Student, Master, Libertine

Before X left Rotterdam we had a conversation about who killed the Modernism. We think that we solved the case.

I had always gone back in the death to the Modernism of the release of this terrible film of Tatischeff, Playtime, in which the old confused man cannot find his way in the Modernist landscape. (Instructions X left with me require all the times that I mention a film I must link to Roger Ebert’s review of it).

But we decided Playtime was too late, the victim already had been mortally wounded. No, we must earlier go to find the assassin. And when you start to think in this way, killers - Earps against Clantons of Modernism - become obvious.

The Beatles killed the Modernism. In 1964 the Beatles make their first try to America and exploited the exposure of Ed Sullivan. Until this moment Modernism was the dominant form of the cultivated classes - after this moment it was the news of yesterday, a relic of a history each one wanted to escape.

It is, I think, the critical point: all people were, perhaps subconscious, struggling within forms which had become excessively restrictive. Like George Harrison indicated: "The Beatles saved the world from boredom." They made thus by taking forms of Apollonian and by twisting them in anthems of Dionysian.

Before he left for Afr... er, his destination, X and I listened to the albums The Night per Hard Day, Beatles to be Sold, and Assistance!. These were noted at one special time in the history of Beatles.

Some divide Beatles into two periods, early and late - but X and I are in accord that there was really of three: Students (until the Assistance!), Masters (Rubber Heart, Revolver, Sgt, Pepper), and Libertines (all else).

These three albums come during the year or two before they gain the complete control. In them they always play the songs of others, but arrangements are invariably innovating, nervously experimental subtle manners. As mockingbirds they find their own voices by imitating others. They are with the pains never to repeat itself.

And then, some drugs, some fights over money and women, and the bacchanal is over. After having destroyed Modernism and its immaculate vision of the future, Beatles could no more propose a new agenda than could Maha Kali, the goddess of the destruction.

Lennon, forgetting all he has once known, writes the songs which even politicize a dream.

It was regrettable to see that the joy and energy of young people fall to the ruin so much quickly. And after it is over, there are only the echoes, the forms, and, yes the dreams.

I think of a place in Texas, where the man who inspired Beatles played in a garage in the choking heat of evening, his dreams agitating through the rigid forms like a spider dancing on the web. The Beatles knew. They were Beatles, after all, because they had heard the Crickets, and the greatest master of all: