Congrats Jordan

Quick note: An auspicious historical anniversary this month—not the centenary of the 1918 Armistice—is being celebrated in the New Yorker magazine with a lovely appreciation by our friend Jordan Orlando, making his début appearance in that august publication, beginning:

To mark this month’s fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles’ ninth album, “The Beatles”—universally known as the White Album—several new expanded and enhanced editions are being released this week. These new versions were created under the supervision of Giles Martin, the son of the album’s original producer, George Martin. As was done last year with “Sgt. Pepper,” the new editions contain, along with a wealth of archival recordings and other material, a brand-new, digitally remixed presentation—a laborious retrieval and reassembly of the contents of the original multitrack master tapes, with a comprehensive scope far beyond that of all previous remasters and releases. The result reveals what might be called the greatest record ever made, not only in terms of its innovation and its strange, impenetrable, endlessly suggestive beauty but also because of its place at the apex of the Beatles’ career and its role as an aesthetic keystone for nearly all the rock-and-roll recordings that have followed.

Upon returning to England from Rishikesh, India, in April, 1968, John Lennon and George Harrison stripped and sanded the psychedelic paintwork off of their Gibson J-160E Casino guitars; Donovan, one of the many musicians who had accompanied them to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram for an advanced transcendental-meditation course, had told them that this would improve the sound. “If you take the paint and varnish off and get the bare wood,” Harrison explained later, “it seems to sort of breathe.” This stripping away of psychedelic symbolism was part of a larger campaign that the band undertook to remove the layers of Beatles mythology, habit, and convention that had accumulated since their beginnings, as Liverpool teen-agers—before Germany and America, before Astrid Kirchherr’s arty portraits had fetishized their mop-top haircuts, before Ed Sullivan and “A Hard Day’s Night,” and Shea Stadium, and the rest of it. Psychedelia, and the Beatles’ influential participation in it, had peaked with the release of their landmark 1967 album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the surrealist tracks on which had beguiled the world and, many said, inspired the Summer of Love. The American political theorist Langdon Winner observed, “The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ album was released. . . . At the time I happened to be driving across the country on Interstate 80; in each city where I stopped for gas or food—Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend—the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.”

It's just a terrific piece, full of New Yorkerish thingy-ness but not a drop of twee. That Donovan anecdote at the top of the second paragraph filled me with a strange nostalgic joy so I was instantly gripped. Everybody needs to read it.

Lenny and the Wolfe

While you all were starting to attach the monstrous comment thread to yesterday's post, I found myself watching a video I'd never seen, or I think even heard of, a documentary thing, from 1967, extraordinarily awkward and even painful for me, starting off kind of randomly with what looks like outtakes of the composer, conductor, teacher, and all-round showman Leonard Bernstein of the New York Philharmonic trying to have something like an interview with the composer, producer, and singer Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys (I'm pretty sure, but I could be wrong, he's not identified), scowling at each other. Brian, of course, never could talk even before his famous breakdown, and Lenny couldn't stop talking, no matter how awkward it got, to the point where it seriously interfered with his work.

The Wilson episode breaks off and the show proper begins with the thing I was looking for, the spectacle of Bernstein sitting at the piano explaining in terms appropriate to an audience of people his own age, roughly my parents' age, a public TV audience, why he loves the Beatles, in the context of a broader discussion of why rock music at that Summer-of-Love moment is important, artistically and politically, addressed to people who think it's disgusting and frightening. It's everything I remember about Bernstein, the fluency in an academic language making him sound as if he isn't very familiar with colloquial English, the fluency at the piano illustrating his points effortlessly, the ridiculous barking conductor's singing voice, and the way he brings his immense technical understanding into the explanation with a deep trust that the listeners will be able to understand stuff they don't know, refusal to imagine they aren't after all just as smart as he is, the generous and democratic certainty that we'll get what he's saying even if we don't know all the words, and we do get it, precisely because he trusts us so much.

Brooks on Beatles, wronger than you could imagine, and other matters

Asta Nielsen as a female Hamlet, 1921. Via (Parenthetical Citations).

Shorter Bill Shakespeare, Hamlet (ca. 1600):

Shakespeare combined the Greek honor code (thou shalt avenge the murder of thy father) with the Christian mercy code (thou shalt not kill) to create the torn figure of Hamlet.

No, that's Brooks. It's the second time we've caught him doing a Shakespeare Shorter (the first was Henry V). As an analysis, it looks about as wrong as you can imagine: the only time in Hamlet where "mercy" is used in any kind of strictly theological sense it is applied to God, not Hamlet, in Claudius's prayer soliloquy (III/iii):