Tag: the Beatles

I hate everything

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“I wish I was like you/Easily amused”  — Nirvana, “All Apologies”

Someone just pointed out — sooo boringly — how I don’t like anything. It’s an asinine statement that can only come from the congenitally cheery extrovert who unthinkingly likes almost everything, no matter how lame and degrading it is. These are the loud laughers and knee-slappers. Ha! What a hoot! The kind that still thinks “SNL” is funny.

It’s true, I’m a rough critic with shades of the pessimistic and a tendency toward the comparatively negative. I’m a dark spirit with high standards and a low tolerance for mediocrity and pure crap. I try many things. I am usually gravely disappointed.

Too many people like too many things. It’s as if they like everything. I consider myself discriminating. I don’t need, nor want, to like everything. Most things are middling or overrated, and I feel like a chump for investing time in them. I once interviewed a critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, and he admitted that most shows, films and concerts he sees are worth two out of four stars. I nodded wisely. 

And so, I’m labeled a hater.

Just because I find Taylor Swift numbingly average, think team sports are boring and obnoxious, abhor nearly every Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino movie, and am convinced the American version of TV’s “The Office” is grating and unfunny and not a whisker near the greatness of the British original. And Marvel: like daggers in my eyes.

Call me cranky, call me what you will.

But I’m not having it. 

There’s so much I do love, such as, in no order: 

World travel, books, reading, writing, drumming, snow skiing, romance, vintage BMX, animals, “Breaking Bad,” the Beatles, Philip Roth, stellar art museums, Iranian cinema, Paris, cold weather, big cities, director Michael Mann, “Hacks,” old film noirs and screwball comedies, Beethoven, architect Frank Gehry, ice cream, Radiohead, the Marx Brothers, “Top Chef,” David Bowie, nice people, the singer Mitski, rollercoasters, “The White Lotus,” Toni Morrison, boygenius, Martin Short, “SCTV,” an inspired cocktail, a great meal, Al Pacino, and — surprise — Anderson’s “Rushmore” and Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” … and so on and so forth. I could rattle off superlatives all day.

I should just keep my mouth shut, because too often my opinions suck the oxygen out of the room. People simply can’t believe I don’t think “The Wire” or Springsteen are unvarnished genius (they’re not). But below the negativity gurgles a sparkling river of all that I praise to a degree of adoration, even obsession.

Nope.

When I was a theater critic, years ago, readers complained about my cynicism to the point that my editors did a scientific breakdown of how many negative reviews I had given as opposed to my positive reviews. The result was 84 percent positive. People, I think, like to cling to the negative response, all that contradicts their self-righteously proclaimed passions that they protect like little bunnies. Free Britney!

Still, it is true I find dissing unworthy cultural totems liberating, a perverse pastime, and I’m not alone in this (see: Larry David). More things that make me recoil: Donna Tartt’s overrated novel “The Goldfinch,” souped-up cars, dinner parties, Harry Potter, bros (frat, finance, tech, gym, etc.), most tattoos, Kanye, that 40-year-old skateboarder … 

Bah. 


Lennon & McCartney in 3D

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

As surprising as it may be, especially for this recovering metalhead, the Beatles are unshakably my favorite musical entity, be it Mozart to Metallica (a pair that shares far more in common than you might think) and beyond. 

I adore almost every damn thing the Beatles recorded (OK, I can skip “All Together Now”) and marvel endlessly at their unsurpassed songcraft, sappy lullabies to psychedelic loopings, to the point of becoming overwhelmed and misty-eyed. Their music moves me like a great Vermeer or Turner, an old Woody Allen or Chaplin flick, a sumptuous Bolognese, or a beautiful woman.

It’s nothing new, this affection. As a toddler, I was singing along to “Yellow Submarine” with my dad and having a ball (I have it on tape). But it’s been roused as I read Ian Leslie’s new book, “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” a head-first spelunking into the two main Beatles’ musical/artistic/personal relationship as they composed some of their greatest tracks: “Yesterday,” “In My Life,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “A Day in the Life,” “Hey Jude.” It examines a plethora of terrific tunes, but places 43 under the microscope. Forty-three!     

Animated by fact and folklore, the book, which I admit I haven’t finished, begins in the beginning: how the boys met, formed early bands and honed their chops in German nightclubs. Yeah, yeah (She loves you, yeah, yeah) — that’s old news to Beatlemaniacs. It gets more interesting when John and Paul’s creative minds miraculously meld and songs start to pour forth in gorgeous, gobsmacking cataracts. 

The author launches with the somewhat green “Come Go with Me” in the late 1950s, strikes upon “Please Please Me,” with plenty of songs in between, and finally hits the stratosphere with “Ticket to Ride” and “We Can Work It Out.” It’s all joyride from there as the Beatles — George and Ringo included, of course, though they’re mere cameos — orbit Earth for seemingly ever. (But hardly. The Beatles lasted roughly 10 years, 1960-1970.)

Expectedly, Paul is painted as the pretty, peppy one, John the caustic, callous one. Yet both are endowed with bristling intelligence and an ample sense of play and worldly curiosity. They are autodidacts of the most ravenous kind, and they devour anything that has to do with art, literature and music. 

Their love of the American songbook, R&B and rock n’ roll is insatiable. And what they learn from them — doo-wop flourishes, country-western twang — dazzles. Their debt to Elvis and Dylan is bottomless.

The book is overstuffed with factoids, from the deep influence of Timothy Leary and LSD on the mid-career John song “Tomorrow Never Knows” to Paul asking George Martin for the kind of biting strings from the film “Psycho” for “Eleanor Rigby” — a masterpiece that Paul wrote at age 23.

It also doesn’t shunt on the group’s tour escapades, drug dabblings, interpersonal jealousies, and other gossipy gum drops. The book gleams with facets. Even at this early stage, Lennon and McCartney feel like brothers. My brothers. 

“John & Paul” is marvelous musicology, mind-blowing and wads of fun. It is my book of the summer, and I still have yet to reach “I Am the Walrus,” “Get Back,” “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” and, with terrible longing, yes, Paul’s heart-yanking “The End.”

Late summer litany

~ Chris ~ 3 Comments

1.Late summer rain, lusty breezes, 70 degrees — paradise. Fall is knocking and I’m tripping over myself to answer the door. Of course more heat is brewing — it will hit 86 on Saturday — but the wind and wet is a heartening preview of the best season of all. Autumn is when I travel. It’s when I look for clothes — jackets, long sleeve shirts, shoes maybe. I recently bought a new watch and new glasses, both of them a shimmering blue, though any color coordination was strictly fortuitous. I’m not that fashionable. I consider the items fall purchases, as the watch is largely a travel accessory and the glasses signify renewal and optimism, things, perhaps counterintuitively, I associate with fall. (Plus, my prior glasses needed a new prescription and I never did like those old frumpy frames.) So summer’s in retreat. Cooler climes and shorter days are coming. And I’m getting all celebratory.  

2.The Little Rascals they’re not. But these kids have vim and spunk and initiative, an entrepreneurial spirit that fuels their gumption to holler at passing strangers who are easily a foot taller than them: “Lemonade! Get your lemonade right here!” These neighborhood urchins, some seven girls and boys, are tracing a wholesome tradition from way back — I’m thinking Tom Sawyer days. Times have changed: Their tangy beverage is displayed in bougie glass dispensers, from Ikea or West Elm. And they demand $2 per cup (in my day we charged a quarter!). It’s the last lap of summer, and here I come strolling under shade trees lining the hood’s main artery, a sitting duck. I’m buffeted by the blandishments of piping young voices touting their wares. But I am stuck. I’m carrying no cash, and evidently they don’t take Visa. All I can do is tell them this and walk on. It’s embarrassing, a little. But it beats what happened to me when I was hawking lemonade as a seven-year-old. “Lemonade!” I yelled at a passing car. The driver turned my way and flipped me off. Those were the days.

A stock photo, but look at that wad of cash!

3. Sometimes — no, almost always — a good, hard pop song is just the thing. I’ve been rediscovering two of the best power pop bands of the ‘90s, Jellyfish and The Posies, who prove a genius for the grooving, hair-tossing, sing-alongy pop hook. Plucking styles from a sequins rainbow of catchy, often ethereal influences — Bowie, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Queen, ELO, Supertramp, Cheap Trick, with a pinch of psychedelia and a pound of Phil Spector — Jellyfish and The Posies layered sweet melodies atop bombastic rhythms and throbbing drums: sugar-coated hand grenades. Their greatest albums, Jellyfish’s “Spilt Milk” and The Posies’ “Frosting on the Beater,” rock as hard as they pop. Lush melodies and harmonies reign. And, especially in the case of Jellyfish, their sound and look is consciously sui generis; Day-Glo and dapper, the group seems right out of Sid & Marty Krofft. Even now, the bands crackle with a big bubblegum snap. Hear them here and here. (What happened to them? Grunge happened.)

Jellyfish, working hard at being psycho-delic.

4.My trip to Budapest and Kraków is precisely two months away. I know, it seems like I’ve been gabbing about it for an eternity. That’s because I have. Vacations are like that: you plan them, book them, then hurry up and wait. For months. Two months left. Grueling, but at least summer (*#$&!) is almost over. I’m still fussing with some fine points of the trip, like booking an overnight sleeper train from Budapest to Kraków (they told me to wait till the end of the month). And netting a spot at a coveted restaurant in Budapest (they told me to wait till mid-September). See, I’m ahead of myself. I booked hotels and dinners and tours four months in advance. Question: Should I really pop 30 bucks for a 45-minute tour of the Hungarian Parliament, which is beautiful and jewel-encrusted? I’m chewing over that one. But I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

Nope.

My current cultural playlist

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

1. Way behind on the cult British crime saga, I’m discovering the gritty and gruesome pleasures of “Peaky Blinders,” an uncompromising gangster epic bristling with politics, razor blades, gamblers, guns, and unvarnished thuggery. 

Set in Birmingham, England, just after World War I, the Netflix series is a fearsomely atmospheric blood opera starring a rogue’s gallery of dapper gangsters with deep family roots and a hunger to stay in power. It openly, inevitably recalls “The Godfather,” “The Sopranos” and, on a knife and knuckle street level, “Gangs of New York,” with perhaps more thematic tentacles.

The show is fronted by Cillian Murphy as crime boss Thomas Shelby, whose smoldering menace can burn a hole like a bullet. One website has voted him the Greatest TV Character of All Time, a testament to Murphy’s pit bull commitment and conviction. He unnerves every time he’s onscreen, makes you shift in your seat. Pepper the grimy period setting with tunes by Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and White Stripes and you get more than anachronistic friction; you get gang-banging with a boogie beat. 

2. Listening to Nirvana’s short, punchy songs, it struck me again why the band is so good and lasting: Almost lick for lick, Nirvana is as infectiously hooky as the Beatles.

And on the Beatles — my favorite band, and I’m not a hundred years old — I liked this line from “The Idiot,” Elif Batuman’s riotous novel of the head and heart: “The Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death.”

3. You also can’t avoid Marvel and its muddleheaded mayhem in the current cinema, a soul-battering bummer. But there do exist little oases floating past the aesthetic carnage, attractive indie films like the raunchy, uproarious “Zola” and my latest favorite, “The Worst Person in the World.” 

The grabby title is slyly misleading in this dark rom-com drama about a young woman who skitters between jobs and lovers while surfing life’s foibles. Joachim Trier’s prickly Norwegian charmer, ablaze with insinuating characters and sexy anecdote, is told in 12 fluid chapters, led by endearing star Renate Reinsve, who won best actress at Cannes for her intricate portrayal of a woman in flux. Hardly the worst person in the world, she’s a millennial supernova.

4. Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel “Lapvona” is grossing out reviewers with its blithe violence and panoramic depravity. (Is Moshfegh the worst person in the world?) The medieval fable, set in a village rife with plague and other misfortunes, is earning wildly mixed reviews, many of them lashing in their displeasure, even from fans of Moshfegh’s previous dark fictions (“Eileen,” “Homesick for Another World”). 

I’m a fan as well, and I’m steeling for a rough ride. I’m only on page nine, and here’s a verbal taste: “disemboweled” “heads of the dead,” “a bone sticking out through the flesh,” “animal excrement.” (Page nine.) The book, in all its gloppy mucus and viscera, came out this week — which makes it the perfect summer beach read. You heard it here first.

Fourth of July: slightly better than you think

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

So they do the big community fireworks show in our exurb the night before the Fourth of July — that is, today, the third — presumably so they don’t have to compete with the real fireworks shows, the mega-extravaganzas detonated by the nearby big cities. Makes sense. Can you imagine if every town and city shot off their arsenals at the same time on the same night? The skies would be pyro pandemonium. (Would that be so bad?)

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For our country-fair version of neon-blooms and sky-borne booms we’re granted largish park space, hot dog and churros stands and only slightly embarrassing cover bands with names like The Rolling Clones doing their best not to asphyxiate classics by CCR, the Beatles, Journey, Foreigner and scads of other woolly ‘60s-‘70s supergroups. The music and fireworks are free. The hot dogs are not. Parking is combat. There is no alcohol. 

This is not a recipe for delight. The Fourth is kind of a dead-end holiday to begin with. Perfunctory plastic flag-waving and high-school-band parades aside, I don’t think many Americans are actually reflecting on the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. You might be, but really you aren’t. It’s all very patriotic, in a face-painty kind of way.  

th-1.jpegThat said, it’s a good summer holiday, sort of the kickoff to the season (which happens to be my least favorite season, just saying), that is strangely rife with hot dogs. They’re all over the joint.

A good holiday, but not the best. That honor goes to, well, just about every other American holiday. Easter, with its gobs of chocolate, is almost better than July Fourth. Thanksgiving is better. Certainly lawless Halloween and the gift-bloated Christmas surpass it. Hell, even my birthday beats out Independence Day, which is kind of like the special little brother of holidays. Sacrilege? Sorry.

But we settle. The Fourth has its fun. Fireworks, especially from the stance of this recovered pyromaniac, are glorious. Even the rinky-dink version in the ‘burbs, with rampant children, grassy blankets, hot dogs, snow-cones and long-in-the-tooth bands belting out “Don’t Stop Believin’” casts a pleasant spell — and gundpowdery smell.

Away from the park, beer flows and barbecues flame. Small gatherings happen in backyards. Kids squeal and peal and dogs slalom around bare legs and sandaled feet. (Those dogs want … hot dogs.) The occasional dancing sparkler is unveiled to the astonished eyes of youngsters.

I have indelible memories of the holiday as a kid on the beaches of Southern California. It was magic: illegal firecrackers, smoke bombs and Roman candles, lit from inside huge sand pits we dug that sat four or five friends. We were there all day until the city’s big fireworks show unfurled in the night sky, over the ocean, popping, bursting, crackling, streaming. And there we were, watching below, aglow in a thousand sizzling colors.

* Update: The local fireworks shebang was rained out on July 3. They rescheduled the big party for, get this, July 13 — a wee late. And it’s Friday the 13th. Isn’t that its own wild holiday?

That magical moment when one first falls for the Beatles

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“Hey Siri — what’s the name of this song?” my tween niece asks the new Apple HomePod, a black orb of netted plastic that’s an interactive speaker you can talk to and enjoy its no-nonsense vocal responses. It stands about seven-inches-tall, it’s shaped like a futuristic sports ball with buffed, rounded edges and a flat, glowing top. It is distinctly Kubrickian.

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“The song by the Beatles is ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’” Siri, or the Apple HomePod’s resident DJ — the tiny person who we all know resides inside — responds in a feathery, tranquilizing female android voice that isn’t at all … creepy.

But this is about the Beatles — the ones with Apple Records, not Apple singular — though both are capitalistic behemoths of flabbergasting muscle, might and moola.

1b36f65fa471104e63641414cff829c5.jpgIt’s about a 12-year-old discovering the indelible Brit band if not for the first time — as a toddler her bedtime lullabies included the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and “Across the Universe” — then for that point in life when culture totally matters, that crucial juncture of taste-making that suffuses a being forever. Art and culture are cyclonic at this age. Their influences batter and blow, shaping aesthetic passions like sand dunes, but with much more permanence.

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My niece is at that point — post-Harry Potter (she was in the stultifying wizard’s unyielding thrall for a few unholy years), post-Pokemon and their predictable kin (though Star Wars never quite captured her imagination).

No, instead she has gravitated to sophistication and kneels at the high-art altars of David Bowie, Queen, Radiohead, “Hamilton,” “The Catcher in the Rye” and (one of this film buff’s all-time favorites) “All About Eve.” She’s hankering to read “The Great Gatsby.”  She performs lustily in local theater musicals. She writes wonderful poetry and is working on a novel. She reads books with dizzying voracity. I reckon she’ll be A.P. all the way.

Hell, I was a grizzled 19 when I finally and full-throatedly got the Beatles. I too had an infantile acquaintance with the group — I was smitten with “Yellow Submarine,” both the animated movie and the soundtrack, as a wee one — but there was no follow through until college.

It hit hard. I got so into every nook and cranny of the band that I was inspired to buy a harmonica and an electronic piano, both of which proved embarrassing and foolhardy acquisitions. The Beatles, like Brando and Shakespeare, were a blinding Damascus moment, earth-rattling, a crack in the cosmos. Their various looks, images, melodies, harmonies, beats, hooks and lyrics dovetailed, in my mind, into an unearthly incandescence so often ascribed to genius.

A few of my niece’s favorite Beatles songs include “Here Comes the Sun,” “Let it Be,” “I Am the Walrus” and “With a Little Help from My Friends” — as good as any Beatles starter kit as any.

These songs are easy ones, Muzak-ready, plucked off the top of any Beatles fan’s pop-addled head. Soon she’ll be singing and swaying to the likes of “Golden Slumbers,” “Norwegian Wood,” “A Day in the Life,” “Lovely Rita,” “In My Life,” “Blackbird,” “The Night Before,” and on and on. (The band recorded 213 songs.) She knows the stinkers, too. She tells Siri to skip “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” when it comes on. Even Siri loathes this song.

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The depth and breadth of one’s favorite Beatles songs is unfathomable — I like almost all of them (almost). Over at Vulture, there’s a brilliantly informative and very funny list of every Beatles song ranked from worst to best. “Silver Hammer” clocks in at a charitable #182. “Ob-La-Di. Ob-La-Da” is properly called one of “the top five Most Irritating Songs Paul McCartney Ever Wrote.” It sits at #194. The worst slot, at #213, goes to “Good Day Sunshine,” a snappy McCartney ditty I rather like. (The best? Not telling. I will reveal #2: the twirling, kaleidoscopic “Strawberry Fields Forever.”)

Some think the Beatles are a band you grow out of, not into. I demur. This polymorphously gifted quartet — well, quintet; one can’t leave out uber-producer George Martin — is a perennial, one for the ages. Once bitten, you’re infected for life. Not liking the Beatles, a laughable proposition, is akin to not liking pizza, puppies or “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” Like Spielberg and Mozart, they may appeal to the masses but, if you’re listening closely, that doesn’t diminish their brilliance one scintilla.

My niece is lucky. She’s just getting started, peeling back the layers and layers of Beatles enchantments, music that rewards the more you listen. “They have sweet tunes and sunny music that’s poetic,” she tells me. On the eternal, deal-breaking question “John or Paul?” she doesn’t hesitate: John.

If she sticks with them — I think she will — she’ll take some of the best artistic journeys she’ll ever take. Lucky indeed: She has a multitude of tuneful universes ahead of her.