Sunday, July 11, 2004



We're living in such conservative times. Anyone who is prepared to commit a passionate act for something they believe in is considered crazy.

A cold story about the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin trapped in the tomb, may not sound like hottest book in town
Hitler and Stalin took over societies already riddled with fear of the future, with paranoia about conspiracies and with hatred of 'others' expressed in murderous language. Both dictatorships were able to replace the notion of moral and legal absolutes with 'historical absolutes': the idea that law must be subordinated to the 'iron laws' of development, whether Marxist-Leninist or racism...
Steel magnate Fritz Thyssen fled to Switzerland because he believed that Nazi planning was 'Bolshevising' Germany. Factory manager Victor Kravchenko defected in 1943 because he found that class privilege and the exploitation of labour in Stalinist society were no better than the worst excesses of capitalism. Violence was... regarded as redemptive, saving society from imaginary enemies. It is the memory of that deception which still, generations later, darkens our hopes of constructing a future through politics.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Do-or-Die Revolution: A Hard Day's Escape
When the Beatles spontaneously launch into I Should Have Known Better from the caged-in luggage compartment of a train as a group of girls cluster outside, Taylor shoots the crisscrossing fence wires not as a cold, defensive barrier but as a protective one, one that fosters a kind of intimacy: It's all that separates the Beatles from the world, but it also frames them beautifully, a visual affirmation that these four raffishly striking young men were made to be seen as well as heard.
There was a time, shortly after John Lennon's death, when A Hard Day's Night was almost unbearable to watch. It was bad enough that we all knew how the band's story had ended, with lawyers and negotiations and daggers of mistrust shooting four ways and then, the worst thing imaginable, silence. But in the early '80s the story took a sadder and more jagged turn. If it was hard to think of the 1980 John as dead, leaving behind some great and some mediocre solo records and a grieving widow nobody ever liked much anyway, it was incomprehensible that the 1964 John -- the one we'd loved first -- was gone too.

The great Beatles movie reminds us how much they gave -- and how much we took [The world premiere of The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night was in London in July 1964 ]
• · See Also Pretty good for a leg crosser: Defender of the little people, Sharon Stone lists her requirements for taking a job
• · · See Also Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline: Fewer Than Half of American Adults Now Read Cold River
• · · · See Also Nobodies of the world unite!
• · · · · Oedipus complex is the antecedent Hamlet complex Ours is a culture obsessed by the skull beneath the skin
• · · · · · Where it will all end, knows God! You heard it here first: Congratulations Terry, ouch Terence Alan Teachout ((Readers of Cold River & Barbara Bush drown in the 33.333% of the Bohemian Index featured on About Last Night))