Review of Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles 20 of X: "All Things Must Pass"

What better way to conclude the year than with a review of the next section of Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles, which has accompanied me for more than half a year now, as I read the book bit by bit, with still more to follow, I'm glad to say, in 2018.  This is the case - what better way - even though we're knocking on the door of the saddest part of the story, and indeed are already there.

Sheffield presents a grimmer than usual portrait of George Harrison in 1970s, after the Beatles disbanded.  He's dissolute, unable to hit his notes or remember his lyrics, verbally happy about the breakup but ravaged by cocaine and booze.  I knew none of this in the 70s.  I was beginning to pull away from music by the middle of the decade, and wouldn't regain my daily proximity until, well ... this very year, and the coming of the Beatles Channel on Sirius XM Radio (not just the music but priceless I-was-there commentary by Peter Asher on his "From Me To You" and his commentary of the listener-voted Top 100 show, where I learned, for example, that the "cool bendy guitar" work on "Ticket to Ride" was by Paul not George) all stoked by Sheffield's book.

I'd heard "All Things Must Pass" in the 1970s, but didn't recognize it for what it was until 2008, when I was finishing up the first edition of New New Media, and chose "All Things Must Pass" as, ironically, a perfect example of the immortality of music on YouTube, or of some great things never passing.

Sheffield cites someone who says "All Things Must Pass" is the "wisest" song the Beatles never included on an album (they decided not include it on Let It Be).  He agrees, and judges it one of the very best of the Beatles songs released to the world after the group broke up.  I'd agree, and would go a little further.

First, along with "Taxman" and "My Guitar Gently Weeps," I think "All Things Must Pass" is among the best Beatle songs ever written by members of the group during and after they were together.  The lyric is in a class by itself, and couldn't have been written by Lennon or McCartney, or by Lennon and McCartney, either.  If Harrison was significantly responsible for the Beatles, in his way as much as Lennon or McCartney, "All Things Must Pass," with its wisdom, sensitivity, and cutting edge, tells us why.  It is at least as extraordinary as the closest Lennon and McCartney songs in theme, which I guess would be "Across the Universe," "Long and Winding Road," and "Two of Us".

Ironically but indicatively, the best performance of "All Things Must Pass" now on video is at the George 2002 memorial concert, and is sung just perfectly by Paul. (And, of course, I can't now find this video on YouTube - here it is on Vimeo.) (If your soul doesn't get choked up watching this video, you're not fully human.) The song indeed passed, but unto another Beatle, and therein the future at large, and humanity both here and now on Planet Earth and in the future in the stars.

Happy New Year everyone - I'll see you here next year, very soon, with more reviews of this superb book.

See also Review of Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles 1 of X: The Love Affair ... 2 of X: The Heroine with a Thousand Faces ... 3 of X: Dear Beatles ... 4 of X: Paradox George ... 5 of X: The Power of Yeah ... 6 of X: The Case for Ringo ... 7 of X: Anatomy of a Ride ... 8 of X: Rubber Soul on July 4 ... 9 of X: Covers ... 10 of X: I. A. Richards ... 11 of X: Underrated Revolver ... 12 of X: Sgt. Pepper ... 13 of X: Beatles vs. Stones ... 14 of X: Unending 60s ... 15 of x: Voting for McCartney, Again ... 16 of x: "I'm in Love, with Marsha Cup" ... 17 of X: The Split ... 18 of X: "Absolute Elsewhere" ... 19 of X: (Unnecessary but Brilliant) Defense of McCartney ... 21 of X: Resistance ... 22: The 70s Till the End ... 23: Near the Science Fiction Shop ... 24 of 24: The Last Two

And here's "It's Real Life" -- free alternate history short story about The Beatles, made into a radio play and audiobook and winner of The Mary Shelley Award 2023

 
lots of Beatles in this time travel

6 Years, 4 Months & 23 Days: Neat 14 Minutes

And my last review of a short film on Amazon Prime for the evening - not sure yet if it's for the year - this time of 6 Years, 4 Months & 23 Days.  First, as you may know, I tend to review mostly time travel, and if not time travel, some kind of science fiction when it comes to short films.  Because ... well, life's too short not to (and time travel has always been my favorite genre, with science in general my next).  But sometimes the title of a short film suggests that it could be about time travel.  So I watch it ... and if it turns out it isn't about time travel at all, but I enjoy it as much as I do a good little time travel story, then ... I give it a review.

That doesn't happen too often, but it did earlier today with The Weekend, a memorable vignette of a couple who connect over a weekend.  And lightning struck twice today, with my viewing of 6 Years, 4 Months & 23 Days a little while ago, a neat and expressive untangling of modern life that unfolds on the screen in just 14 minutes.

The time in the title is the amount of time that our hero, David (well played by John Mawson - who's been on Outlander! - and who also wrote this) has gone without sex - because his wife was in a coma and then died due to the car accident that David who had been drinking got them into.  The night before the short film begins, David's in a bar.  He puts on a hat which makes him look younger, and winds up in bed with a dancer half his age (good job by Augie Duke).  They wake up the next morning, she's shocked at his age, and that's when the complications and the fun ensue.

There's a heart-warming quality to this narrative, and a mix of humor and profundity that reminds me of Neil Simon, though I'm so old myself that I can't recall the last time I saw one of his plays (definitely more than 6 years ago).  In any case, one of the benefits of the Internet, and of Amazon Prime in particular, is you don't have to go to Broadway to see the story, and in fact you can see it on your screen, for free, any time night or day.

So don't wait 6 years or even 23 days to see this.  And if you wake up on New Year's Day with someone half your age in bed, someone you met just the night before - well, this movie is especially just the thing for you to see.

 

It started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...



 

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The Weekend: Ala McLuhan

Hey, The Weekend (a 20-minute short from 2016 on Amazon Prime) isn't about time travel - though it is reminiscent in more than the title of the 1945 classic The Lost Weekend (which actually isn't about a time travel either, though its title is suggestive) - and it's not even science fiction.  But The Weekend is nonetheless sensitive, well written and portrayed, and definitely worth watching.

It tells the story of a guy, recently jilted, who takes in a woman he meets on a walkway by a beach. She offers him French fries, he declines, but changes his mind, and off we go.

I won't tell you any more of the story, so you can enjoy seeing it yourself.  I will say that, except for one big thing, the story is about nothing - other than two souls brushing against each other, somehow finding a few days of peace in the noise and craziness of the real world all around us, and that's everything.

A short like this - the epitome of McLuhan's cool, because it bids you, the viewer, to fill so much of it in with your own thoughts and feelings (see McLuhan in an Age of Social Media for more) - is absolutely dependent on the acting. Danielle Guldin is quietly outstanding as Chloe, the bearer of the French fries, and Taso Mikroulis is just right as the guy.

The Weekend takes place in New York City.  The shore and the apartment could be anywhere, and there's just one small shopping-for-groceries scene where the street is clearly in the city, but somehow New York City is very much a part of this short film, which somehow also gives it a kinship in my mind to some of the work of Woody Allen.  All of which is to say that Dennis Cahlo, who wrote, directed, and has a cameo in The Weekend, did a fine job indeed with this movie.


 

It started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...



 

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Chronological Order: Door to the Past, Literally

Chronological Order, the 2010 feature-length movie I just saw on Amazon Prime, certainly deserves an award, which would be for the most unlikely time-travel device I've ever come across on page or screen.  That would be a door that our protagonist, a guy by the name of Guy, finds floating in the ocean.  He and we soon learn that when he stands it up and walks through it, he walks a little or longer into the past.

That's a great set-up for a time-travel story in the science fantasy genre.  But the execution and development leaves a lot to be desired.  I'm always up for a low-key, slice-of-life presentation.  But Chronological Order is so low-key as to seem desultory, and although this reflects the persona and the predicament on the protagonist, it also makes it difficult for the viewer to keep focus or even, in my case, continuing interest.

Nonetheless, Chronological Order does have something, in its unusual set-up and even its meandering pace.  Lurking behind everything Guy does is the question of free will, which comes up whenever the time traveler in the present sees himself in the future, or when the unknowing time traveler in the past (before his present self has traveled to the past) sees his present self in the past for the first time.  If I'm wearing a blue shirt today, and I travel to the past to yesterday, where I see myself wearing that blue shirt, does that mean I in yesterday will have no choice but to put on that blue shirt when I get dressed today?  If the answer is yes, that negates or erases my free will to put on whatever shirt I please.

Guy wears lots of shirts in Chronological Order, and grapples with rather than explicates the inherent problem of free will in this story.  Just to be clear: I'm a firm believer in free will.  I don't believe it's a necessary illusion of intelligent life.  And it's one reason (in addition to the grandfather paradox, which can only be solved by the multiple-universe hypothesis, even more incredible than time travel) that I think time travel is impossible, whether low-key and unfocused or keenly drawn on a razor's edge.  Though, I've always admired a point that Chance (played by Hugh Laurie) made in the first season of that series on Hulu last year, "Someone once asked William James if he believed in Free Will. 'Of course,' James replied. 'What choice do I have?'"

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Europa Report: Stark Inspiration

I caught Europa Report (2013) on Netflix last night, a mixture of a stark, beautiful, and ultimately inspiring account of the first flight with people to one of Jupiter's moons, the one deemed most likely to have life, due to its water and heat signatures, both of which we knew (the water and heat, not life) in 2013 and at the end of 2017.

The movie pulls no punches, which makes its ending all the more awe-inspiring.  [Spoilers ahead ...]

Everyone of the voyage dies, in one heroic way or another.  But this first trip beyond the Moon (our Moon) by any human beings manages to get back communication to Earth, with an image of: a multi-celled organism!  Proof there's life out there in our solar system, more advanced than some ancient bacterium.

I've been arguing with people in science and science fiction for years about the need to send humans beyond this planet.  Why not send robots, these people ask, wouldn't they, in the Europa Report, have found the same life as did our human beings, without the loss of their life?  Europa Report makes vividly clear why that wouldn't work:  it's human ingenuity, unprogramable, that captured that extraordinary image of off-Earthly life.

There are also some people who don't and say they wouldn't find such a discovery amazing and Earth-shattering - in the best way possible - whether made by robot or human.  We need to spend the money needed to get us off this planet on such problems as reducing poverty, fighting disease, and other crucial things on Earth.   Although I agree completely that we need to spend more money on those pursuits, I believe even more strongly that those expenditures shouldn't be at the expense of space travel.  (And in the Europa Report, the mission is private financed.)  But to those people who don't get the inspiration of the Europa Report, I'd say: don't watch the movie.

But to everyone else: see it, if you haven't already.  It's a great way to ring in the New Year.  And even for those who don't find getting humans off this planet an essential way of learning more about what we're doing here in this cosmos - maybe see the movie, anyway, after all.  Optimist that I am, I believe every human being ultimately will be inspired by the possibility of finding life on other planets, and it's just a question of how long that truth takes to break through to your soul.

The Fifth Wall: Meta Meet Her

A delightful, significant little short - 12 mins - on Amazon Prime: The Fifth Wall (2016), about a character with no name who has a conversation with her creator.  Interestingly, the writer is Scott Meridew and the director is Sinisa Radosavljevic aka Sin Radot, but the creator's voice in The Fifth Wall sounds the same as the actress, Tina Vrbnjak, who plays the character.

I say "interesting," because I'm not quite sure of the import of that move, other than making it seem as if the character is talking to herself, which I guess means that "she" exists both in the heads of the writer and directors, as well on the screen, in the apartment we're looking at.

It's a pretty philosophic, meta conversation, as far as these kinds of things go.  As some of you may know, there's a long tradition of fictional characters aware of their own existence, and usually contesting that, or otherwise complaining about it.  See the entry "Metafiction" for examples - ok, here it is.  I've always liked the genre - not usually science fiction, but philosophy fiction, or, to be more precise, ontology fiction, since ontology is the branch of philosophy that probes the nature of existence - not physical existence per se, but the deeper existence of everything in the universe, including ideas.

But back to The Fifth Wall, it takes off from the fourth wall, which is the space or "wall" between the performer and audience.   The fifth does one better, because it's the space between the character and the creator - the creator having created the character, in contrast to the performer and audience, in which both exist almost independently - "almost," because one could argue that a performer without an audience is not really a performer, and so the audience therein creates the performer.  One could argue that, but I'm not sure I would, since I once heard a guest speaker at a conference giving a lecture in a stentorian voice, and when I walked into the room I found he was talking to no one.  Though, one could also argue in that case that his talking to no one created an audience - at least, an audience of one - because it got me to walk into the room, and then I felt so bad for this speaker with no audience that I couldn't bring myself to leave.

But back to The Fifth Wall one final time - what the character wants is to continue to exist, after the short film concludes.  Her creator tells her (and us) that she has a chance to live again, any time anyone wants to see this film again.  I'll likely do that - but you can and should do that, too!  Help this nameless character played by someone named Tina live - watch her movie!

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Travelers 2: Chess Match of the Centuries

I had high praise for the first season Travelers (on Netflix) a year ago.  I have even higher praise for the second season (of 12 episodes, like the first).  I'll try to talk about it with a minimum of spoilers.

First, my favorite episode was almost a standalone - though each episode follows closely from the previous one - and amounts to one of the best takes I've ever seen on the genre of do-over time traveling, probably most known in the Groundhog Day movie.   In Travelers, the hour begins with a massacre of our team.  The rest of the episode details the Director's (AI from the distant future usually in control of most things) painstaking attempts to reverse that massacre.  It's played out beautifully, like a chess match in which the superior opponent has the opportunity of redoing each of her/his movies until a win is obtained.

Chess match is a good metaphor for the most significant parts of this season, and indeed most of the season in general.  Although there's plenty of action, the peak moves involve MacLaren and his team matching wits with the Faction (the group from the future who oppose the Director), and a new villain, Vincent.

Vincent was the very first traveler.  He was supposed to die in the Towers on September 11 - a daring beginning - but defies the Director and survives, and thrives.  He's played by Enrico Colantoni, whom I first noticed in Flashpoint (an excellent Canadian swat team drama), and he projects a worthy bad guy in Travelers (which, by the way, is also a Canadian production).  The acting is top-notch throughout, with MacKenzie Porter (Hell on Wheels) even better than last year as Marcy.  In fact, everyone was stronger than last year, likely because the plot was more advanced.  Eric McCormack as MacLaren, Reilly Dolman as Philip, Nesta Cooper as Carly, and Jared Abrahamson as Trevor all put in memorable performances.   Even Patrick Gilmore as David was excellent.

I say "even," because you don't often see secondary characters who play such important roles in a fast-moving story like this.  But they're there, in and out, throughout the twelves episodes, especially McLaren and wife Cat, Marcy and David, and Philip with a Factor agent and then the beginning of something with Carly.  And the families and friends and relations really come into their own in the finale, which changes everything - though you never know, given the possibility of do-overs.

And that's all I say - other than, see this. If you enjoy a time-travel story with all the trimmings - intellect, action, humor, culture class - you'll love this.

See also: Travelers (review of Season 1): 12 Monkeys Meets Quantum Leap with a Story All of its Own

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Knightfall 1.4: Parentage

Well, I was very glad to see Queen Joan take my suggestion from last week - see my review of Knightfall 1.3 - and sleep with the King to disguise the father of her baby, rather than end her pregnancy.  Joan did get a little help from her maid, we discover at the end of tonight's episode 1.4, but the result is the same:  Joan and Landry's baby will be born, King Philip will think it's his - at least, at first - and that will make for a good continuing source of roiling drama in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, the search for the grail continues to take its intense but meandering course.  As I've said before, I'm much more interested in the people than the grail, and I find it to be at best an ok motivation for everything that's going on.  Far more appealing is in the intrigue at court, and now the imminent war with the English.

Back to Joan and Landry's baby.  If it's a boy, he of course could grow up to be a Templar, and that opens up all kinds of possibilities.  As the Pope told Landry in a previous episode, many a Templar has given into to the temptations of the flesh, which means there already should be some Templar offspring afoot and about.

I can't recall what, if anything, we and Parsifal know about this parentage.   Well, no matter, he's clearly on his way to becoming a Templar in any case.  But the Templars love women almost as much as their stated calling, and it will be interesting to see how that lust and love of various kinds plays out in the episodes ahead.

See also: Knightfall 1.1: Possibilities ... Knightfall 1.2: Grail and Tinder ... Knightfall 1.3: Baby

Vikings 5.6: Meanwhile, Back Home ...

Wow, a slowly building episode 5.6 of Vikings just on, in which almost all roads converge on Kattegat and a fierce battle that will decide the fate of our of series - or, the characters in the series - looms brutally ahead.

Let's see.  On the side of Lagertha - warned by Queen Astrid, who pays for the messenger to Lagertha not only with gold, but her body, against her will, many times - we have Bjorn, escaped from Arabia, borne on its sandstorms and arriving just in time.

On the side of Ivar, with have Harald - who could be betrayed by Astrid (again), but still has an impressive force - but, even more significantly, Heahmund, whom Ivar has wisely not killed, and who has now apparently decided, at least at this point, to fight alongside him.

Ubbe's with Lagertha, Hvitsek's with Ivar, and though Ubbe's a little better, I'd say the two sides are still pretty evenly matched.  Though - I guess I would give the slight edge to edge to Ivar and Heahmund - since the only fighter equal to either of them would be Bjorn, and he is only one to their two.   But Lagertha herself is better than Harald ... so, yeah, it will be close, and I have no idea what if anything real history says about this battle, or even it even really took place.

Otherwise, in other places, Floki's getting a chilly reception from his followers is a rather discouraging way to begin the voyage to America, which I'm still hoping this leads to, at some point in the series.  But it's still good to see Floki and those Vikings there, as the vanguard of a future trip across the Atlantic.

And I'll be back here next week with a report of the battle for Kattegut.

See also Vikings 5.1-2: Floki in Iceland ... Vikings 5.3: Laughing Ivar ...Vikings 5.4: Four of More Good Stories ... Vikings 5.5: Meet Lawrence of Arabia

And see also Vikings 4.1: I'll Still Take Paris ... Vikings 4.2: Sacred Texts ...Vikings 4.4: Speaking the Language ... Vikings 4.5: Knives ... Vikings 4.8: Ships Up Cliff ... Vikings 4.10: "God Bless Paris" ... Vikings 4.11: Ragnar's Sons ... Vikings 4.12: Two Expeditions ... Vikings 4.13: Family ... Vikings 4.14: Penultimate Ragnar? ... Vikings 4.15: Close of an Era ... Vikings 1.16: Musselman ... Vikings 1.17: Ivar's Wheels ...Vikings 1.18: The Beginning of Revenge ... Vikings 4.19: On the Verge of History ... Vikings 4.20: Ends and Starts

And see also Vikings 3.1. Fighting and Farming ... Vikings 3.2: Leonard Nimoy ...Vikings 3.3: We'll Always Have Paris ... Vikings 3.4: They Call Me the Wanderer ... Vikings 3.5: Massacre ... Vikings 3.6: Athelstan and Floki ...Vikings 3.7: At the Gates ... Vikings 3.8: Battle for Paris ... Vikings 3.9: The Conquered ... Vikings Season 3 Finale: Normandy

And see also Vikings 2.1-2: Upping the Ante of Conquest ... Vikings 2.4: Wise King ... Vikings 2.5: Caught in the Middle ... Vikings 2.6: The Guardians ...Vikings 2.7: Volatile Mix ... Vikings 2.8: Great Post-Apocalyptic Narrative ... Vikings Season 2 Finale: Satisfying, Surprising, Superb

And see also Vikings ... Vikings 1.2: Lindisfarne ... Vikings 1.3: The Priest ... Vikings 1.4:  Twist and Testudo ... Vikings 1.5: Freud and Family ... Vikings 1.7: Religion and Battle ... Vikings 1.8: Sacrifice
... Vikings Season 1 Finale: Below the Ash

 
historical science fiction - a little further back in time

Alistair1918: Just Right

Alistair1918 from 2016 is charming, special, altogether superb little feature movie (on Amazon Prime) with a frame on time travel you don't find very often if at all.  The Alistair in the title is a British soldier on the Western front in 1918, who gets blown into a wormhole and ends up in present-day Los Angeles.  There's no action at all in France.  It's all in LA, where Alistair is befriended by a wannabe documentary film maker - Poppy (played by director Annie K. McVey) - who works with her estranged and skeptical husband, a dedicated young camera man, and eventually a French scientist (Sophie, played by Amy Motta who appeared on Mad Men) who understands time travel, in an effort to get Alistair back to 1918 and his beloved wife.

Poppy may be a wannabe, but she shoots a good movie, and Annie McVey does the same with Alistair1918.  The time-travel part of it has the flavor of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, updated with the barest trappings of science.  The general ambience reminded me of District 9 - the same kind of on-ground, low key but effective cinematography that we saw in that excellent aliens from outer space in South Africa 2009 movie.

There are two slight slip-ups regarding the public's knowledge of media in 1918 when Alistair says to one of his 21st century friends that they had telephone and radio back in 1918.  That's technically true, of course - telephone was invented in 1876 and radio in 1900 - but few people other than scientists and engineers knew about them until the 1920s.   Alistair did work for a newspaper before he went to war, so it's certainly possible that he had knowledge of those two inventions - but, if so, he should have said that he knew about them by virtue of his work at a newspaper, and not as knowledge that was generally known. (Radio was developed considerably during the First World War, but, again, most soldiers on the front likely had little knowledge of it.)  But this is a very minor point, and no one other than a persnickety about media-history professor like me would have spotted it.

Overall, McVey did a fine job directing, and Guy Birtwhistle some excellent writing as well as playing Alistair,  in a movie that I expect to be citing from now on as the way to do a soft-spoken, realistic movie about something almost certainly impossible but ever fascinating.


 

It started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...



 

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Triple Hit: Parallel Schrödingers

Parallel worlds lurk behind a lot of time travel - since one way of getting around the paradox of that, if you changed the past, how would the earlier you in the future know that the past needed to be changed if it no longer existed, but if the new reality were a parallel reality, in which the event that needed changing now never happened, there would be no problem, since the time traveler came from the old reality - but it's not often been explored in the movies, though it was a mainstay of Fringe and is the theme of Counterpart, just now beginning on Starz.

All of which is to say I was eager to see Triple Hit, because it's a movie (free on Amazon), in which parallel universes are almost the whole story.  The "almost," though, is its main problem, since it also brings in space travel and time travel, and is a bit of a free-for-all hodge-podge of science fiction tropes.

But it has its moments.  Triple Hit (2009, originally Schrödinger's Girl - you ever notice how the original titles are usually much better than what they've been changed to?) tells the story of Rebecca/Anastasia/Sarah, Dave/David/Dmitri, Matt/Matthew/Mateus, etc in three parallel realities (worlds) in which Rebecca/Anastasia/Sarah is/are trying to break on through to at least one of the other realities.  All of the realities are some version of our United Kingdom.  One of them is pretty much like ours, another seems like a high-tech white-coated European Union, and the third, the most fun, is a "People's Republic," replete with a statue of Stalin and obeisance to the Soviet Union(!).

Of course something goes wrong with the attempt and frenetic craziness and mayhem ensue, done up almost in a slapstick 1950s bug-eyed-monster B-movie kind of style.  So ... it's hard to take Triple Hit seriously, but it is fun, especially in the wee hours of the morning, with good multiple campy performances by Abigail Tarttelin as Rebecca/Anastasia/Sarah.  See it if parallel worlds are your cups of tea.

  
more parallel realities ...