Get back?
Beatles reunion a weird, spooky undertaking
I like the Beatles more than most
people.
And by that, I don’t mean that I
like the Beatles more than most
people like the Beatles. I mean that I
like the Beatles more than I like
most people.
During my early teen years, I
probably spent more time with the
Beatles than I did with people. Until
very recently, I considered it a
major personality flaw if someone
didn’t like the Beatles.
I listened to their albums over
and over again, read exploitive
biographies and bought expensive
posters.
So you would think I would be
thrilled by the idea of a new Beatles
song, that I would be counting the
hours until I could finally hear it.
Well, I am counting the hours,
and I am excited.
But I’m also kind of spooked.
I came to terms with the impossi
bility of a Beatles reunion very early
on. I knew that I would never see
the Beatles perform.
John Lennon was dead. (John
Lennon IS dead.) And the rest of the
Beatles said they wouldn’t go on
without him. End of story.
I was disappointed, but I was alsc
sort of relieved. I watched all the
other supergroups of the past come
back new and improved to tour large
stadiums, singing yesterday’s hits
and selling lots of T-shirts —
basically embarrassing themselves
trying to reclaim something that is
forever stuck in the past.
“Thank heavens,” I thought. “The
Beatles won’t ever do that. Their
music and their memory will never
be perverted that way.”
And now “Free as a Bird.”
I have to admit that the Beatles
comeback—complete with
unreleased music and a six-hour
documentary on ABC — is a little
Rainbow Rowell
classier than the Creedence
Clearwater Revival revival or even
the Eagles tour.
Except for one thing.
John Lennon is still dead. Very
dead.
This should prevent a reunion for
at least three reasons.
When John Lennon died, he,
didn’t seem to be all juiced about
getting back with the Beatles. All
the exploitive biographies I read
made it sound like Lennon didn’t
like the other Beatles very much.
Maybe “Free as a Bird” meant
“free from the Beatles.”
Second, the decision to use
John’s dead voice was made by
Yoko Ono, a woman whom — try as
I might — I will never ever like.
Other products to which she has
leant Lennon's image or drawings
include coffee mugs, backpacks and
tacky greeting cards. And she wears
those awful sunglasses.
The third and most important
reason that Lennon’s death should
make a Beatles reunion impossible
is this: Dead people don’t reunite.
They don’t sing lead. Or backup.
They shouldn’t come out with new
albums, shouldn’t appear in com
mercials. Dead people should just
stay dead.
When Natalie Cole teamed up
with her dad, Nat “King” Cole, to
sing “Unforgettable,” some people
said it was beautiful.
They were wrong. It was scary.
Downright morbid.
Maybe Nat King Cole never
liked that song and never wanted to
hear it again.TVlaybe he never liked
Natalie.
But he didn’t have a choice. No
one could ask him because he’s
dead. And dead people can’t answer
questions.
Just like they can’t play piano or
say, “Ringo? I despise Ringo. He
gives me hives.”
Technology will continue to
make it easier for us to bring back
the dead. If there’s a demand for
new Beatles songs, engineers could
reproduce Lennon’s voice “Forrest
Gump”-style. He could sing with the
Beatles forever ... until Paul
McCartney or one of the others dies.
Heck, they could all die. Who
needs them anyway? They haven’t
been productive in years. We would
probably hear more Beatles songs if
all four kicked the bucket.
I will buy all the new Beatles
compact discs.
And I might even like the new
song. But I won’t consider it the
Beatles.
It’s not.
It’s Paul McCartney, George
Harrison, Ringo Starr and a tape.
Lennon wasn’t there to argue over
the lyrics or the chorus. He wasn’t
there to call Paul names, make nasty
comments or sulk with Yoko in the
corner.
He didn’t even get to finish his
song, and it was HIS song.
I just hope that hereafter, the
voices of the dead are left in the
hereafter.
Rowell is a senior news-editorial, adver
tising and English major and a Dally Ne
braskan columnist
write cur ^
Going \pro ’ a scary but rewarding venture
I write for my living, such as it is.
And when I first wandered down
to the offices of the Daily Nebras
kan waaaay back in 1991,1 thought
that nothing could be finer than to
write and be paid for it.
I’d already written and not been
paid — writing had become some
thing of a solitary vice, for me.
I thought I’d go blind, scribbling
in spiral bound notebooks all hours
of the night. And here I was, ready
to go pro.
I didn’t realize how much I still
had to learn.
Writing for an audience is not
like writing for yourself; it’s a whole
lot worse.
And the editors, ugh! I was
convinced I had stumbled into some -
enclave of primitive humanity. How
could they butcher my words like
that?
It was like they’d never heard of
the past perfect.
I quickly discovered that the pay
stank, the paper was a rag, the
people who worked here were dim
bulbs.
But my writing improved. ,
I learned to meet a deadline, to
write even when I felt like I had
nothing to say — like there WAS
nothing to say, and I had to say it in
67 lines.
I learned to take editing — even
bad editing—and to grudgingly
admit that some of it was not bad.
That sometimes it was my writing
that was bad. Or worse, it was my
ideas that were bad.
My first job was as “Staff
Humorist” — a position no longer
available, I’m afraid — for the Arts
and Entertainment section.
So from the very beginning, I had
a column.
Now a column is a tricky beast.
It’s only fiin until you run out of
ideas and have no means of manu
facturing new ones.
Most people run out around the
third week.
Mark Baldridge
“What they all have in
common, all the
columnists, anyway, is
that they are prepared to
ivrite badly until they
can write well. ”
And when the first few columns
in which you are obviously gasping
for ideas see print... well, it’s
mortifying.
And it goes on being mortifying
until you learn the secret of ideas:
that there are an infinite number of
them floating around.
You learn to watch the passage
of your own thought like a spectator
—just a piece of your awareness
always watching your thoughts. And
when you see one that interests you,
you abstract it from the flow of
ideas and put it aside — for the •
column.
You become a gardener, of sorts,
cultivating and weeding your own
thought as you would a garden.
What you become, after all, is a
writer.
A writer is a thinker on paper;
it’s as simple as that. And writing is
a way of thinking out loud.
It sharpens your mind, offers
you formulas for approaching
new ideas, gives you something
to do with the gray stuff between
your ears.
And it teaches you how wrong
you can be. V'■<,
Seeing your own words in print
the next day has an alarmingly
sobering effect on the mind. It can
make a more timid character swear
off print forever. And no one — no
one in the world — is immune.
Writers, particularly newspaper
columnists, know their limits.
And they are always offered
opportunities to surpass them.
And it is this peculiar nature of
the weekly column that has proved
the most important, to me and to
many: It offers you a chance to
expand yourself.
Not every day, not every week,
but over time.
Which brings us to the real point
of today’s column: the possibilities.
A lot of people seem to think the
DN is this big homogenous machine
that, somehow, authors all these
columns with different people’s
names on them.
It isn’t so. Most of these kids
down here can’t stand each other.
What they all have in common,
all the columnists, anyway, is that
they are prepared to write badly
until they can write well.
And you can join them.
The DN is now seeking colum
nists for next semester.
Those among the student body
who feel underrepresented on these
pages today will have no one to
blame but themselves if they go
unrepresented tomorrow as well.
Come down, apply to write.
Those who are serious about
writing will stay and write record
reviews or news stories or sports
interviews until they get the
column they know in their hearts
they deserve.
This is your newspaper.
You want it back?
Baldridge Is a senior English major and
a Daily Nebraskan Colnmnlst
guest
Todd Burger
House of madness
entangles patients
I have once visited a house of
madness, the Glore Psychiatric
Museum (I think it is called),
which is located inside the
administrative building of the
State (Mental) Hospital in St.
Joseph, Missouri.
There relates the history of the
institution, filled with patients’
artifacts so carefully arranged and
framed with words by a psychiat
ric-minded curator as to give the
impression of a continuous
evolutionary improvement in the
treatment of mental patients.
Patients (are they presently
living or dead, in or out of this
very hospital?) lived among these
artifacts that now sit as dead
objects before the observer at the
museum.
They certainly weren’t airy
artifacts to the patients; they were
the many things of daily life:
beds, chairs, clothes, straitjackets,
wash basins, hand-made crafts.
They were actual run-of-the-mill
state hospital things that the
patients lived (suffered and died)
among, which is what makes this
museum-within-an-institution so
compelling.
I couldn’t help noticing that
the pained existence of the mental
patients (or rather, the enduring
existence of their artifactual
effects) was unsuccessfully
covered with the gloss of offi
cious psychiatric rhetoric about
how patient care is continually
improving (and how, even in
things past, which we now see as
horrific — as you surely must
know—were only done with the
patient’s best interests at heart:
sometimes it took a burst of cold
water therapy to get that patient
to mind herself and her doctor).
But there are still people,
many people, who are — for all
legal and practical purposes —
locked up not too far from this
very museum room that is open
for the public to see into and to
marvel.
The inmates outside the
museum are living among objects
which are, by definition, candi
dates for ftiture placement as
artifacts in this in-house museum.
All told, the museum is
calculated by the curator psychia
trist to make even the would-be
skeptic exclaim: “Look at all we
have done! Look at how far we
have advanced from base
brutality to enlightened care!”
The psychiatrist as curator,
then, has achieved another victory
' in getting errant minds to think
his way: the right way.
People are committed to an
institution because their minds
don’t function right or somebody
thinks their minds don’t function
right or somebody wants to think
that their minds don’t function
right.
Just outside of this huge room
of dusty artifacts was a hallway of
administration where the present
day relations between staff,
patients and society were being
negotiated, I imagine, in a rather
top-down authorial way (notice
that power-laden word, “autho
rial.” How can another “author”
subvert that presumed authority?
Is it by daring to write against
that first overweening authorial
grain?). For who in their right
mind would want the inmates to
run the asylum?
“They must be silenced
atid corrected for the
good of society. Yes, for
society’s sake. We will
do it in the people’s
name. ”
Why should they even have
much of a voice as long as they
have the wrong voice? “They
must be silenced and corrected,”
the good administrator says, “for
the good of society. Yes, for
society’s sake. We will do it in
the people’s name.”
Thusly, there is the dynamic of
right-thinking minds versus
wrong-thinking minds. If you
don’t agree with the right
thinking minds then you must be
so very wrong thinking that you
will be contained and fixed —
until such a time as you become a
completely compliant and
malleable right-thinking mind.
By then, of course, much of
you may have vanished some
where along the way. But at least
you are a somewhat safe — yet
now somewhat tainted and
suspect—right-thinking mind.
And if you revolt — and it
must be a silent revolt for a loud
revolt brings too many conse
quences — if you revolt, if you
withdraw into yourself trying to
keep your very self from escap
ing, the right-thinking minds will
continue to work on you, con
vinced that you are about to
break, about to lose your essential
self.
All that you can do is hide and
wait and hope that the right
thinking minds retreat and go
away. Perhaps, if you think you
are smart, you can try to act like
you have changed, even as you
try to hide what you may have
left of yourself under the surface.
You may think this will work,
but the right-thinking minds have >
seen all the tricks and all the
plays; they have the advantage in
that they have seen more, read
more, know more. Above all,
they are right-thinking ifiinds.
You remain a wrong-thinking *
mind who has to be fixed or at
least silenced into submission.
You hide yourself, or have you
lost yourself?
And how do wrong-thinking
minds think of people with right
thinking minds? I had to wonder
at what I was thinking when I was
going in and out.of the adminis
tration doors leading inside to the
second-story museum. There on
the porch were these casually
dressed people lounging outside
in this hothouse day—workers?
patients?—staring at me directly
without any reserve whatsoever.
Did they think me about to
join them in some capacity? Or,
worse, did they loathe me,
perceiving me as a brazenly
curious tourist doing the madness
kick?
If they had only known I was
not a mere interloper. But maybe
they had known, for their
unwavering stares bespeaked
such an uncanny recognition.
Burger Is a senior English major.