#but Miles and Julian are ‘you’re my BROTHER and I LOVE YOU’ even though they’ll never say it

[hawkp]

Thinking about how Miles had two brothers and leaving them when he joined up was hard for him.

Thinking about how as much as Julian rubbed him the wrong way when they met, he definitely started to think of him as another brother.

Thinking about how they watch out for and fight vehemently for each other.

[to0thach3]

glowing, pt. 4

pt. 1,   pt, 2,   pt. 3,   p. 4,   pt. 5,   pt. 6,   pt. 7

Dinners, at the palace or not, were awkward.

They were always a little bit strange, with the odd mix of people that attended them, and maybe the unspoken feelings had always left an uncomfortable aura.

But the meals that followed Portia's visit to her brother were nearly unbearable, for anyone. Muriel had gotten so tense that he'd left the table, even the building, on multiple occasions. The five people that remained, all characteristically chatty, fell dead silent, and it wasn't unusual for the only noise to be that of silverware against plates.

Asra frequently tried to start up a conversation, asking Nadia about the rebuilding of the Flooded District, or tapping the table in front of Julian to get his attention.

Sometimes it worked, and the uncomfortable atmosphere relented for a minute or two, and sometimes someone would even laugh. But then Julian would lock eyes with MC, or Portia with Julian, and things would fade back.

One night, 2 weeks after that day at Julian's house (5 weeks into the disease, a nagging voice told him), the silence at the magic shop's dinner table had gotten a bit too stifling, and Nadia broke it by asking MC about how the wedding planning had been going. MC blinked quickly, reaching blindly for Asra's hands, which cradled hers gently. Her eyes darted to Julian, and he almost thought he saw guilt within them.

"It's going well," she began after clearing her throat. "Asra's sent a letter to his parents, so they should be arriving in a few weeks. I don't have anyone to invite, so it'll be pretty small. You all, Muriel, Mazelinka. You're welcome to invite your sisters, Nadi. Fill up the empty seats." She gave a strangled little laugh. "I can count on all of you being there, right?" Her eyes flickered to Julian once more.

"Of course," Nadia said airily. "And my sisters adore you, I'm sure they would be happy to come. As would Lucio, but that's completely your choice."

MC nodded slowly. "We'll talk about it. Julian? You'll be there? Just as a guest, I mean." The eye contact was painfully intense, and Julian nearly shrunk under it. He was at a loss for words, until Portia elbowed him roughly. "Yes," he sputtered. "Of course. I'll be there." He paused, mind moving a thousand miles an hour to make the quick decision. "Right beside you, if you'd still let me stand with you."

MC looked at him blankly. Julian watched as Asra stroked her hand lightly with his thumb, and fought to keep down a bout of coughs and the flowers that would no doubt accompany it. "Thank you, Julian," MC said softly. "I'd love that."

Asra gave Julian a lazy, grateful smile, and Julian felt his heart jump, though he had no idea why. "It's getting late," Asra said with a glance toward the west window. "You're all welcome to stay, but I need to get up early to visit Muriel." He stood fluidly, leaning down to press a kiss against MC's temple. "I'll see you when you come to bed, love," he whispered. Not quiet enough, and the vines around Julian's lungs clamped tighter. The surge of jealousy that ripped through him was overwhelming and terrible, and he covered his mouth with his arm and a cough ripped through him.

"Whoever leaves last, be sure you lock up!" Asra called over his shoulder as he headed upstairs with one last wave.

A few more coughs rattled through Julian's chest, and he felt Portia's hand lightly pat him on the back, and MC looked at him with concern. "Are you okay, Jules?"

Julian nodded in lieu of an answer, looking down at his arm and quickly scooping up the petals that had fallen onto his leather sleeve, tucking them into his pocket. Portia watched him carefully, trading a glance with him before speaking up. "He's getting over an illness. We're not quite sure what, but he's had a nasty cough. That's why he missed a few dinners over the last couple of weeks." Her words were clear and believable, but Julian heard the tension and anxiety behind them, and he frowned.

MC's eyebrows furrowed, worry lines appearing. "That's awful. Any other symptoms? The air's been getting drier, that can't be easy."

"Some of the groundskeepers are out sick as well," Nadia chimed in. "There might be something going around."

"I'm alright. Just a cough, probably just a cold." Julian stood, maneuvering his long legs out from under the table. "I should be going. Goodnight, ladies."

He headed briskly to the door, but MC was right behind him. "Jules!" she called gently as she caught up with him at the entryway. "I'm sorry, about what happened at the palace. I had no idea you weren't feeling well, and springing that on you must have caught you off-guard." She stared at him with wide eyes. "And it means the world to me that you'll stand with me at the wedding. So... I'm sorry, and thank you. Oh!" She reached around him to open the door, gesturing for him to step ahead of her. They both walked a few steps into the street, and MC linked her arm with Julian's. This wasn't strange. She usually insisted on walking him to Goldgrave after dinner, as though he needed protection.

"I wanted to ask if you'd spend the day with me tomorrow." MC grabbed onto his arm with her free hand, fingers playing idly with the metal snaps. "Asra will be in the forest all day, and Nadia has some kind of taste test for the wedding."

Julian looked down at her curiously. "Shouldn't you be there for that? Since it's your wedding?"

MC shrugged. "I trust Nadia's judgement, and it sounds like it'll be tedious. So, I'd like to spend the day with you. We can go to the Red District, or the Theatre, or the Market. We could spend the day at the cottage. Whatever you want."

Julian rolled his shoulders, and MC let go of his arm. "I've missed you," he said gently. "But I don't think it's a good idea for us to spend time alone together."

"Oh."

The word carried through the narrow streets, and the echo rang in Julian's ears.

"I'm sorry. I just thought... I thought we were okay now? I'm sorry. Asra said that things would be okay if I apologized. I just want- I want things to be okay, Julian. Why are we not okay?"

"'Asra said'?" Julian stepped back. "You apologized because Asra told you to?"

Head tilted, MC looked up at the doctor. "Yeah. He thought it was the best way to resolve this. Are you angry with me?"

"Oh, I'm sure Asra would have an answer to that."

She crossed her arms over her chest and scoffed. "So you're mad that I asked my fiancé for advice? What's going on, Jules? Why do you suddenly have an issue with me and Asra's relationship?"

"Suddenly? You think the two people I've loved in my life can get engaged, and that my issue with it is sudden?" Julian flayed his arms out in frustration, and locked eyes with a stunned MC.

"Jules..."

"Don't-" He scuttled back a few more steps. "Don't call me that. Ask Portia or Nadia if they'll stand with you, because I can't do it. I'm sorry." He turned and rushed down the street toward Goldgrave, leaving MC in the dust as her tears started to fall.

[auskultu]

“I Read the News Today, Oh Boy”

Nat Hentoff, Ramparts, November 1967

You see, we haven’t really started yet, the Beatles. The future stretches out beyond our imagination. There is musical infinity as well. We’ve only just discovered what we can do as musicians. What threshold we can cross. It doesn't matter so much anymore if we’re No. 1 or on the chart. It's all right if the people dislike us. Just don't deny us. — George Harrison

As the rush to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band confirmed, the Beatles are now Art. Jack Kroll, Newsweek’s analyst of Now Culture, proclaimed “A Day in the Life” to be “the Beatles’ ‘Waste Land.’” In the New Statesman, composer-critic-musicologist Wilfred Metiers devoted an entire column to an exegesis of the themes of loneliness that make the album “art of an increasingly subtle kind.”

The Beatles, moreover, are Functional Art. Said the Times Educational Supplement (of London): “Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics represent an important barometer to our society—sentiments which are shared by pupils in every classroom in Britain ... If the record’s understanding were to be reflected in Britain’s teachers, our schools might be more sympathetic institutions than some are now.” In echo, a school superintendent this past July told a conference of music educators in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, how to start their journey across that alarmingly widening generational gap: “If you want to know what youths are thinking and feeling, you cannot find anyone who speaks for them or to them more clearly than the Beatles.” Said Beatles even speak for and to the dead. At the funeral in August of murdered British playwright Joe Orton, the Beatles’ recording of “A Day in the Life” started the decidedly secular service.

And yet three years ago, Paul McCartney insisted, “We have no message and aren’t trying to deliver one.” What is the message now? On one level, it’s not quite clear, even within the company of the four gurus. Tim Leary announces: “The Beatles have taken my place. That latest album—a complete celebration of LSD.” And Paul McCartney, who has indeed taken LSD, says: “After I took it, it opened my eyes. We only use one tenth of our brain. Just think what all we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part! It would mean a whole new world. If the politicians would take LSD, there wouldn’t be any more war, or poverty.”

But George Harrison, once a trip-taker, tells the Los Angeles Free Press: “Acid is not the answer, definitely not the answer. It’s enabled people to see a little bit more, but when you really get hip you don’t need it.” And John Lennon, who has also journeyed somewhere into himself through acid, laughs when told that hippies, actual and acolyte, take the initials of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as a hortatory message. “No,” he says, “my son, Julian, brought a painting home from school and said it was a picture of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” So what is the message? Look up in the sky—and live.

On another level, however, the message is clear and Beatles-consensual enough. Writing of the Sgt. Pepper implosion, Paul Williams, editor of Crawdaddy, the higher critic of the new sounds and feelings, asserts: “If there’s a message, it’s ‘Dig Yourself.’ ” With a little help from your friends. It’s getting better all the time, and it doesn’t really matter if you’re wrong or right.

But that’s not all. There is also death. The Beatles are, up to a point, hip to death, more so than any other popular music group has ever been. Eleanor Rigby is dead long before the obsequies. And death grins in “A Day in the Life” of the man who blew his mind out in a car. In the same song, the deaths of miners in Lancaster become “four thousand holes ... and though the holes were rather small they had to count them all.”

The man in the car is bloody well dead, the crowd of people who stood and stared has turned away, the miners are in holes, but “though the news was rather sad / Well I just had to laugh. I saw the photograph.” Thus the auto-anesthesia of us all, who will not see pain, who will not believe in death, and who are disappointed when the news is not of pain and death. But could the song also show the Beatles’ own auto-anesthesia? Having seen pain and having thought of death, do they turn to save themselves—and their friends—through magic?

Magic? Wilfred Mellers finds one common bond in the music of Boulez, Cage, Bob Dylan and the Beatles—“an attempt to return to magic, possibly as a substitute for belief.” In an interview with Miles in the International Times, Paul McCartney says: “With any kind of thing, my aim seems to be to distort it, distort it from what we know it as, even with music and visual things and to change it from what it is to see what it could be. To see the potential in it all. To take a note and wreck it and see in that note what else there is in it, that a simple act like distorting it has caused. To take a film and to superimpose on top of it so you can’t quite tell what it is anymore, it’s all trying to create magic, it’s all trying to make things happen so that you don’t know why they’ve happened.” 

And George Harrison, anxious for serenity, talks about being only 24 “in this incarnation,” and goes on: “We’re Beatles, and it’s a little scene and we’re playing and we’re pretending to be Beatles, like Harold Wilson’s pretending to be Prime Minister . . . They’re all playing. The Queen is the Queen. The idea that you could wake up and it happens that you’re Queen, it’s amazing but you could all be Queens if you imagine it. . . they’ll have a war quickly if it gets too good, they’ll just pick on the nearest person to save us from our doom. That’s it, soon as you freak out and have a good time, it’s dangerous, but they don’t think of the danger of going into some other country in a tank with a machine-gun and shooting someone. That’s all legal and aboveboard, but you can’t freak out—that’s stupid.”

Magic is dangerous to the world, but the world is more dangerous to the Beatles—and to their friends. And so, there is the leap into the magic of the loving community. We all live in our yellow submarine and our friends are all on board. With our love—we could save the world—if they only knew. [But since they don’t know] “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying, it is not dying.” In this, the Beatles and the hippies are together in a search for peace.

And so the Beatles no longer speak to the very young who do not yet know how dangerous the world is, how efficiently numbing, how full of little boxes for them. The very young have turned to the plastic Monkees; but the older teens and many in their twenties and beyond are listening. On the other hand, the Revolver disc was dismissed by a class in a large industrially-centered English school with the words: “Aw no, sir, we don’t like that: it’s all Chinky.”

Beatles records are not on the jukeboxes in the black ghettos nor, I expect, are they the food of magic for those in the lower tracks of any of our schools. Those young abandoned magic with Santa Claus. The Beatles are increasingly for the comfortable and afraid—afraid to be lonely, afraid to be Eleanor Rigby. It is true, as Frank Kofsky writes in the National Guardian, “There are millions of devout followers of Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles, and all the rest, who are in opposition to the society that spawned them and are, in the words of a Jefferson Airplane song, ‘trying to revolutionize tomorrow.’ In hippie communities like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, they strive to realize the new socialist man (my label, not theirs) who will be capable of fulfilling to the limit the creative potential of the human race, especially in the arts.”

But, even with a little help from their friends, will these revolutionizers of tomorrow-through love, through consciousness-expansion, through digging themselves on their yellow submarine-change what’s happening out there? Even if you could spike LBJ’s root beer with LSD, what then?

However, as for expanding creative potential among those in the beloved community, the Beatles are indeed among the liberators. They started nibbling at Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. (In that incarnation, George Harrison also picked up on Chet Atkins and Duane Eddy.) They were less black-inflected than the Animals and the Rolling Stones; but along with them and other young British rockers brushed by the blues, the Beatles turned millions of American adolescents onto what had been here all the hurting time. But the young here never did want it raw so they absorbed it through the British filter. Oh yes, some later found Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and now they’re into their own kind of greyboating with Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield and Big Brother and the Holding Company, but that’s a trip, as it has to be, with a return ticket. I mean, Shankar is beloved, but if he put an evening raga on you at high noon, would you know?

Anyway, the Beatles went on—into and through Buddy Holly, the Nashville communion, Bob Dylan, the Who, the Beach Boys. They were getting to where, as Paul McCartney put it, they could be influenced by themselves. And in their wake they left behind the fake imperatives of the 32-bar tune, “consonant” changes, steady tempos. Harmonies shifted vertiginously, their early modalities grew strange branches, voicings continually surprised themselves, and uncommonly ecumenical textures appeared —the sitar in “Norwegian Wood,” guitar tracks running backwards on “I’m Only Sleeping,” sitar and electronic sounds in “Love You Too,” more electronics in “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Writing of the latter, Mellers discovered “a new sonorous experience in amalgamating avant-garde jazz (Mingus-like jungle noises, Cage-like electronics, folk penta-tonicism, Indian sitars).” And in the Mellotron overlay in “Penny Lane,” he wondered if Lennon and McCartney had been digging Charles Ives.

Sgt. Pepper has further disintegrated paper categories and boundaries to get to where the Beatles could hear where they belong at the moment. Their first album had been recorded in one day. This one, with four to six sessions a week, evolved through more than three months, and is the most heterogeneous, heady mix of possibilities in pop music history. Combs and paper over a string octet and harp on “Lovely Rita”; multiple tracks of percussion and strings into which sitar, tamboura and swor-mandel are imbedded, swirling between 4/4 and 5/4 on “Within You Without You.” Three tambouras, a dilruba, a tabla, an Indian table-harp, a sitar (Harrison), three cellos, and eight violins on “She’s Leaving Home”; Lennon on Hammond organ, recorded at different speeds and then overlaid with electronic echoes, while four harmonicas disport in Being for the “Benefit of Mr. Kite.” And on and on to the 41-piece orchestra in “A Day in the Life” with, as Jack Kroll exults, “a growling, bone-grinding crescendo that drones up like a giant crippled turbine struggling to spin new power into a foundered civilization.”

Where now? The next move, says Paul McCartney, “seems to be things like electronics because it’s a complete new field and there’s a lot of good new sounds to be listened to in it. But if the music itself is just going to jump about five miles ahead, then everyone’s going to be left standing with this gap of five miles that they’ve got to all cross before they can even see what scene these people are on ... That’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to look into that gap a bit.” 

As George Harrison says, “You see, we haven’t really started yet, the Beatles. The future stretches out beyond our imagination.” The Beatles are absolutely fre-e-e. “The competition among the best—Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, among them—is no longer for money,” observes pop chronicler Al Aronowitz in the Saturday Evening Post. “They already have enough of that. The competition is in music . . . The best artists in the business—the aristocracy—are moving into positions of power. They’re making fewer and fewer compromises with commercialism. There’s hardly anything interesting happening outside this exclusive circle.”

Meanwhile Rap Brown tries to find the revolution and the strategists of the New Politics scour the new class for their constituency. But to the Beatles, are they for real? Why be up-tight about anything? “At the back of my brain somewhere,” Paul McCartney says, “there is something telling me now that ... it tells me in a cliche too, it tells me that everything is beautiful.” And so it may be. Who can put down magic that works for the magician?

Must everything be related constantly to the non-psychedelic world? I keep thinking about the Beatles as “an important barometer to our society,” and I remember Donald Michael predicting in The Next Generation that the control centers “will be able to tolerate groups living at different paces and styles, if they show no deliberate intent to alter significantly the drive or direction of the prevailing social processes . . . Isolated and insulated from major and majority preoccupations of the society, and thereby offering no threat to the status quo, these enclaves will provide opportunities for more whimsical, personally paced styles of life.”

But what the hell, like the rest of us with stereo, the Beatles get by with a little help from their friends and they do live up to their promise: “A splendid time is guaranteed for all.” The music’s getting better all the time as the indignant desert birds hover about the shape with a lion body and the head of a man.