(Almost) Actual Beatlemania Bites Dust

Watched Dick Lester's 1962 Ring-A-Ding Rhythm! on the DVR a few nights ago. Now, a re-issue/re-master/re-release/all-of-the-above of Lester's Hard Day's RutNight. (There are no coincidences.)

The four members of the Beatles hold a press conference
at an undetermined location ca. 1964. (AP Photo) #

Bigger picture (tl;dr, i.e.) musings on it, "A Hard Days Night and Beatlemania: The West's Last Outbreak of Optimism Disease" (a Rushdie-ism) here.

"Disease of Optimism" in-fucking-deed. And perspective for the awful Boomers:

... the phenomenon we know as "The Sixties" was a piddling thing compared to its world-historical granddaddy: The revolutionary tide that swept Europe periodically from 1789 to 1848, which began with the Bastille's fall and ended with Karl Marx's invention of communism ...

Sorry Tom Carson's leaving his American Prospect gig, but everything turns to shit eventually; what else can be said?

If there's a more rhapsodic 20th-century sight than teenage girls ululating their heads off as John, Paul, George and Ringo play, I don't know what it might be. And by way of postscript, there are worse subjects than this one—a movie that helped make it possible for the likes of me to have careers mulling pop culture's wonders—to say goodbye with. "Well, that happened," as Alec Baldwin immortally said in David Mamet's State And Main, and the Prospect and I are going our separate ways.

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