John Not Into Chicks In This January 1966 Issue Of Fabulous Magazine.

I don't know how Ray thought this story makes him look like a good journalist. "It was the most important story of my career" what, because one of the subjects was so flattered by it that they flattered you in turn and got you to be (one of) their court stenographers for a time? He's better than most Beatles writers but this story makes him sound easily bought and bad at his job, idk why he'd tell it.

Cultivating journalists was one of John’s best PR skills. He was very good at building relationships, encouraging loyalties, creating a dynamic where his interests became the journalist’s interests.

Ray Connolly is a good example. He met Paul first, reporting on the filming of Magical Mystery Tour. He was new to the job, and remembers “sitting meekly outside the crowd in the bar in the hotel, wondering how I was ever going to get to know anyone, when suddenly someone sat in the empty chair next to mine. It was Paul McCartney.” From this start, Connolly builds a working relationship with Paul and the other Beatles. But over time, he becomes closer to John and Yoko - because they put the work in. Paul is friendly to a shy journalist, and vaguely supportive afterwards. But John rings him up, pays attention to his writing, rewards him when he (and Yoko) like what Connolly’s doing.

Here’s the big turning point. On 27 November 1969, Connolly published an article headlined “1969: The day the Beatles died”. “In writing this article, I was, in journalistic parlance, flying a kite,” Connolly explains - writing up his own guess about what was happening. “In terms of my career, it turned out to be probably the most important piece I ever wrote – and at least one of the Beatles was delighted when he read it.” And here’s how he expressed that delight:

The day after this piece was published a white rose in a see-through plastic box was delivered to my desk at the Evening Standard. An attached card read ‘To Ray with love from John and Yoko’. The unwritten message couldn’t have been clearer. From that moment I was to have my own ‘Deep Throat’ in the Beatles organisation, leaking me a steady flow of information - John Lennon.

I laughed out loud when I first read that, because it’s just so perfect. The white rose turns 1960s flower power into the new, stripped-back, all-white JohnandYoko aesthetic. It keeps the imagery of peace and flowers, but moves them into the art gallery. The rose comes encased in plastic, another trademark (think of Plastic Ono Band, or John’s enthusiasm for the idea of performing in a giant plastic bubble in Get Back.) And the written message doesn’t say anything concrete: no specific praise, no comment on the piece. Instead of committing themselves, they leave Ray to join the dots.

Which he did. More than that, just look at how he reads the situation: he sees John as his source, rather seeing himself as John’s journalist. Within a month, John and Yoko are paying Ray’s first-class fare so he can fly to Canada to report on their peace campaign. Ray Connolly strikes me as one of the brighter Beatle-adjacent journalists - he kept his independence, and managed to stay on good terms with Paul as well as John - but he fell for that one hook, line and sinker.

Suze Rotolo

The death of Suze Rotolo is sad news; it almost seems symbolic of the passing of a certain kind of 60s innocence and idealism. But more than a symbol of an era, or a poet's muse, Rotolo seems to have been a talented artist and an interesting and thoughtful person. Her interviews in 'No Direction Home' Martin Scorsese's celebrated documentary on Dylan were illuminating and good-humoured, and she came across as very likeable. Her 2008 memoir of life in Greenwich Village, 'The Freewheelin' Years' bears this out. When reading the book, I found the sections where she described her upbringing, political awakening and youthful exploration of art and poetry more interesting than those describing her relationship with Dylan, which after all only took up four years of a full and varied life. I was struck by her descriptions of time spent studying in Perugia - her solitary excursions into the countryside to draw and write indicated a broad creative curiosity and need for solitude quite at odds with the intense, incestuous atmosphere of New York's folk scene. No wonder she felt compelled to leave, despite being subjected to a barrage of disapproval on her return for 'abandoning' Bob. I'm sure he, even in the midst of his bellyaching, recognised that her absence during that period was crucial to his artistic development, providing the creative fuel for some of his finest early songs. Judging by the book and the testimony of those who knew her, Suze was very much her own person, loyal to her principles and friends and stands out among the baby-boomer generation for remaining married to same person for 40 years! (film-maker Enzo Bartoliucci.)

In some of the interviews from the time her book came out she mentioned the lot of so-called 'red-diaper' children of Communist parents, who were obliged for years to keep quiet about their parents' political activities due to the insidious atmosphere of the McCarthy era, a necessary secrecy that she reckons contributed to the atmosphere of lively storytelling and self-mythologising of the early folk scene. Her account of growing up in what she described as a materially poor but 'culturally wealthy' family and her own love of poetry, art and literature growing up is very moving, as well as her commitment to civil rights and similar causes early on. In the memoir, she captured the essence of being young, idealistic and thrilled by art in the same way that Dylan captured the essence of being young and in love in his early songs inspired by her. It would have been good to know more of her art and writing during her lifetime, but ultimately it seems she preferred a private life above all, and would never sacrifice that for fame or wide renown. She speaks of reading Francoise Gilot's memoir of life with Picasso at the time of her trip to Perugia and feeling a strong sense of recognition at the plight of the talented woman forced to play second fiddle to her genius lover. There was no way she could fit herself into the reductive 60s role of a male singer’s ‘chick’, even if she had wanted to. Her wit is evident in this podcast, where she nicely skewered the essence of Dylan (and perhaps the essence of all geniuses who seek fame) when she described a song of his ('What Was It You Wanted' from the 80s album Oh Mercy) as 'very clever, very funny, with a big nasty streak!'. True, witty, and delivered with a wry smile and not a shred of bitterness. Both her natural sense of privacy and her strong sense of self could not continue in a relationship with Dylan as his fame began to spiral into the stratosphere, though by all accounts making the break was a long, painful process. One gets the feeling from her interviews of great love shared in those early days, but no regret now for how things panned out. Seeing how insane things got for Dylan in later years, I think the modern term for Suze’s experience is ‘bullet dodged’.

Though it's sad she's gone before her time (she had been suffering cancer for some years), it's still in keeping to raise a glass to a good person who lived her life well. RIP Suze.

Hollering at this description of Magic Alex at some pre-Apple planning meeting. John's weird little boyfriend, plotting away.

(Source: Magical mystery tours : my life with the Beatles by Tony Bramwell)

Probably not.

A depressing conclusion to a mystery

T/W anorexia, disordered eating, just generally miserable times

Something was bothering me from a few anecdotes that I'd read over the past couple of months regarding John's height. In Elliot Mintz account of John giving him a hug, he mentions that John was no giant, despite apparently being 5"10. Robert Rosen, the man who got hold of Lennon's diaries says that John's shirts fitted his 5"8 frame perfectly (just ... just don't ask how he got them) and Mike Tree estimates that John's height was about 5"8. ((A random redditor further apparently interviewed Halstead, the captain of John Bermuda trip, who said he thought John was 5"7/5"6)). From this it would be a pretty fair to conclude that John had been lying about his height, especially as the Beatles did wear heels.

The thing is that we know from John's midsummer Night's Dream costume fitting was measured to 5"10, a pretty good indicator that John actually was that height. (Note as well that Ringo is listed as 5"6 here when his PR height was 5"8, indicating that these are accurate.)

Even by today's standards, 5"10 is above average height. So what's going on? Why are there multiple accounts of John in the 70s of him not being very tall?

One reason could be his posture and that he may have been slouching, which he seems to have done a bit. The other reason is that John may have just been extremely skinny, but in saying that in my experience skinniness usually makes you look a bit taller.

So let's go back to the drawing board and look at common reasons for what causes an adult to lose height. The obvious answer is age, but what is it about age that causes people to shrink? Welll, many factors, a big one being spinal compression as the vertebrae thins out and loses elasticity. However, two other key factors are muscle wastage and Osteoporosis: a condition where bones lose their density and become weaker. As the bones become weaker, micro breaks in the spine can occur, causing people to stoop and lose height. Muscle wastage on the other hand affects the spine as well as posture.

What does this have to do with John? He was in his late 30s-40 when these stories started coming in, not an old man in the slightest. See unfortunately, Osteoporosis doesen't just occur in old people, it can also crop up in younger people too due to different risk factors; factors like genetics, hormone issues, lack of vitamins and ... malnutrition.

I think anyone who has seen pictures of 1980 John and knows about his eating habits knows where I'm going with this.

Osteoporosis is a common side effect of anorexia, occuring in 30% of sufferers with 90% of sufferers experiencing bone thinning. Osteoporosis can also occur within a year of the onset of symptoms. As far as we know John's disordered eating and periods of starvation started in the late 60s, meaning that he had nearly a decade of consistent bouts of starvation. Muscle wastage too is extremely common with anorexia and from pictures you can see that this is also the case with John. In the picture above, there is no muscle on the chest area to cover the bones. A lack of physical activity would also have exacerbated both conditions.

I could be wrong, man could just have had a terrible posture and people could be misremembering his height. Nevertheless, I think there's a real possibility that John actually starved himself shorter.

251 Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, England | 21 April 1964

[➕] Mimi's framed photo of John:

Swinging through the ivories

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

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

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

Do you have any big opinions about rpf?

Not sure what we're counting as "big" here.

Aside from the standard "don't harrass the people it's about" take, I guess my opinion on rpf is that it does say something about its authors, readers and the broader fandom. Not in a moralistic "writing about bad things means you endorse them" sense, or even in the sense that you can conclude an author's historical takes from their writing. (I know a fair amount of people who will read or write McLennon without really buying into the theory of it being true)

But I think there's enough parallels between the trends in fic and the trends in analysis to see that these two things aren't neatly separable. As a fellow author, I can understand Cynthia being frequently brushed aside in fic, even if I don't love it – when it comes to analysing the real history though, I am less forgiving. However, because of the seeming link between the decentring of Cynthia in fic and her frequent exclusion from meaningful analysis, I find myself being (perhaps disproportionately) frustrated with her treatment in fic as a result.

Cynthia here is just an example among several, but I think the fact that she's not treated meaningfully better by the wider (generally more heteronormative) Beatles fandom speaks to the fact that what I'm describing isn't just attributable to the largely queer space of Beatles RPF fandom decentring straight relationships. (also any other lesbians fucking tired of people decrying any consideration to women as homophobia??)

I have also noticed that some people's takes on the history have a very literary bent – I'm thinking about times I have seen people call for symmetry between John and Paul, as though their relationship needs to be made up of perfectly mirroring feelings to be beautiful. There's an important distinction to be drawn here between descriptivism and prescriptivism – like, to be clear, there is something inherently literary in observing parallels between their lives, like say losing their mothers young, but I am specifically referring to people saying John and Paul should be analysed with the assumption of this symmetry existing, which feels like a limiting way of looking at real people.

That being said, I'm not sure how much engaging with RPF as such affects this sort of attitude. To some extent, we are all always trying to make sense of reality through narrative, but I'm not sure how aware of it people are.

With all that in mind,

I think RPF is a very cool way to express and explore thoughts related to the history (and, at least in my case, engage in discourse about the history as well as the fandom itself) that don't need to be fact-checked whilst being contained in an explicitly fictional realm. I also think that a lot of speculation people engage in about celebrities is actually kind of akin to fanfic and I sort of prefer the fact that RPF is upfront about its fictionality.

I like thinking about what RPF has in common with things like biopics and how it diverges from them, its strange but existing relationship with the concept of "truth" (which I think is somewhat distinct from the concept of "factualness"). I'm fascinated by adaption in general; I find the process of systematically pruning, supplementing and molding historical reality until it takes the shape of a narrative deeply interesting, and even when I don't love the product, I think there's meaning to be derived in understanding how we got from point A to B.

Bull’s-eye view

The camera lens as a ruthless eye – it’s a well-worn cliche, but one that keeps demanding to be used. Photographs, even the most carefully shot, can reveal elements utterly unplanned by the photographer and the subject, from an previously unnoticed tower in a landscape to the lines in the face of a movie star clinging to youth. Since its invention the camera’s capacity to invade privacy has been readily exploited, leading to excitement and anxiety in equal measure.

Another common, but apposite cliche, is the idea that the photographer somehow violates their subject – even if the latter is willing to be photographed – by capturing their raw, unmediated image. As Henri Cartier-Bresson put it: ‘The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.’ Referring to the subject as ‘prey’ sounds slightly terrifying, but is probably a sentiment familiar to many photographers. Even inanimate objects and views become a kind of prey in the avaricious aperture of a camera.

It’s the camera’s invasion of human privacy that is the focus of an exhibition beginning at the end of the month in Tate Modern, entitled Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. Grouped under various themes that range from the obvious (sexually explicit or graphically violent shots) to more subtle examples of voyeurism like government surveillance and street photography, the sample of images available online indicates an exploration of humanity’s secret moments. Some are shocking, like the terrified face of a young South African man clinging to the side of a building while a jeering crowd urges him to jump, some are unsettlingly banal, like the couple kissing at the New York Tortilla Factory, but all share that strange intimacy that comes when a photography ‘steals’ a moment that a subject would never intend to be recorded.

One photograph from the exhibition that captures a thing rather than a person is a powerful image of a British army watchtower at the Crossmaglen security force base in South Armagh. On an otherwise normal-looking street the watchtower looks utterly unnatural, bristling with wire fencing and multiple aerials. Obviously this photo was illicitly taken, and yet the tower looks somewhat ridiculous, rather than threatening. Its incongruity highlights the unnatural political situation that gave rise to its creation.

Ideas of reality and artificiality are thrown into relief in Walker Evans’ 1927 Street Scene (above), where the hatted man viewed from above, bathed in intense shadow, look like figures from the set of a film noir. The fetishisation of the past in film and art often means that genuinely contemporary images end up looking like pastiches.

The value of this exhibition is not just the interesting images that will be on show, but the questions it raises about the function and power of photography, which are even more relevant now than in the past, considering we are under more surveillance now than ever before.

Welcome to the continent

BBC are having an Africa season of sorts – probably reflecting renewed interest in the continent in the light of the upcoming World Cup. The latest instalment is An African Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby, in which the veteran reporter explores life and culture in Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Kenya, Ethiopia, Congo and SA, among others. I caught part of the second instalment, when he visited Ethiopia and Kenya. (On a side note, when will the BBC iPlayer become available in Ireland?? I’d gladly pay! And it seems bizarre that the BBC radio iPlayer is freely available, but not the television one! But that’s another entry).

I was reminded again of my earlier thoughts on Rupert Everett and Hector when witnessing Dimbleby’s complete inability to just act normal around his African interviewees, but he wasn’t the worst example of western awkwardness either. Like in Welcome to Lagos, the people defied stereotypes of unrelenting misery – most people had tough lives but like anyone would, tried to make the best of it. The role of technology was an interesting side note – in a continent where many countries have sporadic communications infrastructure, the mobile phone is an essential item. Cultural purists might balk at the sight of a Masai tribesman leaning against a tree chatting into a Nokia, but, as he explained, the device was an invaluable help to them in maintaining their traditional way of life, advising their fellow tribesman where to bring their animals for water and arranging meeting places to swap information. Like the best forms of technology, the mobile enables the Masai to continue living their traditional lives, only more efficiently than before – it becomes an invaluable, almost invisible part of life.

An overriding theme in any programme about Africa is the almost dizzying level of entrepeneurship displayed by even the most uneducated of people. This is hardly surprising – many African nations have been betrayed by their own leaders so it makes perfect sense that people take their financial matters into their own hands. Some sniffy commentators in the west complain that this displays a sort of ingrained ‘me and mine first’ culture that will forever paralyse Africa until better ways of organisation are imported from abroad, and correlate the obnoxious wealth-grabbing of various presidents to a street seller making enough to buy a mobile phone. This is a manifestly silly idea, since it pre-supposed some kind of inescapable destiny of behaviour that doesn’t stand up to even the most basic scientific analysis, and doesn’t take into account the simple fact that people will always make the best of whatever situation they find themselves in. Many Africans find themselves in situations where their leaders do nothing for them, so they help themselves and their families as much as they can. Anybody would so the same. Strong societies and communities don’t evolve overnight, especially when the conditions are unfavourable, and ordinary human self-interest is not some kind of incurable hamartia.

One enterprise on show was a kind of Western Union service in Kenya called MPusa where people send money to relatives and receive a text to confirm the money has arrived – incredibly simple, incredibily useful. Dimbleby also visited a call-centre and the set of a soap opera promoting unity between Kenya’s tribes. A focus group audience for the soap confirmed that tribal conflict in 2008 was strongest among the uneducated, but the more people were educated, the less conflict there was. Again, the simplest answer is the correct one, rather than the dark mutterings about ingrained African ‘tribalism’ that blight the conservative (and often the notionally liberal) western press. The 2008 violence in Kenya was multifaceted, but it was certainly not simply the inevitable result of bloodthirsty tribes seething at each other.

These recent programmes on Africa have been really cheering. Seeing people just getting on with their lives as society at large gradually evolves around them dispels the negative stereotypes that are pumped into our brains in the west by media, charity organisations and self-styled ‘experts’. I don’t mean that in a patronising way ‘look at them there with their little businesses’, and of course it’s obvious Africa has lots of problems to overcome. It would be naive to assume that a fully modernised African society will exactly mirror the West – there are too many dramatically different cultural features to African life for that to happen – but it looks more and more each day that Africa will eventually become a thoroughly modern continent on its own terms, which is the best news of all.