Category: High Priestess

Things Noticed

Ace Backwords, natural-born troublemaker and attention-getter, has made the news again. Check out this San Francisco Chronicle piece by Kevin Fagan.
People sure have a lot of opinions about it. The piece garnered 65 comments so far.

It has been suggested that Ace Backwords adopt the alternate persona of Face Bookwords, but so far no action on that front. Meanwhile, he can be found on Facebook under the old familiar moniker of Ace Backwords. And he has collected a boatload of friends. FB does enforce a limit, you know. A word to the wise.

Another suggested Facebook friend is Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Yes, she is related to R. Crumb. And an artist in her own right.

BN Duncan was not politically correct. Not surprisingly, he was Ace’s best friend. Now he’s gone but never, never forgotten.

Speaking again of the Beatles

A Toot and a Snore in ’74

Posted by JetWaveRadio on YouTube, this is a part of something called A Toot and a Snore in ’74, a Beatleg record with the participating musicians listed as John Lennon (his name is bigger on the album cover), Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Harry Nilsson, Jesse Ed Davis and Bobby Keys. The occasion was a product of Lennon’s “lost weekend.” It was the only time we know of when McCartney and Lennon played together after the Beatles broke up.

“Genius is Pain” from National Lampoon Magical Misery Tour

Tony Hendra as John Lennon is brilliant. He was one of the writers, too. This is about the funniest thing I ever heard. The visuals are great, by Rick Moore.

Did you know there’s a website called SuckMyBeatles?

Speaking of the Beatles

….and we were speaking of the Beatles, because several chapters of Acid Heroes are about them. So here is an official, High-Priestess-Endorsed recommended article:
“The Beatles ‘bigger than Jesus’ on Google,” written by Harry Wallop for Telegraph.co.uk

Here on YouTube is 25-year old Paul McCartney being hassled by a journalist about psychedelics.
“I’m not trying to spread the word about this,” says Paul.
“I don’t think my fans are going to take drugs just because I did.”

Mikal Gilmore on the Beatles’ Demise

prstsvertshortThe new Rolling Stone has a story by Mikal Gilmore called “Why the Beatles Broke Up” . A year of research and reflection led to the conclusion, and it’s okay to tell you this, because the author does:

The Beatles’ end was an accident, a maneuver by John Lennon that went horribly wrong.

Gilmore’s online story-about-the-story is very sympathetic to Paul McCartney. John Lennon is the problem, George Harrison less so. Goddess knows where poor Ringo was in all this. The High Priestess of Backwordness has always pictured Ringo as something like Dorothy of Kansas: picked up by a whirlwind and set down, uncomprehending, in another place.

One of Gilmore’s quotes resonates deeply with the High Priestess:

The end of the Beatles was convoluted and acrimonious, but it was also transcendent: No matter their problems, no matter how much they viewed one another with suspicion in their last year or two, the Beatles still knew how to talk to each other through their music, and nobody else has truly matched that heart-to-heart they achieved.

That thought alone is worth the admission price.

Due to the priestly vow of poverty, it is not the High Priestess’s style to buy Rolling Stone or indeed any magazine.. Every now and then a clutch of them turns up at the public library’s discard and donation shelf. The High Priestess considers these as acceptable as offerings on an altar, even if they are several years old. But she might have to go out and buy this one.

And this story-about-the-story-about-the story is now at an end.