Mendelssohn's Rock Bible: The Beatles Visit Manila!

In the mid-1960s, Britain’s pound sterling had been under sustained downward pressure from a persistently adverse trade balance. Then The Beatles came along, posting world-record dollar-denominated concert receipts from their American tours in 1964, 1965, and 1966, earning $650 a second in modern dollars. Their 1966 concert tours of Germany and Japan raked in truckloads of deutschemarks and yen at exactly the moment the pound's value was most tenuous due to a British consumption boom. This may be the most boring paragraph I have ever written, or that you have ever read, but things get better below the wee chasm.

Having noted The Beatles' importance to maintaining a favourable exchange rate for the pound sterling, the UK government wasn’t tickled pink with manager Brian Epstein’s handling of their visit to the Philippines in mid-1966. The group had been greeted by thousands of screaming fans when they arrived at Manila Airport on 3rd July, but was whisked away by military police to a private yacht party with well-heeled locals almost before said fans could catch a glimpse of their heroes. By the time they finally got to their rooms at the Hotel Manila in the early hours of July 4, they were exhausted, and eager to enjoy a rejuvenating nap before their afternoon and evening shows at the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium. 

Little did they realise that the shows’ promoter had promised their attendance at a breakfast reception with First Lady Imelda Marcos, she of the 1000 pairs of shoes, hubby Ferdinand Marcos, top government officials, and 300 top government officials’ kiddies. The boys realised someone had dropped the ball only when, waiting for room service that never arrived, they saw Madame Marcos screaming on television, 'They've let me down!'"  

The next day, on their way back to the airport, were spat on and poked with sharp sticks while the policemen charged with protecting them just sneered hatefully, dropped pianos on their heads, or burned them with cigarettes. 

In London, Queen Elizabeth II huddled with Brian Wilson, the Prime Minister at the time, and it was decided that The Beatles were too valuable to be left in the care of Brian Epstein. The Queen is said to have believed that they should be entrusted to the Royal Air Force, but PM Wilson, who had been a drinking buddy of John Lennon back in Liverpool before the group’s commercial breakthrough, felt sure the boys would rebel at this suggestion. One of his aides noted that he notoriously brutish Don Arden, known to have held a rival manager out of a third-storey window by his ankles to discourage him from poaching one of Arden’s acts, was likely to intimidate anyone intent on burning our boys with cigarettes or poking them with sharp sticks. When one of Her Majesty's toadies phoned Arden's office, though, the great man revealed that he was too busy bilking The Small Faces to take on new clients. 

Peter Grant, later to manage the Led Zeppelins, but at the time an intimidator for producer Mickie Most, briefly seemed an inspired choice, but the cabal eventually agreed instead on Snuffy Schulberg, earlier the manager of Chirpy & The Ginghams. Whereas Arden had held rivals out of third-storey windows by their ankles, Schulberg, a one-time cantor in his native Australia, actually dropped them out of fourth-storey windows. But hardly had his release from HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs, which has a really cool name, but is thought less horrific than, for instance, HM Prison Wakefield, been arranged, than The Beatles announced they would no longer tour, the danger of being burned with cigarettes and poked with sharp sticks being minimal in Abbey Road Studios. George Harrison wore bedroom slippers at the group’s final official concert appearance, at Candlestick Park, near San Francisco.

Rodrigo Duterte, the Phillippines’ present president, turns out to have been one of the children who didn’t get to meet The Beatles at Madame Marcos’s gala breakfast, but has nonetheless remained a huge fan of the group. He is said to enjoy listening to their albums Rubber Soul and Dark Side of the Moon between recruiting death squads to assassinate suspected drug dealers, and having steamy conversations on Skype with Donald J. Trump, who is known to think it very unfair that he doesn’t get death squads of his own. Duterte has apparently offered Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr £1 billion and 22 of the 7107 Philippines islands of their choice — except Luzon, on which Manila is located — to perform a reunion show in the Philippines. A spokesman for Sir Paul has said, “No fookin’ way,” but it’s possible he was being snide. Many Americans mistakenly believe that all Brits pronounce the first vowel sound in fucking like that in spook, but it isn’t the case. It’s a northern thing. The Beatles were of course from the British northwest, but Sir Paul hasn’t lived there since 1931, and uses the referenced vowel sound only when being coy, as in "When I’m Sixty-Four", in which he pronounces the name Chuck with the vowel sound of his native city. 

Melania's Cry for Help on Crowdfunder!

[Translated from the Slovenian] 

People ask what it is about my husband that originally drew me to him. He made me laugh, at least until I realised he wasn’t joking when he spoke incessantly of his own greatness. As the daughter of a humble Slovenian Communist chauffeur who had to work 12-hour shifts to put zlikrofi (small dumplings cooked in hot water and filled with potato, onion, minced lard or smoked bacon, herbs and spices), štruklji (different types of dough filled with cheese, walnut, or apple), and premurska gibanica (a sweet cake made of shortcrust pastry and several layers of filo pastry laid between apple, walnut, cottage cheese, and poppy seed fillings) on his wife’s and daughters’ dinner plates, I will not pretend not to have been enticed by Donald having his own airplane, helicopter, and university. 

It is well known that there is such a thing as a chubby chaser — a man who is attracted to obese women. What many do not know is that, correspondingly, there is also such a thing as a waddler-wanter, a woman who finds very sexy a man who waddles. I am unashamed to be such a woman. The tubbier he grew, the more of a waddler my Donald became. His having grown increasingly corpulent over the years meant that there has always been just a little bit more of him to love.

People ask me if I knew about my husband’s…encounter with Stormi Daniels (whose name the press seems unable to spell properly!). Of course I did, just as I knew about his involvements with Sultri Wolpert, Slutti McNae, Vaselina Stroganov, and many dozens of others. In almost every case, my husband invited me to join in. Nothing excites him more than two girls, unless it’s three, or even four or five. I declined in every case. It’s one thing to pretend to be partying with another girl for the cover of a now-defunct French men’s magazine, and quite another to do it in real life, for no modelling fee. So the whole Stormi Daniels business has been no more humiliating for me than having to have something too closely resembling phone sex with Howard Stern. 

But honestly, enough is enough, and when, in the most horrifying display of mass stupidity in modern political history, America elected my husband president, I knew I had somehow to get out, and back to the place where I have always felt most loved, Sevnica, in central Slovenia, heretofore known for its underwear factory, annual salami festival, and sport fishing in the beautiful River Saba. Surrounded by my husband’s handlers and advisors, I did not feel free to express openly my urge to flee, but felt sure my speech at the Republican National Convention, at which I brazenly plagiarised Michelle Obama and tacitly invoked Rick fucking Astley, of all people, would be recognised as a cry for help. I cannot begin to describe my mortification when it was not. Nor, in fact, was my obviously (I thought!) tongue-in-cheek announcement that I would devote myself to eradicating cyberbullying. As though my husband isn’t himself the world’s most profligate cyberbully! I slipped the Pope a note when we met, but His Holiness apparently misplaced it.

You may ask why I am appealing to you here on Crowdfunder when my husband is so very, very rich. It is because I expect that my taking our son back to Slovenia, where I envisage him becoming a champion sportsfisherman or renowned sausage-maker, will make Donald furious, and that he will try to give me not a single dollar, or even euro. As a capable and resolute woman, I am prepared to seek employment at Sevnica’s famous underwear factory, preferably as a model. But I have had servants of every possible sort now for the past almost-20 years, during which my principal preoccupation has been remaining trophy-wife gorgeous, and it may take me a few months to become used to doing my and little Barron’s laundry and making him zlikrofi after an exhausting day at the factory. Please be generous. 

The Super Bowl for Gals, and Guys of Impeachable Masculinity

Robert Kraft, the non-cheese billionaire owner of the New England Patriot Acts, described himself as “disappointed” when The Stable Genius earlier this season castigated players who didn’t stand during the anthem, which The Stable Genius fervently reveres, and even knows a few of the words to. Robert Kraft has not denounced The Stable Genius’s being a belligerent, stupid, incompetent, delusional, indecent, inhumane monster, and has been romantically linked to a half-his-age purported actress who I think we’re meant to assume loves him because he makes her laugh. 

The Patriot Acts’ head coach, Bill Bellichickenlittle, which I might be misspelling, is a surly asshole who sent The Stable Genius a congratulatory message when TSG, to the abject mortification of any American with the most rudimentary sense of decency and propriety, was elected president. The team’s quarterback, Tom Brady Bunch, appears to be an idiot savant — brilliant on the field of play, and a dimwit’s dimwit off it. Much like his employer, Mr. Kraft, he has spoken out against TSG’s immoderate comments on players protesting police brutality against communities of colour during the National Anthem, but not against Mr. Trump’s being a belligerent, stupid, incompetent, delusional, indecent, inhumane monster. He gets an iota of credit for not having accepted an invitation last April to get slimed with the rest of the team by TSG at the White House. 

Those of his teammates who explained why they wouldn’t attend get a great deal more credit. I don’t think being a professional athlete confers moral immunity. I think it’s every American’s moral duty to speak out against the present horror. Speaking out only against the tiny part that affects one personally, as Brady has done, is cowardly and self-serving. 

If I didn’t think identifying with a professional sports team is pure madness — akin to hoping that Loew’s sells more rakes during a given fiscal quarter than Home Depot — I’d root for the Eagles solely because of Kraft, Bellichick, and Brady, though I have no doubt that the Eagles have their fair share of assholes.

Many purport to watch the Super Bowl not because of the actual game, which is interrupted approximately every 35 milliseconds for commercials, but for said commercials. Advertising agencies try to demonstrate themselves more brilliant than one another with their Super Bowl ads, and there can be no disputing that many are very wry. But let’s remain mindful that in the vast majority of cases, these advertisements are created to induce people to buy products or pay for services they don’t really want or need by “creatives” who don’t themselves like the products they’re in the business of making the rest of us crave. Anheuser-Busch, always one of the game’s key sponsors, commonly has the best commercials, advertising one of the worst products. Budweiser is beer-flavoured soda pop. 

A large percentage of the male residents of whichever city’s team prevails will feel somehow more manly as a result of the victory. The vast majority of the mercenaries who play for the two teams have neither affection for nor even much knowledge of the communities for whose men they are proxies. It makes no sense whatever for a middle-aged beer-bellied bozo from a blue-collar Philly suburb to run through the streets bellowing, “We did it!” as a result of a 22-year-old safety from Alabama he's never met and never will meet having run an interception back for the winning touchdown. 

There is nothing more ludicrous — and more patently bogus an excuse for more ad sales — than pre-game analysis. Just once in my life I would love for some player in response to the question, “What do the [your team’s name here] have to do to win today?” say, “Have more points than the other guys at game's end.” Which isn’t to suggest that I don’t feel for the former players customarily charged with posing this provocative query. Once colossuses, once the men all other men yearned in vain to be, they are now reduced to trying to get active athletes in many cases too young to remember their past glories to mumble the same tedious cliches they themselves mumbled ‘way back when. 

Mumbling clichés is seen as very manly. Saying something interesting or thoughtful would make one…suspect. Behold: football!

I’d love to see both teams kneel during the National Anthem. If that’s asking too much, maybe all the players could hold up seven fingers in tribute to Colin Kaepernick, who wore No. 7 while with the San Francisco 49ers, or middle fingers as a salute to The Stable Genius. My guess is they will not.

Caroline Laughs and It's Raining All Day

There wasn’t very much I enjoyed about living between 2008 and 2011 in Beacon, New York, 50 miles north of New York City in the Hudson Valley. There was an awful lot of poverty on display — the hat factories for which the area had been known had closed decades before, and the huge Nabisco printing plant down by the river had become a museum of largely ludicrous modern art. It seemed that for around 48 weeks of the year it was either bitingly cold or suffocatingly hot and humid. I had a 2000-square foot house with a nice view of the river all to myself after Dame Zelda found that she couldn’t bear being physically estranged from the verdant land of her birth and girlhood, and actually made some friends, but one of them turned out to be a conceptual artist whose schtick was to stick straight-sided ovals in the exact centre of photographs. When I suggested that he wasn’t making art, but jokes about art, he became incensed. How could anyone be so unhip? 

A model!

I got tired of finding myself in line with Pete Seeger at the post office. He seemed the kindest man in the world, but just once could I not post something without his standing behind me beaming? I got no less tired of seeing the lead singer of the Psychedelic Furs, who’d apparently relocated from London, on Second Saturday, when all the local art galleries would stay open late. He actually attempted bona fide art (painting, you see), but wasn’t very good at it, and was dishearteningly standoffish. (Or maybe shy. Will I never learn to cut the others the same amount of slack that I demand?)

(Hizzoner the Mayor’s sense of humour was hardly better than that of my present neighbours in SW London. When i suggested that our little neck of the woods rebrand itself as Beacon — Gateway to Poughkeepsie, he didn’t so much as reply, in much the same spirit that nextdoor.com routinely removes my posts about, for instance, widening the Thames (a tidal river, you see) to preclude my shoes getting soggy when I walk along the tow path of a bleak winter afternoon.)

I did very much enjoy Valentines Day in Beacon, though. Main Street (it actually called itself that), would ban vehicular traffic. Seitan that had been moulded into the shape of a suckling pig would be spit-roasted in front of the town’s favourite vegan restaurant, and the children of Republican parents who regarded veganism as socialism’s advance guard would be encouraged to jab it with sharp sticks. I would bet there are as many Make America Great Again ball caps in evidence in Beacon these days as art galleries. 

My favourite of which displayed real art — often really shitty real art, but not straight-sided ovals pasted on old portraits bought at thrift shops. It was owned by a couple who lived across the river just north of West Point. The guy, who’d apparently made a fortune as a Wall Street sleazebag and decided to devote the rest of his life to…ahem…his art, had very avant garde facial hair and was never seen without one of those little stingy-brim fedoras that Justin Timberlake had made so fashionable. On one Second Saturday, his very gregarious wife, an endearingly dreadful painter in her own right, wore a form-fitting black latex mermaid dress, stiletto-heeled boots, and gothy makeup, and I’d have bought one of her dreadful paintings just as a matter of principle if it been very much less pricey.

Her dreadful painting had…well, energy and the courage of its convictions in the way that Richard Butler’s did not, but that isn’t to suggest that I don’t recognise "Pretty in Pink" as one of the greatest songs of my lifetime. “[Her] lovers walk through her in coats”? Exquisitely surreal, and exquisitely enigmatic! “She lives in the place in the side of our lives where nothing is ever put straight”? Bliss! I generally regard incomprehensible lyrics as a function of the songwriter’s laziness or deficient skill, but these — about awful cruelty and transvestism, as best I can ascertain —are endlessly intriguing. And I adore the way Butler sings them. In my novel Who Is Keri Fetherwaite? software enables one to make himself sound like other famous singers in exactly the proportions he or she specifies (for instance, 12.5 percent Patsy Cline, 45 percent Karen Carpenter, and 42.5 percent Aretha). In “Pretty”, I think Richard Butler, who I know for a fact at the time smoked around 1000 cigarettes a day, sounds — gloriously! — like 50 percent Johnny Rotten and 50 percent Lee Marvin. 

Anyone able to explain to me why hipsters would have looked to Justin fucking Timberlake for inspiration wins a free lifetime subscrption to Mendel Illness. No, wait. I know the answer. Post-irony, right?

Half of Every Loving Couple Will One Day Leave the Other

Nothing I have ever posted on the social media was as widely admired as my description of an elderly couple salsa-dancing behind the bandstand, out of sight of other merrymakers, one early spring evening three years ago at Farmers Market in Los Angeles. I found the outpouring of enthusiasm for the little vignette I’d written hardly less heartening than the couple so palpably adoring each other, and so enjoying in each other’s company. 

That’s the exquisite part. The terrifying, hideous part is that half of every loving couple will one day leave the other— in many cases not only alone, but also ancient, debilitated, and terrified. 

I have always thought (and, in a way, hoped) that my own ticket will be punched before Dame Zelda’s, but in the past several weeks, have found myself imagining what might happen if, God forbid, I survive her, and it's occurred to me that the time to start making provisions for being left alone in a far-off foreign land (not that I’ve been able to think of the USA as my country since Donald Trump became president) might be right now. Over the weekend, I composed the following (which I hope never to have to put it on line) for SeniorMatch.com. 

I have never enjoyed filling out profiles such as this one, as I’m not one to talk about myself LOL, but here goes! I am [my age at the time of my bereavement], and in very good physical condition, as I haven’t smoked tobacco (I smoke either cannabis or opium nightly, depending on what’s available) since Memorial Day 1976. It has been years since a stranger in an airport thought I must be a rock star he couldn’t quite place and demanded my autograph LOL, but I do my best to maintain what little physical allure I have left. I drink only in moderation, and walk a few miles and lift weights daily. I am 6-1 and weigh six pounds more than on the day I graduated from Santa Monica High School in 1954, though I may not be remembering the year accurately.

I’ve got a couple of saggy bits that I’ll let you discover on your own LOL, but my chest is firm from weight-lifting. I may appear deeply cynical, but, deep down, pure mush. I never forget a slight — or a kindness. I like people in theory, but commonly not so much in practice. I enjoy solitude, but am subject to immobilising feelings of isolation and loneliness. I’m rather hard work that way, and in many others LOL. For instance, sometimes I get so depressed that I can barely breathe, let alone speak. I may be rather too fond of my own sense of humour. I commonly make myself giggle (and, to be fair, gurgle) a lot at night after I’ve had my cannabis, but many find my sense of humour weird or even upsetting, so I’ll let you decide for yourself LOL. 

My Ideal Match, hereinafter IDM, will get my jokes, and will be happy to greet me in provocative attire when I get home from my daily traipse. I especially like fetishwear, immoderately high heels, and dramatic makeup. As I come in through the door, I would like her to purr sultrily,“See anything you like, handsome?” and cross her long legs, well, tauntingly LOL. (Naturally, if I’m not in the mood for sex, she’ll sense that’s the case, and not bring it up, and did you see what I did there LOL?) Immediately following coitus, she’ll hasten in her impractical footwear into the kitchen to make me a delicious dinner. I like Japanese, Indonesian, Thai, Spanish, Mexican, French, and Indian cuisine, approximately in that order, and haven’t eaten a fellow mammal since 1978.

When I am writing a novel or short story, IDM will say repeatedly, “I can’t wait to read it!” Indeed, I will overhear her telling her friends on the phone how much she’s looking forward to it. When she does actually read it, she will frequently shake her head, remove her reading glasses, and marvel, “This is just so, so good, Johnny! It’s absolutely criminal that the likes of John Grisham and Dan Brown have huge audiences while you grow ever more ancient in obscurity.”

I would of course expect comparable exultation for my music. IDM will be moved to actual tears by my more poignant, non-ironic songs, and never fail to comment on how inventive and irresistible the melodies of the more antic songs are. (When I actually work harder on the tunes on which they ride, I seethe with resentment when people seem to notice only my lyrics). If she compares me to someone, it won’t be someone I admired 45 years ago, and have long since stopped admiring, but Richard Rodgers, perhaps, or Cole Porter. About my singing she will say, approximately, “Well, your pitch can be dodgy, but you phrase so interestingly that it more than makes up for it!”

She will not scoff at my having drawn the line at mammals, and continued to eat fish and fowl.