All You Need Is....Beatles?
Plus Big Thief and our usual cartoons.
Greg Mitchell has authored more than a dozen books (see most of them here) and directed four recent PBS films. Subscribing to this newsletter is still FREE—so if you want to help fund, maybe purchase one of my books, thanks!
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As Trump pushes Ukraine to accept Putin’s 28-point “peace plan,” Tom Friendman calls it:
Trump’s Neville Chamberlain Prize
If Ukraine is, indeed, forced to surrender to the specific terms of this “deal” by then, Thanksgiving will no longer be an American holiday. It will become a Russian holiday. It will become a day of thanks that victory in Putin’s savage and misbegotten war against Ukraine’s people, which has been an utter failure — morally, militarily, diplomatically and economically — was delivered to Russia not by the superiority of its arms or the virtue of its claims, but by an American administration.
How do you say “Thanksgiving” in Russian?
Then there’s this, from NY Times this morning:
Patel Under Scrutiny for Use of SWAT Teams to Protect His Girlfriend
The new Beatles “Anthology” coming this week, as we have noted. The NY Times has this piece, an appreciation. Which opens with: “Growing up, I hated the Beatles.” But:
The new edition of “Anthology” — eight one-hour episodes, edited from the series’ original home-video version, plus a ninth about the surviving members gathering to complete three songs left behind by Lennon — has enough familiar scenes to satisfy boomer nostalgia. But there are also small but revelatory details like Harrison talking about his schoolboy obsession with rock ’n’ roll, as we see his sketches of guitars in an architecture notebook.
One unearthed demo, unavailable at the time of the original series, reveals that before “Yellow Submarine” became the toddler-friendly singalong we all know, it was a gloomy acoustic number with Lennon singing: “In the place where I was born / No one cared, no one cared.”
Here are some more new cuts. “You Never Give Me Your Money” Take #36.
“Baby You’re a Rich Man,” Take #12.
And the recent “Now and Then” gets a new mix:
We were finishing the newly streaming doc about Marc Maron, which beyond the joking focuses on him coping with the sudden death of his girlfriend Lynn Shelton, when this song came on over the credits, and we were quite struck by it. I’ve heard a little Big Thief over the years and know they are oft-nominees for Grammys but had never heard them like this:
I’ve mentioned recently that Jeff Tweedy on his current tour (now paused) has been playing at least one song each set covering a famous song by a local hero—from Blue Oyster Cult on Long Island to Prince in Minneapolis and Woody Guthrie in Oklahoma. But a couple of nights he pulled out this surprise—Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” in Tennessee, sung by his bass player, fantastically, Sima Cunningham. I’ll post some other stuff by her soon.
From Tunes to Toons
Clay Bennett:
I have to say, I appreciate this mockery of JFK conspiracy theories from The Onion:
Photo Finish
Once one of the most evil sites in the world: former Stasi headquarters, Berlin.
Thanks for the love and happiness!
Leave the Beatles alone. Don’t listen if you don’t want to but they are my teen years remembered. I can almost feel the evil coming from the building even before I read your description.