This year is the 55th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. It also marks the beginning of a Golden Age of conspiracy theories that continues to thrive to this day.My first sense of the reach of conspiracy culture occurred while listening to a Woody Allen standup album back in the 80s. He quipped that he…
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Today is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. It also marks the beginning of a Golden Age of conspiracy theories that continues to thrive to this day. My first sense of the reach of conspiracy culture occurred while listening to a Woody Allen standup album back in the 80s. He quipped that he…
It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but he didn’t like it. According to an Associated Press story published at the time of Pope Benedict’s papal reign, in 1986 the then-Cardinal Ratzinger denounced rock music as a “vehicle of anti-religion.” This is why Bono probably didn’t give him any shades (recall John “The Funky Pontiff” Paul II).…
In the two years since Disney pulled the plug on director Robert Zemeckis’ long-gestating, 3-D, CGI redux of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, the filmmaker has finally grown philosophical about the project. “That would have been a great one to bring the Beatles back to life,” the director told Total Film Magazine. “But it’s probably better…
In my early teens, I received John Lennon’s Skywriting By Word of Mouth, a posthumously published anthology of poems, stories, riffs and drawings that continued the ear- and eye-candy Dada established in Spaniard in the Works and tunes like I Am The Walrus. The book had all of the anarchy, but none of the angst,…
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Beatles: When the Rain Comes
My parents, like those of a lot of kids in my generation, thought the Beatles’ music was a suitable alternative to the “baby Muzak” of traditional lullabies, which once comprised the soundtracks of pre-K lives. The Beatles’ blue, yellow and white periods (so-called for the dominant colors of their album covers, respectively “Sgt. Pepper,” “Magical…