"The Beatles remasters have finally hit the street and all across the world, music fans are gorging themselves on the most fabled and revered repertoire in pop music history. This may well prove to be the last hurrah of the CD age and certainly the marketing gurus at Capital have been working overtime to make sure we've all very aware of the Beatles as we approach this holiday season. It's highly likely that the Fab Four will prove to be the best selling artists of this decade, an incredible feat for a group that disbanded nearly 40 years ago. … [Read more...]

The Incredible Flying Earpiece (Fraud's Deviant to Fudd's Law) Beatles' Digital Remasters Jim Lehrer Newshour on PBS September 9, 2009 … [Read more...]

[cover: Chip Kidd, 1988] Of the scores of Beatles books I've skimmed over the years, Tell Me Why: The Beatles: Album by Album, Song by Song, the Sixties and After , by Tim Riley, is one of the few I've taken the time to read because of its depth, insight and readability. Written when the author was only 28, the 423-page book (first published by Random House in 1988) is by a Colorado native who attended the well-regarded Oberlin College and Conservatory and earned degrees in English and piano performance. With those dual degrees, he is able to … [Read more...]

Gary Kamiya on Ronald Reagan's 1964 campaign speech for that other Barry: The Speech tapped into the primordial American myth: untrammeled individuality. There must be a territory for Huck Finn to light out to, a promised land where authority--or government--does not reach. In this always-beckoning frontier, all the hindrances that drag Americans down are left behind. Businessmen can run their businesses as they like, free from the plague of do-gooder bureaucrats. White people need not carry the spurious cross of racial guilt. Unruly and … [Read more...]

The Annotated Godfather Script, by Jenny M. Jones (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers) Even better than it looks. How art is composed of freak accidents, near-misses and poor management, blow by blow. … [Read more...]