I can't lay my hands on the quote at the moment, Biograph--maybe Luc Sante's review of Goldman in the NYRB?--and perhaps it was Goldman's bio of Lenny Bruce, not Elvis. My larger point is dismissing Goldman as "a necrographer" is simply too convenient. People say he did it for the money--but of course as The Beatles themselves demonstrated for decades, there's MUCH more money to be made in shutting up and playing along.

Not to say that some people aren't jerks, and maybe Goldman was simply bloody-minded--but IMHO his portrait of Lennon, or more importantly his research--adds something to our understanding.

Nancy has left a new comment on your post "Norman and Goldman and Sentimentality":

Another thought-provoking post, Mike. You make an important point about how little the facts that Goldman's and Norman's bios state differ -- interpretation is almost all. While I also prefer Norman's sympathy toward John to Goldman's animosity toward him, I can hardly stand to read Norman because of his animosity towards Paul. I think Norman's McCartney-bashing goes beyond the John-was-the-genius-in-the-band commonplaces to a level that's rather scary, the way Goldman's treatment of John is scary: it makes me feel as if there's some deep psychological reason why Norman needs Paul to have so few redeeming qualities.

I'm very tired (along with many other fans, I suspect) of the John v. Paul cage match that gets ritualistically reenacted in so many books about the group. More and more it seems to me an evasion of the really interesting questions about them as human beings and artists -- especially an evasion of why they were able to create such timeless music together. Even as solo artists in the early 70s, some of their most powerful songs ("Too Many People," "How Do You Sleep," "Dear Friend," "Let Me Roll It") were in part directed at each other. Why that is -- what they did for each other artistically -- that's the real question, to my mind.

As for the question of whether John attacked Stu, that seems frustratingly in the category of things we're just not going to know for sure. I have no trouble believing that Paul doesn't remember -- I think of all the things in my own life that I can't swear to -- and that in general neither he nor anyone else close to John wants either to go on record saying something happened they aren't sure did happen, or to believe that John could have done it.

I think the main reason the Beatles story is so fascinating is that it throws into high relief issues of understanding and interpretation that we all wrestle with. How can someone be both deeply compassionate and violent? How can people create beautiful, lasting art and behave selfishly and irresponsibly? How can people be close friends and get to the point of trying to destroy each other? The level of their artistic achievements takes all this to an epic scope.

All of which suggests people will be talking about the Beatles for a long, long time to come.

Hey! Traffic!

Thanks, Funkster4! I'm going to see if I can find more of that concert on the internet. Any thoughts?

I did some phoneticizing, Darrel--shit is spelled something like \"schitt\" or whatever. (I forget what \"Berenice\" ended up being, but I never did get it qwight wright.) As I told Jon, if people seem to like it I\'ll do more and employ the sneaky trix you suggest. I\'m so glad you liked it.

Ovid, the security guard's name is Thane Cesar, and he's still alive.

I saw Phil van Praag at a conference in 2008, and it is conclusive. It's telling that--as with the acoustic evidence in the JFK case--the breakthroughs are coming from things that were not examined by the original investigative bodies.

Thanks for reading, Jac! Here are a few simple answers, though I doubt you will agree with them.

You deal with aggressor states by not creating them in the first place. Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, the prototypical modern aggressor states, were both directly created by the traumas felt by the German and Russian civilian populations in the First World War. Aggressor states are deviations from the norm, mutations made infinitely more likely by wide-scale suffering, want, and feelings of powerlessness. You can also prove the case from the other direction: In 1945, we acted differently towards the defeated nations--rebuilding their societies into stable, prosperous systems--and got the opposite result. This is not romanticism, but intense practicality.

Our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are excellent examples of how modern technology has made warfare impractical, increasing civilian trauma without effectively solving the problem. A US Ranger friend of mine with Central Asian tours under his belt once said to me, "The Army breaks things. That's what it's good at, and what it's designed to do." Sending the military into Central Asia to break things, without committing to rebuilding that region--something I'm not sure we could do, given the complexity of the societies--seems likely to sow more, not less individual trauma, which leads to more, not fewer, broken institutions, and eventually more, not fewer, aggressor states.

The whole point of WWI, Jac, is that none of the major powers were in any danger of being "enslaved" in 1914. The whole of Europe had enjoyed seventy years of peace, with concomitant increases in material wealth, health, education, and social mobility. Britain and France were liberal democracies; Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary were all autocracies progressing at various rates towards liberalization. And yet, at the beginning of the War, each government used exactly the terminology that you did--"defending oneself," "protecting one's people," keeping from "being enslaved." The rhetoric was so incessant that it speedily created a reality--one where all of Europe was indeed, under attack. But the death of the crown prince of Austria-Hungary (soon to assume the throne, and speed up the liberalizing of that empire) did not HAVE to cause a global conflagration. It was the romantic attachment to rhetoric, and the too-hasty use of military might, which created the crisis.

To be sure, there are times when war is, perhaps, the lesser of two evils. But it is very, very difficult to predict when the reasons given for war are indeed a factual revelation of clear and present danger, and not propaganda, yellow journalism, or a convenience of power. Because technology continues to magnify the consequences of our actions in this area--as it does in so many areas--it's incumbent on us to be ever more cautious in our exercise of military force. You may find that idealistic; to me it seems utterly practical.

Thanks for reading!