of public attention the Beatles were getting, and later girlfriends/wives didn't have to put up with it. This didn't make their lives that much easier. Maureen got her face scratched when Ringo became the second Beatle to tie the knot. Pattie had to disguise herself as a chamber maid to get out of the hotel where she was staying at with George. The absolut maximum of fannish hostility, though, was reserved for Linda and Yoko, who at the time of the break-up were often singled out as culprits not just by fangirls and -boys but even in the so called "serious" media. (My parents, for example, were absolutely convinced that animosity between Linda and Yoko broke up the Beatles. Why? Because they remembered reading it in the papers at the time. Pointing out that by the time Linda encountered Yoko, the Beatles were already in free fall and that they hardly interacted enough to form any kind of relationship, hostile or otherwise, was greeted with much surprise.)

Since Yoko is the better known woman (and hostility towards her became proverbial and made it to more recent stupid flowcharts as well as several spirited defense posts), I'll write about Linda. Now, the Linda hatred started to ebb away from the mid-80s onwards - probably due to a combination of sheer endurance (i.e. the stabiliity of the McCartney marriage and -family which was and is rare in the rock business), animal rights' campaigning and vegeterianism, and by the time she died of cancer in 1998, she was downright popular. Though occasionally you come across the old hostility revived. Germaine Greer for example, quoting witticisms like "what do you call a cow with wings? Linda McCartney!" and wondering "if Stella McCartney knew her mother was once known as Linda Starfucker". Then there is the latest McCartney biography by Howard Sounes, which I won't buy because the excerpts I read in newspapers contained such gems like "By marrying Paul, Linda instantly became a public figure — but opinion about her was always divided. Almost everybody I interviewed who knew her personally spoke very warmly of her, yet people in the media — myself included — found her a gauche, abrasive woman lacking in charm". And the usual hypocrisy of the press writing of the 60s who on the one hand reports male rock stars' promiscuity with an undertone of admiration but immediately cries "groupie!" in disdain when a woman in the same era also practised free love. Mr. Sounes would have us know that the woman's postumous image as as vegetarian saint is false because, shock horror, she slept with "probably 20 men" in the 60s before her marriage to Paul. And this sexist crap gets printed in 2010, not 1970. No money for this book from me, H.S., so thanks for getting these excerpts printed as a warning.

When the former Linda Eastman died, most headlines and obituaries picked of the various professions she had "photographer"; several collections of her photography are available both in print and online. Below the cut are some favourites of mine, demonstrating why she was indeed an excellent photographer.

( The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Yoko Ono and some people from Liverpool await )

The first part of the weekly SJA two parter was greeted with much squee by me and made me very happy, but you won't get a review until I've seen both parts, i.e. tomorrow. In the meantime, reading in various papers various people's reactions to the Keith Richards memoirs makes for an odd demonstration of how relaxing it can be not to be in a fandom. I mean, I like some of the Stones' songs, but I am not invested in them emotionally, neither in their overall music nor in them as people, and so I can just be amused and entertained by the latest round of Mick's-such-a-phony-and-mine's-bigger!/is not! instead of angsting as I might were they the other band.

Incidentally: Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Marianne Faithfull are on several Beatles songs, notably All You Need Is Love and Yellow Submarine, George Harrison was a guest chez Richards on that fateful drug raid day in 1967 (and later figured out the police must have waited for him and Pattie to leave first because they didn't want to arrest a Beatle), and of course the first Stones' breakout hit, I Wanna Be Your Man, is a Lennon/McCartney tune they gave the Stones upon request, finishing it in front of their eyes in a gesture that combined generosity and showing off; the press and fans made and partly still makes much of the Beatles/Stones rivalry, but in actual practice this was mainly a media event whereas the bands themselves were friends. Though Mick Jagger in his funny and affectionate induction speech for the Beatles at the Rock'n Roll Hall of Fame memorably called them "the four-headed-monster" and admitted he was both jealous and inspired to start song writing himself back in ye early 60s.

Meanwhile, the fellow musicians the Beatles were inspired and challenged by in the 60s were, other than their old childhood heroes from the 50s, a) Bob Dylan and b) Brian Wilson. Of course Bob Dylan inspired pretty much every other song writer in the 60s (the two most obviously Dylan-esque Beatles songs are You've got to hide your love away and Norwegian Wood), but the other thing that he did for the Beatles was to introduce them to marijuana, which is one of those pop history anecdotes that never gets old. It's August 28th 1964, the Beatles are locked in a New York hotel room because going outside has become impossible, but they asked, via a journalist, whether they could meet Bob D. anyway since they're fans. He agrees to pay a visit and comes up from Woodstock to the Delmonico Hotel. Ever gracious and polite, Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, of course asks Dylan what he'd like to drink.

Bob D: Cheap Wine.

An embarrassed Brian admits they have only good wine there but sends out roadie Mal Evans to procur something suitably cheap. In the meantime, Bob Dylan suggests smoking some pot. Now very embarrassed, Brian and the boys admit they don't have pot, either, since they haven't smoked it before. (They were introduced to pills in Hamburg and took them a lot in order to stay awake and energetic during the seven-hours-marathon sessions, but other than that hadn't had anything more adventurous than Scotch and Coke.)

Bob D: But what about your song? *attempts Beatlesque headshake* I get high, I get high?

John: It's "I can't hide, I can't hide, actually.

This inspires Dylan to helpfully provide his own pot, roll a joint, and pass it to Ringo. Not knowing that pot smoking etiquette means you share the joint around, Ringo smokes the entire thing in the bathroom, returns to the main suite and announces the ceiling is coming down. At which point the rest, including Brian, want some as well, and the whole thing gets very giggly indeed. (With a sad note in as much as Brian, looking at himself in the mirror, pointed, said "Jew" and giggled, the first time he referred to himself as Jewish in company, which tells you something about Brian's issues and repression.) Paul was convinced he had discovered the meaning of life and told Mal Evans, who had returned with the Dylan-ordered cheap wine, to write down the wisdom revealed. When they checked the next morning, the only thing written on the paper was "there are seven levels", to everyone's amusement. Dylan departs, secure in the knowledge he changed their music for good. (And provided occasion for various headlines involving pot busts years later.)

There are various cinematic takes on this.

( Bob Dylan meets the Beatles in black and white and colour )