December 7, 2023 : Substack Mini (56A)
A moment’s surcease
It’s been such a bleak season here in the Wondercabinet (and of course in the world), what with Bob Irwin’s passing at the end of October and the ongoing Gazan horror in all its terrible relentlessness to either side of that. So I thought that this week might be a good moment for a little respite—not so much a flight from all the gruesome reality as a moment’s imagining of what it might be like—what it will needs someday to be like—for the immediate horrors to come to some sort of resolution. Obviously not yet, but someday: something perhaps to steer forward toward. At first I was thinking of tapping into John Lennon’s anthem “Imagine” (perhaps the Playing for Change version, which, admittedly, is kinda heartening) but then a commodious vicus of recirculation brought me instead to an extraordinary instantiation of George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” as it befell the lucky denizens of a Madrid Unemployment office during a particularly grim economic crisis ten years ago, in 2013, courtesy of a gamin flash mob.
And that memory in turn sparked another, how the legendary Beatles producer George Martin carpentered another version of the tune in his own final album, a medley of inspired co-productions entitled In My Life from back in 1998, in this instance setting the virtuosity of the eminent classical guitarist John Williams within the context of his (Martin’s) own full orchestral score. A BBC documentary crew helmed by Alan Benson happened to capture the collaboration, as you can see here:
And then here’s how it all sounded in the final recording:
Which in turn reminded me of the time George Harrison himself joined Paul Simon on an early edition of Saturday Night Live, from way back in 1976:
If only. And for godsake, when? And how, and by way of whom? (If not somehow all of us—the Americans among us all bear a special responsibility as we are financing the whole thing—and not next month or next year but now.)
See you next week!
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