#tagged as mine for the addition

[darkdragon768]

Various doodles of the Dorito Twins.

I just like to play with them like dolls and put them into situations.

[torchlitinthedesert]

I was writing about how Paul started writing with John, and how that story has been told. Once you’ve noticed that Paul wrote songs first, you can’t unsee it. And you can’t help spotting which writers just haven’t noticed, and who is actively going LOOK OVER THERE A SQUIRREL when they have to mention Paul bringing songwriting into the group. (I’m curious to see how the new Ian Leslie book handles this; the first review I’ve seen says the partnership “began in earnest in 1962”, which suggests Leslie has at least looked beyond the usual “they met at Woolton Fete and almost immediately started writing together” take.) Anyway, here’s a LOOK OVER THERE A SQUIRREL compilation, because some of these are outrageous

During the 1960s, the official band narrative presents JohnandPaul as a unit, keeping their contributions carefully balanced. Here’s Hunter Davies, the jumping-off point for most later accounts:

[Paul] played a couple of tunes to John he had written himself. Since he’d started playing the guitar, he had tried to make up a few of his own little tunes. The first tune he played to John that evening was called ‘I Lost My Little Girl’.

Not to be outdone, John immediately started making up his own tunes. He had been elaborating and adapting other people's words and tunes to his own devices for some time, but he hadn't written down proper tunes till Paul appeared with his. Not that Paul's tunes meant much, nor John's. They were very simple and derivative. It was only them coming together, each egging the other on, which suddenly inspired them to write songs for themselves to play.

After the breakup, rock journalism tended to take John’s side, and downplay Paul. Here’s Philip Norman in Shout! (1981), doing a virtuoso hatchet job:

Paul McCartney had always used his guitar to help him make up tunes. His main objective in the Quarry Men, however, was to oust Eric Griffiths from the role of lead guitarist. One night at the Broadway Conservative Club, he prevailed on the others to let him take the solo in a number. He fluffed it and, later, in an attempt to redeem himself, played over to John a song he had written, called I Lost My Little Girl. John, though he had always tinkered with lyrics, had never thought of writing entire songs before. Egged on by Paul - and by Buddy Holly - he felt there could be no harm in trying. Soon he and Paul were each writing songs furiously, as if it were a race.

Did you think, dear reader, that writing your own songs might be a significant artistic breakthrough? No, no, it’s just a backup weapon in Paul’s Machiavellian plot against poor Eric. This is his “main objective”, and he’s manipulated the others into letting him grab a solo. Norman has, by the way, already admitted that the Quarrymen all recognised that Paul was a stronger musician than the rest of the group. Is it reasonable for the best guitarist to want to play a solo? Clearly not.

For maximum whiplash, compare Norman telling the same story 27 years later, in John Lennon: The Life (2008).

The idea of writing original songs to perform, rather than merely recycling other people’s, was firmly rooted in Paul’s mind well before he met John. He had begun trying it virtually from the moment he acquired a guitar, combining melodic gifts inherited from his father with a talent for mimicking and pastiching the American-accented hits of the moment. His first completed song, “I Lost My Little Girl,” had been written in 1956, partly as a diversion from the trauma of his mother’s death, partly as an expression of it. Around the time he joined the Quarrymen, he had something like a dozen other compositions under his belt, mostly picked out on the family upright piano, including a first draft of what would eventually become “When I’m Sixty-four” (which he thought “might come in handy for a musical comedy or something”).

For a fifteen-year-old Liverpool schoolboy - indeed for any ordinary mortal - this was breathtaking presumptuousness. In Britain’s first rock’n’roll era, as for a century before it, songwriting was considered an art verging on the magical. It could be practiced only in London (naturally) by a tiny coterie of music-business insiders, middle-aged men with names like Paddy or Bunny, who alone understood the sacred alchemy of rhyming arms with charms and moon with June.

Just imagine if Norman had published that second version in 1981. Shout! was one of the most influential Beatles books, shaping the narrative for decades to come. Even Norman now admits its extreme bias, but you can still see its lingering influence. (Also, what a natural-born hater Norman is. When he puts his Paul-bashing on hold, he makes up some fictional songwriters to despise instead.)

Next up we have Mark Lewisohn, who doesn’t write Paul as the Evil Grand Vizier, but keeps shuffling the pack to put John front and centre whenever a breakthrough happens. His prologue to Tune In is a snapshot of John and Paul writing together at the very beginning of their partnership:

Towards the end of 1957, John wrote Hello Little Girl and Paul came up with I Lost My Little Girl; the similarity in their titles was apparently coincidental but both were steeped in [Buddy Holly and] the Crickets’ sound…Buddy Holly was the springboard to John and Paul’s songwriting. As John later said: “Practically every Buddy Holly song was three chords, so why not write your own.” Stated so matter-of-factly, it could seem that writing songs was an obvious next move, but it wasn’t. Teenagers all over Britain liked Buddy Holly and rock and roll, but of that great number only a fraction picked up a guitar and tried playing it, and fewer still, in fact hardly anyone, used it as the inspiration to write songs themselves. John and Paul didn’t know anyone else who did it, no one from school or college, no relative or friend… and yet somehow, by nothing more than fate or fluke, they’d found each other, discovered they both wrote songs, and decided to try it together.

When Lewisohn disagrees with the accepted narrative, he’s usually very keen to show you all his evidence for why everyone else is wrong. Here he suggests John wrote Hello Little Girl first, without discussion. Then he quotes John on getting the idea to write songs, before discussing what an important innovation that was. Right at the end, he says they both wrote independently - but John is in prime position throughout.

As you read on, he acknowledges Paul’s pre-Quarrymen songs, framing them as juvenilia (“exceptional for a first attempt by a boy on the cusp of 14”). Giving I Lost My Little Girl a later date than everyone else, Lewisohn notes that when Paul performed it on MTV Unplugged, his “vocal includes a Holly hiccup, pinpointing its creation to post-September 1957”. (Because the way Paul sings something in 1991 must be exactly how he sang it from the beginning.) Lewisohn also ignores the many interviews in which John says he started writing after seeing Paul’s example.

Obviously, these distraction tactics sell Paul short. But I think they harm John, too. If you’re interested in him as an artist, don’t you want to know how he developed? What he learned, how he used those influences to shape his own voice? How he and Paul worked, together and apart? How they saw their partnership, how that fed into their competitiveness, ambitions, or insecurities? Mary Sue Blorbo Leader John is no good to me. And, more than 60 years on, memories have faded and sources have died; we’ve lost so many chances to look at how they really worked. John and Paul both deserve better.

[genikrispies]

the modesty tiger........ 🫣🐯🎀

[logicpng]

...at least that's the link order that made most sense to me

[Image ID:

Clownillustrations' Welcome Home fanart. Wally Darling is drawn at an angle slightly from below, lacking his mouth, and the eyes wide open and bright white looking the viewer. In front of him, along his height through the middle of his face, a long stripe made of the blurry Welcome Home website screenshots, glowing. Behind him is a vinyl record with a plain red label.

The background is littered with text, a wall of repeating "Let me in." from top to bottom to the left of the image, Wally's dialogue behind him, and the text on the foreground, slightly corrupted, says "I will help you understand neighbor I will find a way soon"

End ID]

[lupine-trees]

never could be sweeter than with you.

[ boys being, after everything, deeply in love— feat. ace!draco. ♡ for the @drarrymicrofic april prompt: hiraeth. ]

drarry | word count: ~430 | rating: t | warnings: reference to past internalized ace-phobia

title from “home” by edward sharpe & the magnetic zeros.

_ _ _

“I always thought it was my fault, you know. That something was the matter with me.”

Harry’s eyes drew up to him, a pained crease striking between his brows. “Draco.”

Draco shifted on the sofa, his feet tucking beneath the velveteen pillow at Harry’s side. “No, I— listen. I only mean, it felt like it then. I had so many reasons to be an excellent Occlumens. It was just another.”

Harry folded his paperback closed, allowing Watson and Holmes to wait. “Tell me,” he said, hand falling soft on Draco’s ankle, soothing.

Draco sighed, fingers running up through his hair, a nervous tic he suspected by now he’d never break. “I hoped it was the war, for a long time. What a horrible thing to hope. But if it wasn’t the war, it meant… it meant it was just me. That there was something wrong with me.” His hands curled tightly around his mug of tea, warmth steadying the shake of him. “I needed there to be a reason so badly. I wanted to want like other people.”

“You can want like you,” Harry murmured, and then, making a circle of the jut of his ankle, “I like the way you want.”

Draco smiled in spite of himself, but it washed easily away. “Yes, but then. Well. Even after I’d goaded myself into tolerating it, I was afraid that no one else would. Harry, it’s absurd— I was so convinced it made me—”

“Undesirable?” Harry offered, with a playful poke to his shin.

“Piss off,” Draco huffed, grinning, his wooly-socked toes kicking soft into Harry’s side.

The fireplace crackled warmly, washing them in gold-orange light. Harry thought, I could let it go. Thought, He already knows.

But then:

“It doesn’t. Make you undesirable. Not to me. This,” he said, gesturing to the sitting room— the book, the tea, the sofa— his hand falling meaningfully back to Draco. Their home. “It’s all I want. It’s so much more than I ever thought I’d have.”

“Do you know I missed you?” Draco answered, non sequitur.

“When?” Harry asked.

Draco shuffled, easing into the cushions, his elbow cast comfortably over the backrest. “At nineteen. And fifteen. And when I was twelve.” His head cocked sideways, a wistful smile overwhelming him. “When I was eight. And five.”

Harry tugged at the hem of his pajamas. “You didn’t know me then.”

“Mhm,” Draco hummed. “I was missing you much longer than I’ve had you.”

Harry reached for his hand then, pulled his fingers softly to his lips. “We’ll fix that,” he whispered, a promise, a plan.

[rowyndodendron]

guys I've cracked the code:

Zagreus: high wisdom, low intelligence

Melinoë: high intelligence, low wisdom

[megabuild]

enjoying the progression of "i wish ao3 filtered character and rpf tags for minecraft youtubers separately so i could filter out the nasty rpf shippers" > "i don't care about the filtering system but wish i didn't have to see real streamer names etc." > "i wish ao3 filtered character and rpf tags for minecraft youtubers separately so i could filter out the characters and get right to the irl infidelity porn"

[newsfromstolenland]

The U.S. and U.K ambassadors to Japan will sit out the annual memorial ceremony marking the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on Friday after the city decided not to invite the Israeli ambassador in what has become an increasingly politicized peace ceremony.

...

A number of envoys to Japan — including those from Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the European Union — have voiced concern over Nagasaki’s decision, sending a letter to Mayor Shiro Suzuki last month stating that not inviting Israel would be lumping the Middle Eastern country in with countries such as Russia and Belarus, the only countries not invited.

Gosh, I wonder what all the countries deciding not to go or "voicing concern" have in common 🤔

And I wonder why people might "lump israel in with russia and belarus"...it's not like they're all invading countries and killing people right now or anything...

But seriously, all these envoys from majority-white western countries skipping or complaining about a memorial to civilians being bombed (many of which countries supported said bombing, one of which actually perpetrated it) because an envoy from a country known for currently killing civilians in an act of genocide wasn't invited? Ghoulish fucking behaviour.

hey i can't make it to Sorry For Visiting Wanton Destruction Upon Your Populace For No Reason Day yeah uhm its just that like you didn't invite my war crime friend and i think its kinda fucked up that you did that

[robulz]

you'll NEVER guess what my favourite eurovision 2024 song is

[huellitaa]

of course i still believe in santa. where is your childlike joy and wondrous whimsy

[torchlitinthedesert]

There’s something very strange about Paul’s usual “how John and I started writing” narrative. Here’s how he likes to describe it:

Me and John knowing each other, the fact that both of us independently had already started to write little songs... I said to him, “What’s your hobby?” I said, “I like songwriting,” and he said, “Oh, so do I.” You know, no one I’d ever met had ever said that as a reply. And we said, “Well, why don’t you play me yours and I’ll play you mine.” GQ, 2020

It’s my impression that this is now in the rotation of Paul Stories - I think he says it in McCartney 3,2,1, and in other interviews. Is it true? The earliest accounts contradict it:

“Paul’s first public performance, as a member of the Quarrymen, was at a dance… later on, after the dance, he played a couple of tunes to John he had written himself. Since he’d started playing the guitar, he had tried to make up a few of his own little tunes. The first tune he played to John that evening was called ‘I Lost My Little Girl’. Not to be outdone, John immediately started making up his own tunes.”

Hunter Davies, The Beatles, 1968

“‘I learned a lot from Paul. He taught me quite a lot of guitar really. He knew more about how to play than I did and he showed me a lot of chords. I’d been playing the guitar like a banjo so I had to learn it again. I didn’t write much material early on, less than Paul, because he was quite competent on guitar. I started to write after Paul did a song he’d written.’”

John Lennon to Ray Connolly, unpublished interview, 1970*

"He used to write songs before I even started writing songs."

John Lennon, St Regis interview, 1971

*[The Connolly quote is weaker as a source, because was published after John’s death (and he quotes it slightly differently: “I started to write after Paul did a song he’d written” is in Connolly’s John biography, but not in the version in his collected Beatle journalism). But it fits with the other accounts.]

Still, Paul’s version might have some truth in it. Mark Lewisohn cites a couple of 1971 interviews where John remembers trying to write a calypso song, tapping into a brief craze of spring 1957. I don’t know if he finished it, or told anyone about it. None of the Quarrymen mention it, while Pete Shotton told Bob Spitz that John was “floored” when Paul first played him one of his own songs. But the calypso story does make “so do I” seem more possible.

It’s still surprising that Paul wants to frame it this way. He’d be justified in pointing out that songwriting was his innovation, something he brought to the band. By any measure, he’s the one who started it: when he met John, he’d already written the melody of When I'm 64, plus Suicide and I Lost My Little Girl. And he was always prolific. As John told David Sheff, talking about I’ll Follow The Sun, “he had a lot of stuff”, “written almost before the Beatles, I think.” He was the one pushing to do their own material, whether that’s talking it up to music promoters or suggesting In Spite of All The Danger at their first amateur recording session. (To me, that suggests that Lennon-McCartney was established later than they tended to admit. In Spite of All The Danger, recorded in 1958, has George as cowriter; if Paul had written anything with John, I bet that's what he'd have suggested they record. And if John on his own had written something that was ready to record, they’d definitely have picked that. )

In the 1950s, writing your own material was groundbreaking: it’s part of the huge cultural shift into the 1960s. There were hundreds of skiffle/rock’n’roll bands in Liverpool, but it’s genuinely possible that Paul was the only songwriter among them. Why isn’t that the story he wants to tell?

When Paul started defending his legacy in the late 1980s, he was fighting against specific distortions. First, that he was the middle-of-the-road conservative one - which is why he lays out his avant garde credentials. So you’d think he’d want to remind everybody that he wrote songs first. But second, he’s up against the idea that he and John didn’t love each other, that they didn’t write together, that Lennon-McCartney was a myth. Paul is a rock star, with an ego to match; he’s not given to downplaying himself. But he wants the partnership more than he wants precedence, even more than he wants credit for innovation.

And he always did. Remember the story about John sharing half his chocolate bar? Paul joined the band, and shared half his songs.

He didn’t need to: he was already writing alone. If he wanted help, George was more musically accomplished, and would have been a more logical choice for a songwriting partner. But it's John whose attention and praise Paul needed, John who had the authority to say they’d play Paul’s songs, John who needed to feel like the most important person in the band. Becoming Lennon-McCartney formalises all of that. And Paul is still true to it.

Across decades, Paul has been consistent about promoting their partnership as a partnership, regardless of who did what. (This isn’t true of John, who by the late 1960s was eager to break down who wrote which song, which lyric, which middle eight.) After working with George Martin on the string arrangement for Yesterday, Paul signed the score: “"Yesterday" by Paul McCartney John Lennon George Martin Esq and Mozart.” Even as a joke, you don’t separate Lennon and McCartney. Ken Mansfield asked Paul why songs were “Lennon-McCartney” when John hadn’t been there for the writing process:

And Paul said: “John and I are so close to each other, we’ve been through so much together, we understand each other so much, our relationship is so deep, that when we’re songwriting,” he said, “even if I’m 6,000 miles away, I can be working on something and I can hear John over my shoulder going, ‘No, no, no, that’s not gonna work; why don’t we do this?’ Or ‘Hey, I like this.’” He said, “So, in essence, to me, we’re songwriting together even if we’re not together.”

Ken was asking about Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, not realising that John was there for that one: they worked on it in India. But rather than giving a practical answer, Paul chooses to frame the partnership as a profound connection. (Of course there are other times Paul insists on or overstates his contribution, or gets petty about who did what. He’s human, and he’s an egomaniac. But always, always within the framework that this was a partnership.)

Fundamentally, he’s loyal to Lennon-McCartney. “So do I” matters more to him than going first. It might not be literally true, but it's the emotional truth that he needs.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

what is your favorite thing about charles and your favorite thing about erik? separately, as in what you like most about their characters :]

a devious question this one is, my friend!!! it's hard enough for me to explain my thoughts cohesively, but having to pick ONE thing i particularly love is difficult. with characters like charles and erik, theres been so much done with their characters over the decades and so they have so many components to them that make them so interesting and fun to observe. BUT I TRY FOR YOU TODAY. under the cut i kinda ramble and the size of this text box makin me anxious

i think if i were to be simple and broad, what i enjoy most about charles is his determination to help others, even if he isn't really thanked and/or if people don't even like him. ofc, this isn't to say he hasn't done wrong- to be honest, the fact he does wrong/questionable things at times is another aspect of him i really enjoy, maybe because- broadly speaking- he's meant to be altruistic (intent vs outcome and all that). i don't know if that's super exciting to most people, but it is for me

as for erik, my reason for liking him is easier to explain tbh. To Be Simple And Broad, his progression from villain to antihero over the decades has been fun to observe (as much as i have so far anyhow) and analyze. i think to be a bit more specific, him using his rage and pain as justifications for his villainous actions is definitely what compels me the most: hurt people hurt and the sort, an idea i've always found interesting (something something vicious cycles and the like). yet now, he recognizes this wasn't really. A Just Thing To Do and is beginning to change that, which i enjoy

[stone-stars]

showing reblogs in tags is the worst thing that tumblr ever decided to do

[spacepunksupreme]

Blorbo Poll Tag Game

Tagged by @nitewrighter thanks Nite :D

Rules: make a poll with five of your favourite characters and then tag five people to do the same. See which character is everyone's favorite!

Taggingggggg: @psygull @despairoftheendless @emerald-truth @hobbitdyke @brimstone-cowboy

[softness-and-shattering]

Saw/shared a post that mentioned 'youtube grammar' yesterday and I checked the tag and

Its basically the thing where people mishear words or phrases and then say it wrong. Some examples are

'manner of fact' instead of 'matter of fact', 'eck cetera' instead of 'et cetera' 'I could care less' v 'I couldn't care less'

And the poster blamed this on lowered education standards, lack of education, and basically people not learning grammar rules and not being able to break down what language a word is from to figure out pronounciation. Im not saying thats wrong, I dont know.

But I also have a running joke/recognition with friends who are bilingual or speak multiple languages, about how sounds get mixed up your head, and sometimes you'll even think of the right word but your muscle memory will write or type another. The example that started the conversation in earnest was me spelling the word 'pneumonic' instead of 'mnemonic'. (If you're going ooh this is his tumblr, hi! :D).

In a comment I was just writing, I wrote think instead of thing. I knew the word I wanted was thing, its the word I thought, its not the word I typed.

Also today I wrote 'mood' instead 'move'.

Its not a lack of education, or a misunderstanding of grammar, or mislearing a phrase. My fingers just mess it up sometimes, because somehow the link between thought and typing has to do with the sounds, not the root or the spelling or possibly even the language. Because, pneumonic.

I dont know if this holds the same with the spoken word, I dont know what those pathways are, and to begin with Im neither a linguist nor neurologist. Im just noticing patterns with myself and my friends.

If anyone does know facts or science about this, please do chime in!

[gordonsicedcoffee]

EMMANUELLE VAUGIER Winner of the Most Thrilling Killing award for SAW II at THE FUSE FANGORIA CHAINSAW AWARDS (2006)