So, eight days after its release, I finally sat down at my office PC to give the Beatles’ Now and Then music video a proper hearing/viewing on decent speakers/monitor. (I could never have delayed the gratification in 1968.) The first word that came to mind was maudlin — sad and sentimental in both mood and tempo. Competently done, as you would expect, perhaps too much so. Now and Then came across to me as Free as a Bird overlaid with Long and Winding Road.
My next thought was that the video depicted John as over-the-top crazy compared to the other Beatles, as if John were Harpo Marx, appearing mainly for comic relief. Yes, the video included a few bits of McCartney cutting up, but by-and-large I thought the scenes with Jiggly John not only made him look foolish but undercut the mood of the song and the finality of the Beatles.
Wasn’t it Paul prancing down the hill 55 years ago as The Fool on the Hill? Was Paul now attempting to even the score? Are we to conclude it was Paul all along who took the Beatles’ music seriously and was the real innovator in the group? Oh, stop it, I say to my teen-fan-self. We all heard what we heard.
And, in the end, Now and Then resides in my head as a Paul self-indulgence, which wouldn’t be his first (have a taste of Wild Honey Pie). It’s a song I’ll listen to 2 or 3 more times to see if I missed something, but it just doesn’t feel like Beatles canon. Plus, the cover art sucks. Ed Ruscha should have stuck to gas stations.
Speaking of sucking: The Beatle-powers-that-be decided to re-mix I Am the Walrus for the newly-reissued Blue Album, and what a mistake that was. Allow me to opine (like others) that the 2023 mix is an abomination — it over-emphasizes the beat, obscures the elements that made the original recording artsy and distinctive, and basically makes it unlistenable for long-time fans of the song. Can’t believe Paul and Ringo approved this.
I still consider the 1967 Capitol mono single to be the definitive and most well-balanced version of I Am the Walrus. If only Giles Martin and company had started with that mix and used their AI to add some separation and presence, I would have been total on board. Goo goo g’joob.
Last year, I posted an editorial cartoon about Melania Trump cashing in on the dubious and now quickly-fading NFT fad. To refresh your memory, NFTs are to actual art what cryptocurrency is to real money — a few hundred bits of computer memory, backed by no authority whatsoever, which supposedly denotes ownership of an item of value. You can read about how NFTs are supposed to work, and why they exist, here.
But the point of this post is not that NFTs are exploited by savvy grifters like Melania, which they certainly are; rather, it is that NFTs reveal just how lazy such grifters are, laziness being the essential quality that defines people like the Trumps. Donald J. and Melania and Don and Eric and Ivanka — they all have trained themselves to look for the lowest-hanging, most-readily-dropped fruits to gather into their bottomless ego-baskets. NFTs were practically designed for people like the Trumps. Whom I wish were rarer.
As a point of evidence, here is one of Melania Trump’s NFTs, titled Melania’s Vision and touted thus by the so-called NFT “broker” that offered it:
Melania Trump’s personal journey has been enlightening; from Slovenia through Europe and into the United States of America — including as First Lady. The beauty and hardships of individuals, majestic landscapes and profound architecture have entered her lens and remain in her heart. Marc-Antoine Coulon’s breathtaking watercolor embodies Melania Trump’s cobalt blue eyes, providing the collector with an amulet to inspire. Melania’s Vision provides the collector with strength and hope.
I’ll give you a moment to catch a fresh breath after that inspirational floe of rotten algae.
[Inhale through your nose, draw the breath into your belly… hold the breath a moment… now exhale slowly through your mouth… it’s okay if you make a soft, cleansing sound.]
According to the NFT trading site OpenSea, this digital rendition of Melania’s eyes is going for 0.o2 Ethereum (the second-most-popular cryptocurrency) or $38.o6.
May I venture that $38.o6 is pretty generous for this piece of flotsam. One needn’t look very closely to see that this image signed by PERSON WHOSE SIGNATURE HAS DENSE VERTICAL STROKES JUST LIKE DONALD’S is less an original watercolor than a Photoshop creation. Melania’s right eye is an obvious digital mirror image of the left, or vice versa. The computer-artist simply did a cut-and-paste-and-flip. Only Melania’s washy eyebrow strokes are non-mirror-image.
Not that time-to-create is the essence of art, but I genuinely doubt that Melania’s Vision took more than 20 minutes to produce. Graphic artists, as I once hoped to be, learn to do things super-quickly because they are paid so little. The majority of the time spent on this work no doubt took place on the upper floors of Trump Tower, discussing the best way the Trump grift family could make a buck off it. They could care less that Melania’s right eye was a mirror-image, down to the smallest eyelash detail, of her left eye.
To them, it’s just another part of the unreality show that the Trumps star in.
Half of Americans want this guy, and his family, to rule this country again. If only I could make an NFT of my head-slap, but it may not matter. Americans vote for people of their class these days: Trump the Grifter, along with his Fagin Family, has somehow convinced a multitude that he’s one of them. This doesn’t speak well of the multitude.
As to the other half of America… well, there’s my market. If I want to make a difference, I had better start perfecting my head-slap and hire a graphic artist who works cheap but markets well.