John & Yoko: Two Virgins

Know what I'm so incredibly sick of I could retch? The stupid "Yoko Broke Up The Beatles" argument- soooo done to death! If I had a dime for every time some jerk at a party noticed my Beatles tattoos and tried to impress me with some half-baked and redonkulously uneducated hypothesis about Yoko "Lady Macbeth" Ono's she-wolfish tendencies and the pain she inflicted upon Paul McCartney and subsequently, the world, well, I'd probably be about two dollars richer.

Fact of the matter is, Yoko made the Beatles better than they would have been without Yoko. Yoko Ono made the world better than it would have been without Yoko. Yoko Ono is every last smidge as innovative, genius, and relevant as Johnny Lemon, and if you want to fight me about this, well, you might as well go dig your own grave. My Yoko-love is packed so tight it could break every last one of your knuckles and kneebones, you hypothetical Yoko-hating jerk-off.

In my sophomore year of college, I wrote a paper about Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama and how they were the only two artists of the nineteen-sixties who took the principles of psychedelia and ran with them. I forget every point I made in the paper except for that one, but I think it was pretty good. I think I got an A minus on it, and the minus part only came about from my slackery tendency to forgo formatting a Chicago Style annotated bibliography because I'd just been up all night jamming out a ten-page paper and couldn't be bothered.

The funny thing about my Yoko Ono essay was that when I wrote it, I'd never seen the work of hers' I discussed the most, 1968's Two Virgins. I mean, it's pretty self-explanatory: serene, muted images of John & Yoko's faces spliced together, a kissing scene, and some acidic Yoko wailings as the soundtrack. See, this all happened in Ye Olde Olden Days. You might not believe this, but there was actually a time when Youtube didn't exist- I know!!! Weird, right? Or maybe it did exist, but it was so new it was practically pre-natal, and all I could ever find on it were things equal to or less than, say, the Strawberry Fields Forever video, on the obscurity-meter.

But oh how the times have changed! Two Virgins has finally been uploaded to Youtube, in all of its placid and transcendent glory. I was a little bit nervous to watch it, in case halfway through the film was punctuated by the presence of a foxtrotting cartoon puppy, and I'd totally ignored it in that paper I wrote! That would be so embarrassing! I'd never be able to show my face to my sophomore Feminism in Art professor again! And that would definitely be the end of the world.

You know, they weren't ACTUALLY virgins:

Part One: Their Faces

Part Two: Smoochin'

PS: If you can prove to me that you watched every single second of those two videos with absolutely no skipping forward, e-mail me at laura@nogoodforme.com, and I'll send you a limited-edition foxtrotting puppy etching made by John Lennon when he was five years old.

Three things to make your Thursday happy

1.

Tonight in L.A.'s the third annual Focus on Female Directors, a shorts program featuring movies and videos from Mira Nair (director of The Namesake), Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton, and up-and-coming filmmakers like Sophie Barthes, Sarah Wickliffe, Michelle Hung, and Mariam Jobrani. I'm most curious about Hilary Goldberg's "In the Spotlight," a "literary hoax" starring Guinevere Turner and Michelle Tea. Oh, and Jennifer Aniston and Andrea Buchanan's "Room 10," mostly because I've got a big giant crush on Kris Kristofferson (though more like the 1974 version), who co-stars here with Robin Wright Penn.

I've gone to Focus on Female Directors the last two years and both events were so grand; at last year's I got to see a short by Zoe Cassavetes and the unspeakably wonderful - and eventually Oscar-winning - "Danish Poet" directed by Torill Kove, which you will please watch right now if you want to have a lovely day:

2.

If you go here you can download an mp3 of "Blood is Clean," the new single from Speck Mountain. As with any band that's got hushed, dreamy vocals and weirdo lyrics and lots of spectral guitar lines, my first impulse is to liken them to Mary Timony, because in some ways I want everything in the world to be like Mary Timony. Suffice it to say this song so goes with my mood today, that mood being, "It's cold in my little tiny house and I just want to burn some jasmine candles and hide under a really old grandma-made blanket that I don't actually have." And the horns totally creep me out. It's a gem for sure.

3.

With the help of darling Creature Comforts, I've recently discovered this fantastic Etsy shop called Berkley Illustration. The artist, Ryan Berkley, makes $7 portraits of animals all dressed up to the nines, each with its own little backstory (his Siamese Cat, for instance, likes to make furniture out of salvaged materials, the panda reviews restaurants for his local weekly newspaper, and the barn owl excels at Sudoko). My favorite's the tiger, who's a general and "pretty nice guy," according to Ryan. If I had kids right now I'd want to decorate their room with stuff like this, and then they'd probably turn out all weird.

Rrrrroll up for the Mystery Tour!

I don't even want to try and guess how many times I've watched The Beatles Anthology since it originally aired in nightly installments on ABC when I was ten years old. I can fondly remember sitting on the staircase of my parents' house when I was supposed to be sleeping, revelling in the gentle lull of George Harrison's Liverpudlian accent, wistfully longing for a bedtime better-suited to my Beatles-related needs. Actually, I ever-craftily feigned illness and insomnia as an excuse to stay up and watch for longer. I would not be surprised to find out that I've watched the Anthology upwards of a hundred times.

Then there's A Hard Day's Night: the best Beatles movie to play for friends who don't really care about the Beatles, the film of theirs that holds up best outside the landscape of the Beatles. Incisive, caustic, and charming, teeming with the classically goonish Lennon comic rhetoric, I'd venture to guess that I've seen it probably around fifty times. Yes: fifty times. And as for Help? It's a little trite, of course, but totally worth it for the parade of unsurpassable Technicolor images it imparts upon the desperate fan: the dazed, sleepy-eyed mid-period Beatles scampering around, clumsy on skis, beguiling on bicycles. The great tragedy of the 21st century is how Help remains unavailable on DVD; after waiting six-plus years for its inevitable release, I recently gave up and eBay-ed a VHS copy in order to scratch my long-standing itch. As such, I'd guess I've seen Help a comparatively scanty ten to fifteen times. But don't fret: now that I finally own it, I'm planning on making up for lost time, and stat.

Which leads me to what I actually want to talk about (all apologies, nothing makes me digress like The Beatles): the Fab Four's final foray into the cinescape of their day (excepting Yellow Submarine, which had nearly zero Beatles involvement--it's not even their real voices!--and therefore doesn't count): Magical Mystery Tour. Shockingly enough, I've seen Magical Mystery Tour only twice, and one of those two times was last night. Considered by the most erudite of Beatles scholars to be the one wayward weak point in an otherwise flawless ten-year run (okay, well, there's also the disaster that is Rocky Raccoon, but whatever, they can't all be winners), Magical Mystery Tour is primarily a Paul McCartney vanity project. The film is bogged down by endless footage of Paul being Paul, and dazzingly so: five straight minutes of Paul exuding charisma at the peak of his hotness in the foothills of the French countryside, soundtracked by the sonic reverie of The Fool on the Hill; Paul excelling at the Vaudevillian choreography accompanying Your Mother Should Know; Paul play-acting at impish cuteness whilst wearing a wizard costume. The movie's attempts at plot and narrative are boring, impossible to follow, self-indulgent and generally unfunny. This being said, I've always been of the belief that Magical Mystery Tour is only relevant when functioning within the same context as other cinematic icons of psychspolitation, like the Monkees' staggeringly-trivial-but-aesthetically-pleasing-nonetheless Head (which is probably an MMT rip-off, come to think of it) or Wild in the Streets, aptly described by the Internet Movie Database as an "unintentionally funny and moronic social satire" (the soundtrack, however, rules: the premise of the movie is that Max Frost, a turned-on 22-yearr-old rock star, becomes President of the United States, relegating the over-thirty crowd to Dystopian "retirement homes" and forcing them to take LSD. His fake band, Max Frost and the Troopers, have a couple of bona fide hits under their belt: Nary a DJ night has passed where I haven't been compelled to play their swelling Fourteen or Fight).

Last night, however, I happened to perceive Magical Mystery Tour in something of a new light. Yes, of course it is still undeniably weak (though the ever-cocksure McCartney insists in Anthology footage that it was a significant inspiriation to Spielberg et al; actually a work of genius if you squint your eyes and cock your head a little to the right), but there are moments of brilliance within it. I mean, come on, it's the Beatles! The first scene that really thrilled me takes place on the (Magical Mystery) tour bus: John Lennon and George Harrison sit together; a young girl (Little Nicola, maybe four or five) sits upon John's lap, and he regales her with kooky, screwy wisecracks and by lampooning with a red balloon. This particular scene immaculately demonstrates Lennon's usually-obscured softer, more tender side: while perhaps my obsessive hero-worship of John Lennon is a little, er, ridiculous and overblown (among other things), this unprecedented glimpse into his fatherly benevolence nearly brought a tear to my eye. Sadly, this scene is nowhere to be found within the expansive archives of Youtube.

However, the second scene that effectively blew my mind is in fact available for all to see. This clip, a proto-music video of George Harrison performing his heavy-lidded, melancholic Blue Jay Way, embodies the very crux of my aesthetic sensibilities: Very Hot Boy with Very Good Bone Structure; lush, phantasmagorical, in-your-face psychedelic renderings; great representations of the daffy, characteristically-George personal style I mused about a few weeks ago; and a hearty dose of good-old "The Beatles being scrappy and clowning around boyishly". The sheer beauty of this clip transcends the otherwise middling bulk of Magical Mystery Tour, and, in my opinion, justifies its very existence. When the BBC initially aired MMT on Boxing Day of 1967 to rather harsh reviews, one particularly snotty newsman declared that the movie "shattered the myth of the Beatles' genius forever". But for me, the inclusion of this clip serves as a reminder that amidst the undeniable mediocrity of the film, the Beatles' relentless creativity and perspicacity were merely dormant: only sleeping if you will.

Soap and Songs

My neighbor Sarah and I were sitting outside our local bar talking about what music we were currently listening to and both bonded over our love of Fleetwood Mac when she mentioned a band that she'd been putting on heavy rotation recently called Midlake. A few weeks later, I'm checking out their album The Trials of Van Occupanther (on Bella Union, the label that brings us such perennial favorites as Dirty Three, Lift to Experience and Devics) and they strongly recall Fleetwood Mac, as well as Christopher Cross. But don't get me wrong- these are comparisons of complete praise. The vocals somehow convey the soaring lilt of Rufus Wainwright and even Thom Yorke, but the unique instrumentations keep one foot firmly rooted in good old fashioned rock music, maybe of the 70's AM persuasion. Young Bride is an especially enchanting song. This album might be the perfect soundtrack of balmy summer sunsets.

Sarah also happens to run a family-owned soap shop that I worship for their amazing Castile Silk soap (100% olive oil with sage, spearmint and orange), which does wonders for my sensitive skin and is gentle enough to use on my face as well as the rest of me. They also have the most exquisite selection and arrangements of flowers I've ever seen. Saipua (derived from the Finnish word for soap) has a storefront on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, but if that's too far a distance to travel for the intoxicating experience of surveying all they have available in person (the store is especially charming), peruse their website at saipua.com.