Beatlemania Was Fun But Now It's Time For Beatledepression

If you could instantly be granted fluency in 5 languages—not taking away your existing language proficiency in any way, solely a gain—what 5 would you choose?

mclennon truthers 🤝 john was killed by cia truthers

(wrongly) believing that when Yoko dies It'll All Come Out.

Master of a new medium

Eadweard J. Muybridge, Yosemite Creek: Summit of Falls at Low Water, 1872, mammoth-plate albumen print. California State Library, Sacramento

Tate Britain’s latest exhibition is an exploration of the work of the oddly named but immensely talented Eadward Muybridge, whose Studies in Animal Locomotion explored the idea of the moving image two decades before cinema was invented. Born Edward Muggeridge in Britain in 1830, he first emigrated to America in 1855 and built his career photographing San Francisco and the Yosemite national park in the years after the Civil War. He proved in 1878, using a sequence of photographs, that a horse’s hooves do indeed all leave the ground during a gallop, and he used the same technique to explore human movement in his seminal work in the 1880s, for which he remains most famous.

The Studies in Animal Locomotion remain interesting, revealing a particularly Victorian combination of science and voyueurism; attractive male and female models performed endless movements for Muybridge who captured the images using multiple cameras, since shutter speeds were not up to the task in the 1880s. Plenty of the ‘studies’ have no apparent scientific purpose, including one curtly titled ‘[Model] 8 pouring bucket of water over 6′, which shows one naked woman dumping a chilly stream over her squealing companion. Though indicating that Muybridge’s intentions were not always in the name of pure science; the more whimsical studies are still charming, especially one of a model leaning back in a chair smoking a cigarette and looking utterly relaxed.

Less ground-breaking, but frequently more beautiful, Muybridges’s earlier images of Yosemite and the lighthouses of the Californian coast form a substantial part of the exhibition. The photographer was hired to collect images of lighthouses in the 1860s for a federal authority, but the results are far from dry documentary: gorgeous albumen prints reveal sea spray turned to smoke by slow shutter speeds and cliff faces leaping out in almost 3D clarity. Elsewhere, he reveals the lives of people in transition; the exhibition contains photos from new coffee plantations in Guatemala and of rebellious Native Americans in California. San Francisco is captured in all its pre-1906 earthquake glory in a 17-foot panorama made up of several large photographs laid painstakingly end to end. The effect is somewhat distorted by the flatness of what should be a 360 degree view, but this aberration, along with the seemingly empty streets (the long exposure could not capture moving people in the photographs) gives the view an unearthly beauty a more accurate image would lack.

Muybridge’s work indicates a photographer who succeeded in bridging the gap between scientific accuracy and painterly aesthetics in the new medium. Even where the beauty of his images is unintentional, their preservation indicates an appreciation on his part of perfect imperfection. His motion studies and the zoopraxiscope, a prototype of the film projector he invented, have assured his place in history, but his landscape work and photojournalism are what really stand out for the modern viewer.

currently 70 pages into Derek Taylor's book and I'm absolutely charmed, did everyone else know how funny he was and just not tell me!!?

Chapter 3: Rulers make bad lovers

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.

The more excerpts I read from that Ian "Monstrous Terf/Zionist" Leslie book the more I see that he just rewrote a bunch of tumblr posts. His contextual knowledge actually seems quite shallow - he just writes in the style of "anecdote we all know + reference to much-shared photo + oft-repeated quote" - a style directly lifted from tumblr. And his apparently not knowing abt the beetles photo on RAM from that talk he did with (puke) Tom Holland is a real tell as to the limits of his knowledge. I wouldn't be surprised if most of his research is posts rather than books/primary sources (whatever his bibliography says). His only original writing seems to be some psychology and some song analysis (tho he's stolen a lot of that too eg In My Life trutherism, originally promoted by OSD.)

It all paints a picture of a grimy little opportunist deliberately queerbaiting to sell his book made up of other people's uncredited or barely-credited research. The text I've seen presents that research without sufficient rigour and puts the book in the same category as all the other sloppy, fanfic-y beatles bios. And some fans are falling all over his grotty transphobic ass bc he's "making McLennon mainstream". With friends like that, who needs enemies? There's a better, non-derivitave, non-sloppy J/P book waiting to be written by a decent person. Ian can go back into the hole he crawled out of and take his chickenshit book with him.

Swinging through the ivories

Last Saturday saw the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mary Lou Williams, jazz pianist, composer, arranger and, in later life, founder of an organisation devoted to help jazz musicians suffering from drug addiction. Williams, like the blues singer Memphis Minnie, was a person whose personality and talent helped her rise above the strictures imposed by gender and race at the time.

She cut her teeth in the 30s writing and arranging for Benny Goodman’s and Duke Ellington’s bands, and in the 40s she mentored Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk, among others. She wasn’t restricted to playing in bands either – her large-scale compositions include the Zodiac Suite, a series of musical sketches, the long hymn called Black Christ of the Andes and several masses (following her conversion to Catholicism in the 50s).

As pianist Billy Taylor remembers, when Williams was mentoring Thelonius Monk she helped him refine his playing style – basically, she stopped him battering the holy shit out of the keyboard! Monk’s style needed to be toned down a bit, and the end result was still characteristically muscular but infused with greater feeling. No doubt Monk had many different mentors. but Taylor’s story shows that Williams was not an insignificant one.

looking up gay bars and I found one with a giant John Lennon picture painted on the wall

Builders of the future

‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime’. The old saying, traditionally attributed to Balzac, is as striking today as ever. In fact, in today’s atmosphere, it rings even more true. We may admire the wealthy, the powerful, the self-made, but deep down we can’t help but believe that a millionaire must be, if not quite a criminal, than at least criminally exploitative. It’s this assumption that fires the script of The Social Network, a movie about the events that led to the founding of Facebook and the gazillion-dollar lawsuits that followed. Mark Zuckerberg, the driving force behind the site, is the world’s youngest billionaire, and it is The Social Network‘s aim to uncover the crime(s) that led to those billions.

Based on the book The Accidental Billionaires, the movie portrays Zuckerberg as a Harvard-attending socially inept weirdo whose immense sense of entitlement causes him to react furiously to a girl’s rejection. After calling her a ‘bitch’ on his blog, he creates (with the help of his geeky roommates) a site called FaceMash that calls up random pairs of photos of female Harvard students with a ‘hot or not?’ button underneath. The site is an instant hit, and Zuckerberg is courted by uber-WASP twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to help them build a Harvard dating site. Zuckerberg agrees, but after stringing them along for a few weeks, creates a more sophisticated version of the idea – the Harvard-based prototype for Facebook. The twins are furious and make the (frankly rather dubious) claim that he ‘stole their idea’. Meanwhile The Facebook (as it’s originally called) takes off like wildfire. Zuckerberg refuses to let co-founder Eduardo Saverin bring in advertising for the site, and on the encouragement of Napster founder Sean Parker, moves the operation to California. He freezes Eduardo out of the business altogether, leading to the second lawsuit that frames the story.

The plot is pacily executed, with the Winklevoss and Saverin trials against Zuckerberg used as a framing device. As the characters remember events the action jumps back in time and the story unfolds. There’s a lot of the kind of ‘lightbulb’ moments so beloved of film-makers trying to evoke a creative process, complete with shots of Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg dashing across Harvard towards the nearest computer to encode his latest revelation. Some of these revelations seem simplistic, but Zuckerberg’s assertion that Facebook is a viable idea because ‘anyone can look at pictures of hot girls on the internet – what they want is to look at pictures of people they know’ is bang on the money and exactly the reason Facebook took off in the way it did. What doesn’t ring true is the script’s constant assertions that Zuckerberg’s primary motivation in setting up the site was to impress girls and increase his social standing in Harvard, with its rigid hierarchies and elite clubs.  The real Zuckerberg hasn’t said much about the film, but he did comment recently that he particularly disagreed with the script’s interpretation of his motives. As he put it: “They [the film's creators] just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things”.

I believe that that is the film’s key weakness. Plenty of people are motivated by emotional damage, but the current idea seems to be that any great acheivement must be underpinned by some terrible lack within the achiever. It’s almost as though the modern world is suspicious of anyone who achieves ‘too’ much, who uses their gifts to their absolute limit and attempts to be the best they can be. Single-mindedness is seen to be the same as destructive obsession, pride in doing well at something is seen as being interchangeable with grasping ambition. After efforts are made to understand those who do things for the wrong reasons, a dangerous assumption seems to be rising in storytelling that implies that no-one ever does anything just for the sake of it. This ties in well with an era in which university courses are rated only on their ‘practicality’, and hobbies are something to enhance a CV with. If you’re not emotionally damaged, you’re nakedly seeking profit; either way, high achievement is suspect.

I don’t know if Mark Zuckerberg is a nice person or not; certainly you don’t get to his position without a tough hide and a willingness to make enemies. What he undoubtedly is is a programming genius and a hard worker. Is he emotionally damaged? He could be, who knows? Whether he is or not, it’s not the reason he invented (or co-invented, depending on who you talk to) Facebook. His statement that he built it because he ‘likes building things’ is the simplest, and therefore most plausible explanation. All over the world, people are creating, inventing, building, designing and investigating all manner of things simply because they are interested in them. People are working day and night, going without food and sleep, not because they are damaged, but because they passionately care about what they do and want to do to the best of their ability.

Most of us are average in our skills and our abilities, and undoubtedly that leads to an easier, more balanced life. But we shouldn’t pathologise geniuses and grafters; they are the ones who take the ‘giant leaps’ that help us all walk faster. Facebook has its good and bad sides, but it can’t be denied that it has changed the world. Even if Zuckerberg is as unpleasant and odd as The Social Network suggests, that’s not relevant to his role as one of its creators.

This line is so funny. Soccer mom that just gave herself a pelvic injury by doing crescent lunge pose too enthusiastically.