after Rutherford Chang
track 1
“I listen to the White Album every day.
I ‘collect’ only White Albums.
I bought my first White Album at a garage sale in Palo Alto for $1 when I was 15 years old.
My exhibition is set up like a record store with the albums arranged in bins by serial number, and visitors are invited to browse and listen to the records.
Except, rather than sell the albums, I am buying more.
I’m most interested in the albums as objects, and observing
how they have
aged.
I often find the “poorer” condition albums more interesting.
Every copy
tells a story, an imagined history
based on the condition of the
album.
At the end of the exhibition I will press a new double-LP made from all the recordings layered upon each other.
It will be like playing a few hundred copies
of the White Album
at once.”
track 12
While recording “Revolution,” John kept getting hung up on a particular lyric. After the line “but when you talk about destruction,” he could not decide whether he wanted to sing
“don’t you know that you can count me out,”
or
“don’t you know that you can count me in.”
Paul later said, “I don’t think he was sure which way he felt about it at the time.” On the White Album version of the song, John sings both.
track 15
1969. The Beatles are falling apart
and John and Yoko are in Amsterdam
surrounded by reporters in bed.
Israeli writer Akiva Nof hops in
and decides to teach John some Hebrew.
John strums and sings along:
ירושלים נשבענו כולנ
לא ננטוש
מכאן עד עולם
(Jerusalem, we all swear
that we will never abandon you
from now until forever.)
I can’t tell from the tape if John knows
what he’s singing—it’s scratchy, like
it’s being played many times at once.
track 23
2023. Is this the Jewish American Dream? I’m eating
chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs and thinking
about John Lennon while the IDF
bombs hospitals in Gaza?
track 26
You say you want a revolution:
40 rabbis gather in Washington
for a public shacharit and to call
for a ceasefire.
The next day 300,000 people march
for Israel. It’s a Level 1 security
event, the highest possible.
The march features a speech by a pastor
who once said the Holocaust
was God’s plan to help the Jews
reach the promised land. In a cemetery
in Cleveland, four miles from the house
I rent, Jewish graves sprout swastikas.
What the fuck?
What can I do?
Danny Caine
Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, Flavortown, and Picture Window, as well as the books How to Protect Bookstores and Why and How to Resist Amazon and Why. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, LitHub, DIAGRAM, HAD, and Barrelhouse. He's a co-owner of the Raven Book Store, Publishers Weekly's 2022 bookstore of the year.