1961: John Writes A Letter To Stuart Sutcliffe.

this yellow submarine scene always makes me laugh

“John loved his Uncle George, who was a big soft-hearted gentleman. He could speak fluent French and was a wonderful artist who’d won scholarships at school.

He was very attentive to John. He bought him his first bicycle and would take him for walks into the Woolton countryside and tell him about nature.”

“He was well read and would read entire books out loud to John.”

“He was particularly fond of John and when the boy was four and a half years old, taught him to read by reciting the headlines from the Liverpool Echo to him. He also taught John how to draw and paint and bought him his first mouth organ.”

Oh god.  I find Uncle George’s death absolutely one of the saddest parts of John.  I think it changed his life so much.  And he barely speaks about him.   (Or when he does it’s often as part of this pattern of loss and grief that would last all his life, not really about his uncle in particular.)

I’d be so interested to know how much Paul and John ever spoke about him, but especially when John was young. When Paul talks about their connection it’s always ‘we’d lost our mums’ - and I know it’s a huge thing between them, I am not trying to lessen Julia’s death - but when they first knew each other John hadn’t lost his mum. But he’d already lost his father-figure, aged 14, the parental figure he was closest to by all accounts.  And lost him in a similar way - not the exact circumstances, but where he was kept somewhat removed from it - they didn’t tell him for a few days until he came home from holiday - and he felt shame/guilt about his initial reaction which was nervous laughter.  In some ways it’s more the mirror image with Paul’s situation than Julia is - although admittedly not the mirror image in how much emotional importance John puts on it.  I wish we had so much more information about it.  I really wonder if he and Paul talked about it at that time, or if he was able to be open about his feelings with himself, much less with Paul.

(I also wonder if Paul knew that when John said that heartless thing about ‘how can you sit there with your mum dead’, it was coming from a place where John did know some of how he was doing that, of being forced to get on with things, despite this huge loss in your life, that strange sense of unreality.  I’m not saying that makes it better, it’s still a very cruel thing to do.  But I think it changes colour a little bit.)

And all the evidence there is suggests that John was really close with George.  He supported John in basically all the things he loved: books, writing, art, music.  He bought him his dog.  There’s a lovely thing Mimi says about them leaving her a chocolate bar and a note that said ‘have a happy day’ while they went off for their days out.  And John leaving George notes asking him to come and tuck him into bed.  When he died, didn’t John keep George’s coat and wear it everywhere for years after?  But there is so little weight to him in John’s emotional story.  And I just never know if John didn’t talk about him because it was just one thing that the press and his terrible biographers left him alone about, so he didn’t feed it to them, or if he genuinely didn’t connect with it very much.

Every biographer rushes over Uncle George’s death to get to Julia, and I think some of that is because John’s emotions rush over it, to get to Julia.  But he raised John from 4 to 14.  I think it’s easy to forget that calling him ‘Uncle George’ doesn’t mean he wasn’t his dad in a lot of ways that matter.

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i wish this new wave of “grunge” was still poor/mentally ill people making art about their struggles and not the girls that bullied me in high school wearing a $60 flannel lol 

I AM BEGGING YOU TO HELP SAVE DUSTIN HIGGS

Dustin Higgs is a Maryland based artist on Death Row for a crime he did not commit -

He was convicted and sentenced to the federal death penalty as an accomplice to the 1996 murders of Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn. It was the first federal death sentence handed down in Maryland in the modern era.

Dustin was not the person who actually shot the three women. In fact, it was Willis Haynes who pulled the trigger, and he was sentenced to life in prison plus 45 years after a separate jury spared him the death penalty for the crime. With the resumption of federal executions in 2020, Dustin's life is at serious risk.

He is sentenced to be excecuted on Jan 15. 2021. 3 days before MLK Day and just 5 DAYS BEFORE THE NEW FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION IS PUT IN PLACE

Please if you have just one second or one spec of human decency, click these links.

Can you please reblog if your blog is a safe place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, asexual, aromantic, pansexual, non binary, demisexual or any other kind of queer or questioning people? Because mine is.