Mclennon Truthers 🤝 John Was Killed By Cia Truthers

This line is so funny. Soccer mom that just gave herself a pelvic injury by doing crescent lunge pose too enthusiastically.

John Lennon & Paul McCartney on the set of television special The Music of Lennon & McCartney at Granada Studios in Manchester, England | 1 November 1965

The Virgin and the Eagle.

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The Way to Santiago

Anyone who undertakes all or part of the Camino de Santiago will be familiar with the question 'Why are you doing it?', implying that everyone who laces on a pair of hiking boots and shoulders a heavy backpack for the long tramp across Northern Spain has a clear-cut mission in mind for undertaking this 1,000 year old pilgrimage. In reality, few have one concrete reason for doing it, or even any reason, and those who set out with one intention in mind nearly always have a completely different experience than what they expected. Particularly for those who expect some kind of miraculous 'road to Damascus' moment, the sheer banality of the trudge, during which few thoughts more profound than 'I'm hungry' or 'My feet hurt' tend to occupy the mind, can be a rude surprise. But sticking it out does lead to a strangely satisfying experience, both more ordinary and more transcendent than what the enlightenment-seekers expect: the sense of wholeness that comes from perseverance. 

This ordinary extraordinariness is the subject of Emilio Estévas' film The Way, clearly a labour of love for the director and his father Martin Sheen, who plays the lead role. Sheen is Tom Avery, a taciturn California opthamologist with few interests outside work and golf at the country club. Tom's son Daniel (played by Estévas himself) is the exact opposite, a wanderer who abandons his doctorate studies to travel the world, much to his father's disapproval. A flashback scene shows Tom telling Daniel 'My life may not look like much to you, but it's the life I chose', to which Daniel responds 'You don't choose life Dad, you live it.'

Daniel's living of life takes a tragic turn when he embarks on the Camino in southern France, and ignoring warnings about inclement weather, is caught in a storm in the Pyrenees and killed. The story of the film follows a shellshocked Tom as he travels to France to identify his son's body, has the remains cremated and in an uncharacteristically spontaneous decision, continues the walk himself, depositing handfuls of Daniel's ashes along the way. Like all peregrinos (pilgrims) Tom encounters cranky alburgue (hostel) wardens, crowded dorms filled with snoring fellow walkers, sore feet and even sleeping rough on his journey. Along the way he is first annoyed by, and eventually forms a grudging friendship with, a party-loving Dutchman, a neurotic Canadian and an loudmouth Irish travel writer. The foursome encounter various obstacles, including robbery, arguments and even an arrest, but finally reach the cathedral of Santiago, each having learned far more than they intended or expected to.

The Way is filmed along the real Camino route and is wonderfully accurate about the day-to-day realities of doing the walk - the beautiful countryside, the physical privations and the un-pilgrim-like behaviour of many fellow travellers. Eccentrics abound, and one of Tom's biggest challenges is learning to tolerate people he'd never meet in his ordinary life. In a way, the walk teaches him to understand Daniel's waywardness, by revealing how stimulating it can be to talk to people (even annoying, half-crazy people) that one would normally never encounter.

All the characters are profoundly sad in their own way, yet their capacity to appreciate the absurd carries them along and saves them from complete self-absorption. The uniquely communal feeling of the walk, where people join up, drift apart and reunite along the road without the need for mobile phones or internet is perfectly evoked. There are frequent lapses into sentimentality and some clunky dialogue, but the characters (with the possible exception of James Nesbitt's over-the-top Jack) are believable and humanly flawed, and the brotherly friendship they form over three months, full of humour and bickering and understated affection, is beautifully shown. A character tells Tom halfway through 'This walk is nothing to do with religion', meaning that while many may expect miracles, it is the very non-miraculous nature of the characters' development that is the point of the Camino. Like so many peregrinos, Tom reaches the end of the route fundamentally the same person, but touched by a profound sense of acceptance, kindness, love and wonder, a state that comes at him obliquely while his intentions are elsewhere.

Good analysis of LJ. I don't remember overt Paul disike but I do remember a lot of Linda dislike. Tho that seems to have been part of a sort of reflexive lack of solidarity between women in the rock scene at the time, encouraged to see each other as threats or something. There's even a weirdly bitchy aside about Joni Mitchell of all people.

The Lost Weekend doco is prob more mature in that way & more positive to Paul+Linda, tho it seems revisionist in that John's violence & periodic dumping of May is played down, & the "paul bringing a message from yoko" forms part of her story by then even tho it's clear from the book that she knew nothing about this at the time. Not dunking on May or saying she's lying - it's just another example of how memories get softened with time, and augmented by stories from others.

Anyway my favourite part of Loving John is John and David Bowie queening out over Elizabeth Taylor, please someone put that in a fic

finished loving john and am turning it around and around in my head. may pang is not without her biases but it's pretty easy to flag where they are and what they're colored by. it is clear to me that she didn't like paul very much, and im not sure whether that's because of the way john presented him to her amidst the business troubles or because she perceived he didn't like her with john. the way may presents the johnandyoko reconciliation, it's entirely caused by yoko's hypnotherapist. but we know that's not entirely true and i dont know if at the time of writing she knew about paul telling john in LA that yoko wanted him back. there's a lot of instances where john and may are conspiring against yoko: keeping secrets and telling lies to pacify her. i dont know if may considered the two of them might have been doing the same to her. it seems easier for her to blame yoko for the whole thing, both the start and end of the relationship, and while she certainly deserves quite a bit of blame it's also john who won't take no for an answer when he first tries to sleep with her and it's john who chose to go back to yoko. yoko knew how to use the deepest parts of his psychology to convince him, but is was still HIS psychology. and honestly as an outside observer even though may had an incredible strength of character at such a young age i dont think anyone was really a match for the depth of trauma john had and it's entirely possible something worse may have happened had he stayed with her longer. and he did almost kill her.

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.

hi pope leo can u drop the skincare routine pls

The Beatles at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England | 25 March 1963 (I)

Victorian sexplorer and cross-cultural relationships

Richard Burton

Last night I watched a documentary on Richard Burton presented by Rupert Everett (The Richard Burton in question was the 19th century explorer, writer and translator of the Kama Sutra, not, as Everett put it, ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s fifth and sixth husbands’). Unsurprisingly, considering its lubricious presenter, the documentary focused on Burton’s exploration of sexuality in various parts of the world and his rejection of hypocritical Victorian mores.

I’ve seen Everett in presenter mode before, in a documentary on Byron a few months ago, and while he can be insufferably irritating, I’ve always quite admired his consistency of personality, This was even more evident in this programme, where he was filmed wandering around Egypt, India and Goa among other places. Whether talking to old ladies in the Indian streets, bantering with nuns in a Goa convent or quizzing an Egyptian masseur on his sexual preferences, Everett didn’t substantially change his personality or delivery to fit in with his surroundings. Even when quizzing an imam on the position of homosexuality in Islam (unsurprisingly, verboten!), he was still himself, understandably a heavily dialled-down version for his own safety, but essentially unchanged. The almost jarring sight of a Western person just being relaxed and normal in foreign countries shows us how most TV presenters (and many travellers) take on a fake, simplified persona to interact with ‘natives’. Does this spring from lack of confidence in one’s own personality, or a persistent Western concept of darker-skinned people as eternally ‘other’? Probably a bit of both.

Somebody like Everett, who is clearly an unapologetic egoist, simply doesn’t think to behave any differently – he does not seem hamstrung by post-colonial guilt, which ironically causes many British travellers to be more condescending to their former subjects than if they weren’t plagued by it. The only other TV personality I can think of who displays the same unselfconsciousness is Hector Ó hEochagháin, who shares Everett’s qualities of being intensely annoying and deeply engaging. I remember seeing him in a travel programme where he crossed part of the Sahara, and was struck by the ease with which he interacted with the men accompanying him, drinking and bantering around the campfire. It shouldn’t be striking to see a group of people from different countries interacting normally, but western attitudes and the disparity of wealth between the First and Third Worlds usually places a stranglehold on normality.

Burton found it very easy to interact in the various countries he lived in, mainly due to his skill in assimilating. Local prostitutes (male and female) and mistresses taught him about a world of sexuality miles away from the whalebone corsets of his upbringing. However the key issue of sexual relationships between people of vastly differing wealth appears to have changed little since his time. In the documentary, an unnamed Egyptian masseur gave insight into this as he tried to entice Everett into a ‘hard sex’ or ‘soft sex’ massage. Politely deflecting the proposition, Everett asked the man if he liked men or women, who replied that he preferred women. When Everett asked how he could perform sex acts on men if he was not homosexual, the man seemed confused and replied ‘it’s my job.’ Therein lies the key issue in relationships that cross these kinds of boundaries. Even outside the world of prostitution, how often do the people from the poorer countries actually love their richer partners, and how much of the attachment is driven by monetary need? Is their even a division in the mind of a very poor person between loving attachment and financial security? How much does the richer partner even mind if their lover really cares for them or not? Is a separate homosexual identity a purely western invention, when a married man with children living in a poor country sees no discord in performing sex acts on other men for money?

There’s no doubt that some cross-cultural relationships work very well, but it seems that in many of them a certain amount of delusion is required on the part of the richer partner that they won’t be abandoned if the money runs out. This sounds like an offensive cliché, but I don’t mean it that way at all – primarily it’s not cultural reasons that lead to this disparity in expectations, but simple economics. It’s impossible to underestimate the effect poverty has in shaping personality, and the same for wealth. Coming from a middle-class background, there are dozens of things I used to take for granted – the idea that people can follow any career they wish, that the norm for romantic relationships is financial and gender equality, that only ‘bad’ people commit violent crime – but these assumptions are founded on the comfortable base of coming from generations of professionals who worked hard to give me such an easy view of the world. There’s no shame in coming from such a background, but it’s crucially important to recognise that our views on life are often hopelessly narrow and things sometimes assumed to be universal are impossible for thousands of people, due to the financial inequality of the world. I could be biologically the same person but I would have vastly different views of the world, life, work, marriage and my sense of self if I had been born in Calcutta, Burundi or even deprived parts of Dublin.

The scandals involving the poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh and his Nepalese boyfriends showed how little has changed since Burton’s day. From watching the documentary, it seemed fairly obvious that few, if any of the young men would have identified as homosexual in the Western sense, but they were happy to play that role (and the role of obsequious, shoe-cleaning servants) for their rich white benefactor. Again, the lines between avarice and affection seemed blurred – the men were not in love with Ó Searcaigh, but they had affection for him nonetheless. From the poet’s point of view, it didn’t seem to matter a great deal to him whether they cared deeply for him or not. The documentary on Ó Searcaigh was keen to portray the Nepalese boys as helpless victims of an evil predator, but this was simplistic and condescending – it seems unlikely they were not at least partly driven by personal gain. The relationships were essentially exploitative, but not hugely more so than many so-called ‘equal’ Western marriages. Maybe the real scandal should be that an economic situation still prevails in the world that allows such relationships to thrive.