Just a quick update: This is the finals cram season. I have four papers. One 10-pager, one 15-pager, two twenty pagers. I’ve written my 10, outlined one twenty and half-written another twenty. I’m panicky, stressed, tired, and occasionally a little delirious and retarded. For example, I just spelled the word “occasionally” ocassionally and then it took me 30 seconds to realize where I was wrong.
Paper subjects:
1. A new approach to American-Iranian relations: lessons learned from Nixon’s Detente.
2. Russian-Iranian nuclear diplomacy: political objectives or financial gains?
3. The legal structure of Russia’s post-USSR capitalist transition, and lessons to be learned.
4. Nabucco pipeline diplomacy: Where have they failed, where have they succeeded, and how?
Yeah, lots of heavy political shit, and three of those subjects have a lot to do with guns, wars, fights, and very very confrontational diplomacy. The only one that doesn’t just has to do with mobsters and corruption. What a fuckin’ life. The really SICK thing is, of course, that I actually enjoy doing this to myself because the work I’m doing is so friggin’ interesting. But anyway, back to the subject as dictated by the title of the post.
Last night, in a fit of stress and melancholy, I couldn’t fall asleep, at all. It just wouldn’t happen, though I lay in bed, in the dark, though I was prodigiously EXHAUSTED and ready to drift off into happy sleepy dreamland. So … I did what every self-respecting slacker ought to do: instead of doing my veritable mountain of work, I put on a movie called “Across the Universe”. It’s a musical number about an English kid who sneaks over to America in the late 60s, meets with some American youngsters, experiences the 60s, falls in love, etc. etc. The point is, it’s a kind of intellectual montage of America’s various major happenings and groovy movements in that early-Vietnam-war time period. It shows the creativity, the brutality, the protest and the self-discovery (while exposing only a little bit about irrevocable drug addiction, and nothing at all about STDs, destruction of society, and the general ridiculousness of the hippie movement). It was, I have to say, a beautiful movie, well written and filmed, thoughtful, serious enough not to be some kind of “Almost Famous” clone but un-serious enough to be unpretentious. It’s just a beautiful movie, I would recommend it to you all.
But probably the reason why I love this movie so much is because its entire soundtrack is from the Beatles. All of the characters’ names are from Beatles songs, and the characters themselves bear some similarity to the great musicians that occurred during and after (and thanks to) the Beatles. The landlady/singer Sadie (from Sexy Sadie, but resembles the immortal Janis Joplin), the English kid Jude (do I really need to tell you?), his best American buddy Max (Maxwell’s Silver Hammer), his girlfriend Lucy (again … kinda common knowledge). And as I watched this movie, and saw how the directors tied the most beautiful songs of the 20th century, the discography of the Beatles, in with the colorful, vibrant, violent turbulent moments of these people’s lives, from running away from England to the foreign shores of America in the quest of regaining love (Hey Jude), to being drafted into the army (I want you/She’s so heavy), to the strange psychadelica of the hippies (I am the Walrus), to the horrible emotional trauma left by the Vietnam War (Happiness is a Warm Gun), I began to remember my own life.
My very best friends (and let’s be honest, on a really good day, they’re the only ones reading this website anyway) know about my feelings towards John, Paul, George and Ringo. Everyone says that he or she loves the Beatles. What’s not to love, right? But for me, the Beatles have been the background music to my life. I don’t just like or love the Beatles, their music is my conscience, an aid to my memory, and my greatest protector. Seeing the funeral of a young boy after the 12th street riots set to “Let it Be”, I remembered listening to that song shortly after events in the war in 2006 in Israel. Listening to “If I fell in Love” as Lucy realizes her love for Jude, I remembered that it was the song Natasha sent me by way of explanation (emphasis on the line: “I would love to love you”) when things started to go bad. I remember thrashing out for the first time not to AC/DC or Black Sabbath but to I Am the Walrus, with Jesse Curti in my junior year at NU, before we went to a jazz club and plotted our adventures, or how I finally cracked Lalitha, a girl whose PLATONIC friendship I wanted badly (she seemed really cool) and finally won by convincing her to do a similar-to-Sadie performance of “Why don’t we do it in the Road”. Even the two minute long tune of “Flying” was the song that got me over my very first girlfriend in high school. The song “Revolution”, which finally snapped my experience as a runaway of the post-Soviet state into place; “I’ve just seen a face”, which was the very first song I ever heard by the Beatles (although I didn’t know it was them at the time) and which thus signified a pivotal moment in and of itself; and the medley of Beatles songs (some of which are in the movie) that guided my reflections of Sergei years after he died. But the moment that brought tears to my eyes and sobs from my stomach was listening to Hey Jude, the song to which I realized several years ago, after my dad made me listen to it, that the Beatles wrote a song for every possible emotion because aside from being stylish and talented musicians, they were perceptive and empathetic individuals. And their magic has passed, treated as a beloved old grandfather of music by some and like a dusty relic by others, but only by few perceived as pure and naked beauty. Thank you mom and dad, for forcing me to listen to them when I was about 9.
Incidentally or on purpose, or simply because I’ve come to lean on them, the Beatles have framed the most important and beautiful events of my life, from the most trivial, silly moments of happiness to the points of deepest pain and introspection. Some of these songs wafted through the background of my life with barely my notice, only to be remembered in memory, and some I used for peace in my own head when there was nowhere else to look for it. All of them however became an integral part of the memories that have populated my life, my human experience. I don’t just love the Beatles. In some ways, I live through the Beatles.
So when say they’re my favorite band, I don’t just mean I have all their CDs. I wish I could thank the Four for what they did for us youngsters.
One Response »
