I'm leaving tomorrow to give a talk at Oklahoma State University, where my good friend Carol Mason invited me to speak under the auspices of the Gender and Women's Studies program there which she's now chairing. On the off chance that anyone is reading this who lives near Stillwater, OK, come to the talk this Friday afternoon, 4:00 pm in the Noble Research Center, Rm. 106. I'll be speaking about the Runaways, and apparently the flyer for the event has been stirring up a bit of dust on campus because of the photo it uses, pictured below, which is one of the favorite of the photos I included in my book.

Since my last post detailing some of my Beatles tourism in Liverpool recently, we had a veritable Beatles holiday with the release on 9-9-09 of the Beatles Rock Band video game and reissues of the whole official Beatles catalogue in newly remastered versions. It's easy to be cynical of such an event, market driven as it so clearly is, but I don't think cynicism alone goes so far in explaining why there's such a sense of occasion surrounding something as apparently banal as the release of a new video game. I was especially surprised to see the supposed arbiters of all things musically hip, Pitchfork.com, go to the trouble of devoting three whole days worth of review space to the whole reissued catalogue and even include a review of the video game.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13425-stereo-box-in-mono/

Probably says more about Pitchfork's target demographic than anything else, but it also shows that even the musically hip are not immune to the excitement of getting access to the Beatles catalogue in a new form.

I, on the other hand, hip or not depending on your perspective, am sort of immune - for one thing, Beatles albums fall into the category of things I'd rather own on vinyl. I don't own their whole catalogue, but I do have a good bit of it, and all on vinyl. Moreover, about half the Beatles albums I own I acquired for free when a friend disposing of a bunch of old vinyl let me have my pick of the litter. I picked up Please Please Me, Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper's from that stash, not a bad score at all.

In the flurry of publicity that surrounded the Beatles consumer holiday, I got a call from a reporter at the Abilene Reporter News, which resulted in the following article that quotes me a surprising amount given that we spoke for all of five minutes:

http://www.reporternews.com/news/2009/sep/08/rockband-beatles/

(I still plan to post some more photos of my Liverpool trip, but those will wait until next time.)