The Armageddon Watch

 

The question of whether Putin's Russia will deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine is a live one.  If it happens, it is likely to happen soon. The tenor in the so-called liberal media is that Putin is losing and weak, without options. But last week I believe it was the NYTimes conservative columnist Brett Stephens who predicted Putin will deploy nukes, and he suggested Kherson as a possible location. Kherson is the first city and region that Russian troops controlled at the beginning of their invasion, but Ukraine troops are closing in on it.  The Ukraine forces have already retaken a number of villages in the region.

 Since that prediction, it looks to me that the chances of a nuclear weapon being used there has increased.  So far I've only seen the Guardian reporting on the evacuation of Russians and Russian sympathizers from the region, announced by the Russian puppet governor who requested and received official Russian help in evacuating.  To me, this is an ominous sign.  If a nuclear explosion is planned there, this would be a first step. 

Putin's apparent weakness is a reason it could happen. Russia's missile attacks on Ukraine this past week were seen as a vicious but futile response to recent humiliating defeats, without military advantage.  Russia used a number of expensive weapons in the attack, and western analysts say they are likely to be depleting their available missiles, since they cannot get high tech parts from western sources anymore.  If this is so, then Putin has pretty much only his sizable arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons left as "options."  Several weeks ago Putin repeated that all types of weapons can be used--and more than hinted this includes nukes--in Russia's self-defense.  He then began the elaborate charade of essentially annexing parts of Ukraine into Russia, and one of those places is Kherson.  All of this looks like step by step preparation, though so far no one in the west is saying so publicly.

Putin's groundwork has also allowed the US and western Europe to figure out exactly what they will do if Russia uses nukes.  The element of surprise is gone.  The world will be shocked, but it is unlikely that Putin will gain military advantage because of it.  Quite the opposite.  But exactly what will happen can't be known, except that it could happen very fast.  This is another case of letting slip the dogs of war, of self-renewing and escalating violence--with uncontrollable consequences.  It all has a tragic inevitability about it.

Here in the US, the slow motion Armageddon of democracy seems about to move faster, one way or another.  Several things are coming to a head.  Donald Trump is likely to face indictment for crimes on the federal level (either directly related to Jan.6 or to crimes associated with his theft of classified documents, or both), and on the state level (in Georgia, for election tampering; and New York, for financial crimes, not to mention a rape trial.) No one knows when any of these will happen, but one or more of them could be relatively soon.

Why is that a threat to the Republic?  There was a debate in the pages of the NYTimes this past week on whether the US faces a second civil war.  As usual, the semantics of it cloud the issue (exactly what is a civil war?)  But one journalist who has been interviewing far right/Christian right zealots for decades, wrote in the Atlantic that if and when Trump is indicted for just about anything,  large scale political violence is likely to break out.  He cited in particular how heavily armed these people are, and what they are expecting to do with those weapons.  He said that at gun shows during the Obama presidency, the reason people gave for stocking up on military weapons was the fear that because of school shootings, the feds were going to come after their guns.  Now (he said) what he hears more often is that they are convinced they are fighting a war against the Great Replacement etc., and the government is their enemy.  They are preparing to fight the federal government in particular.

Another participant in the discussion, a NY Times columnist with a deep knowledge of American history and the Constitution, agreed that political violence is likely, but the US has often suffered some small scale political violence.  And he wondered if these people have the stomach for large scale, sustained warfare against trained troops.  I agree that this is uncertain. So far political violence has been perpetrated by individuals or small groups, almost always against the defenseless: congregations in a church or synagogue, old people in a supermarket, children in school.  In other words, the act of heavily armed, camo-clad cowards.

Even the attack on the Capitol last January showed division.  Some people came to commit violence against the Capitol police and anyone who stood in their way.  Most others seemed more interested in taking video with their phones and posting it, breaking things and taking souvenirs.  No one can really predict what might happen (the dogs of war again) but we are quite possibly going to find out.

Then there is the upcoming election--another grave threat on many levels.  The election polls appear useless and other surveys of attitudes etc. are contradictory, but the punditry suspects the momentum in favor of the Democrats because of the abortion decision is waning, and continuing inflation and rising gasoline prices are favoring Republicans. Because they are so much more likely to fix that, and their candidates have detailed policies and plans to do so.  Just kidding.

 The old 33% of the electorate who were Always Trumpers now seems to have become 40%, and Republican power brokers are looking only at the R, not the candidate.  Will voters follow, and support the certifiably insane, the holy warriors, the authoritarians and white supremacists, the thoroughly corrupt, the dangerously stupid?  Will this be a wave election one way or another, or a state by state, district by district decision?

We probably won't know for days and possibly weeks after election day.  And unless our news media has gotten better and better equipped to cover this story, we may not know how corrupted the election processes are in individual districts and states.  We can be sure that Rabid Right Republicans will extol every one of their victorious candidates as elected righteously, and every election they lose as illegitimate.

Again, all this domestic potential for Armageddon has historical preparation, and an air of tragic inevitability.  But it may not happen on a very large scale, at least not this year.  However, a Republican controlled House and/or Senate next year may well usher in mayhem, as they hold the country and world economy hostage to go after old people (by slashing Social Security and Medicare) as well as young women, immigrants and the planet. Meanwhile as officeholders these brainless and heartless fanatics will have no capacity to govern, especially in times of complex crisis.  

Well, enjoy your day.  Every day you can enjoy.

History of My Reading: Cambridge Baptism

Carol and me with kittens from Stuff's litter at our Cambridge apt.

I returned with Carol and company to Cambridge after my Cummington community experience in August 1970.  By this time Carol and her Knox College friends had moved into a summer sublet—probably more of a housesitting gig—on a quiet leafy side street at 13 Ellery St., apt.4.  It was about half a block from the central artery of Massachusetts Avenue, known colloquially as Mass Ave: a roughly 16 mile road that begins in Boston and defines the heart of Cambridge before heading onward past Somerville to Concord and the fabled Lexington Green, and beyond.  

13 Ellery St.

It wasn’t until I’d gone to college in the Midwest that I heard people give city directions in terms of north/south, east/west (cf. “Go north three blocks and turn west.”) In western Pennsylvania as in most of the northeast, cities were ordered by the borders of serpentine rivers and eccentric coastlines, as well as hills and ridges and valleys.  So while Cambridge is vaguely north of Boston, it is connected by Mass Ave in a way that defies the compass.  Orientation reverts to directions like left and right.

 So emerging from the tree-shadowed Ellery Street to busy, noisy Mass Ave puts Central Square (Cambridge) and Boston to your left, and Harvard Square a few long blocks to your right. While I was living there the rest of that summer, the first commercial building to the right on Mass Ave housed several businesses, including the F-Stop camera store, Cheap Thrills records, a music and musical instrument store, and the Orson Welles Cinema.  At the time I first saw it, the Welles was a single screen, so-called “repertory cinema” showing foreign and offbeat American movies. (It had a film school as well, though that was not immediately obvious to me.) 

Orson Welles at the Orson Welles

The Orson Welles intrigued me. I’d been increasingly interested in film and filmmaking. I had one film course at Iowa, and in my months at Buffalo I got to know film professor (and McLuhan pal) Gerald O’Grady.  I attended a number of his film classes, especially when they were showing movies.

 Carol had gotten interested in film, too, especially after she read The Film Director as Superstar by Joseph Gelmis, a collection of interviews (Kubrick, Bertolucci, Lindsay Anderson, Richard Lester, John Cassavettes and a very young Francis Ford Coppola, among others), a book I’d left with her when I was at Cummington.

 We emerged from one of our first movies there when I saw a familiar face in the lobby.  It was Steve Goldberg, formerly of Knox College, who turned out to be the theatre manager.  He remembered me, and in the course of our conversation, suggested I try writing for the local weekly paper called the Phoenix.  I laughed before I nodded an acknowledgement. I didn’t see where I would fit in. I knew nothing about Boston or Cambridge, and though I’d seen the Phoenix a few times, I still didn’t have a handle on it.  It was more seriously journalistic than an underground newspaper, but it wasn’t like a daily either. A few years later in his defining New Yorker piece, Calvin Trillin would describe the growing number of such journals as “sea-level” newspapers. Today, their descendants are usually lumped together as “alternative.” 

(As if meeting a former Knox student there wasn’t coincidence enough, I soon after walked into the music store next door to see behind the counter someone I’d known at Greensburg (PA) Central Catholic High School. Paul Lenart had been a year ahead of me, and had gone off to Columbia University on a football scholarship, which made him a subject of my envy since that was my aspirational and unaffordable first choice school.  But he’d been injured early on, lost his scholarship and was now a guitarist in a regionally popular band that sometimes played at Jack’s bar near Central Square, famous then for featuring Bonnie Raitt before she went national.  Eventually he sold me my next guitar.)

Pierrot Le Fou

I soon had my first immersive film experience, when the Welles programmed a Jean-Luc Godard festival, a bill of Godard double-features that changed every couple of days.  I got a discount ticket book and saw many of them, almost all for the first time (among them “Band of Outsiders,” “Alphaville,” “Contempt,” “Masculin Feminin,” and my favorite, “Pierrot le Fou” with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina), eventually watching from the back row while drinking coffee and smoking Gauloise cigarettes.  Mass Ave and the Welles would turn out to be mainstays of my time in Cambridge and Boston.

 Past the Orson Welles, two particular wonders of Harvard Square awaited.  First, the bookstores.  There was one before the square, but more past the high brick walls of Harvard Yard that began the Square proper. Harvard Bookstore was right there on Mass Ave, shortly to be joined by its book annex, with hurt books and remainders.  Around the corner was the Grolier Bookshop, reputed to be a gathering place for poets, though I never experienced this.  It was one of the contacts that Robert Creeley wrote down for me.

 The huge Harvard Coop had a big book section. There were more bookstores on Brattle Street behind it, including one of my favorites, Reading International.  Across from there and below street level on Mt. Auburn St. was Passim, a bookstore during the day, and a music venue at night—it had formerly been Club 47, where Joan Baez first sang in concert, among many other luminaries of the folk revival 1960s.

 But bookstores weren’t the only sources of books.  There were two Ecology Action storefronts and a couple of other such organizations that collected and gave away surplus books, and since it was Cambridge, the quality was high.  I scored a mother lode of books at one such place on a memorable afternoon, and walked out embarrassed at my haul, but ecstatic.

 I was soon reading Henry Miller for the first time, and his rhapsodizing descriptions of Paris bookstores suggested that this might be my Paris. That feeling was reinforced by the cafes, some with outdoor seating, an anomaly in America at the time. There were not varieties of coffees available on every corner in the 70s, but in and around Harvard Square there were coffees closer to their foreign origins, such as the Turkish coffee in a dark café buried in a complex of shops.  

Harvard Sq 1970.  BK photo.

Soon I had a favorite place: the unpretentious Patisserie below street level on the section of Brattle Street that wound around to the left as you faced the Harvard Coop.  Its menu was modest but everything tasted great.  I loved especially their almond croissants. Its French coffee had a taste still unique in my experience.  It tasted blue, the equivalent of Gauloise smoke.  I was a frequent enough customer that the owner (who was Greek) knew me by sight, and remarked on how long it might have been since I was there last.

 The riches of the cafes included the newspapers left by patrons and strewn around, not only the Boston Globe and the counterculture and political papers but the New York Times and Washington Post.  There were magazines of all kinds from everywhere at several of the bookstores, with walls of them at the Out of Town News just outside the Harvard Square subway entrance.

 The cafes completed the mental ambience of the bookstores, and I felt as comfortable as I got, reading and writing in them. That extended to less exotic but still strange venues, like the ice cream place with the delicate 1890s wrought iron tables and chairs, and the Pewter Pot, which served a variety of muffins (very big in Boston) and 15 cent coffee in Pewter mugs.  I was reading and writing there once when I glanced up and saw a man passing quickly by the window, looking my way with a wistful half smile. I was sure it was the writer and actor Buck Henry. And it might have been, for this was Harvard Square, where I routinely saw Nobel Prize winners bicycling by.

 The apartment on Ellery Street was large and well kept, though mostly empty.  It was on the top floor, with easy access to the flat roof, where a lot of sunbathing had gone on all summer, and continued while I was there.  But with fall, the sublet was up, Carol’s friends returned to school, and we had to look for another place. 

Repainted and gentrified, 325 Columbia St.
now. First floor apt. was ours.

We clearly couldn’t afford anything so spacious in such a prime area, but we did find a large room at the front of a duplex in East Cambridge, at 325 Columbia Street. (According to a notebook, I found it by answering an ad in the Phoenix titled ISMAEL COME HOME.)  The street turned out to be a kind of local truck route, so the rumbling was fairly constant, but I eventually got used to it.

 We painted our room teal blue, with lighter blue around the sort-of bay windows.  We painted the living room in shades of sea green and violet. The previous tenants had left a lot of psychedelic posters, which I cut up and affixed to a wall in the narrow hallway as collages. (Through unforwarded mail and some detective work, I learned that this apartment had been the gathering place for poets and others in the antiwar movement, and that poet Denise Levertov had often been there. She confirmed this in an exchange of letters. We had met my senior year at Knox.) 

My Cambridge reading started there with authors unauthorized in my college lit classes.  Both Carol and I read Jack Kerouac, beginning with The Dharma Bums (in which a character based on Gary Snyder has a large role) and Big Sur, even before On the Road.

 I moved on to Henry Miller, whose style I found enthralling despite the sometimes questionable content: the novels Tropic of Cancer (my sun sign) and Tropic of Capricorn (Carol’s), his narrative nonfiction (The Air Conditioned Nightmare, The Colossus of Maroussi) and essays (The Books in My Life and The Wisdom of the Heart, in which he described his Zen-like approach to writing.)There was soon something of a Henry Miller boom in the 70s, and at the Orson Welles I saw an autobiographical film on him, and another on his compatriot Anais Nin (I also acquired and read some of her volumes of diary entries which were then popular.)

 I tried reading William Burroughs, whose theories of writing—especially his cut-up method—fascinated me, but I didn’t match up with his resulting fiction.  There were others, but I most recall Kerouac’s ecstatic discoveries as reflecting the flavor of those first few months for us on Columbia Street.

 I was still attracted to poetry with a surrealistic flavor. I read Robert Bly’s translations of Pablo Neruda, more of Bill Knott (who I’d encountered in New Haven) and a new poet, James Tate, who I heard read and met in Cambridge. (He had exasperated tales of trying to help Knott just get through life and empty the garbage.) I’d admired Jon Anderson’s first book of poems, Looking for Jonathan, in 1968, and now the harder edged Death and Friends in 1970.  

Gino Severini self-portrait

In the next months my reading expanded in different directions.  For example, I began seeking out books on the modern artists of the early twentieth century, from the Dadaists to those artists who clustered in Paris—Surrealists, Cubists, Futurists and more.  It was then I discovered the Italian Futurist Gino Severini—the only one of that group who lived in Paris and knew everyone from Picasso to Erik Satie. With the same last name as my mother, I learned he might have been a blood relative of my grandfather, but even if only a relative in imagination, he became a guide over the years. 

 At the same time I also discovered Dorothea Tanning, the only American and only woman enrolled in the Paris Surrealists.  She was a native of Galesburg, Illinois, and (as I later found) a Knox College student who preceded me (by several decades) as an editor of the college literary magazine.  My fascination with this place and period, which had begun with the expatriate writers like Joyce, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, brought me around through the painters to other writers, particularly the French poets Guillaume Apollinaire (another friend of Gino) and Paul Eluard. 

Thanks to the extensive collection of cheap art prints at the Harvard Coop department store (the large ones were a dollar), we had our own modern gallery (though the Vermeer in the living room—a print I still have—was the exception): a Magritte and Picassos in our room, a Max Ernst in the kitchen and a Paul Klee in the bathroom, which otherwise featured a large ceramic bathtub with a Moby Dick shower curtain but no shower, and an ancient pull-chain flush toilet.

 I continued reading about ecology, including Paul Shepard’s second anthology, Environ/Mental.  I don’t remember what precipitated it, but I began reading Buckminster Fuller obsessively.  The autobiographical sections in Ideas and Integrities grabbed me—his despair at his lack of worldly success and acceptance of his ideas that drove him to the edge of Lake Michigan, contemplating suicide.  That resonated.  But even navigating his strange vocabulary I saw him as literally a sailor (he’d served in the Navy) who knew what he was talking about with his concept of Spaceship Earth—that all we needed to live was aboard, but we were limited mostly to what was on the ship. 

 Fuller’s concept of an “anticipatory design science” made a lot of sense, even if I couldn’t follow all his proposals. A few years later I attended one of his improvised lectures at M.I.T., and saw him up close as I joined a cluster around him afterwards to hear more.

 I got hold of a new anthology for students called Worlds in the Making, which related ecology to the future.  I was already looking at the future as a subject.  Carol and I were also reading ostensibly more serious books in the psychedelic/countercultural vein, including on astrology, and we got our charts done (I’ve lost mine but I still have Carol’s.) I was nervously consulting the I Ching, which never quite assuaged my frustrations at my lack of worldly progress, probably not the best attitude.

 And we were surrounded by lots and lots of music. For awhile we didn’t have any at home, but Carol made a trip back to Chicago and shipped more of her belongings to Columbia Street, including the component stereo she’d had at Knox. By the end of 1970, the Beatles breakup led to an efflorescence of new albums: McCartney’s solo album (which we had from the previous spring), Lennon and Ono’s separate Plastic Ono Band albums, Ringo’s “Sentimental Journey” and “Beaucoups of Blues,” and George Harrison’s triple album, “All Things Must Pass.” The flood continued in 1971 with “Ram” (McCartney), “Imagine” (Lennon) and the multi-disk live album from Harrison’s all-star concert for Bangla Desh, the first such charity event. 

J.T. & Carole King

James Taylor was a kind of favorite son in Boston, and the “Sweet Baby James” album that made him a star was played everywhere.  “After the Goldrush” also came out in 1970, and began my Neil Young obsession.  Carol and I had to be selective in the concerts we attended, but we did see Neil Young play in Boston, and caught a concert in the now legendary James Taylor and Carole King tour.  The strangest concert I remember we attended was when Poco opened for the Moody Blues. We went to hear Poco, assuming the Boston crowd was there for the psychedelic Moody Blues.  But Poco blew that audience away, and nobody much was in the mood for the Moody heaviness afterwards.

 There were also free concerts, including a few in the Cambridge Common, just beyond Harvard Square.  Carol and I heard the distant music one Sunday in Harvard Square and walked over there.  We passed a smiling young woman coming the other way and asked her who was playing.  “It’s a beautiful day,” she said.  We agreed, it was a beautiful, sunny day.  But who was playing?  She laughed.  “It’s A Beautiful Day.”  Yes, there was such a group—I remember staring stoned at their album cover a few years before in Galesburg. 

The ex-Beatles releases, the back-and-forth accusation songs of Lennon and McCartney, and John and Yoko’s events and interviews were widely discussed in the pages of Rolling Stone and other music papers as well as the Boston area weeklies, and among people we met.  Lennon’s first album and Neil Young’s “Goldrush” in particular grabbed me and didn’t let go for years.  But Carol and I also listened alot to John Phillips’ (of the Mamas and Papas) solo album, even though the music media dismissed it. I don’t think I ever quite convinced her of the brilliance of the Bee Gees though, even if I played their “Odessa” double album too often. 

 

In a new relationship and a home of our own, and with the stimulations of my Cambridge baptism, I was bursting with creative expressions.  I wrote in every form from verse to polemic.  I was writing songs at a furious clip, enlisting Carol to add bits of gentle percussion to tapes I made of them, at first just to not forget what I’d written.

  Inspired by Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, I resumed constructing collages, as did Carol.  I briefly continued my Cummington experimentations with painting.  And I devised and physically made a board game—the Cambridge Conspiracy Game.  It was arranged like a Monopoly board but with Cambridge sites. Its purpose however was as a kind of anti-Monopoly. The object was not competition.  The only way to win was for players to cooperate.  Everybody won, or everybody lost.

 Columbia Street extended down from Mass Ave on the Boston side edge of Central Square a considerable distance before it got to us. Our building was a bit run down, and so was the immediate neighborhood. It was not fashionable or even recognizably Cambridge. It evidently had been Irish and (a bit further on) Italian, but was now mostly Portuguese. 

  We shopped for major groceries at the Purity Supreme supermarket in Central Square, but we also explored the shops in Inman Square: a walk down Columbia St. for a long block in the opposite direction from Mass Ave, and then the streets to the left that eventually led to the Harvard Square area.

  My impression was that Inman Square had once been the Italian area, and there was a very good but decently priced Italian restaurant there, that we could afford occasionally. There was also an authentic German bakery, and a large deli restaurant called S&S, that is apparently still there.

Inman Sq. early 1970s

 There was an old fashioned 5&10 next to a small grocery that sold $1 bottles of French Bordeaux wine (vin ordinaire in Paris), not far from a blues club. Legal Seafoods was the Cambridge choice for fresh seafood. We took our clothes to the Laundromat in Inman Square, where each washer and dryer had an individual name inscribed on it.  If we wanted to leave while our clothes were still in process, the Italian who owned it would watch over them, and we might come back to see them folded and waiting for us.

 This end of Cambridge was noisy and sooty, as urban a place as I’d ever lived. But we also belonged to a co-op that every week delivered organic vegetables from nearby farms (in the revolution talk of the day, it was called the Food Conspiracy.)  We also were asked to work in the fields periodically, which I remember doing once.  For awhile Carol and I tried the brown rice diet recommended by John and Yoko, so we wouldn’t be “sampaku” (supposedly you were if there was white all around your eyeballs, and it wasn’t a good sign.)  We gave that up pretty quickly, and I wrote a song about it. 

 I extended my ecology commitments to the household, perhaps a little too much (a succession of housemates weren’t thrilled.) But I was motivated to do kitchen cleanup and some of the cooking.  Carol made amazing Irish stew I still remember.

 Early on we added a tricolor kitten to the household, a female we named Stuff, on the theory that cats respond to sibilants when called. Soon Carol adopted a young stray, a black male we called Muk (I think as a reference to milk, which he loved.)  However, we failed to monitor their maturation, and soon we had a pregnant Stuff.

  One day I awoke to find that Carol and our housemate Andrea had panicked when they thought Stuff wasn’t delivering properly, and had rushed her to the vet who said she was fine, but that adventure caused Stuff’s labor to stop.  We had to take her back to induce birth, and by then I was the only one with the nerve to be present for the actual births.  Stuff had six kittens of various hues and combinations, including a silver gray male.  We decided to keep him, and named him Gray.  Those three cats—Stuff, Muk and Gray-- would be under my care for the next twenty years.

 All this may sound idyllic but of course it wasn’t quite. We both had demons to work through, and after the initial overriding bliss, we had each other to get used to.  Neither of us had anything but vague direction, and so along with the freedom of exploration, we had anxieties.  Plus the complications of family pressures, housemates, and a few neighborhood and apartment problems, etc. But complications is all they were. We had what Carol would later describe as a good little life.  

Carol started out working as a waitress at the counter of the Brigham’s ice cream shop in Central Square, which was also a kind of luncheonette, with coffee, sandwiches, etc. She wore a light brown uniform and dispensed “frappes” (Bostonese for milk shakes) and ice cream cones with “Jimmies” (sprinkles) on top. She soon figured out how to sneak me almost free meals.  She thought the manager didn’t notice, but it turned out he did, and didn’t care. 

 The main Cambridge post office building was nearby, and it may have been an employee having lunch at Brigham’s that alerted Carol to job openings at that post office. She took the Civil Service exam and was quickly hired, perhaps as a temporary for the Christmas season rush, but she was kept on afterwards.  To my surprise she liked it there, especially her co-workers, and she visibly began to open up again to the outside world.

 I “took in” typing, edited and rewrote graduate school papers, and had temp jobs, such as working in college bookstores during textbook rush or doing inventory, and painting the vast interior of a former Harvard eating club preparing to become a restaurant, Grendel’s Den on Winthrop St. and across Brattle from my Patisserie, near Harvard Square. It’s still there.  (Though I thought I did good work on those walls and ceilings, I was fired for insubordination, for sticking up for a colleague being bullied. He probably thought I was a dope for doing so.) 

hawker later in 70s (not me)

I eventually added a weekly gig as a “hawker,” selling one or both of the counterculture papers on a street corner (in my case, at Prospect and Mass Ave in Cambridge.) By then—probably early 1971—the Cambridge-based Phoenix had been joined by Boston After Dark, which had started out as a tabloid of mostly entertainment listings and stories, but by then had expanded to a full weekly newspaper, with news and arts coverage.

 Unlike most alternative weeklies since, these papers weren’t given away, but sold. Both had gained initial circulation with free classified ads, personals mostly.  The next attraction was coverage of the kinds of arts and entertainment that appealed to young readers, including the hordes of college students at the many colleges and universities in the Boston area.  The writers were also young, and spoke the same language, unlike the stodgy dailies.  That applied to the cultural and political coverage and point of view of news stories.  There was a huge potential readership that had nowhere else to go locally.

 For some reason lost to history, I gravitated towards selling Boston After Dark.  I took the T (Boston area’s subway/light rail system, which Carol likened to amusement park rides) to the Boston printing plant, picked up and paid for the number of papers I was gambling I could sell, and transited back to my Cambridge corner.

 There were a lot of hawkers.  Every corner in and near Harvard Square was taken, and often enough, one or two of the corners near me were also claimed. There were occasional turf wars, but generally hawkers respected the claims of regulars.   Where I was, the clientele came from surrounding office buildings, usually at lunchtimes.  My best customers were young women from those offices, who bought their copy from me with their friends watching from the floors above.  

 Since I didn’t always sell them all, I had lots of opportunities to read what was in them.  I read the Phoenix as well. Meanwhile, I fantasized my own publication, complete with articles I’d like to see in it. Eventually the light bulb went off, and I realized I might pitch these existing publications with those ideas.  That took a surprisingly long time.

 I was always sending things out, poems and stories but increasingly also reviews and articles.  I had my first acceptance in Rolling Stone, with an unsolicited review of the book, A Child’s Garden of Verses for the Revolution, by my erstwhile teacher and correspondent, William Eastlake. I did a piece on Henry Miller accepted by a west coast publication called Organ.  The editor liked it, and agreed to assign a piece on Buckminster Fuller.  I think the magazine folded before it could be published, but I did get paid. 

I’ve found the notebook from this time which contains my first draft of a long poem called “Ears.”  I remember it as inspired by a Kenneth Koch poem on the theme of eyes that I heard him read, but I can’t locate that poem and don’t remember where the reading was. A version of “Ears” as well as several other poems and a prose piece of impressions of Cambridge, appeared in a one-off publication called Words Cambridge in spring 1971.  The people who appeared in it put the publication together, assembling and binding it in the offices of the Orson Welles cinema.  Another version of “Ears” would appear at the end of the year in a more professionally produced though also short-lived literary magazine, Cotelydon. 

Carol 1968 at Knox. Bill Thompson photo.

Both Carol and I had various physical complaints that sent us for tests at the Cambridge hospital and especially to Massachusetts General, which because it was a teaching hospital, was more open to doing tests for people who couldn’t otherwise pay for them, as long as students could observe or participate.  My tests proved inconclusive.  The best advice I got was “drink more water.”

 So I was not unduly concerned when Carol went for tests at Mass General, after my repeated urging. Her health had always been somewhat shaky, but there had been two recent incidents in which she’d been overcome by fatigue.  We’d attended a screening at the Orson Welles and met the filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek, who was about to show one of his films beamed by multiple projectors onto the inner dome of a building—the Moviedrome at Stony Point in New York state.  The audience would be lying on the floor looking up.  The film would last for several hours—a truly immersive experience.  We signed up for the bus to go, but when the day approached Carol suddenly felt extremely tired, so we cancelled.

 Another wave of fatigue prevented us from meeting up with some Knox friends.  We were literally out our front door when she said she had to go back.  The prospect of a long bus ride to the Moviedrome had been daunting, but this outing was not going to be so strenuous.  It seemed more serious.  

 I was back in our room when she returned from her visit to Mass General.  I asked her what the doctor said.  She brought up something else that had us both laughing.  Then I asked her again what the doctor said.  She suddenly burst into tears.  

 After initial tests she had been sent to a doctor in the hospital who diagnosed her with what was then called Hodgkin’s Disease (now Hodgkins lymphoma.)  Through her tears, and fear that she would die, she provided what turned out to be an accurate account of what the doctor said (I’ve unfortunately forgotten his name.)  

The diagnosis was serious, he said, but the good news was a new treatment that had excellent results, available at only two hospitals in the U.S.: Stanford and Massachusetts General.  It involved removing the spleen, followed by two rounds of treatments, some combination of radiation and chemotherapy. Because they'd caught it at an early stage, after that she should be fine. 

 She repeated the words but did not seem to believe them until I repeated them back to her. Part of her despair resulted from a stop at a library or bookstore on the way home where she read that the disease was usually fatal. But soon she accepted the assurances she brought back from her doctor. Later I did what research I could, which confirmed what she’d been told.

 In the early 1970s, it seemed most cancers were mysterious and fatal. Not many years before that, the word “cancer” was not even uttered in polite company (comedian Billy Crystal had a routine that reflected this.)  I was becoming a little familiar with the radiation and chemotherapy treatments because my mother had recently undergone some, and would undergo more, after Carol completed hers. But I wasn’t around for most of my mother’s, and my parents were generally secretive about such things, so I was somewhere between discreet (not wanting to embarrass my mother) and frightened. It was very different with Carol.

 I was there with her completely, every moment, every step. I was at the hospital for her spleen removal operation, and her initial treatments. Sometimes, instead of remaining in the waiting room, I would spend the estimated time outside on Boston Common before returning.  Carol waited her turn in an area reserved for patients, where she befriended a few regulars also waiting for their treatments, and heard their stories.  Some had much less hopeful prospects.  Later, when she felt stronger and self-reliance was important to her, she bolstered her confidence by going to the treatments on her own. She found her courage, partly in making it ordinary.

  At home, I took care of her as best I could.  We talked about everything involved, what she thought and how she felt, and I tended, however watchfully, to follow her lead.  She needed to comprehend and cope with what was happening to her.  A part of her body was cut out, and the rest of it subjected to the damage (including to her beautiful hair) caused by radiation and chemicals, as well as the eventual healing. 

 I could also offer a different perspective.   “You felt your body broken,” begins a poem I wrote to her, “but I saw it whole/with such/ joy at its aliveness/its softness and beauty/that the tubes hanging out/were proof only/that your loveliness/was present/transcendent…” 

 She wanted above all to be not sick, so we tried to keep things as normal as possible. She had taken up knitting, as did her friends at the hospital, to pass the time before and after treatments.  She knitted at home as well, including a six foot long, blue and green scarf for me—not often very practical (except for Doctor Who conventions) but beautiful.  I still display it. When effects of the treatments accumulated, we watched a lot of TV on our small black and white set, and she began painting, as well as making rude sculptures out of play dough.  

Carol on one of our visits to Cape Cod. BK photo

The cats helped, particularly the kittens while we had them (we placed them in other homes when they were old enough. Stuff had a second litter of four, all black.)  I recall sitting in our armchair reading, while several of the kittens chased each other, up one of my arms and down the other.

 Looking back through our earlier correspondence, a pattern of precedent emerged from the previous year—particularly Carol’s series of inexplicable fevers and fatigue.  She had been hospitalized in Galesburg months before I arrived, and one of the reasons she didn’t want to go back was her fear that she would die there.

 Over the years I’ve wondered what fate led us to Boston, where this disease could be treated.  Though the treatments themselves had serious medical consequences for her years later (they are no longer done in the same way), and both the disease and the treatments may have led to her final illness, she nevertheless had another fifty years of what might even be characterized as a fabulous life.

  Jeremy Gladstone visited us in Cambridge, on his way back to Europe (he didn't finish his dinner with us because he was "shrinking his stomach" in preparation for being on the road.)  He and Carol had a previous relationship (they’d lived together in the same house in Galesburg and the same rooms as I had the year before) and they remained friends.  They corresponded when he was in Lausanne, in French-speaking Switzerland.  He assured her that she could teach English there, and urged her to at least make a long visit. Carol was intrigued, and having the goal of a European trip helped her through her treatments.  

In the fall of 1971 I finally sent an article to Boston After Dark, with a letter inquiring about writing book reviews. The associate arts editor Jake Kugel wrote back, said he liked the article but couldn’t use it, and suggested I come in to the office to see what books they had that they wanted reviewed.  I did, and came away with at least one.  But before my first review was due, it was announced that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda would receive the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature.  I dashed off an article about him and sent it to Kugel.  It was published in early November.

 By the end of the year I’d published two book reviews (including one of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar) and an article on Norman Mailer in Boston After Dark.  Meanwhile, I was in touch with Dave Marsh, editor of the Detroit-based magazine Creem (actually, their address was Walled Lake, Michigan.) Though the now-legendary Creem was mostly a rock music magazine, it published more. I may have published a review of The Greening of America there, but the first I recall of a flurry of pieces for Creem—a review of the movie “Omega Man” starring Charleston Heston—appeared in December. 

 Suddenly the apparently random aspects of my life seemed to be coalescing in these opportunities—the aimless observations of counterculture in Boulder and Berkeley, the seemingly wasted hours watching movies, listening to the latest music and discussing it all in perilous detail, and the instinctive reading and cultural curiosity, as well as the years of unread writing, of absorbing and searching for forms and expression.

 Now I was suddenly getting published regularly and meeting new people, especially at Boston After Dark.  But Carol still felt intimidated by what she perceived of that world, which was becoming my world.  And then she felt well enough, and it came time for the dream of Europe to become real.

  I went with her to Logan airport and saw her off for her first trip to England, Greece and France (sending me a pile of postcards) before settling in Switzerland.  She worked part time while taking French courses every morning, and she learned to drive.  Eventually, true to Jeremy's prediction, she  was hired as an English teacher in Lausanne.  She came back for visits and follow-ups at Mass General a couple of times.  At the end of one of these visits of several weeks (including a trip to see her parents in Chicago), I put her on the train to New York, where she would get a direct flight to Switzerland. But before the train left I impulsively bought myself a ticket to New York (it was all of $10 then) and joined her, intending to return on the next train back.  On the way she decided to stay longer, so we spent a few days in New York (hosted by Michael Shain) and Cambridge and again in New York, before she flew back to Europe.

 I have many blue airmail letters from those first years she was in Switzerland.  Early on, there was some thought of my joining her there or in England, but as my involvement in Boston increased and her attraction and commitment to Europe solidified, those thoughts faded.  Years passed, and eventually she wrote that she was getting married to someone she met there. I could only wish her well.  I didn’t hear from her for many years not long after that. It was clear that she blossomed in Europe, just as we both suspected she would not be fulfilled if she stayed.   Our roads and our lives diverged. But we always had Cambridge. 

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

 and I wake in the night at the least sound

 in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

 I go and lie down where the wood drake

 rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

 who do not tax their lives with forethought

 of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

 And I feel above me the day-blind stars

 waiting with their light. For a time

 I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

--Wendell Berry

Related to but not identical with the climate distortion crisis is the mass extinction of nonhuman life currently underway and accelerating nearly everywhere on planet Earth.  According to new surveys, half of the bird species in the world are threatened, and one in eight face imminent extinction.  North American forests have already lost 1 billion birds from populations in 1970.  Altogether North America has lost 3 billion birds, a reduction of 30%.  Losses are steepest among familiar backyard species such as sparrows, warblers, finches and blackbirds.

 Loss of habitat, polluted water and air as well as the direct effects of climate distortion such as fires and higher temperatures affecting migrations and habitat are major factors.  Climate distortion is fostering diseases, not only among human populations.  Currently a set of diseases are killing North American birds by the millions--threatening poultry supplies while further devastating wild bird populations, taking several prominent species to the brink of extinction.

Because human civilization cannot survive without the support of other life, the biodiversity crisis is the focus of the next UN COP climate meeting in December.  In advance of this, the U.S. State Department has for the first time appointed a special envoy for biodiversity and water resources: the Washington Post calls Monica Medina "a diplomat for plants and animals."

We deal with the diminution of other life in our own lives.  As birds disappear from the air, younger people cease to expect to see them.  But poets for at least a couple of generations now have been lamenting the losses, and decrying the blindness and money machine willfulness of society's relentless destruction of our most basic companions.  

What we're seeing so far (except for some of these tree and bird epidemics) is a gradual diminution.  However, it is as true of extinctions as it is of climate distortion: there can come a moment when the interconnections are broken, and failures cascade, relentlessly and irretrievably.  We're are nearing those in both categories, or so the scientists say.

Poets have known this.  Apart from anger and despair, they enact the moment of apprehending and appreciating what is still there.  W.S. Merwin and William Stafford, the poets who appear the most on this blog, have been among the most forthright in saying this.  These poems are ceaselessly sad for the moments that future generations may not have, and in fact that many people now will not and cannot have.  Besides whatever political activity or direct action one can take, the best we can do is be in these moments as fully as we can, even if through images and the conjuring of words only, which are never enough.  “There is  a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now," Merwin said in an interview in the 1980s. "One really wants, hopelessly, to save the world, and one tries to say everything that can’t be said for the things that one loves, while there’s still time.” 

 Among what "can't be said" is the physical experience of presence, of relationship with other beings in the whole of the embracing world.  In this poem, Berry draws a lesson from this presence, this relationship, which is precisely the value of that moment in the present-ness of the drake and heron, apparently free from "the forethought of grief." 

For now, we may still have moments to rest in the grace of the world, or to approach them in these words.  Best not to miss too many of them.

Says I To Myself, or Maybe the Universe

 

When commentators were falling over each other trying to illustrate what a long time Queen Elizabeth II had been queen (xx number of Prime Ministers and Presidents, etc.), they hit home with this statistic: they said that only 10% of the world's current population had been alive when Elizabeth was crowned Queen.

Well, that was June 1953, I was alive and a few weeks shy of my 7th birthday.  I have a vague recollection of the royal procession televised in black and white, but that's likely from seeing it later.  But I could have seen it.  I'd certainly seen Hopalong Cassidy and Captain Video.  (I'd also pondered the mystery of Bishop Sheen's guardian angel erasing his blackboard, just out of sight of the camera on his Tuesday night show.)  

When I heard this 10% statistic (assuming it is accurate), I was knocked back a bit. While I didn't realize my age group is that much of a minority (my generation was pretty large), it's not news that I'm not swimming in the Zeitgeist the way I once did.  Not that I even want to.

Since my retirement I've pursued the second look-- examination of some worlds of my past, but from perspectives made possible by the passage of time.  That's probably not surprising to anyone who has been reading this blog since 2016.  It's quite a lot of what I've been writing about.

Writing about a past of limited interest to that 90%, and doing so on an outmoded medium on the Internet, is not a recipe for a readership of clamoring millions.  Thanks also to Blogger ending support for the email notification system of new posts, my already small officially measured readership has diminished further.  I can't say I'm happy about mostly talking to myself, but I'm not about to change what I'm doing.

  Not everybody gets this chance--to look back, to reexamine, to discover aspects of the past I didn't know or understand, to explore the textures of the past in the present, to go deeper, to connect up those scattered memories into contexts.  Sometimes to experience the shiver of recognition, as when I recently flipped through an old history textbook I'd used in probably eighth grade, as seeing certain illustrations prompted an eerie echo of staring at them in 1958.  It's not all bliss--some memories revived do haunt the nights.  But I'm still not going to miss this opportunity.  I don't apologize to anyone for this, and I expect to keep doing it. 

 Maybe I'll find a better platform to write about it, but so far it hasn't bothered me enough to spend the time looking for one.  I spent way too much time in my life writing fruitless proposals or begging for assignments, trying to please editors and agents.  I know I'm overcompensating, but to me the Internet blog means I write and I publish it, no proposals to be approved, no publication situations or egos to deal with.  No market research.  No submitting manuscripts and waiting.  So nobody looking over my shoulder.  I just write it (hard enough, thank you) and publish it. In terms of access, my potential readership is the entire world, for as long as this thing is connected to the servers.  There's nothing stopping them but themselves.

This is Russia's Vietnam

 Especially from the point of view of the Russian people, the Russian war on Ukraine is Russia's Vietnam.  It is a war of outsiders against people defending their homes, based on lies by their President and their country's leaders.  Now with the apparent equivalent of the draft, that war comes home, as Vietnam did in the U.S.

I feel for the young men of Russia (I believe only males are being called up.)  The photo above apparently is of young men trying to escape the country, as so many Americans did to Canada and elsewhere.  The New York Times had a front page photo of young men who had been drafted and were on their way to war.  I've seen the look in those eyes before.

The tragedy of war knows no boundaries, especially now.  Ukraine is suffering, Russian people suffer, the entire interconnected world and all life on the planet suffers because of this war.  But these echoes of the Vietnam war are haunting. 

The Laughing Thrush

 

O nameless joy of the morning

 tumbling upward note by note out of the night

 and the hush of the dark valley

 and out of whatever has not been there

 song unquestioning and unbounded

 yet this is the place and the one time

 in the whole of before and after

 with all of memory waking into it

and the lost visages that hover

around the edges of sleep

constant and clear

and the words that lately have fallen silent

to surface among the phrases of some future

if there is a future

here is where they all sing the first daylight

whether or not there is anyone listening

 --W.S. Merwin

Beatles: Let It Back

 

The long video chronicle of a month in the life of the Beatles called Get Back has been streaming on Disney Plus since late last year, but the full eight hours was made available on Blu Ray and DVD only in July.  That's the way I watched it, and watched it again, and watched... So it was a major part of my musical experience this summer, especially as it sent me to reviewing other Beatles material I've got. (I've missed recent pricey books and boxed sets, but my decades-long identity as a Beatles fan has reaped gifts of books and music over the years from at least three girlfriends, my sisters, etc.  I've had a lot of birthdays and Christmases. These DVDs were gifts from Margaret.)  I found the series engrossing, mystifying and often enough, exhilarating. 

After completing what's known as the White Album in October 1968 (official title: The Beatles), the Beatles decided to have themselves filmed in the recording studio to be made into a TV special.  At first they were going to do White Album songs, but then decided it would be more interesting to show them creating new songs, rehearsing them, and then performing them in a live show...somewhere.  The day after New Years in 1969, they began.

Until now, all that officially resulted from these sessions were the feature film Let It Be and the album of that title, both released in 1970.  By the time they came out, the Beatles as a band effectively no longer existed.  The movie in particular became known as the story of them breaking up.  

About a half century later, the Beatles' still-existing company called Apple, still had the original 16 mm footage of all the hours filmed that month, plus audio tapes that ran even when the cameras didn't.  Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings films, jumped at the chance to try to construct a new something or other out of that footage.  When he started watching it (he would say repeatedly to interviewers), he was astonished: the Beatles didn't look like a dour group who hated each other.  They were often affectionate, and often having fun. The sessions had tensions but also a lot of joy.  Sometimes in subtle ways, they showed the earned closeness of a band of self-selected brothers, who had made magic together for nearly a decade, and still could. Some four years later Jackson delivered Get Back, an eight hour selection for Disney to run in three segments, and eventually, for Apple to issue as three DVDs.

Apart from doing it at all, Peter Jackson earns high praise for doing two basic things.  First, he used today's technology to "restore" the visuals and the sound.  I'm guessing that in fact the visuals look even better than the original 16 mm film, although 16 can look pretty damn good.  The sound of the music probably needed less work, but the real contribution was to clean up the sound so that the conversations etc. can be heard.  

Second, Jackson structured the film chronologically, which in itself changes the impressions often created by the Let It Be movie, which was directed by the guy who filmed all those hours, Michael Lindsay-Hogg.   Let It Be has the barest sense of chronology.  It's basically a collection of scenes.  It also looks terrible.  Even when it first came out, blown up to 35 mm, it was grainy and dark.  Surviving versions are often further edited and panned-and-scanned.  The one I have on VHS looks like a series of extreme close-ups shot during a blackout.  My fading memory of seeing it a couple of times in theatres, however, supports the idea that close-ups or one and two shots predominated.  Jackson's film has a larger sense of space.  We get the full studio and the full band. 

But even as a chronology of that month and of these sessions, Jackson's film isn't complete.  Important events outside the studio aren't mentioned, both in terms of background (the Beatles finances were a mess, and Apple was going broke) and specific events.  For example, early in the month, George Harrison suddenly gets up and leaves, quitting the group.  It's a big dramatic moment, and Jackson's film does a great job of showing the other Beatles' responses.  Then a few days later, Harrison comes back, inexplicably cheerful.  Jackson's film doesn't even try to suggest why Harrison left, except to show a painful conversation with McCartney that the Let It Be film also shows part of.  (Some Beatles scholars however suggests George and John Lennon had an off-camera tiff earlier that day, which precipitated George leaving.)  But what Jackson's film doesn't mention is that the day before George quit, his wife Patti left him.  And then she returned at about the time he rejoined the group.  He seemed to remain in a very good mood from then on, very committed to the band.

Apart from leaving out external events (including alleged drug use), Jackson leaves out parts of some conversations, skipping sentences and even moving the order of statements within the same conversation.  I know this because Beatles scholars on YouTube play the original audio tapes, which became available long before Jackson's Get Back was released.   So while this is a huge improvement in understanding what actually happened in these January 1969 sessions, Jackson's film isn't quite as complete or straightforward as it might seem.

Get Back tells a story that seems to be basically accurate.  The initial idea was to make use of the otherwise empty building of the British film company, Twickenham Studio, because Apple had leased it for the month in preparation for the making of The Magic Christian feature film, that was scheduled to begin shooting there in February.  That movie starred Peter Sellars and Ringo Starr, so that was another reasons the Beatles had to finish this musical adventure in January--Ringo would be unavailable.

But the Beatles were miserable at Twickingham. They were in a huge, cold room in the London winter, showing up in the morning at a time they would normally still be asleep, and unaccustomed to making music in a studio that early. The sound in the room was awful. They had to deal with every moment being filmed, as well as still photographers roaming around them constantly.  Director Lindsay-Hogg was badgering them about where they would do the live show.  They couldn't agree.

Harrison's departure seemed to change the game.  The other three Beatles met with him and all agreed they weren't going back to Twickingham, they weren't doing a TV show but the footage could be used for a feature film (they owed their studio one anyway) and they weren't going out of the country for a live show (which is what their director wanted.)   George helped organize the equipment needed to record in the Apple headquarters basement.

The mood lightened immediately when they got there, where a a homey space was created that they all liked.  Though the film shows a disconcerting amount of jamming and fooling around, they got down to working out songs.  This is the stuff that I really like, and I suppose anyone who has been in a musical group, especially one working with original songs, will recognize the process, even if this is on a whole other level. I love artistic process movies.  I love Sting's Bring On The Night.  So even what may seem tedious to others tends to delight me.

But several songs are getting bogged down, with several of the Beatles realizing they need another player, someone to do keyboards live.  Then one day, Billy Preston just shows up to say hello--he has known them since they were all teenagers playing dubious clubs in Hamburg.  (In fact, George Harrison had been talking him up to the others, and invited him to "drop in.")

 They ask him to sit in on the song they're working on ("I've Got A Feeling"), and immediately everything starts to fall into place.    Billy Preston provides the musical spark to several songs that completes them, and gets the juices going.  One of the early highlights of the series is watching Paul McCartney working out the basics of "Get Back" from scratch. Then we see the lyrics gradually change from an anti-racist protest song (anyone remember Enoch Powell?) to the words we know.  Billy Preston's keyboards finally completes it.  He remained part of the group through the rest of the sessions.  His work on "Get Back" has been praised, but he's equally essential to "Don't Let Me Down."  

Throughout we hear each of the Beatles bringing in songs (several times, something they had written the night before), and everyone gets interested.  Most of these songs, and others they are working on, will appear (we know now) either on their next album, the incomparable Abbey Road, or, more hauntingly, on their post-Beatles solo albums.  The explorations of George Harrison's song "Something" are especially fascinating.  The musical accompaniment for once comes easily, and that great tune is there.  But Harrison has almost no lyrics to what will eventually be known as one of the greatest love songs of all time.  It sounds so heartfelt, but for months, George didn't know what "something in the way she moves" attracts me like.  

Of the songs that eventually do make it on the Let It Be album, one of the most troublesome is "Two of Us."  It was the song Paul and George argued about at Twickingham.  For weeks the group is never satisfied with it, no matter how many times they do it--and they do it a lot.  Paul and John sing it to each other in posh London accents, Scottish accents, Bob Dylan accents, and eventually sing it without moving their lips, like two crazed ventriloquists.  But it is Paul getting tired of playing the electric bass and picking up an acoustic guitar that gets the song going, as a kind of skiffle or folk song, with Ringo's tasty drumming and George playing bass notes on his electric guitar.

Yoko Ono has been a constant presence sitting silently beside John (in Let It Be she seems ominous; in Get Back, pretty neutral. Both she and George Harrison's second wife Olivia are listed as producers for the Get Back series.)  By the third and fourth week of the sessions, the studio opens up.  Paul's girlfriend Linda Eastman (who was shown as present once at Twickingham) brings her six year old daughter Heather to the Apple studio, and Heather's interactions with John, George and Ringo as well as Paul, and her imitation of a Yoko vocal, are highlights. (Paul and Linda would marry a week before John and Yoko. Paul soon adopted Heather as his daughter.)   Patti Harrison and Ringo's wife Maureen also visit the studio, and most of them listen to a day's recordings in the control room together.  These are some of the most affecting scenes.

But the Beatles can still never agree on a live show, and until the last moment, aren't sure if they will do their now famous rooftop concert.  Jackson intercuts the entire concert (just five songs, some repeated).  He included more street reaction than did Let It Be, so Jackson has the narrative of the police officers arriving, being diverted and finally ascending to the roof, all in split screens.  The Beatles road manager finally tries to turn off George's amp, but he curtly turns it back on and they finish the song. 

 Each time I've seen these scenes I've gotten a different impression. Sometimes the street interviews were mindless distractions.  Other times they were overpowered by the energy of the music.  Once I marveled at the reaction of people on adjacent rooftops and the street.  There's no telling how well they could hear (a segment in the Beatles Anthology suggests the sound wasn't really very loud on the street), but they show little emotion.  I couldn't help thinking of the contrast with the years of screams and fainting.  On the other hand, the people complaining about their music and the police showing up could have been straight out of A Hard Day's Night.  That much didn't change.

I was surprised then by how briefly Jackson treats the final day, in which the Beatles alone in the studio record the acoustic "Two of Us" and the two McCartney piano numbers, now classics: "The Long and Winding Road" and "Let It Be."  The movie Let It Be presented full versions of both songs, but without context, it reinforced that movie's narrative of a dominating McCartney, and the others literally (in this scene) sitting at a lower level, playing supporting parts.  In context, it was just the most efficient way to do the final recordings of these two songs, at the end of an exhausting month.  However, it would have been nice to hear more of them.  ( For my money, the best cut of "Let It Be" on film is in the Beatles Anthology.)  

What about the Beatles themselves?  Paul McCartney is neither the authoritarian monster and central villain that the Let It Be movie casts him to be (though his beard and black suit don't help), but neither is he the genial and articulate statesman of interviews.  Emotionally he seems all over the place--capable of far-seeing insights and long monologues of near nonsense. He comes off as a paradox at times.  For example, who was the most actively opposed to doing the rooftop concert? And who looked like he was having the best time doing it?  McCartney, both. 

John Lennon is always the class clown, but he's also very quiet and subdued for long stretches, though when they play in the Apple basement he's right there, energetic and engaged.  There are moments when both McCartney and especially Lennon are pretty open about their fears and insecurities, past and present.  Paul is uncomfortable in his role and worried about the band's direction.  On the music itself, he worries that his classic ballads drag too much.  John is contrite for showing up late and not being at his best. (This may be the result of his reputed occasional heroin use, or he's just sick.  It's the flu season and both Paul and Ringo also complain of being ill at different times.) John is realistic about the limits of his own guitar work, though I was surprised to see that he did the guitar solos on "Get Back," and some of the jams show he had more lead guitar skills than I would have guessed.

George Harrison appears all black or all white, sour or sunny, and in Martin Scorsese's biographical film about him, that's how Ringo describes him: either saint or sinner, nothing in between.  It wouldn't be until Abbey Road and his own All Things Must Pass album (the most successful of all the immediate post-Beatles releases), that the quality of his songwriting was fully revealed, along with his unique, haunting and supple voice.  Just before the Get Back sessions, he had spent six months producing other artists, and his production of All Things Must Pass (despite what Spector did to it) is musically remarkable.  In that sense, he never really had a "solo" career.  He was the instigator of the Traveling Wilburys in the early 90s, which he formed (Olivia  Harrison said in the Scorsese film) because he missed being in a group.  He missed the Beatles. 

Ringo Starr was the backbone of the Beatles sound, and the glue that held the Beatles together. Though he's not heard saying much in this series, it's partly because he does his job so well.  A lot of Beatles songs sound simple until you get into their structure.  For instance, George comes in with a song, "I, Me, Mine," best known now for its eloquent lyrics, that he was inspired to write by seeing a grand waltz performed on a TV movie.  Most of the song is in waltz time (John and Yoko actually waltz to it), though it breaks into a four-four rocker, and back again.  Other songs are replete with even more subtle complications, and Ringo has to engineer these time-jumps seamlessly. 

Even so, Ringo has a nice scene doing a comic take to the delight of Heather McCartney, and also when he brings in the basic idea for "Octopus' Garden"--  George (the other non-Lennon-McCartney songwriter) immediately starts working with him to extend it, soon charming everyone and interesting the other Beatles in developing it.

Transcending all other impressions of this series is this magic opportunity to spend this much time with these four extraordinary people, all of them still in their twenties, as this extraordinary group.  Though this experiment was artificial in that it wasn't how the Beatles made their records anymore, it did bring them together every day over an extended period for the last time.  In the decade to come, as they went their separate ways (though different combinations of them collaborated), they all had periods of depression or despondency, and they all at times had serious drug and/or alcohol problems; two marriages ended, and they all endured tragedies.  John Lennon was weeks past his 40th birthday when he was shot dead.  These hours in the studio, during which they often revisited their past music as well as shaping new songs, seem like a time out of time.

With the benefit of hindsight, we do see suggestions of what would soon break up the band.  We also see the Beatles' luck start to change.  In the beginning they happened to find the right manager, the right producer, and then the right film director to help them blossom.  But this film makes a joke of their association with "Magic Alex," the supposed electronics genius they hired who is exposed as a total and expensive charlatan.  Not so funny is reference to John Lennon meeting Allen Klein, and his glowing account of Klein's knowledge and business acumen.  Eventually, Lennon convinced George and Ringo to make Klein (then managing the Rolling Stones) the group's manager.  Paul saw through Klein, and the resulting conflict was the proximate cause for the Beatles to break up.  Klein did get them more money, but his nefarious schemes eventually turned John and especially George against him.  They all dumped him, and he became an active nemesis for awhile, until more money changed hands.  

Also at about this time, John and George brought legendary producer Phil Spector into their efforts, and Spector's production of the long delayed Let It Be album did not go over well.  Eventually, McCartney backed a re-release that stripped it of Spector's effects, for the album Let It Be Naked. 

Yet, just weeks after the rooftop concert, the Beatles began recording again, this time with their producer of all previous records, George Martin, and did so at their EMI studios on Abbey Road, for their last, transcendent album.  And in the end...