Monday , November 16, 2009

Laura Jane's Magnum Opus #2: The Day George Harrison Died, but I- and the music- Lived

Exactly seven years ago yesterday, George "No Middle Name" Harrison died from lung cancer-related brain business. I was sixteen years old, and, though his death did not kill me, I certainly did everything in my power to let it get me down. As follows is the most intimate and involved account I can possibly give of the roughest/toughest "Celebrity I Love Death Day" I've ever known.

There has always been this microscopic chip of my most idealistic self that believes, when a human being dies, they go live in some nowhere-never-nothing-nada nether-space, and sit alone in peace, their only entertainment being the letters that the living write them. I am 100% sure that this "theory" is fanciful, half-baked, impossible, and not true, but if not:

This essay is dedicated to you, My Sweet George. I'm not totally sure what you did- but, what matters is that you did it. And you did it for a million, and you did it for me. You were the Sazerac of Dark Horses, and seriously the Sexiest Man Alive, forever. "Blue Jay Way" is easily the coolest Beatles song there is, you were so hot in 1969 I can't even deal with it, and here is the rest.

1. The Morning

I was sixteen years old.
Like every sixteen year old, I knew everything.
And, like every sixteen year old, I knew nothing.

I forget every thing that happened on November 29th, 2001, before my Mother told me it (the news). I can, however, speculate. The facts:

It was really early in the morning. It was really early because I was sixteen years old, and so went to high school, and high school starts really stupidly early in the morning. In high school, my alarm went off at 6:52 AM every day, and it was always still dark out. There is no way in hell it can be healthy for a human being to wake up to darkness, unless they are a farmer, maybe- but even then, I'm not so sure.

I was sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor (beige carpet), straightening my hair with the kind of cheap drugstore straightening iron that I'd be pissed if I got stuck using seven years later. I wore a lot of eyeliner in high school; I either had or hadn't applied it. I was looking in a mirror, straightening my hair. No wonder I can't remember that morning, beforehand. Well, firstly, because it was nothing; secondly, because it was too early. Blah, blah, blah. Beep, beep, beep. Shower, shower, eyeliner. Straighten, straighten, straighten. Hi! Nothing. I don't know what music I was listening to before my Mother knocked on my door, though something (probably the ghost of George Harrison) tells me it was Pussywhipped by Bikini Kill. Who cares.

Midway through "Hamster Baby", maybe, my Mother knocked on my door. When you know somebody as well as you know your own Mother, you can even hear tragedy in their door-knock. That is the best way to know somebody, well enough to solidly and confidently intuit death from the inside sound of their knuckles hitting a bedroom door.

And from that psychic rat-a-tat, I knew I would either never see my Grandfather again, or never meet the Quiet Beatle. I sat with the possibility of either, and, using the powers of deduction and my awesome ESP skills, realized that it was George. Had it been my grandfather, it would have been sobby, sloppy unrestrained hittage, but it wasn't. The tragiknock was Laura-specific, I heard; designed to go easy on Poor Her. It felt sorry for me already; transference came fast. I felt sorry for myself. Here you go, Laura Jane. It's here. This is it, Stupid. George Harrison is dead. It's today. Live it. It's today. TODAY IS THE DAY GEORGE HARRISON DIED.

I turned the doorknob with hesitation whereas normally I would have just yelled/whined "OPEN IT". The way you want to prolong it, in those moments, what your life was then. You live your whole life of this one dumb thing and then, in one second, it becomes a whole complete 'nother, and you accept it, and the first one disappears. So weird. All of it! So weird! How you tell yourself, These are your last few moments of living a life shared with George Harrison alive; savor it. And the only way to do that is by turning the doorknob slow. So you do.

It happened:

Mom's face, hair, and eyes were all apologetic. No shit she felt sorry for me! Nobody wants to tell her only child bad news. If she had known I already Water Sign-sensed it, she probably would not have felt any better, so who cares. It happened. She told me, and I registered the meaning, but was doubtful. I did not trust my Mother that morning. It had nothing to do with Mom; everything to do with shock.

Okay, Laura Jane. Deep breath. She could be wrong. She is probably wrong. She is definitely wrong. She is sketchy. The news is sketchy. Maybe it was misreported. Maybe she is wrong.

I am only realizing now how insanely fucking irrational that shit was. What kind of fucked up shit would have had to happen to the mainstream media for it to misreport The Death of a Beatle?!?! That is imposible. The media would never.

So now I know, then I knew. I closed my bedroom door, softly though inside I slammed. The light of my room was yellow. Fuck Yellow. Fuck, Fuck, Fuck. Are you serious? I asked life. Do I seriously still have to-
Even after finding out-
Are you kidding-

Straighten, straighten, straighten. I'd stored up those tears for nine years. Straighten, straighten, straighten. Get in the car, go to school. But still- I had to act. And so, I put a shitty cheapo Best of George Harrison CD on my shitty cheapo boom-box: "Think for Yourself".

I have always really liked that song. It's fucking catchy as shit.

"I was always rahhhh-ther beastly to George," Beatles producer/Classiest Man Alive George Martin admitted threescore years down the road.

Why, George Martin? Didn't you hear it? "Think For Yourself" is sick.

2. The Car

In the car, I remained skeptical. I didn't believe it was true, which annoyed me. I was annoyed at both my Mother and the media for psyching me out. What an inconvenience, I thought.

As always, my Dad was playing CBC Radio 1, the fourth-most trustworthy radio station in the world, after BBC Radios 3-5. It was smooth-sailing until just after the Winston Churchill Boulevard entrance to the Queen Elizabeth Way: CBC Radio 1 was not reporting any such death of any such Beatle as George Harrison. Therefore, this George Harrison Being Dead business was obviously all a dumb, confused ruse. I felt made a fool of, simple and duped. I'd taped that shitty cheapo Best of GH comp and was wondering whether I should listen to it on my Walkman or not. I decided to give CBC Radio 1 the benefit of the doubt and wait for a little while longer to see if they'd report George's "death". No use in feeling sorry for myself and listening to "Something" over and over again if it was all a lie, which I was about 85% it was.

Then they reported it. Some notes of one of the songs he wrote played, they played it, and I thought, "Oh Shit Laura Jane". Oh. Shit. Laura Jane! I thought: Get ready to feel some pain, Bro! And did. I forced tears out of my big dumb eyes in fear that they would not come naturally. But then they did. So.

So. So on, so forth. Let it be- let it be? Are you serious? NO.

And as for my guitar? Well. It, it gently weeped. Wept, I mean. Wept.

3. In Between Law and The Car

There are two types of high schools: old fancy ones that look like Yale, and brown boxes that look like prisons. Mine was the latter. I arrived at it.

I felt disassociated, and not in the "I just dropped E" kinda way. I walked in through the bottom-floor doors. All those people I knew. It bothered me, how normal they were being! Didn't they know? And, if they did, or didn't, didn't they know me? Didn't they know that this would be the sort of thing that could fuck a girl (me, Laura Jane) up? Why were they all so mean? Why were they not comforting me? Where were my flowers?

I forget if Dave Smith knew or didn't know, only that he had the most common name of anybody I've ever known, and the Bluest Eyes in Texas. I stared him down, appalled, in front of the lockers by the caf, which we spelled cafe but pronounced caf. I did not care either way; North or South, it pissed me off. Nobody got it, least of all him. Things were different now- the World has changed!- but they were (I thought) too damn dumb to figure it out. Their world had changed, whether they knew or cared or not. But, I thought: you have to be pretty fucking stupid to exist in a world that had just changed, and not even notice. That's just fucked behavior in my opinion. It was my opinion seven years ago, and it is my opinion seven years later. Know when the world has changed, World! And if you're unsure as to whether it has or has not, well then: just ask.

At sixteen, I had a problem with "glamourization" and knew it. I was constantly beginning sentences with "I know I glamourize ______, but..."

I forgot that that was once a thing about myself. Back then, it was a prevalent component of how I self-defined. God. Hare Krishna. I don't even know what the Helen Keller "glamour" even means anymore, besides the magazine. Did I/do I glamorize the Beatles? What is the difference between glamourizing and idealizing something? How do you know if it is glamourization or just genuine love (which, I'll have you know, is all you need)? It seems they must only be the same if glamour is your ideal, or if you love glamour. It certainly is not mine, and I certainly do not. Glamour is nothing. I hate it.

Niki. Niki was my best friend for so long; she was that day, by a long shot and a shotput. We lived in another world together, one we drew pictures of in our Team Notebooks which were of brownstones and trees and all the famous people we liked, all living on our street and wearing stripey scarves. As much as I loved her, I at that age knew maybe she would not understand how broken I felt by this, but that she would understand I was. And that was the best I could do.

You know somebody is family when you can collapse yourself into them, which I did, into her, on The Day George Harrison Died. Stupidly early in the morning, by lockers, because we were in high school. I am not small but have always felt so. Especially around Niki: my special Libra, who shares a birthday with John Lennon himself. Ahhh, Le Sigh.

Niki led me to the basement girls' bathroom, and I cried in the middle of it and she held me there, at sixteen, and she seventeen, the two of us, in the middle of it, me crying. All the kids knew who we were and watched us, which I liked. I like being the Center of Attention, especially the tragi-Center of Attention. I was wearing a red hoody with burgundy sleeves (where did it go?) and a flared faded denim skirt and clunky boots. My hair was parted to the side, blonde-streaked and in a little ponytail. To the kids they were cooler and older and one of them was crying, which was kind of cool in that faraway way. Older people have better things to cry about.

In my head, I forced myself to repeat the sentence "I just wish I could've shaken his hand" over and over again. What I wish now is that I could've known: if you allow your thoughts to come into you naturally, you think more interesting things than some contrived semi-poetic nothings.

I don't know if ever before I had cried like that and loved somebody enough to have them hold me while doing it. I hate that then, I was not myself now: who was I, and how could I have cried like that, without really knowing why?

I knew why. Because George Harrison was dead, and I loved him, and he had died.

But, WHY???

Did I feel like he had left me behind? Were the tears an expulsion of how much it all had meant to me, all the times it did? Was I ridding myself of that, to cope? Or was I just sad to begin with, in a way that had nothing to do with George Harrison, and now had an excuse to feel it?

Krishna, Krishna, Krishna. God Only Knows.

4. Law

First Period Law.

I still see Ally, all the time, at very least once every couple of weeks. The Velvet Underground didn't say very much that I agree with, but here is one, and it's about Ally: She's My Best Friend. Enough time (well, seven years) has passed so that now, she is only really Ally to me anymore- to the rest of the world, she's Allison. Ally is a Pisces, and I love her so much it feels like sunburn.

A year earlier, she had photocopied all the best Beatles photos she had, decoupaged them onto a square box, and given it to me for Christmas. I have never stopped using it, for Very Important Purposes. Right now, it holds a stack of CDs (Cool Laura 3, Cool Laura 2, Disc 2 of Remember by the Fiery Furnaces, After the Gold Rush, Beatles-o-Rama, etc), some photobooth photos of LJ Solo, a charm of a treble clef, and a little tin of star anise.

You will never again feel pain like how you did before you ever felt pain, just like the way you'll never get drunk like how you could before you'd ever puked from getting too drunk.

I walked into my first period second-floor class with eyes garbled up like a prairie tarmac mirage. No tears, just hopeful disengagement. I remember being pissed off, feeling really let down, by Ally's indifference. She knew, but didn't care. She cared, but didn't know.

Oh well. Just like every day, I folded my arms into pretzel formation, balled up my hoody into a pillow, and fell asleep. That is what First Period Law was for. An extra 1.5 hours of sleep, every morning. It ruled. I think I might have written about this exact phenomenon in my First Magnum Opus, but I'm kind of over my First Magnum Opus and not really in the mood to re-read it and beat myself up about how crappily-written and juvie it is, just to confirm whether or not I discussed my affinity for sleeping through Twelfth Grade Law. If you're bored, let me know.

Magnum Opus or Magnum No-pus, I slept. And did not dream about George Harrison.

I felt guilty about this.

5. Stoned/French/Stoned French

I am not 100% sure if the next thing I am going to write about actually happened on The Day George Harrison Died, or if it happened on another day. If that's the case, I don't mind. If that's the case, I'm sure it's better than whatever did.

We had ten minutes been classes, and they were precious. Oh God they were precious. In the course of ten minutes: you can do a little, or you can do a lot, which is proof that time doesn't exist. In the course of those particular ten minutes, I always did my best to do a lot. Except, there is no "a lot" for me; instead, it would be "do as much as you possibly can, and make it unnecessarily productive: write a poem, confess your love to some dude, go for a jog, drink fifteen cups of coffee, etc. And if you do not, well, then you might... die?"

Enough people had died today.
I was not going to die today.
Somebody else already had.
I was not going to die today.
Today, I was going to live.

I am from Canada, and in Canada, in November, it is cold. Ally and I, in those opaline, icy-white ten minutes, scampered out to Smoker's Corner, a tiny but oh-so-rich (with what? I don't know. Take my word for it?) triangle of sidewalk a hundred-odd feet South (or North, maybe East, possibly West) of the "cafe".

Mark and Thom were smoking baby little hash joints together. They were like us, only dudes, and nothing like us: way inferior.

"Look at my fingernails," said Thom. They were tipped in black-

"Hash oil," he explained.

"I hate you," I said to myself, in my head. "George Harrison is dead, you stupid loser. You probably think you like the Beatles, but I doubt you even know that Savoy Truffle is a song by them, and you don't even care that George Harrison is dead (you stupid loser). You and your stupidity. Pure, unadulterated stupidity."

Oh! To be sixteen and fabulous-

Never again. It's as dead as Dead George Harrison, deader than Dead John Lennon.

Ally and I got super-stoned in two, then went to French class. Two minutes? A huge lie. It took us more like fifteen, then plus another, standing in the girls' bathroom, each looking at each of our eye-sets in each either mirror, "Are they red? Can you tell??"

It was not so much our eyes as it was the smell of winter, which sticks to you, which pot smoke sticks to even worse:

1. Alex and I next summer, having just gotten high at the golf course, spraying ourselves with nasty drugstore Calgon shit, preparing for walking into Blockbuster. Because Blockbuster cared-

"I'd rather just smell like weed," I said. "I'd rather just smell like weed, instead of weed and shitty perfume."

That was one of the most important realizations of my life. Seventeen and fabulous. We rented "The Royal Tenenbaums".

2) George Harrison? Still dead.
I forgot for a second.

I always like to be best friends with people who look the opposite of me. And we did- still do. Sharp blond lines versus cubby French round shit. "Circles" by the Who? Um? Lennon and McCartney?

It makes people happy. The world cannot resist a good blonde/brunette duo.

Except Madame Grupp. That year, I would lie to people and tell them her ugly chalk-striped suit was Chanel, because I wanted it to be-

Sixteen and fabulous: You Do What You Can, Man.

Ally- if this does happen to be the case, which I guess is something neither you nor I will never know, I just wanted to say, since I have never formally thanked you for it- Thanks for deflecting some of the hurting, for distracting me, for being blond sharp you, for squeezing my dumb hand, all on the day George Harrison died. Thank you, Ally. Formally, as in: on the Internet.

Because Madame Grupp did not have a Chanel suit, and I loved her for it, I decided it would be a fantastic idea to prove to her that I was neither stoned nor fifteen minutes late for class that day. I did so by volunteering to orally conjugate the most complex and difficult tense our class had tackled yet. I am Wikipedia-ing that shit right now; I'm pretty sure it was the every-tricky subjonctif.

As if I could even have told you my own name at that point! I was that perfect kind of stupid-stoned that can't happen outside of high school; it hits you triply harder because you are hiding it, and because you are experiencing it in an institutional environment, which is fucking weird.

By conjugating the verb, I mean,

Madame Grupp had to hold my hand through every damned Gallic syllable I spoke. Whatever dumbass exercise I had to do to prove that I "got it"- you know, put together some sentence about two people's names, a dude & a girl, doing some activity together in some place. The classroom as a collective unit giggled at my obviously inebriated idiocy. She's stoned. Madame Grupp had bat eyebrows to begin with, but by the time I was done explaining the ins and outs of Pierre et Juliette's excursion to la plage, they'd become utterly Vampiric. Cakey white cream-to-powder foundation hung desperately and depressingly inside the wings of her crows feet.

I think you get the point. It was a sad day.

6. Lunchtime

I had third period lunch that semester; Niki did not. This was unfortunate but made bearable by my willingness to skip fourth period biology and hang out with her. Lunch was either four mushy-gooey chocolate chip cookies, mushy-gluey white macaroni salad, a cream cheese bagel, or fries with ketchup. A Diet Coke, blue Slushie if I was depressed, or two cups of hazelnut coffee (OKAY: Why do they allow 13-18 year olds to consume copious amounts of caffeine on school property? Even at the time, I thought it was kind of fucked up. It was, however, fantabulous for curing pot hangovers).

On the day George Harrison died, I chose to abstain from eating at all. I resisted the urge to feed myself as a symbolic gesture, meant to communicate my tragic nature and intense Beatle-love (I guess?) to my peer group (particularly all the dudes I had a crush on). This was part of my "schtick" in high school. I was not clever enough to express my feelings of dissatisfaction and hopelessness through any other means but heavy-handed self-starvation. "It sucks you can't double-starve yourself," I might have thought to myself, on the day George Harrison died.

Geordon, who incidentally grew up to attain a moderate amount of fame as one of the Misshapes DJs, said, "I'm sorry for your loss." He was smirking and it was probably sarcastic. I was sitting at our reserved table which was cool for a table because it was a window seat, and we got to sit on the central heating system instead of plastic crap chairs on one side of it. Geordon informed me that another girl in our year, Christine, was also torn apart by George Harrison's death.

This made me really angry, which says a lot about who I was as a person at age sixteen. I had spent the entire morning shooting sneers at my entire school for not caring enough; then, when I found out someone did, I got angry and defensive and immediately began reciting to myself that she didn't actually care, not like I did at least.

I told Geordon to leave me alone.

I think one of the weirdest and most thought-provoking things about The Way People Are, or, The Way People Have Become, is the intensity of the relationships we have with people we don't know. Maybe half the appeal of celebrity is that having famous people around makes us ("all the lonely people") feel way less lonely. But then, when your (second-) favorite famous person dies, you feel lonelier than ever.

I realized, sitting staring straight ahead at all the kids I made a big fuss out of not relating to at all, on November 29th, 2003, The Day George Harrison Died, that none of it had ever happened. All my daydreams were and only ever would be, lame-day-lame-dreams. You can picture yourself in your head making tape-loop collabos with bedroom-eyed '66 McCartney, growing up next door to practically-your-brother John Lennon, or making eyes/out with 1964 George, he of the all-time skinniest legs, but it can't be true, and definitely isn't. It won't be, never, no matter what.

Ray Davies is not the dude I can't figure out if I have a crush on or not (he's really Lurch-hot and, like, complicated, but is it ever going to go anywhere?). Keith Moon is not my twin brother. Simon Doonan is not my uncle, and I never resisted Keith Richards' nasty advances in Marrakech and felt validated by it.

At sixteen, fabulous as I was, this was all way too harsh for me to take in. It made me cry. John Winston Ono Lennon got murdered by a chubby Geek Squad-type five years before I was born, and now George was dead too.

All I had left to wonder was: Will I Ever Meet Paul McCartney?

7. Skipping

I miss how good it felt to play hooky. I miss kicking open the glass doors to the path. I miss that icy winter blast hitting me, spelling freedom. I miss announcing my bad-ass little plan to the kids I bumped into who were in the same class I was skipping. It was the sweetest Fuck You of my life. It meant everything about me. And on this day more than any, I just felt so entitled!

I smoked an illicit cigarette at the bus stop, then boarded, stupidly relishing how tortured and alone I felt. On the bus there was me, a couple kids from school, and a bunch of old people.

And just as Keith Moon is my twin brother and I was actually the sexy-cute Girl Beatle bass player, here is what I did:

I stood on top of my seat and screamed:

Don't You Care? Don't you KNOW? One of the BEATLES died. Seriously. Seriously. Have you seriously not heard of that band? Have you never heard a song they sung? You know all those times you were grocery shopping and "Hey Jude" or "We Can Work It Out" played over the PA? Did it never occur to you that there is guitar in that song? And that somebody played it? That it wasn't just studio musicians? Do you even know what a studio musician is, for that matter? It was not a studio musician. It was not a machine. It was a man. It was DEAD GEORGE HARRISON. GEORGE HARRISON IS DEAD. And one day too, so will be you.

What will you do?

8. Work

The bus pulled into the terminal at Square One and, in vain, I checked all the newspaper boxes to see if George's death was on any front pages. It wasn't, because his death happened in the earliest hours of the morning, after they all had gone to print. This was very obvious to me. I knew this was true. It makes no sense in the world that a Beatle would die and it would go entirely unreported by every single media outlet at my disposal. But at sixteen I was accustomed to lying to myself, so used it as more hating-the-entire-world-except-for-the-Beatles-and-myself ammunition. Newspapers, I decided, were failing to report George Harrison's death. The horror of it all!

The next day, when all the George's Death newspapers did come out, I put dollars into every box and stole every paper there was. I still have them all.

On The Day George Harrison Died, I had to go to work. I was a barista at a chain coffee shop. My manager, Rob, had Short Man Syndrome and would always claim to be writing a Canadian History book for profit, but was clearly, sadly, lying.

I thought maybe he was going to let me off work that night because I had experienced a major loss. I was wrong. Instead he told me to keep my chin up, try to forget that GEORGE HARRISON WAS DEAD, and be the best damn barista I could. I wanted to heat up milk to 350 degrees and scald his face with it. Killing time before my shift, I sat in the shopping mall corridor where you could get away with smoking indoors, by The Keg Steakhouse where the stale air smelled like nasty meat. I went to work, and scowled.

On The Day George Harrison Died, I was the worst barista the world had ever known.

8. Post Haste

If The Day George Harrison Died happened in '08 rather than '03, I know exactly what I would do: get a bottle of white wine, a bottle of Perrier, Thai food takeout, and a fresh pack of cigarettes, then sit on my bed eating and crying and drinking unlimited white wine spritzers and chain-smoking and listening to "Long, Long, Long" over and over again. That would have been really nice. I forget that there was a time when I didn't know how to make life unfold in accordance with my exact perfect specifications.

On November 29th, 2003, I told my parents to go fuck themselves and stayed up all night making a zine of fake headlines about George Harrison's death:

-The World Gently Weeps for George
-Something in the Way he Moved
-A Long, Long, Long Life cut Tragically Short
-Coping with George Harrison's Death: It's All Too Much
-Hella "Dark Horse" shit
-Only a Northern Soul
-WAH-WAH (as in, like, crying)

I was right about the second and fifth.

__

George Harrison's whole deal within the Beatleverse is hard to pin down. His relevance and contributions lurk somewhere between the cracks of John & Paul's obvious genius & inevitable success and Ringo Starr's dog-eared good luck. I will never, ever know if Lennon & McCartney's flashy brilliance would have been enough to ensure that The Beatles would've been The Beatles George-free. I will never know if, had George been in a band by himself with three less-talented dudes, it would have been on any level good. But I can be sure that I will continue to contemplate these points on a semi-regular basis for the rest of my life.

Blah, blah, blah. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

I never even got to shake his hand.

9. George Harrison For Never

Sometimes I kind of hate George Harrison. He grew up to be an ungrateful codger who never had anything nice to say about The Beatles. Hey, Dude: I SO don't feel sorry for you. He also aged poorly, was really into NASCAR which is lame, had shitty taste in girls (Pattie Boyd looks like a baby and just seems kind of ditsy), ruined the White Album with the plodding feels-like-ten-year-long "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" outro, and I hate his dumb religious shit.

10. GEORGE HARRISON FOREVER

But mostly, I love George Harrison.

1. He wrote "Savoy Truffle", semi-extensive knowledge of which I think is the most accurate gauge for figuring out whether a person actually likes the Beatles or not. If you claim to be a Beatles fan but cannot recite at least three lines of "Savoy Truffle," you are a phony and a liar.

2. The segment of the endearingly-crappy Magical Mystery Tour film where George sings Blue Jay Way is really ridiculously cool. The same can be said of the moment when the character of cartoon George Harrison is introduced with a sitar twang in Yellow Submarine, but there is no video of that moment on Youtube. The MMT thing can be seen below, and here is a link to a review of MMT I wrote a hundred billion years ago, when I used to use way more impressive adjectives in my nogoodforme posts.

3. I wish John Lennon and Paul McCartney would shut up and stop arguing about who was more experimental. Blah, blah, blah, I made tape loops first, I like Stockhausen better than you do, etc. I am not about to argue that George Harrison was the "most experimental Beatle" because he made Electronic Sound, a crappy album with a cute cover. I am, however, about to argue that Wonderwall Music fucking RULES. Lucky for me, I don't have to say anything else, because I ALREADY WROTE ABOUT IT.

4. The Concert for Bangladesh was cool, and GH wore this really sick white suit with little burnt-orange Om signs embroidered on it. Here he is doing Wah-Wah, which is killer:

5. GEORGE HARRISON IS MY STYLE ICON, AND SHOULD BE YOURS, TOO. That is a link to the first post I ever wrote for nogoodforme.com; it's so cute how much effort I put into it!

6. Three (or one) word(s), depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist: LONG, LONG, LONG, my third-favourite Beatles song of all time.

7. He spearheaded the Rishikesh trip. What would the Beatles be without ever having been "Beatles in Rishikesh"-era Beatles? To think of it gives me chills.

8. The George Harrison/John Lennon bromance is one of the greatest unsung bromances of all time. It must have been so nice for them both to be able to bitch about Paul McCartney togeths. I'm so glad George was able to give John that. Here they are hanging out cutely:

10. A MYSTERIOUS COINCEDENCE

As I was typing up the part about Niki and I in the bathroom, I had my iTunes on Shuffle and it played the Anthology version of "Piggies" followed by "My Sweet Lord" consecutively, which is kind of fucked up.

__

Q.E.D,
LJF, Seven Years Later

Tags: bromances, dead and famous, George Harrison, getting high, high school nostalgia, In Memoriam, Magnum Opus, November, star anise, The Beatles, unsung bromances

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OUR LAST FEW ENTRIES

+ Random Picture Entry: "Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash" (and "Jet"!)
+ Snapshot: Listening, Watching, Reading, Wearing, Wanting
+ nogoodforme ix: All-Time Favorite Onscreen Performances
+ We're Obsessed: My Parents Were Awesome
+ Heavy Rotation: Nine Inch Nails, Bjork, Don McLean, Karen O and The Kids, The Kinks, Sloan
+ Imaginary Shopping Spree: The Imaginary Winter Coat Edition
+ LIZ AND LJ ON: Baby Liz and Baby LJ!
+ The KAT ATTACK Book Club: Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
+ All-Time Top 5 Things We Loved About Whip It
+ Random Picture Entry: Marianne Faithfull Revealed as Nail-Biter!!!
+ Snapshot: Listening, Watching, Reading, Wearing, Wanting
+ Heavy Rotation: The Konki Duet, The Raveonettes, The Freelance Hellraiser, The Gun Club, The Beastie Boys, The Idle Race
+ HOW TO LIVE: The nogoodforme Guide to Achieving Maximum Coziness
+ Imaginary Shopping Spree: Stella McCartney "Fruit of the Week" Knickers, Linda Derector Eyeglasses
+ Stories About Songs: "Acid Tongue" by Jenny Lewis (Perfume, Bad Habits, The Beatles & Carrie Bradshaw)

OLD SCHOOL

+ Listing of all entries
+ Read entries from May 19 - June 13, 2003