When Joshua Wolf Shenk's book Powers Of Two: Finding The Essence Of Innovation In Creative Pairs was published in 2014, Michael Gerber, Devin McKinney and I each wrote a post about it. Since Shenk's book has come up in recent comments, I thought I'd bring those posts back to the forefront. You can read take 1 here, take 2 here, and take 3 here. Add your own take in the comments!
"You're right, she DOES look like Alma Cogan…" A lot of people have asked how you might help the blog, so I'm always looking for painless (read: free) ways you can show your HD-love. I just found one. The Brave browser works just like Chrome, but is faster, more private, and more secure. I've been using it for three weeks now and really like it. Give it a spin. If you use this link, we'll get a small kickback. There's another neat aspect to Brave, in that you can earn money by opting in to ads. They block the crappy ads you [...]
Thanks to our ever-vigilant @Hologram Sam, we now know that Peter Jackson's frenzied attempt at making the 1969 Get Back sessions less of an unholy drag will premiere on September 4, 2020. Mike will not be there. Mike may never be there, unless all of you say it's wonderful. Mike's teenaged years were scarred by many, many Twickenham bootlegs, and Mike DOES NOT FORGET. "State-of-the-art image-correction technology will be used to make Paul less pushy, George less sullen, and Ringo less cold," said a Disney spokesman. "It will also sweep the opiates from John and Yoko's bloodstream." The film will be sponsored [...]
Hey you guys, should I make some Hey Dullblog t-shirts? They'd be about $25 each (shipping included), cheaper if we got a bunch, you just have to order it on theswissavenue.com. I did it on black because my wife said people like black t-shirts better, but I can do white instead if everybody squawks. Hairy arms optional Work it, sister
File under "M" for money In the midst of commenting on Michael B.'s excellent post, I was reminded of something that I've said to friends innumerable times but might never have ever written here for you all. I have a lot of Beatle Thoughts like that, sorry. The only solution is for everyone to live with me, and that won't work because my cat Max gets hemorrhoids around new people. All John Lennon needed to be happy was to give it all away. This isn't the hippie pipe-dream it might seem. Let me explain: At his death, the Chief Beatle was estimated [...]
John at Thanksgiving, 1979 Belatedly for someone as into the Beatles as I, I’ve been reading Fred Seaman’s The Last Days of John Lennon. It’s a very quick read, but not a particularly pleasant one. Seaman, John's personal assistant for the last two or so years, depicts a rock star in his late thirties who may as well be in his late eighties for the way in which his happiness seems to be confined to rare moments when he reminisces about something he did in his early twenties. If there’s a spectrum of Dakota-era John Lennons stretching from Goldman’s smack-addled burnout on [...]
These dark days, I'll take opportunities to laugh wherever I can get them. On a recent trip to Indianapolis I saw this bus, and immediately imagined it as on its way to the imaginary, wink-wink-pornographic girls school Wings celebrated in song back in 1977. It was released as the B side of "Mull of Kintyre" and reached #33 on the U.S. charts. I so want to think that everyone on this bus is cheering "Hip, hip, hooray!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkoYyo1yyU
I’m writing this because the discussion on the “Were John and Paul Lovers?” post has been niggling at me for a while now. Though it was published more than six years ago, it's one of Hey Dullblog’s most viewed and most contentious posts. And because Michael Gerber and I read every comment as it goes through moderation, we're aware of movements on the blog in a way others may not be. Given the persistent interest in this topic, I've decided that it’s worth articulating my thoughts about it in more depth. Backstage at Hey Dullblog can get complicated I want to [...]
They don't even golf like you or I. I was responding to a comment regarding the podcast Another Kind of Mind, and the application of "emotional intelligence" to The Beatles, and as I wrote the water grew deep enough for me to want this to be its own post. I have long thought—since 1995 or so, when the Anthology finally belched out all the last tracks worth hearing—that the great undiscovered country of Beatle fandom was trying to figure out what the experience was like for John, Paul, George, and Ringo. What, day by day, LP by LP, million by million, did [...]
The Beatles with Alma Cogan This article and this article from the Daily Mail have long intrigued me, less for whether or not it they are definitely true or false than because their truthiness is revealing. They claim that John Lennon had an affair with Alma Cogan, a British singer eight years his senior, and that he apparently believed she was the reincarnation of his late mother. Cogan, as the article points out, was very much a traditional entertainer of the sort whom the Beatles quickly rendered culturally antiquated. But offstage, Cogan and the group mixed in the same relatively [...]