The last Beatles song?

From The Washington Post (gift link):

Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.

McCartney, 80, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back. The “new” song is set to be released later this year, he said.

Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” McCartney told BBC radio. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar.’”

The song seems to be John’s “Now and Then,” which Paul, George and Ringo worked on at the time of the Beatles’ Anthology. George dismissed the song (reportedly calling it “fucking rubbish”), and “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” were the only new Beatles recordings released.

Me, I think John’s piano-vocal demo is a beautifully sad song. I hope that feeling isn’t lost under too many layers of production as the demo gets turned into a record.

Related reading
All OCA Beatles posts (Pinboard)

[Lost Media Wiki: “To date, no content from the overdub sessions in 1994 and 1995 has resurfaced either officially or unofficially.” The various versions of “Now and Then” with fuller instrumentation that can be found online are the work of fans.]

Separated at birth (DeSantis edition)

The Broadway actor Denée Benton made news by calling Ron DeSantis the “current Grand Wizard” of Florida. As they say, if the hood fits, &c.

I admit though that when I heard about the epithet, I thought of a different Grand Wizard. That downturned mouth, that scrunched-up face — Ron DeSantis looks the evil manager known to fans of 1970s professional wrestling as the Grand Wizard. Yes, I was a consumer of UHF television in the 1970s. I liked junk and weirdness.

 
[Color drained but otherwise unretouched. Click either image for a larger view.]

Here’s just one sample of the Grand Wizard’s shtick.

Also separated at birth
Claude Akins and Simon Oakland : Ernest Angley and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán : Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : William Barr and Edward Chapman : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : Ernie Bushmiller and Red Rodney : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Adam Driver and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska : Bonita Granville and Cyndi Lauper : Charles Grassley and Abraham Jebediah Simpson II : Christopher Guest and Donald Wolfit : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Pat Harrington Jr. and Marcel Herrand : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Steven Isserlis and Pat Metheny : Colonel Wilhelm Klink and Rudy Giuliani : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : Markku Luolajan-Mikkola and John Malkovich : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Chico Marx and Robert Walden : Elisabeth Moss and Alexis Smith : Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny : Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Gene Wilder

[I like this detail from the Wikipedia article about Ernie Roth, who played the Grand Wizard: “Roth, who was Jewish, reportedly took the name ‘The Grand Wizard’ as a snub to the white supremacy organization the Ku Klux Klan, whose leaders were called Grand Wizard.”]

Kind of Kind of Blue

A dog-food commercial with faux Kind of Blue (specifically, "So What") as background music? Clearly, the commercial was made so that I would notice it and then say something about it.

My dad brought me up right: I’ve been listening to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue since it appeared in 1959 (in my toddlerhood). Everyone should have a copy of Kind of Blue in the house.

Related reading
All OCA Miles Davis posts (Pinboard)

[Thanks to Elaine for the post title.]

Soul “Eyes”

Soul Music (BBC Radio 4) has a beautiful episode about Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It’s great to hear Terry Johnson talk of the Flamingos about how he reimagined the song and how the rest of the group reacted.

Here’s a version of the song that didn’t make it into the podcast, from Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy. It bears the Terry Johnston stamp. Discographical info here.

[About the post title: “Soul Eyes” is a tune by Mal Waldron. I couldn't resist.]

Great typos

From Jack Shepherd’s On Words and Up Words: six great typos of history. With a special appearance by Tytyuyllus, or Titivillus, a devil whose job it was (is?) to collect from a particular monastic community a thousand sacks a day of “failings and negligences” in syllables and words. Otherwise, he got (gets?) a beating. Which might mean that when we fix our typos, we are depriving some other demonic spirit of an honest day’s labor.

Writer, spare that typo?

A book from Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson, the historian who writes Letters from an American, has a book coming in September, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. She describes it in her June 10 letter.

Mark Hurst on Vision Pro

Mark Hurst, who led a charge against Google Glass ten years ago, has now written about Apple’s Vision Pro headset, or as he calls it, Vision No:

What imitation of vision there is in the device, exists only as machine vision, continually scanning both inside and out. A phalanx of cameras monitors the user’s eyes in order to display them on the device’s front panel, while other cameras spy on the room layout, the furniture, and the people nearby — as the user’s eyes are locked away inside the Vision No enclosure. The only way for users to see anything is to accept the representation of the world as offered by the corporation’s filters. I don’t know about you, but my grip on reality — incomplete and imperfect as it may be — will not improve by passing through the hidden manipulations of a two-trillion-dollar company with an insatiable need for growth.

I recently listened to a Mac-centric podcast whose hosts were enthusiastic about Vision Pro. Two grown-ups excited about — it’s their example — the prospect of looking at spreadsheets on the top of a mountain. A virtual mountain, that is, a digital wallpaper that replaces your surroundings. Neil Postman suggested asking six questions about any new technology. The first one alone poses a problem for Vision Pro: “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?”

A related post
My surroundings already are “an infinite canvas”

[I hadn’t realized that the device displays one’s eyes on the screen. Eyes without a face! That’s beyond creepy.]

116th and Park

[1640 and 1642 Park Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click either image for a much larger view.]

What made me look up the corner of 116th Street and Park Avenue: The Pawnbroker (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1964). Sol Nazerman, Holocaust survivor and pawnbroker, has his shop at 1642.

[Nazerman (Rod Steiger), white hair, dark sweater, is just to the right of the 95. 95 E. 116th seems to be another way of referring to 1640 Park. Click for a much larger view. ]

The rhyme is beyond uncanny: 1642, the site of Nazerman’s pawn shop, was once the home of Kamerman & Co. Plumbing Supplies. In 1920 a trade publication described Israel Kamerman as “the well-known jobber who conducts a large, up-to-date supply house at 1642 Park avenue [sic].”

The corner location that became El Radiante later became an herbs-and-spices store, a botánica, and a deli. Today the corner is the site of a seven- or nine-story condo building in progress.

In 1970, 1642 was demolished, with a low-income housing development taking its place in 2009. Here’s a 1995 photograph showing the herbs-and-spices store and the then-empty lot.

On March 12, 2014, a gas explosion destroyed 1644 and 1646. Eight people were killed; more than seventy were injured. Here is a New York Times article about the mourning that followed.

The 1644 lot still stands vacant. Since at least September 2015, a sign has been attached to the chainlink fence in front of the property. A small tree in a planter stands in front of the fence. Google Maps photographs through the years show flowers and photographs left on the fence. The artist’s renderings of what will be the new 1640 and its environs show none of that.

When you look into the history of an address, you never know what you’re going to find.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Boxes

[Click for a larger view.]

Between the toilet
And the shower
Fall the Boxes.

If you saw something like this in someone’s house, you’d worry, wouldn’t you? I’m saving this DOJ photograph here to caution myself against far milder kinds of clutter. Also against installing a chandelier in the batheroonie.

*

Also: looking more closely, I now see that there are boxes in the tub, reaching to the ceiling.

Between the boxes
And the boxes
Falls the Shower Curtain.

[Poetry, such as it is, with apologies to T.S. Eliot.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

In the word of 53-A, five letters, “Peanuts plaint”: ______! Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lester Ruff, or Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing under the pseudonym that signals an easier Stumper. The puzzle is fairly easy, but I hit a snag in the upper left corner: 17-A, six letters, “Physician’s patron.” All I could think of was HERMES, which is not a good answer, but ASCLEPIUS didn’t fit. So I searched for “Physician’s patron,” and magically, that corner fell into place, becoming as straightforward as I think it was meant to be.

Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “Whom Alda got his M*A*S*H nickname from.” Lifelong learning.

12-D, eight letters, “Monitored?” Clever.

16-A, eight letters, “Successor to LAN technologies.” What once sounded like the future now sounds like science-fiction of the past.

22-A, three letters, “Not following.” Befitting a Stumper.

24-D, five letters, “Changes to one’s story.” Not LIES.

25-D, four letters, “Viva Rock Vegas character.” An idiosyncratically specific way to clue this name.

35-A, fifteen letters, “Nothing I can do.” Just a nice bit of colloquial speech.

36-D, eight letters, “It achieved statehood in 1901.” Statehood, eh? NEWMEXI? — oops, no.

48-A, six letters, “811, to librarians.” Or to readers who know the stacks.

My favorite in this puzzle: 46-D, six letters, “Cat without a coat.” More lifelong learning.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.