Abigail Zitin, soon-to-be-Ph. D., likes Mr. Rostan's Thoughts About Things at least to a degree...if her comments on the "single page" I wrote about on Friday are an indication. Her lead-off comment was that the blog shows a "fluent, clear, and expressive prose style," which I DID NOT show any traces of on that page. It was my own misinterpretation of the prompt. However, after taking very careful notes during the precept group meeting, I revised the whole page...doubled it, even...for what will be my first graded paper in the MAPH program.
I was nervous, to be sure, for a while. The terms of MAPH clearly spell out that a B- average must be maintained in the Core and a B overall for the year. With so much work and so little grades, the margin for error is, well, marginal. But I have to tell myself that working hard and doing the best I can will result in the success I know I can have. Bill the would-be philosopher-king said it best on Friday when I confessed my worries: the fact that I could go home the same night I got my exercise back and immediately start over meant I had nothing to worry about.
The past three days have seen two hours, MINIMUM, devoted to the paper. But I have also made time to relax...to eat Karen Slovin's squash, re-watch the Noam Chomsky documentary they showed us at Emerson, and debate literary theory and the best "entrance music" there is. To talk to my parents as they settle in to a truly empty nest. To learn how to play an H. P. Lovecraft-themed board game of Lovecraftian complexity from the hostess with the mostest on the ball, Karen Singerman. To experience the delirious pleasure of the 2005 Lifetime movie Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life. (Message to high school students: pornography is bad, pornography will wreck your and your family's life, pornography will introduce you to slutty girls who claim you beat and tried to rape them if you reject them, and pornography should always be called by all four syllables.) To feel the Godly ecstasy of services at Rockefeller Chapel, the most grandiose church I've ever been in.
And to listen to a little George Harrison.
The Beatles all shot their best wads as solo artists before the end of 1973. It may be debatable who had the best solo career overall, but as to what the best solo album is, no argument on my part. I love John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Ram, and Ringo, but the triple-vinyl All Things Must Pass is one of the greatest moments in rock 'n' roll history. Period.
George Harrison was not a simple man. He was a passionate lover and devoted friend but also a recluse. He was known as the "Quiet Beatle" but could become the most fiery and uncompromising of men if you argued against his personal credo and value...and on top of that he had a delightful, whimsical sense of humor. And he was known all over the world with the sort of fame which makes you filthy rich, but his overriding quality was a deep and sincere love of God and the spiritual.
All Things Must Pass is a statement of character and beliefs, expressed by a brilliant musician, expressive singer, and thoughtful songwriter who hitherto had been restricted to one or two songs per album. George seized his day and throttled it.
From a purely surface perspective, the album is almost flawless. You can't have a better aggregation than the Beatles, but George, playing a melodic slide guitar throughout, did the best he could: Eric Clapton, Dave Mason, Gary (Procol Harum) Brooker, Gary ("Dream Weaver") Wright, Carl Radle, Klaus Voorman, Jim Gordon, Ringo himself, I think Jim Keltner, and Badfinger for good measure, all layered together with some apropos strings and horns by Phil Spector at the top of his game. The melodies stick in your head, and George's voice was never better, running the gamut from light-hearted to earnest to prophetic to sweetly near-seductive.
And under the surface? George's lyrics are a combination of philosophical observation, romantic probing of the self, and religious exhortation. All Things Must Pass is for the most part a record with the higher powers on mind: I imagine George, 27 at the time, pondering his place in a world where his public identity was now as individual as his private one, and both were given by the blessings of God. In Beatles songs like "Within You Without You" and "The Inner Light" he had considered the nature of the divine and how it links humans together. Now, beyond "My Sweet Lord," he good-humoredly warned against excessive attention to religious doctrine in favor of focus on faith ("Awaiting On You All"), mused on the light and dark sides of the universe ("Beware of Darkness," "I Dig Love"), accepted the mystery of it all (the gorgeous title track), and offered up a plea to the higher powers ("Hear Me Lord").
But the other parts of his personality came through as well. "Apple Scruffs" and "Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp" are charming, knowing, semi-comic sketches, while "Wah-Wah" and "Let It Down" let him rock out like the Carl Perkins-lover he was. And while musically he never lets you forget that he was the same man who wrote the immortal "Something," lyrically he brought back its heartfelt mood in the album's two standout tracks, the Multiple-Walls-of-Sound "What Is Life?" and a cover of Bob Dylan's "If Not For You" which ranks with Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds, and Garth Brooks as the greatest cover of a Dylan tune ever, and I usually favor it as THE BEST. Dylan, a man with as complex a character as Harrison, also co-wrote the opening "I'd Have You Anytime," and allegedly the one song I haven't been able to get out of my head, the countryish "Behind That Locked Door," was about him.
But the definitive track on the record is the song which appears twice, "Isn't It a Pity?," a tune about the Beatles' break-up on one hand and the inability of humanity to come together in love, peace, anything on the other, which is first a massively-orchestrated epic and second a ruminating acoustic piece. The literary analyst in me is interested in the two placements of the song, which does NOT bookend the album per se--version one was the end of side one, after "Wah-Wah," while version two is the penultimate track before "Hear Me Lord"--but the emotional me is always moved by the little anger, the little sadness, the resignation.
All Things Must Pass was just what I needed to listen to as the MAPH year began. In its way, it has as much food for thought as Freud and Foucault, but conveys its message in a far more melodic manner. When George Harrison asks for God's blessing after learning to accept the world as it is and the changes which will always follow, it is nothing but inspirational for a man in his own time of change and growth who knows alone he is nothing but with faith, love, and friendship, will make it through and hopefully build a better world before it's all over.
"It's time to start smiling, what else should we do?"
P.S. Garth Brooks was not a typo...any skeptic should hear his piano-and-voice cover of Time Out of Mind's "To Make You Feel My Love."
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