Late Night Horror is best known today, if it is known at all, by its mysterious (if slightly apocryphal) reputation: a broadcast so terrifying, that so scarred viewers, that it was not just taken off the air, but swiftly destroyed. It’s a compelling story, but one that overshadows Late Night Horror’s distinction as a forward-thinking piece of entertainment, both technically and socially. Moreover, its destruction not only reveals England’s odd history of missing TV, it also illuminates something about how media consumption has changed, about cultural memory, maybe even about the ephemeral nature of art itself. Like a ghost, Late Night Horror had to disappear to make an impression.
The endpoint of cooking is not eating; it is cleaning.
We dream, we plan, we crave, we shop, we chop, we fry, we simmer, we garnish, we serve. And then we eat, sometimes alone and sometimes not, and when the eating is done, a mess remains, a record of our pleasure. We must put spices back on their racks, the halved butter stick back in the fridge before it pools on the counter. We must transfer braised greens and ladlefuls of curry into containers that will keep them from spoiling. We must hem and haw over whether cake goes in the fridge or stays on the table, to stare at us for breakfast. We must collect all the surfaces and vessels we have dirtied and turn them clean again. This is a result not of the cooking process, but of the final leg of it.
Who was the first rocker to explore Eastern spirituality and broker what would come to be called world music? George Harrison. Who spurred the Beatles to quit live performance and expand their sonic palette in the studio? George Harrison. Who awoke rock’s social conscience and invented the all-star charity event with the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971? You’re catching on.
This is part of the impetus behind Philip Norman’s new biography, “George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle” — to give due and overdue attention to the self-styled “dark horse” of the 20th century’s most important pop act. The other part seems to be completism: Norman authored the first serious book about the Fab Four, “Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation,” which was published in 1981, and has since written biographies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, not to mention Elton John, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.One imagines a list of names on Norman’s refrigerator, two-thirds of them checked off, and poor, sad-eyed Ringo Starr down at the bottom.
As he sang in “Things Have Changed,” don’t get up, he’s only passing through. That’s the most fascinating mystery about Dylan and his music — the stubbornly mischievous refusal to fade into the past. In a way, the book enshrines a history that Dylan has already slipped away from, a history where he’s determined not to get trapped. It’s a road map of places he has left behind. But then, that’s how Bob Dylan stories usually go. While everybody kneels to pray, the drifter escapes.