jameswharris

CD/DVD/BD Discs vs. Streaming

by James Wallace Harris, 6/29/23

I recently wrote “The Emerging Mindset of Not Owning Movies” about converting my DVD/BD collection to digital files so I could stream through Plex. But I soon realized that converting hundreds of discs was too much trouble, so I gave up. I figured it would be worth the money to just subscribe to a bunch of streaming services instead.

However, in the weeks since I discovered some TV shows and movies aren’t available on streaming. The trouble is I just don’t like using disc players anymore. For example, I exercise by watching Miranda Esmonde-White’s Classical Stretch program. I have a couple seasons on DVD. When I was testing out Plex I converted them to files that I could stream through the Roku interface. It was so much nicer than loading the disc every morning.

Another reason why I gave up on Plex was I thought I needed to buy a Synology NAS and buy 2-3 very large capacity hard drives. Something that would take several hundred dollars.

Well, I had a breakthrough this week. I realized that I neither had to convert all my discs to make Plex worthwhile nor did I need a robust RAID system to store my video files. All I needed was just the files I would watch, and if I was only converting discs that aren’t on subscription streaming services then that wouldn’t be very many at all.

I bought a 512GB SSD for my Intel NUC 11. The NUC had a place for a second short SSD card. It was $59. Installing Plex again was three minutes. I put Classical Stretch, Survivors (1975 BBC show), and the last three seasons of Perry Mason on the drive. I could subscribe to Paramount Plus to watch Perry, but I didn’t want to add another subscription right now.

Plex streams videos off the SSD extremely fast. Almost, instantly. Way faster than the 8GB mechanical hard drive I was testing Plex with before. It’s extremely convenient.

When I finish Perry I’m just going to delete its files off the SSD. Not having to build a secure backed-up library makes things so much easier. Now, if I want to watch something I own on disc I’ll just rip it and put it on the SDD, and when I’m finished, I’ll delete it.

For some reason, coming up with this solution has made me very happy. I don’t need to mess with a second computer, or a NAS, or spend endless hours ripping and maintaining a library of video files. I’ve even simplified the ripping process. The proper method for ripping was to rip with Make MKV and then shrink those files with HandBrake. Then copy the files to the server and make a backup somewhere else. It was very time-consuming.

Now I just use MKV and save its .mkv files directly to the SSD. I don’t worry about shrinking the .mkv file to conserve space or backing it up. If I know I want to watch something that night that’s not on a subscription streaming service but I own the disc, I just rip it while working at my computer, and it’s ready for watching on Plex later when I want to watch TV.

I’ve very happy with this solution. I love to figure out solutions that are cheap, streamlined, minimal, and make things easier. This means I need only one computer, and I don’t need DVD players and their remotes. I recently got rid of one TV, leaving just two (one for me, one for Susan). That was satisfying too. I also put away one CD player and turntable. I only stream music now, but I left one CD player out in case I do want to play CDs. However, it’s just so much nicer not messing with those machines. I regret buying my Audiolab 6000 amplifier and CD transport. I wish I had gotten another Bluenote Powernode.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve simplified my life by getting rid of several machines. I also gave up having a second computer, a Linux machine. I have less to worry about. I realize that I’m zeroing in on something. That I’m focusing my efforts and resources.

JWH

If You Knew Then What You Know Now

by James Wallace Harris, 6/21/23

How often have you heard an old person say they may look old on the outside but feel like a teenager on the inside? My wife’s uncle once told people on his 89th birthday that he felt 19 inside but something was terribly wrong with his body. And, how often have you wished you could go back to your younger self and give them advice hoping it would change who you were today?

Yesterday on YouTube I watched an excellent TED Talk about how we don’t know what our future self wants, even though we think we do. Journalist Shankar Vendantam gives several examples of people thinking one thing when they are young and something different when they got older. Vendantam makes a case that we’re constantly becoming new people, which is interesting when you think about how we always feel like we’re the same person.

If you could travel back in time to advise your younger self, they would have rejected it. They would have known better. We always think we know better.

I am reading The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, a novel first published in 1975. It’s not an easy novel to read because Brunner was trying to show what it would be like to live in the early 21st century by extrapolating what he knew from the early 1970s. The novel has been praised for being an early example of fiction about computer hacking and invented the term worm for a computer virus. It’s also about eluding oppressive computer surveillance.

The Shockwave Rider is very hard to read, and I’m having to go back and reread some sections several times. That’s because Brunner was intentionally trying to give his readers future shock. Do y’all remember the 1970 nonfiction book, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler?

And this makes me wonder if we could take back examples of what it’s like to live in 2023 and give them to our younger selves, could they comprehend what their future selves might be like? I think this would be especially dramatic to people who grew up before the internet. I’m not sure people who grew up with the internet could imagine what life was like before it, or understand the concept of future shock.

Let’s imagine taking an iPad full of news videos, documentaries, magazines, and newspapers back to give to our younger self. How would they react? What would they make of 9/11 or January 6th? What would they make of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter? Or watching movies on HBO? How would they feel from watching a week’s worth of the NBC Nightly News? Or a few episodes of PBS Frontline? What would they think of mass shootings and climate change?

I know I would have been horrified. As a teen seeing the real future would be scarier than any horror film.

I’m sure most of us wish we could go back and warn ourselves, hoping we could set our younger selves on a different path so we’d end up living in a better future. Recently, The New York Times ran an opinion piece, “Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse.” It’s about the analysis of 235 surveys, covering 574,000 responses that ask people if they think our society is in moral decline. The current political climate suggests that people want to return to an early time when they believe people were nicer. The results of the research show that people always think that, no matter when they are asked, now, or in the past.

My initial reaction was that I agreed that people don’t change, and our perceptions of the past and future remain the same. But I thought the environment and civilization were getting worse, and would get much worse in the future. If you sub to the New York Times, please read the comments to the article linked above. Reactions are all over the place. They are fascinating and revealing, better than the article itself.

Personally, I feel people are more hateful now, but maybe that’s a delusion on my part. I have fond memories of the 1960s, but when I read about that decade in history books, those years were horrible. I think what hasn’t changed is my sense of happiness with life. If I ignore all the turmoil in the world, and just focus on what’s going on in my own life, I was happy then, and happy now.

They say knowledge is power, and that might be true. But a lot of depression, anxiety, and unhappiness come from knowing more about what’s going on around the world. When I first read Stand on Zanzibar in 1969, John Brunner’s 1968 novel about the 2010s, I was scared by the future he imagined. It was full of terrorism and political chaos. But in 1969, America was full of terrorism and political chaos. We forget that there were hundreds of anti-war bombings happening around the country, as well as endless riots and social unrest. And we also forget that statistically, crime was much worse back then.

I find reading The Shockwave Rider fascinating because Brunner invents several futuristic changes on each page that he expected might exist for us in the 21st century. For example, he predicted our lives would be full of gadgets that did all kinds of things for us. And we’ve had zillions of gadgets in our lives. What’s odd, is Brunner mostly predicted different kinds of gadgets that we don’t have. But the idea that lives would be cluttered with gizmos is right on. He also predicted all kinds of sexual and gender changes in society. His examples aren’t exactly the same as what we see today, but again, he was right about our time being more about sex and gender.

I think Brunner was predicting a future we’d want to avoid. That he knew that in the future we’d all wish we could go back and change our younger selves so we’d avoid the future we have. It’s weird to remember reading Brunner in 1969 and thinking about Future Shock in 1970, and then living in 2023 after living with future shock for decades.

Maybe the hate we see today is no more than the hate that existed in the past, but combined with future shock it feels like it’s so much more.

The upshot of all this is we wish things were different, but our minds stay the same. I’m 71 and feel mentally like I did at 17. I do wish my body was 17 again, however, I do feel different philosophically. I feel wiser. I would not exchange that for physical youth.

It’s 2023 but we wish it was the 1950s. But I remember in the 1950s we were so excited about living in the 21st century, and if I think about it, I remember there were a lot of things in the 1950s that were terrible and grotesque too.

Ram Das was right, all we can do is Be Here Now.

JWH

What Susan and I Are Watching

by James Wallace Harris, 6/16/23

Unless I have someone to watch TV with, I end up watching YouTube videos, and maybe an old movie once a month. So I’m grateful when Susan is willing to watch TV with me. As we’ve gotten older our taste in television has diverged significantly, so it’s hard to find shows we’ll both watch. Currently, we’re watching Call the Midwife (Netflix), The Big Door Prize (AppleTV), and Platonic (AppleTV). And, about once a month, we have three friends over to binge-watch four episodes of Ted Lasso (AppleTV).

Susan and I seem to share a love for British TV, or at least a certain type of British TV. Last year we started our 9 pm TV watching with Downton Abbey, then went to Upstairs, Downstairs (old and new), All Creatures Great and Small (old and new), and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. We’re continuing with Call the Midwife. Most of the British PBS shows have a certain feel to them. Especially since Call the Midwife and All Creatures Great and Small are TV shows based on memoirs about English life in the mid-20th century. And Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs have a definite historical feel. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was about mid-20th century American life. So we might like shows with a sense of history.

While my sister was here for a week, she got us hooked on Platonic, and that caused us to try The Big Door Prize.

It’s interesting to contrast the two British TV shows, Call the Midwife and All Creatures Great and Small, set in the past, with the two American shows, Platonic and The Big Door Prize, set in the present. The British shows are heartwarming and focus on people who help other people, while the American shows are focused on people who are focused on themselves. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is set in the mid-20th century but is very different from those other shows. I’m not using it in the comparisons below.

The British shows are about people who work long hours at very hard jobs and do a lot of sacrificing for others, while the American shows are about frivolous life after work where the characters spend a lot of time in self-doubt, worrying about their relationships, while trying to find something meaningful in their lives.

The British shows, focus on the grittier aspects of life, while the American shows lean towards the fantastic and fanciful. In The Big Door Prize, a small-town community wakes up to discover a magical machine in their local grocery that tells them their potential. While Platonic is about a man and woman rekindling their friendship after many years. In both shows, the setup leads to quirky characters dealing with quirky new situations. Is it me, or does that suggest Americans are bored?

By the way, Susan and I both enjoy Platonic and The Big Door Prize, but we’re not wild about either. While I fill idle hours with YouTube videos, Susan fills her time sewing and watching old favorite sitcoms (M.A.S.H., Andy Griffith, Friends) and feel-good dramas (The Gilmore Girls, Grey’s Anatomy). The shows we loved most while watching together have been the British shows that originally appeared on PBS and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

We’re only in the 4th season of Call the Midwife, and it currently has twelve in total, so we’ll have plenty of TV for several weeks. But after that, we’ll be searching for something new to watch. We’re open to suggestions — but consider our track record. I’m not sure how many TV shows exist about hard-working self-sacrificing people based on memoirs.

I think Susan and I are burned out on television so it’s very hard to find something new to watch. Neither one of us care about mysteries, thrillers, or police procedurals. And I’m tired of my old favorite themes of Westerns and science fiction. We both loved Downton Abbey and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel but shows like those are rare.

JWH

Do You Remember the Childhood of Famous Americans Series of Biographies Written for Children?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/12/23

Over the years, my friend Linda and I have nostalgically recalled a series of books we both read in elementary school. They were biographies aimed at kids, but that’s all we could remember. We both wondered why we never saw them in used bookstores, or libraries, or met other people who fondly recalled them?

These books came up again on Sunday, and I did a Google search and discovered they were books published by Bobbs-Merrill starting in the 1930s. The series was called Childhood of Famous Americans. Linda and I remembered them being blue, but in my search, I found many people remember them as the “orange books.”

Well, this site solved that mystery, claiming there were 220 in the series, and showed photos of how they looked different over the decades. Some of them were orange and others were blue. They also had uniform dust jackets with numbers. Those numbers appealed to me. They made me want to read them all. However, I doubt I read more than 10-12 of them. Linda claims to have read far more, but then she was a much bigger bookworm in elementary school than I was. Linda and I both remember the yellow decoration about the blue book below.

Evidently, this series was intended to provide patriotic reading for young readers. I was already a patriotic little kid when I discovered them. My father was in the Air Force, and we were living on Homestead Air Force Base, and I discovered them in 1962 in the Air Base Elementary. I was in the 5th grade. My teacher was Mr. Granger. He was a WWII vet, who had been in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Mr. Granger had lost a leg in the war and had a wooden one which the class found fascinating. Sometimes Mr. Granger would step on our feet not knowing it, and we all would never let him know. Mr. Granger told the class lots of interesting stories. It would have been interesting to have a biography of Mr. Granger.

I became a bookworm that year. Linda says she became a bookworm in the first grade, but I didn’t discover books until summer school between the third and fourth grades. I was sent there because they thought I couldn’t read. On the first day, the teacher said to pick out a book from a twirling wire rack and I found a kid’s version of Up Periscope. It turns out I could read. They just had never given me anything worth reading before.

In the fourth grade, I slowly started getting into books. I liked nonfiction books about war, planes, dogs, and nature. We moved to Homestead for the 5th grade and I had access to two libraries: the base library and the school library. I loved Homestead Air Force Base Library, and have written about it before. It was while I regularly used these two libraries that I became a bookworm.

The Childhood of Famous Americans was the first book series I got hooked on. They may have caused my lifelong love of biographies, or my biography-loving genes first discovered biographies there.

I remember reading bios of Ben Franklin, John F. Kennedy, Jim Thorpe, George Washington Carver, and I think Betsy Ross that are in the series. I’m pretty sure I read several others but don’t recall specific memories. I also remember reading a biography of Blackjack Pershing then but he doesn’t seem to be in the series, so maybe there were other biography series for kids.

This page at LibraryThing lists 208 books in the series, with links about them, and gives the totals for people owning them in their collection. Few people owned them, but some titles have huge numbers of likes. That suggests there are plenty of people like me and Linda who remember them.

The series ran for a long time, and have been reprinted in paperback, and inspired other series. Some publishers have even tried to restart the series.

I can’t remember any exact details from the books, but reading about them while researching this piece, it seems they were a mixture of fiction and nonfiction. Some writers have called them problematic for both conservatives and liberals. All this book banning is making people overly sensitive about books.

I’ll keep an eye out for Childhood of Famous Americans books at the library bookstore and see if I can find some to read. I wonder if I can document any instances of them that were the seeds of my current philosophy?

Did you read any of the Childhood of Famous Americans books? Leave a memory in the comments.

JWH

Beatlemania in 2023

by James Wallace Harris

Yesterday, when our friend Leigh Ann came over to play our weekly game of Rummikub with Susan and me, and they started telling each other what they’d done this week, I felt rather mute. I feel I don’t talk as much as I used to, and that getting old has left me with less to say. But aging might not be the cause because some of my friends talk even more than they did when they were younger.

I thought I had a very exciting week but I couldn’t put it into words. I guess that’s why I blog, to find ways to put things into words. All I was able to say was I was going through a phase of Beatlemania. But that didn’t come close to meaning what I wanted to say. For someone observing me, I would look like I wasn’t doing much the last few weeks, sitting around doing nothing but thinking, watching TV, reading, or listening to music. But inside my head, things are hopping, at least to me, but here’s what I was thinking.

Why do we love the things we love? Why do we devote time to the activities we do and not other activities? Why do we remember some things and forget other things? For the past few weeks, I’ve been exclusively listening to albums by The Beatles every day and finding great enjoyment in their music. I was a fan of The Beatles back in the 1960s but never a fanatic. I can go decades without playing their albums, but three weeks ago I signed up for Apple Music and started streaming Beatles albums again, playing, two or three a day.

After I got hooked on Beatles music again I also started listening to a 44-hour biography of The Beatles, Tune In by Mark Lewisohn. That led me to ask: What are the best books on The Beatles? I found The Beatles and The Historians by Torkelson Weber. Finally, I also got hooked on watching documentaries about The Beatles too — YouTube is full of them. Beatlemania thrives online.

Why am I undergoing a Beatlemania phase in 2023? How can songs from five and six decades ago give me so much pleasure now? I’ve been thinking about that while I listening, and a number of reasons have come to mind.

#1 – Forgetting Our Hateful Times

Buddhists and Hindus teach that we should be here now. Now for me is retirement in an older middle-class suburb. I don’t have much to do other than maintain my declining health, coexist with my wife and two cats, and take care of an aging house and yard that needs more and more upkeep. I suppose I could find a kind of Eastern beatific bliss in just doing that, but my Western mind wants more. If I take in news about the larger world via television and the Internet, my reality is troubled by endless worries about things I have no control over but I can’t help but wish I could change. The most disturbing of these worries is how hate is taking over the world.

When I listen to The Beatles I escape all thoughts of that hate for a couple of hours. That’s quite pleasurable. This is also true when I watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, All Creatures Great and Small, Downton Abbey, and other shows that let me forget the hate in the world. Reading old science fiction also works. These artistic works bring various kinds of beauty into my world.

One friend said that listening to music just triggers endorphins — that I’m just a dopamine junky. That might be where the rubber meets the road but it doesn’t explain where I’m going and why. This reminds me of “Fixing a Hole” by The Beatles, especially the lines:

I’m painting the room in a colorful way
And when my mind is wandering
There I will go

When I contemplate this I realize I’ve used these kinds of escapes my whole life to avoid aspects of reality I didn’t like. Knowing that made me realize that I can map events in my past along a timeline created by pop culture that is well documented by date and time.

#2 – I Love Reconstructing Memories

Looking back over a lifetime of avoiding reality is quite revealing. Wise people from history tell us the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Recreating what happened in my past through reconstructing memories is a form of examination.

The second reason why I’m remembering The Beatles is that I can use their career as an external timescale for measuring events in my own past. They are like tree rings or carbon dating. For example, I know what I was doing on the evenings of the 9th, 16th, and 23rd of February 1964, because that’s when The Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. And those memories release other memories of that month to float up from my unconsciousness to my conscious mind. Because The Beatles were so often in the news I can use memories of those news events to recall what I was doing in my life between 1964 and 1970.

In this case, playing The Beatles albums over and over these past weeks reminded me of 1964. I now see something different that I didn’t realize then. I moved to South Carolina just days after the assassination of JFK. I was starting my third 7th-grade school in the Fall of 1963, moving into my 3rd house, I hadn’t yet made any friends, and my alcoholic parents had begun fighting. We were all mourning the president, and the beginning of 1964 was a very weird time nationally with the funeral and as LBJ took over.

Beatlemania hit in February of 1964 and it seemed like magic. My mood, and maybe even the mood of the country changed. At least it did for many of us kids. Even though South Carolina was the worst time for my parents I started having a good time, and living there became one of my favorite memories. If I think hard and dredge up other memories, I can dredge up other bad memories, but my sister Becky and I made friends, and we had a lot of fun that year. We played outside a lot. I hadn’t gotten addicted to science fiction yet, and I don’t remember watching much TV that year. What I remember is The Beatles and all the other music that came out in 1964. During the 1960s, AM radio, science fiction, and television produced most of my endorphins.

Looking back I remember the Sixties very fondly, but if I go to Wikipedia and read the history of the decade it was horrible. There were just as many hateful people back then as there are now. I realized that The Beatles were constantly in my awareness, releasing new singles and albums, and doing things that got them on TV and in the news. Listening to their music these weeks I realized that I hadn’t paid much attention to the lyrics back then, but I found their music upbeat and uplifting and knew that’s what they did for us back in the Sixties too.

#3 – Growing Up in the 1960s

While listening to all of The Beatles albums from Please Please Me to Abbey Road this week, I observed the Fab Four maturing as creative artists and I recalled parallels in my own growing maturity. The kid who rocked out to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was also watching My Favorite Martian. I wasn’t very mature, and neither were The Beatles’ songs. Most of their early tunes were about teen love, but then most of the songs on AM Top 40 in 1964 were also about teen love. I turned 13 in late 1964, so that was a preoccupation of my own mind.

The Beatles were never protest singers like early Dylan and a lot of American rock and roll bands. Although, John Lennon did go heavily in that direction after leaving The Beatles. Their song “Revolution” was a kind of protest song put down. This week I was surprised by how quickly their songs changed to topics other than love, and when they were about love, they left teenage life behind and were about work and relationships of people in their twenties.

Young people often enjoy works of fiction where the protagonists are slightly older than themselves. The Beatles and Bob Dylan were about a decade older than I was. They were not Baby Boomers. They were digesting experiences ahead of me and their music was a kind of guide to aging for my teenage self.

As I play the music from 1962 to 1969 now, I can recall how I grew and the music grew. The Beatles were only #1 with me in 1964 and part of 1965, because in July 1965 Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” hit the charts, and he took over the #1 spot. Eventually, The Byrds pushed The Beatles down to #3, and then Simon and Garfunkel pushed them to #4, and then Jefferson Airplane and a zillion other bands vied to be my favorites. Each artist had their own philosophical insight into the decade.

The third reason why I’m remembering The Beatles is to recall the growth of my maturity as a person. It’s understandable that my 12-year-old self would respond to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” in early 1964 but my 13-year-old self would much prefer “I’m A Loser” in 1965 or my 16-year-old self would resonate with “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in 1968. But this is harder to understand and requires remembering the other music I loved during those years. The Beatles evolved as creative artists from year to year, and so did all other creators of popular music, as did all of their fans.

What’s interesting now is when I watch TV shows I loved back in 1964-65, like Gilligan’s Island or The Beverly Hillbillies, I internally cringe to think I was once so simple-minded to enjoy them. But I don’t cringe at hearing the early simple songs of The Beatles. I should cringe when I hear “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” but I don’t. Why?

#4 – What If Things Had Been Different?

The fourth reason why I’m remembering The Beatles is that I’m trying to reconstruct possible alternative personal histories of the 1960s. Our formative years are always shaped by the times in which we grow up. Nearly everyone is programmed for life by external influences when they are young. How would I have been different if I had imprinted on Bob Dylan in 1964 rather than The Beatles? Or Miles Davis? Or Beethoven? Pop culture does a number on us, in essence, it’s a kind of brainwashing. Think about how the political right is up in arms over the Woke culture of today and how they don’t want it to shape their children. If you remember the generation gap, you’ll remember how there was some generational resistance against the pop culture of the 1960s too.

The fourth reason why I’m remembering The Beatles is harder to explain, but I’ll give you a thought experiment. What if I could reincarnate in my 12-year-old body but with my present mind, how would I relive 1964-1969? Sure, I still love listening to The Beatles today, but isn’t that conditioning and nostalgia? If I was back in 1964 with my 71-year-old mind, I’m not sure a song titled “I Want To Hold Your Hand” would be that appealing. Even if I was in a 12-year-old body, I wouldn’t want to live through being a teenager again. Then why am I doing it now? Reviewing the past now gives me a chance to think about what else might have been interesting about the Sixties. This makes me wonder why I wasn’t more mature back then.

And the truth is I was interested in all kinds of other things but I’ve mostly forgotten them. Remembering The Beatles is a way to try and remember those other things. We can call this the fifth reason. Of course, there were other songs and musicians, but there was so much more. We remember the past through the highlights that have stayed with us or our collective history. But what were the mundane things I was doing just before or just after playing The Beatles?

I can vividly remember a time I was listening to “Hey Jude.” I had just gotten off work at the Kwik Chek in Coconut Grove, Florida, where I was a stocker. I was sixteen and had worked my way up from bagboy to stocker. I had just spent six hours after school shelving the canned foods on the vegetable aisle. I was driving home from work in an old 1958 Mercury at ten o’clock at night. I had the windows down. I was hot and dirty, drinking a 16-ounce bottle of ice-cold Coke and it tasted great. “Hey Jude” came on, and it sounded better than any time I had heard it before or probably since. It was my favorite song on the radio at that time. I was driving along Old Cutler Road, which wasn’t lit with lampposts, and the dark was eerie and surreal driving under old mangrove trees near Matheson Hammock while listening to “Hey Jude” turned all the way up.

#5 – History

I guess the fifth reason why I’m remembering The Beatles is their history is so fascinating that I just want to know more about them. There are certain subjects that fascinate me that make me want to become an amateur historian or biographer. I never stick to these subjects long, but I always come back to them. These topics are like million-piece jigsaw puzzles I work on from time to time.

I love reading books and watching documentaries about my favorite subjects. I love going deeper and deeper into a topic. It’s both psychologically and philosophically rewarding. The depth of detail and research in Tune In is remarkable. But also reading The Beatles and the Historians is teaching me a tremendous amount about understanding memory and analysis of the past. It teaches me a bit about being a historian. If you want to know more about this book I highly recommend watching this YouTube review.

We all delude ourselves. We all have faulty memories. We should never trust our own opinions. Studying how historians evaluate the data they collect is applicable to studying how we perceive the world. And reading an in-depth biography like Tune In helps me mentally construct my own biography in more greater detail.

#6 – It’s Not Nostalgia

I’ve always looked backward. And sometimes I do have a longing to return to the past. But I also know that the past had more bad things that I’ve forgotten than good things that I remember. One thing I’ve noticed while playing these Beatles albums over and over is how little I recall them. I’ve been able to recall enough memories about how I reacted to The Beatles in the 1960s to remember that I didn’t play their albums that much, and I mostly heard their tunes on the radio. I bought the albums, and some of the singles, but I didn’t play them over and over again like I did Bob Dylan or The Byrds.

And I have gone through smaller bouts of Beatlemania over the decades. The first time was when their albums came out on CDs and I bought them again. Then bought them a third time when those CDs were remastered. During those periods I also read about The Beatles and watched documentaries that summed up their career. Each time playing their music from the past meant more to what I was doing in the now. I wasn’t just reliving the past. Their music has a weird kind of lasting power.

#7 – Self Revelation

I don’t believe in an afterlife. Until I’m proven wrong I assume this life is all we get. And it troubles me that we forget so much about our one life. We forget due to inattention. Nor do we pay attention to what makes us who we are. Quite often we chase illusions rather than face up to reality. We exist by reacting impulsively to a never-ending parade of random events. I’ve become obsessed with figuring out who I am by remembering what I did in the past and why. I use the lessons of memory to trigger revelations about myself with the final goal of knowing who I am today.

Strangely enough, I’m finding such revelations in The Beatles. Why am I playing them now after ignoring them for years, or even decades? Lately, I can play Beatles albums for one to two hours and find a kind of bliss.

While I’m strung out on the endorphins The Beatles music pumps into me, my mind is racing with thoughts. Memories and connections burble up out of my unconscious mind. I might look like I’m doing nothing, but it feels like I’m more active than when I’m running around doing something very physical.

JWH