21. “You Never Give Me Your Money” – Abbey Road

20. “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight” – Abbey Road

Few songs capture the same kind of feeling that the Abbey Road Medley does. Plus, singing “Carry That Weight” is fun. Seems like a bar song.

19. “Strawberry Fields Forever” – Magical Mystery Tour

18. “A Hard Day’s Night” - A Hard Day’s Night

Entertainment Weekly put this song at #1. Then, I stopped reading Entertainment Weekly. Great song, yes, as are all of these. BEST? Not by a long shot. Maybe it’s just because I’m not in love with their early recordings. I’m a Sgt. Pepper and beyond type guy.

17. “Birthday” - The Beatles (The White Album)

This song is just catchy. I’m sorry. That bridge is contagious.

16. “The End” - Abbey Road

If there’s a way for the greatest band in history to go out, this is it…well, that and “Her Majesty”, of course.

15. “Something” - Abbey Road

Unfortunately, George Harrison was just beginning to shine as a songwriter when the group decided to call it quits.

14. “Get Back” – Let It Be

While Abbey Road was recorded after Let It Be, making it The Beatles’ last album, many people believed that “Get Back” was the last song in their catalog because Let It Be was recorded, then shelved, then released after Abbey Road shortly after the band’s breakup.

13. “Hello Goodbye” - Magical Mystery Tour

…and here on display is Paul McCartney’s complicated wordplay that constantly keeps the listener guessing…”You say yes, I say no, you stay stop, and I say go go go…”

12. “Here Comes the Sun” – Abbey Road

More proff that three of the four Beatles could write an incredible song. Ringo’s still working on it, most likely.

11. “Elanor Rigby” – Revolver

Father Mackenzie seems like an awful man, and after hearing this song so many times, I am yet to realize why I feel the way I do.

10. “All You Need is Love” - Magical Mystery Tour + Yellow Submarine

Everything The Beatles were about summed up in five words.

9. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

John Lennon said that he was inspired to write this song when his son Julian showed him a painting that he had made in school that he called “Lucy in the Sky”. The rest of the song was also inspired by Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (LSD).

8. “Hey Jude” - Past Masters [recorded during sessions for “The Beatles (The White Album)”

This is the first Beatles song I ever heard, and I love it, everything from the everlasting chant to John walking in and saying “bloody hell!”.

7. “Revolution” - Past Masters [originally recorded for “The Beatles (The White Album)”

The B-side to the previous song. This actually did appear on The White Album, but in a more mellow tone rather than the real rock tone that this version delivers.

6. “Come Together” - Abbey Road

Rumor has it that each of the four verses describes one of them. I’m yet to discover which one has “toe jam football”, and I think they all would fit the “spinal cracker” definition. I think.

Wait, what the hell is a “spinal cracker”?

5. “I’ve Got A Feeling” – Let It Be

From the album that almost wasn’t, this track was recorded from the famous rooftop concert that The Beatles gave, which would end up being their last concert. After about 45 minutes, the police asked for the concert to be stopped. I bet they regret that move to this day.

4. “Glass Onion” - The Beatles (The White Album)

This song is basically a review of songs from Magical Mystery Tour, which happens to be my favorite Beatles album, this album being my 2nd favorite. The song shows that John Lennon did indeed have a sense of humor, confusing conspiracy theorists even further with this line: “I told you bout the walrus and me, man / You know that we’re as close as can be, man! / Well here’s another clue for you all / The walrus was Paul…”, even though John appeared as the walrus in the video for “I Am the Walrus”, sang “I Am the Walrus”, and appeared as the walrus on the cover of Magical Mystery Tour.

3. “Helter Skelter” – The Beatles (The White Album)

Paul McCartney’s one moment of recorded spaz became what is probably the first metal rock recording, and who can forget Ringo’s quote at the end of the song?

I GOT BLISTERS ON MA FINGAS!!!

2. “Don’t Let Me Down” - Past Masters [originally recorded for “Let It Be”

Probably one of the most under appreciated songs of The Beatles whole catalog.

1. “I Am the Walrus” - Magical Mystery Tour

Everything about this song is amazing. Enough said. This song makes absolutely no sense, but it proved that not everything has to make sense. Some things can just be interpreted as they are.

Days Of Future Past was one of rock’s earliest concept albums, in many ways the Moody Blues’ answer to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Released on November 10, 1967, Days Of Future Past chronicles a day in the life of a common Englishman, dawn to dusk in a masterpiece of heavily orchestrated, flowing British psychedelic rock. It was the second studio album by the band, but bears little resemblance to the R&B tinged blues-rock sound of their first album (1965’s Go Now in the U.S. and a slightly different but simultaneous U.K. release, The Magnificent Moodies). Frustrated with the inability to score a follow-up hit to the massively popular (#10 U.S., #1 U.K.) 1964 single “Go Now!”, Denny Laine and Clint Warwick left for greener pastures (Denny to McCartney & Wings and Warwick to carpentry). Remaining members Graeme Edge, Mike Pinder and Ray Thomas recruited John Lodge and Justin Hayward to the band in late 1966, which led to a redirection of sound and style that was introduced on Days Of Future Past. The success of the album (#3 U.S., #27 U.K.) spurred the Moodies forward, and it became the first of nine straight Top 30 albums that stretched into the 1980s. Edge, Hayward and Lodge continue to practice the sound and style begun in 1967 with frequent concerts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Days Of Future Past features the hits “Tuesday Afternoon” and “Nights In White Satin.” It’s #20 on my Top 25 for 1967 and is available as download tracks from iTunes (click here) and as a CD from Amazon (click here).

It occurred to me the other day that when Let it Be, The Beatles’ last official release, came out, John Lennon was 30 years old and Paul McCartney was 28. They had changed the face of music, written and recorded some of the highest-selling and most ground-breaking albums in history, sparked a cultural phenomenon that spanned continents… all in their 20s. Amazing.

The next thought I had is that it must be weird to live out the next two thirds of your life knowing you’ve basically already peaked. (Of course, sadly, John didn’t get that chance.) I mean, Paul knows that he can have Wings and a series of well-received solo albums and all that, but nothing he ever does in his life will approach what he did in his 20s.

I’m not suggesting this is a horrible thing. I’m pretty sure we’d all love to have that problem. But I know I live my life expecting I have greater things in my future, and I suspect most people do. For Paul, it’s all been downhill the past 35+ years. Poor bastard.

The week is finally over and I’m pretty confident that I got through it with passing marks. I’m pretty much exhausted right now but I’m not sure a nap would be a good idea. The econ test was a joke and it bothered me how stupid it was. That’s about all I have to say about it.

Okay so a couple months ago I was looking at Christgau’s review of Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion (he doesn’t like it, but I still think it’s pretty catchy). All he said was “sunny down snuff”. I don’t know what those words mean, and I still don’t. This is why I’d never cut it in English. Anyways I looked them up and they are lyrics to a song “Heroes and Villains” by Brian Wilson (of The Beach Boys). So if you were to list famous bands that everyone should listen to, The Beach Boys would be pretty high up there. However, I never have (and I guess I still haven’t technically). The only thing I remembered of them is the comedic parodies where people would be surfing and their music would play in the background. It really just sounded comedic to me when I was 8 or 9 like some crappy old pop songs. “Good Vibrations”, for example. Now that song just scares the shit out of me. This stuff is like so heavily psychadelic that I just can’t comprehend it. Well, I didn’t decide to listen to Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys (er, “Good Vibrations” wasn’t on Pet Sounds, but it was by The Beach Boys) but rather SMiLE by Brian Wilson. Wikipedia is really what got me interested. The article on The Beach Boys paints a much different image than I initially perceived… which is sort of similar to The Beatles, I guess. I mention this because of how closely they seem to parallel each other. Apparently SMiLE was originally intended as a Beach Boys project but because of conflict/Brian Wilson becoming mentally ill (I really would like to summarize what I read about this, because it is pretty interesting. You know, with drugs, psychiatrists, and crazy conspiracy shit that keeps you reading a wiki article. Here’s the link) it was cancelled. It was suppose to be a hugeass legendary project of awesomeness but fell through… and then a few weeks after it was officially cancelled, Sgt. Pepper’s by The Beatles was released (which is the #1 record on Rolling Stone’s somewhat famous list of the 500 best albums of all time). Oh and the other parallel is just that like, they both wrote pop songs and then wrote psychadelic pop songs that stayed pop but are incredibly hazy. These songs frighten me but I’m going to learn to like this album or at least appreciate it slightly.

So to be honest I was listening to some Beach Boys tracks and the original versions of SMiLE tracks on youtube and was basically shitting my pants about how awful and painful this was going to be. I mean all of the damn voices are dubbed and it’s migraine inducing. And then he has these random sounds (wall of sound-refined, according to wikipedia) that I don’t like. I mean I don’t need all that goddamn sound at once, but apparently it was both acclaimed, then criticized, and then Wilson’s version (on SMiLE) was of course acclaimed. I don’t really know, I just know that it was really unpleasant.
But now I’m 2/3 way through the album and it’s not so bad. There’s a lot of little interesting ditties that keeps the album feeling light. Though I’ll be honest I have a slight headache (then again I’m pretty tired). It’s fun and I think Christgau was right and I definitely prefer Wilson’s old voice vs. his young voice. While Carl and Brian definitely had some amazing voices back then (they’re still good) they were just sort of awkwardly clean… serial killer clean.

Oh I forgot to mention that I remembered SMiLE because I saw something that convinced me to go onto metacritic which conveniently has a list of the top rated albums (since 2000 + some extra). And, well, SMiLE was right there staring me in the face. Anyways I also looked at some other music lists and saw that Christgau actually liked More Adventurous by Rilo Kiley in 2004. Since they are so easy to listen to, it should be a nice break after this.

Going back to the album apparently a very small, but considerable part of the concept of the album was to write ditties that are deceptively simple. You definitely heard child-like chord progression and then these random riffs (eh wrong word). Random noises, instruments, voices, it makes you go sort of crazy. Oh and the other part of it was that Brian Wilson and lyrical collaborator Van Dyke Parks (who worked on both the original and this actual release) are like spiritually enlightened and so their lyrics are amazing. I wish I could actually hear what they are saying but all I hear is this shit attacking my head. I think this is what happens when music “whooshes” you. Goddamn, he (most likely) didn’t use LSD when he finished this production so what the fuck must be going on in his mind to create compositions like this? On a related note I thought about how he must randomly hear shit and think, “Wow, this is perfect for such and such song” or “Maybe I should write an entire goddamn song about this 2 second sound.” Sort of like how art majors see random shit and make something pretty (or shitty looking for the hardcore depressing art majors). It’d be interesting to see/hear through the eyes/ears of gifted others (literally) I guess.

Whoo, just finished the album. It sound like one longass song which I guess it was sort of meant to sound like (I think “Heroes and Villains” is the main piece and then the rest is just a story of some journey… or something).

*edit* I forgot to mention that Christgau’s “review” of Merriweather Post Pavilion is pretty on par though. A lot of the sound and feeling in the former is found in the latter… and the latter came first.

Sem desenhos novos finalizados…

They’ve been going in and out of style..

One of my other favorite tracks on Sgt. Pepper is Paul’s charmingly kinky ‘Lovely Rita.’ The Beatles had a knack for populating their songs and albums with colorful characters like this. On Sgt. Pepper alone, they gave us Rita, Lucy, Mr. Kite and of course Ringo’s alter ego Billy Shears.

Throw in Eleanor Rigby, Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, Prudence, Bungalow Bill, Maxwell, Sadie, JoJo, Sweet Loretta, Doctor Robert, Lady Madonna and the Walrus. It’s no wonder a movie like Across the Universe was able to not only feature Beatles songs but name every major and minor character after a Beatles song as well.

And it’s no wonder Cirque du Soleil was able to craft an entire performance around this stuff. Sgt. Pepper was tapping into the Cirque du Soleil vibe nearly 20 years before Cirque du Soleil existed. I’m reminded of the hilarious scene in Knocked Up where Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd eat mushrooms before watching a Cirque performance. People have been doing that to Sgt. Pepper for decades.

I’ve highlighted a “Paul album” and a “John album” so now it’s time to focus on one that’s a bit of both. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a collaborative effort, with John and Paul sharing input on most of the album’s 13 tracks. The few exceptions mostly belong to McCartney (‘Fixing a Hole,’ ‘When I’m 64,’ ‘Lovely Rita’) although Lennon is credited with authorship of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.’

The album’s best-loved track, ‘A Day in the Life,’ is split in two, with John contributing the dreamy verses and Paul the upbeat center portion (as well as the cacophonous crescendos in the middle and at the end. One of the reasons that song rises to the upper tier of my list of favorite Beatles songs is how beautifully it combines the personalities and talents of those two songwriters.

‘Getting Better’ is another song that blends those two perspectives. Paul’s “it’s getting better all the time” is matched by John’s “it can’t get no worse.” It’s reminiscent of their collaboration on the wonderful ‘We Can Work It Out,’ where Paul’s optimistic title phrase is paired with John’s more downbeat (musically and lyrically) “Life if very short and there’s no time…”

Apart from ‘A Day in the Life’ and ‘With a Little Help From My Friends,’ ‘Getting Better’ is probably my favorite song on Sgt. Pepper. Much of this album hasn’t aged very well and is more notable for its production values and the creativity of the concept than actual songcraft. But ‘Getting Better’ showcases the best of both.

Over the past year or two, as a music critic, I have expanded the amount of music I listen to, and ultimately, my music collection. I’ve been listening to a little bit of everything over the years, but now I can especially say that I have listened to a lot of what this world has to offer, music-wise. There is still a lot that I haven’t discovered, but something I’ve begun to really dive into is the earlier decades of music, primarily listening to a lot of The Beatles, Ryan Adams (and the Cardinals), Nirvana, and others. Rather than write reviews of these artists and their many albums, I decided I would write a bit on what their music has meant to me in the past few years.

I could talk all day about the revival of The Beatles and how they were yet again, in the year 2009, number one on the Billboard charts. But what I’ll talk about instead is this: the music they made in the early 60’s is much different than the music they made closer to the end of their career, nearly 1969-1970. And that music is also different compared to the music we hear from Paul McCartney every couple to few years now, in 2009. Yes, it’s all been said before, but there’s something that changes when you’re high on the current drug (in those days, acid) or drunk, nearly about to pass out and you step into the studio to record something. Songs like “Everyone’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey”, or “Strawberry Fields Forever”, or especially such a hit as “I Am The Walrus” prove that the most random oddities can come out in the music you’re playing if you’re under the influence.

Recently, I was given the opportunity to attend a presentation on Recording The Beatles, a book that a couple of authors and sound engineers put together about the many recordings The Beatles did at Abbey Road. On record, nearly 95% of all the music that we have from The Beatles was recorded at Abbey Road, and something they continuously did in the studio was change things. Creativity was always afoot with the group in the Abbey Road studio, and they continually changed it up with every song they recorded. I’m sure at one point, they looked at each other and said, “What do you think this would sound like if we were all high?” and recorded exactly what they had set out to do. I think that’s how we might have been given The Magical Mystery Tour music and some of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band tunes. Classic, yes. But done under the influence.

The question that has always plagued me is what would these bands, artists, and songwriters sound like if they weren’t always doped up or were sober once in a while? Fortunately, we have some evidence of what a difference getting clean can have on music, and this is what fascinates me. Ryan Adams and his band the Cardinals can prove a direct difference between the days when the man was as high as a kite, and this recent decade or two where he’s begun to clean up his act. Adams’ music carries a quite different sound beginning in 2000, all the way to present, than it does prior to that. One band we don’t have the privilege of hearing what it might sound like now is Nirvana. Kurt Cobain tragically ended his life before getting clean, and we may never know what the band would sound like, or what he would have been able to accomplish without the influence of drugs and alcohol.

This post isn’t meant to be a history lesson, and it definitely isn’t a public announcement to stop doing drugs or drinking. What I challenge you to do is, the next time you’re listening to older music, back in the early decades, do some of your own digging. Is there a difference between the old music that was popular back in the day and the newer pop tunes that the same artist is putting out? I guarantee you there will likely be something different, and it’s not just age.

Artist: The Beatles

Released: 1967

Background: I always hesitate to say “Poor Ringo.”

That’s because the Starr-y eyed drummer was part of what was most likely the most popular and lucrative band in the world. Every member of the Fab Four are pretty much musical saints, and Ringo has to have the satisfaction of being a part of some of the greatest songs ever written.

But Ringo is often derided as the least talented member of the Fab Foursome. Some of that stems from the fact that John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison all went on to have relatively successful solo careers after the Beatles split. Ringo? He was on Shiny Time Station and was in Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” It also doesn’t help that Ringo sings lead on songs like “Boys,” “Yellow Submarine” and “Octopus’ Garden.” While all three of those tunes are excellent, they don’t really have the heft of “Day in the Life,” “Hey Jude,” “Yesterday” or “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey.”

“A Little Help From My Friends” is probably Ringo’s most popular song where he sings lead. Interestingly, the song was written by Lennon and McCartney for Ringo. And the song’s vocals were apparently constructed in a limited range to conform with Ringo’s – um – limited range.

Still, I think Ringo knocked it out of the park with this song. It’s a bit slow and methodical. But it’s catchy enough for a wide audience to appreciate. Maybe that’s why Joe Cocker did a cover of the song which became the highly recognizable theme to the Wonder Years.

What makes the song great: In a strange way, the song’s limited octave range is one of its biggest drawing points. In a strange way, some Beatles songs are difficult to do for karaoke because the octaves change wildly. “A Day in the Life” and “Helter Skelter” are two good examples of this peculiar phenomenon.

“A Little Help From My Friends” is pretty much required to be sung at a low octave. It’s the natural way that the song is remembered. And that makes the song accessible to pretty much anybody. It also helps that the song is popular and well-known enough to prompt the crowd to sing along with you. That’s always nice.

Best element of the song: I like the song’s accessibility. It’s also not too short or too long, and it doesn’t get bogged down in instrumentals or weird utterances of the number nine.

Worst element of the song: “A Little Help From My Friends” isn’t going to win any awards as an original selection. It’s a pretty popular – and therefore – common choice. And although the song is accessible, it’s not particularly challenging for those who want to push the karaoke envelope.

Conclusion: To reiterate, I don’t think there’s any reason to be sorry for Ringo. He was an integral part of music history and he should be congratulated. But it’s good to know that at least one song that he sings is worthy of being picked at a karaoke bar. Or in a Yellow Submarine. But probably not an Octopus’ Garden, because it’s impossible to sing underwater.

The Beatles were denied the use of the following three people on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album as they were deemed too controversial. 1.) Jesus Christ 2.) Gandhi 3.) Adolf Hitler

Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) is in the second row, third from the left (to his right is poet Dylan Thomas).*

It’s been so cold this week, Mr. Singh, my Outreach Connection connection was wearing a bedraggled parka as he stood on the corner flogging his paper, which is sold to support the homeless and unemployed.

He told me he’ll be moving his location indoors to the Metro Hall lobby once the really cold weather hits.

I’m glad I caught him in his usual spot because his regular cover feature, “Notable Quotables,” this issue was my favourite one so far:

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”  Music at Night, 1931
— Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Did you know?

● Huxley’s novel The Doors of Perception (1954) developed a cult following in the psychedelic 1960s, and inspired the name of the rock band The Doors.

● Huxley also appears on the sleeve of The Beatles’ landmark Sgt. Pepper (1967) album.

● He died of cancer on November 22, 1963 – the same day as C.S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy.

*To find out who else is on the Sgt. Pepper cover, go here.

P.S. Here are two of my favourite examples of “expressing the inexpressible” … in fact, neither one is even in English.  Enjoy!

Contigo en la distancia:

Lucy Vodden, the woman who inspired the Beatles classic ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,’ died last Tuesday at the age of 46. Vodden, a childhood friend of Julian Lennon, passed away after losing a fight with the autoimmune disease lupus, according to an announcement made Monday by the St. Thomas’ Lupus Trust Charity.

John Lennon took the song title from a picture Julian had drawn of Vodden at school. “That’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” Julian told his dad when he brought the artwork home. Due to the psychedelic feel of the song, from the Fab Four’s iconic 1967 album ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ many fans felt the song’s title was an allusion to LSD.

“I remember Julian and I both doing pictures on a double-sided easel, throwing paint at each other, much to the horror of the classroom attendant,” Vodden — who’s maiden name was O’Donnell — told BBC radio in 2007. “Julian had painted a picture and on that particular day his father turned up with the chauffeur to pick him up from school.”

Sgt. Pepper was an important event for “my generation.”  And Lucy was on of the best songs on the album.  Lucy Vodden was the “Mona Lisa” of Sgt. Pepper, the mortal inspiration for an immortal work of art.
There is also a heart warming angle to the story.  Julian Lennon either kept in touch or reconnected with his childhood friend.  He corresponded with Lucy and telephoned her. Julian and Lucy shared a love of gardening and Lennon would send Lucy gift certificated for her to use at a local gardening store. In June, it was reported that Julian Lennon was supporting Vodden during her fight with the disease. According to the charity, Lennon and his mother, John’s first wife Cynthia, were “shocked and saddened by the loss of Lucy and their thoughts are with her husband and family today and always.

El martes de la semana pasada murió la niña que le dio el dibujo al hijo de Lennon e inspiró al padre de éste a componer la canción “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds“.

La mítica canción que aparece en el disco Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, fue compuesta en plena pscicodelia de los Beatles. Algunos dicen que en realidad hace referencia al ácido LSD. Pero John Lennon aclaró siempre que fue el dibujo que le trajo Julian, su hijo, lo que le hizo componer ese bello tema.

A continuación les dejamos el link al artículo que publicó ayer en su portal de internet el diario Times de Inglaterra (en idioma original).

Real-life ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ dies at 46

Detail from an installation, The Ten Commandments, at Deitch Projects in New York City by Keith Haring, 2009 (original panels 1985). Photo by 16 Miles of String.

CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, PART TWO

by Peter Gabel

II.

During Friday night Shabbat services at my synagogue Beyt Tikkun in San Francisco (Beyt Tikkun means House of Healing and Repairing), we always go outside in a whirl of dancing, holding hands in long lines, and singing Tov Le’Hodot La’Adonie (“It’s Good to Give Thanks to G-d”). By this time, our rabbi has already stipulated that the God we do not believe in does not exist so that we do not have to spend our time worrying about it, and our goal is to elevate our awareness, to apprehend the miraculous nature of the universe as we turn away, at “sundown,” from the mysterious great ball of fire one million times larger than our own planet and face the other billions of fireballs in what we call the sky. To apprehend this magnificence while singing and dancing with other whirling comrades is just Wow! as the prayers say. It takes you out of the humdrum flatness of everyday existence, in which this same earth and sky appear as mere objects before us as we carry out our functional activities, in which our minds are racing from thought to thought distracting us from Being Present, or better yet, in the words of Ram Das, from Being Here. Even more, the whirl of the spiral dance allows us to make eye contact with each other, to actually see each other as radiant spiritual beings, with open hearts and bursting with recognition as we share this amazing experience of where we actually are, where we have actually been all day. How remarkably different this collective encounter is from the reciprocal withdrawnness, from the mutual solitude of the day, as we woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across our heads, found our way downstairs and drank a cup, and somebody spoke and we went into a dream. [FN14]

The very purpose of this spiritual practice is to bring ourselves into contact with the world behind the world, by lifting our spirit to deepen our awareness of the phenomena before us so as to unveil a spiritual and moral meaning that is obscured by the leveled-down empirical perception of everyday life. The poet William Blake brilliantly captured the necessity of this deepening of awareness for gaining access to truth when he said, “We are led to Believe a Lie When we see [with], not Thro’, the Eye.” [FN15] And it is just this kind of access to another dimension of reality that is sometimes made possible by social movements, in which people emerge from the passive station of their reciprocal isolation into a new kind of connection, a new “mutual recognition,” that allows the seemingly fixed appearance of the world to dissolve, revealing a spiritual depth that had previously been “unconscious” in the sense of inaccessible to conscious knowledge. [FN16] Historical moments touched by these movements often produce outpourings of intellectual and cultural creativity, as people in disparate locations begin to express the new insight in a burst of music, literature, intellectual work, and activism, all of it seeking to “realize” what we’ve been given an intimation of. And the work that is thus produced can have the effect of altering the entire social landscape to such a degree that no one is free not to admit some relation to what is going on, not to “admit that the waters around you have grown,” [FN17] to swim or to refuse to swim and try to get the waters to go down.

The 1960s was certainly such a period, and I suspect that forty years later many of us in this room are still trying to establish our relationship to the breakthrough of consciousness that altered our way of seeing the world itself and the meaning of our existence within it as we ourselves constitute it. By way of analogy to my description of the elevation of consciousness during the Shabbat service at my synagogue, the ‘60s should be understood as a dawning of awareness that unfolded through the overlapping influence of the civil rights movement’s illumination of injustice, the evocative power of Martin Luther King, Jr., the linguistic fissures and image-scrambles produced by the Beat poets, the song, dance, and creative movement of rock n’ roll, the youthful moral eloquence of JFK, and the consequent emergence of a student movement, a women’s movement, a gay liberation and sexual liberation movement, and an environmental movement that expressed an opening up of the heart allowing a new kind of sight into what we came to see as the insanity of the fixed and rigid posture and thinking that was producing the Vietnam war, with its 55,000 American and three million Asian dead. [FN18]

Within the critical legal studies movement that was itself an expression of this upsurge in awareness, we were confronted by a “legal order” and hierarchical institutions that supported this order that seemed to allow no room whatsoever for the sense of love, hope, and transcendence that we felt ineffably all around us. On the contrary, it seemed to be an enormous, spiritually dead thought-machine that produced and reproduced both hierarchies and rules that made the world of the war, and racial hatred, and sexual repression, and environmental destruction appear entirely normal and inevitable. And this disjunction between our dawning, idealistic awareness and the professional settings in which we found ourselves as young adults led us to throw ourselves into trying to (a) take apart the fixity of, and (b) reveal the meaning of what everywhere surrounded us.

Here we come to the key split that developed within CLS. For the part of the work that was motivated by “taking apart the fixity” of the legal order became the indeterminacy critique, and the part that was motivated by “revealing the meaning” of that order became the critique of alienation, to which I shall now turn. Located within this historical process, it is clear, I hope, that the work of these two strands within CLS was at first complementary, in the sense that both were intended to be in service of a breakthrough to another level of social being and knowledge in which our idealistic vision of a more loving and caring world would become possible. That they became separated was too bad, the result of the effects of fear and loss of confidence in our transcendent hopes as we were complexly enveloped by the rise of Ronald Reagan, by tenure struggles, and related dilemmas of personal identity as we ebbed away from each other with the ebbing of the ‘60s themselves, and by the resulting defensiveness and separation within our own groups. But for reasons that I will return to, we are now approaching a new historical moment in which a reunification of our efforts may become possible.

In the case of both the Shabbat service consciousness and the social movement consciousness, a transformation of our social being takes place that allows a transformation of our knowledge of the world. In each case, prior to the transformation, we exist underneath the weight of our inherited conditioning, cemented within our pre-existing social roles, eyes darting away from each other’s gaze, withdrawn into our separateness and seeing the world from a detached state, a solitude which we assume to be natural, the way things are. Without realizing it, we exist in a state of secret Fear of the Other, preoccupied unconsciously with keeping the Other at a distance, and in a state of denial of the world’s loving and transformative energy. [FN19] We try to close ourselves up, and to treat the world around us as equally closed or fixed, because we are afraid to reveal what has not been confirmed. But through the outbreak of connection permitted by the singing and dancing and expressive discourse of the service and movement, we attain a new level of mutual recognition which in turn confirms a new kind of insight into the “fallen” and despiritualized nature of the world. From a philosophical/epistemological point of view, a change in both the subject and object occurs, such that the being of the knower finds a new moral platform with which to see the world as suffering under the weight of its own alienation and separation, and the being of the known object or “world” becomes suddenly transparent in its depth-dimension as something not fixed according to its prior surface appearance, but as alienated and in need of a restorative salvation. Or to put this in yet another way: The recovery of each of us as subjects through the spiritual elevation of mutual recognition provides the inter-subjective ground that reveals the moral deficit in the world as object-of-knowledge. Martin Luther King, Jr. made exactly this point when he defined Justice as “love correcting that which revolts against love.” [FN20]

Thus the type of insight that emerges from the ratcheting up of awareness allowed by the upsurge of confirmatory recognition is an inherently spiritual and moral awareness that both critiques the falsity of what is as an alienated appearance trying to deny its own falsity, and at the same instant points in a moral direction toward bringing into being a world that embodies the connection that has allowed our confirmatory recognition to take place. [FN21] Why would we want to kill the Viet Cong? They are not “them,” they are us, G-d’s children, and furthermore, we are not the “fellow Americans” that Lyndon Johnson keeps referring to, but vessels of universal humanity scattered apart in an historical shatter that must be repaired. [FN22] As we elevate our awareness by uplifting each other through a new mutual recognition, fixed nationalities appear as imaginary, as collective defense mechanisms born of an entire world of mutual fear, and in need of a compassionate spiritual redemption so that we as “peoples” might appear to ourselves not as alien threats to each other, but as unique incarnations of a common humanity.

To the strand of CLS that emerged from this kind of insight, the problem with law was not that it was indeterminate and therefore a mask for political choices made by free individuals, but that it was serving as a legitimating vehicle for our alienation from one another, making our alienation appear to be the embodiment of justice and obscuring our true spiritual and moral destiny as communal beings, a destiny that we had glimpsed through the redemptive insights of our participation in the movement. In reality, it was this “alienation critique” that was the entire basis for the CLS critique of law as legitimating ideology, because the critique necessarily refers to a transcendent moral horizon to challenge the ideology’s claims to legitimacy. For as I have already said, insofar as an aspect of legal ideology is “believed in” as a moral discourse supporting the status quo, it cannot be dismissed by a showing of its logical indeterminacy, but only by revealing, through our anchorage in a transcendent moral vantage point, the “determinate” meaning of the legal ideology as an act of legitimation, as a kind of advertisement for a morally impoverished state of affairs.

This then is the true relationship between CLS and what this conference is calling a “Higher Law”–a higher law not as a metaphysical or religious abstraction, but as an embodiment of the presence of social justice manifesting itself in the real world through a spiritually elevating movement that provides a moral horizon for revealing what must be changed about the world, in part through the progressive transformation of legal culture, through law.

Here are eight examples from CLS that appeal to a higher law so defined:

• Karl Klare’s critique of the Supreme Court’s use of a new post-New Deal ideology of “social conceptualism” to steal away the democratic aspirations of working people as they expressed themselves through the upsurge of the labor movement (Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937-1941). [FN23]

• Alan Freeman’s critique of the Supreme Court’s use of an individualistic conception of racial discrimination as bad acts by isolated “perpetrators” as a way of naturalizing and legitimizing the ongoing societal racism suffered by its victims (Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law). [FN24]

• Duncan Kennedy’s demonstration of how Blackstone’s Commentaries absorbed and transformed the legal statuses of feudal hierarchies (from The Law of Wrongs to Incorporeal Hereditaments) to rationalize the emerging bourgeois hierarchies of pre-liberal societies in the eighteenth century (The Structure of Blackstone’s Commentaries). [FN25]

• Paul Harris’s and my account of how the architecture of courtrooms induce deference to the legitimacy of legal hierarchies in a way that confers political legitimacy on social and economic institutions that claim to be expressions of popular will, but are actually expressions of social alienation (Building Power and Breaking Images: Critical Legal Theory and the Practice of Law). [FN26]

• Mary Joe Frug’s critique of the legitimation of male toughness in common law contract doctrine from the vantage point of women who care about the welfare of their contracting partners (Re-reading Contracts: A Feminist Analysis of a Contracts Casebook). [FN27]

• Anthony Cook’s articulation of the importance of experientially-based insight, growing out of religious practice and social struggle, to the reconstruction of just communities (Beyond Critical Legal Studies: The Reconstructive Theology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.). [FN28]

• William Forbath’s analysis of how the American labor movement’s moral vision of an egalitarian society rooted in mutuality and solidarity was constrained and reshaped by workers’ encounter with the individualist categories of American law (Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement). [FN29]

• Rhonda Magee Andrews’s argument that the realization of equality within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment requires legal recognition of the existential suffering and denial of humanity produced by racial subordination and the creation of remedies based on a substantive vision of human dignity (Racial Suffering as Human Suffering: An Existentially-Grounded Humanity Consciousness as a Guide to a Fourteenth Amendment Reborn). [FN30]

None of these works makes use of the indeterminacy critique, and all of them are moral statements in which existing (or then-existing) legal regimes obscured or deflected the struggle for a more humane and just world.

–Peter Gabel

Peter Gabel is former President and Professor of Law at New College of California and is Associate Editor of Tikkun magazine. He is also Co-Director with Nanette Schorr of the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics.

Peter Gabel thanks Duncan Kennedy, Michael Lerner, Michael McAvoy, Gary Peller, and Matthew Wilkes for helpful comments and criticisms.

This piece was originally published in a special issue of the Pepperdine Law Review, Vol. 36 (2009).

Further Reading:

Critical Legal Studies as a Spiritual Practice, Part One by Peter Gabel, 10/28/09

Footnotes:

14. See The Beatles, A Day in the Life, on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone 1967).

15. William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake 492 (David V. Erdman ed., Anchor Books 1988) (1965).

16. This is among the main themes of my book, Peter Gabel, The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning (Acada Books 2000) (see especially What Moves in a Movement? on page 184).

17. Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’ on The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Columbia Records 1964).

18. Bernard Weinraub, 30 Years Later, Cake and Credit Cards in Saigon, N.Y. Times, May 1, 2005, available at http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/international/asia/01saigon.html.

19. See Gabel, supra note 15, at 87-92 (discussing a full development of these ideas in the chapter, The Blockage of Social Desire: The Circle of Collective Denial and the Problem of the Rotating Lack of Confidence in the Desire of the Other).

20. Martin Luther King, Jr., Montgomery Bus Boycott, in Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches 210, 213 (Josh Gottheimer ed., Basic Civitas Books 2003) (1955).

21. See Peter Gabel, The Phenomenology of Rights-Consciousness and the Pact of the Withdrawn Selves, 62 Tex. L. Rev. 1563, 1567-69, 1586-91 (1984).

22. The reference is to the teaching of the Kabbalah that our alienation is expressive of an original shattering of G-d’s Divine Light that must be repaired through the work of tikkun olam, the healing and repairing of the world.

23. Karl E. Klare, Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1933-1941, 62 Minn. L. Rev. 265, 301-03, 322-25 (1978).

24. Alan David Freeman, Legitimizing Racism Through Anti-Discrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine, 62 Minn. L. Rev. 1049, 1052-57 (1978).

25. Duncan Kennedy, The Structure of Blackstone’s Commentaries, 28 Buff. L. Rev. 205 (1979).

26. Peter Gabel & Paul Harris, Building Power and Breaking Images: Critical Legal Theory and the Practice of Law, 11 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 369 (1983).

27. Mary Joe Frug, Re-reading Contracts: A Feminist Analysis of a Contracts Casebook, 34 Am. U. L. Rev. 1065 (1985).

28. Anthony E. Cook, Beyond Critical Legal Studies: The Reconstructive Theology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, 989-93 (1990).

29. William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (1991).

30. Rhonda V. Magee Andrews, Racial Suffering as Human Suffering: An Existentially-Grounded Humanity Consciousness as a Guide to a Fourteenth Amendment Reborn, 13 Temp. Pol. & Civ. Rts. L. Rev. 891 (2004).

Não tinha como ser mais psicodélico, não? Mais colorido? Poxa, de quem foi a idéia absurda de que essa música fazia alusão ao LSD? Esse povo parece que bebe chá de cogumelo!!!

"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" from the movie 'Yellow Submarine'

Lucy O’Donnell, the woman who inspired the classic Beatles song “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” has died at age 46.  Julian Lennon was four years old when he drew a picture of his classmate Lucy.  He took the drawing home and showed it to his dad, saying “This is Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”   John Lennon’s song appeared on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967.  For many years she kept her connection to the Beatles secret because she often heard the song was really about LSD – and it may well could have been.  But the song, like most of the magic created by the Beatles, had a very simple and real inspiration from everyday life.

Story from the London Daily Mail

MP3: “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” by the Beatles (mono)

YouTube: Clip from the movie Yellow Submarine

Lucy Vodden, who inspired the Beatles classic “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” has passed away.  Most Beatles fans — and even many casual followers — will recall the story that while the Beatles were writing songs for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Julian Lennon came home from school with a drawing of his classmate, Lucy.  He showed his father and explained that the drawing was “Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”

To this day, people refuse to believe that the song was about anything other than LSD, a surprising notion to cling to given that the John and his fellow Beatles were quite honest about the drug references that did find their way into songs and that they had experimented quite extensively with various substances.

Nevertheless, the young lady who inspired the song has sadly passed after a long battle with cancer.  Godspeed to her family and friends.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,556580,00.html?test=latestnews

Lucy Vodden

Reza a lenda que foi um desenho feito por Julian Lennon aos 4 anos de idade que inspirou o pai, John Lennon, a compor o chamado “hino psicodélico” dos Beatles, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”. Lucy O’Donnell era colega de classe de Julian que, no lugar dos olhos da amiga, havia desenhado diamantes e teria descrito a obra ao pai como “Lucy no céu com diamantes”. Lucy, então uma menina e hoje uma mulher de 46 anos com o nome de casada de Lucy Vodden, faleceu neste domingo, 27.09.2009:

Lucy Vodden, a mulher que inspirou a letra de “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, composta por John Lennon para os Beatles, morreu no domingo, 27, após longa batalha contra o lupus.

Presente no disco Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), a faixa bateu de frente com grupos sociais da época – chegou a ser banida pela rede britânica BBC, por suposta apologia a drogas (abreviado em singla, o título da canção se transforma em LSD).

A pequena Lucy e o desenho inspirado nela

A versão oficial da banda foi a seguinte: certo dia de 1966, Julian, filho de Lennon, voltou da escola com desenho de uma coleguinha de classe, Lucy O’Donnell (após se casar, ela adotaria o sobrenome Vodden). No lugar dos olhos da amiga, Julian, então com quatro anos, havia posto diamantes – e descreveu a arte ao pai: “Lucy no céu com diamantes”.

Leia mais clicando aqui.

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E a propósito dos Beatles [válido para segunda, 28.09.2009, na Livraria da Travessa do Shopping Leblon, RJ]: