The problem with picking the greatest Beatles songs, as Rolling Stone has done, is that the Beatles were not always Great–you know, capital G Great, as in profound, but not only profound, also peerless. They were, however, prolific, creative, innovative, imaginative, relentlessly cheerful, and over and over and over again, perfect. Songs like “Lovely Rita”, “Good Morning“, “Baby You Can Drive My Car“, “Lady Madonna,” “We Can Work It Out,” “I’ve Just Seen a Face”–I could go on–are just irresistible pop gems. The were almost never not likable; they were almost never not lovable. Not for nothing did they star in cheery movies like A Hard Day’s Night and Help, and get a Saturday morning cartoon show. Those dark Rolling Stones never got a TV show, and their movie was about Altamont. On the other hand, the Stones produced one great song after another. For as much as they rocked, the Stones lived in your head. The Beatles almost never loved in your head. Paul McCartney was just too ebullient, and his forays into seriousness, then and in ensuing years, were cliched. John Lennon, the smart one, never seemed to me to be as deep as he was credited. Some of the band’s “greatest” stuff resulted when he exercised that impulse.

Here are Rolling Stone’s Top Ten: 1.) “A Day in the Life”; 2.) “I Want to Hold Your Hand; 3.) “Strawberry Fields Forever”; 4.) “Yesterday”; 5.) “In My Life”; 6.) “Something”; 7.) “Hey Jude”; 8.) “Let It Be”; 9.) “Come Together”; and 10.) “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

I agree with four of the selections: “A Day in the Life,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Something,” and “Come Together.” “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” are simplistic and derivative and unworthy; “In My Life” is nice but not better than a thousand other songs of its era. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is fun and infectious, but the band produced better material during that period. “yesterday” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” are vey fine songs; I prefer others.

I would probably rank “Strawberry Fields Forever” in first place; I thought it was a deeply mysterious song when I first heard it through my pillow on my Zenith transistor radio over WCAO, and then all the more mysterious, full of dimly understood lost thoughts, when I learned that Strawberry Fields was an orphanage. Still, “A Day in the Life” is beautifuland profound, and the band nailed it. Tough choice. My other choices: “All You Need is Love,” “Penny Lane,” “Paperback Writer,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Got To Get You INto My Life,” and “I Saw Her Standing There.”

The top choice was a true Lennon-McCartney collaboration, with John writing the opening and closing verses and Paul providing the bridge.

Rounding out the first half of the top 10 were No. 3 No. 4 “Yesterday” and No. 5 “In My Life.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2010/08/26/2010-08-26_news_today_oh_boy_mag_picks_alltime_best_beatles_tunes.html#ixzz0xiWo9vef

Currently on Slate, a photo album from Magnum Photos of the Mad Men era, including this shot of a 1963 literary cocktail party at George Plimpton‘s Upper East Side apartment. Plimpton is seated at left with literary agent Maggie Abbott next to him. At top, left to right: Jonathan Miller, Gore Vidal, Ricky Leacock, Robert Laskey, and Paul Heller. In background, left to right: Ralph Ellison and Peter Matthiessen. Center: Walter Bernstein (seated on couch with back to camera), Sydney Lumet (behind Bernstein to right), Mario Puzo (leaning against mirror), Jack Richardson (tall man, front, right foreground), Arthur Kopit (foreground, right), Frank Perry (left of Kopit), Eleanor Perry (left of Frank), Arthur Penn (obscured behind Eleanor), and Truman Capote (center on couch), 1963.
© Cornell Capa C / Magnum Photos

Dock Ellis, the former Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher, recalls his day of excellence.

My latest assignment has me working for Mr. Joe Plumeri, the chairman and CEO of the Willis Company. Have you ever heard of Willis? Neither had I, until this relationship began. Turns out Willis is a venerable British insurance company, now approximately 175 years old. Mr. Plumeri is an astute and charismatic businessman from the wilds of Trenton, New Jersey. He brought me over to London for three days to absorb what I could by attending a group of town hall meetings Joe would be conducting with Willis’ employees.

Day One passed like a whirlwind. Arriving around noon at the splendid Willis Building, located on Lime Street opposite the really ugly Lloyd’s of London building and near the wonderful Gherkin, I got a quick tour of the premises, including a visit to the rooftop and the splendid view it affords.  After that, I did my best to stay out of the way of the folks in the Communications Department, who had their hands full without babysitting a guest. Later, however, I got to sit in with two sessions with Joe, during which he explained that the company’s earnings were especially impressive given the hardships the difficult economic climate imposed. In the evening,  I had a great time. Josh King and Nick Balamaci and I went to dinner at La Pont de la Tour, a terrific restaurant located on Bankside just east of the Tower Bridge. They are a couple of smart and witty fellows, and we had a great time after dinner, crossing Tower Bridge and examining the husk of the venerable, amazing, now abandoned Willis Building on Trinity Square, before retiring to our rooms at Willis House.

The next day I attended two more town hall sessions. I suppose the experience must be something like Dead Heads used to be able to go through, when they could compare concerts, and savor how Jerry Garcia would play a solo during Sugar Magnolia at one show but save it for Truckin’ at another. Relieved of duty at around 3:30, I headed back to Bankside and the Tate Modern, which was having an exhibition called Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. There were at lot of incredible photos on display, including images by Walker Evans, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank and Weegie. But the exhibit was intellectually flabby. The cohering idea, as articulated by the curator, Sandra S. Phillips, in a filmed introduction, was that these were images taken by “the invasive eye,” but that seems to be a notion at once flabby and liquid. In what way is Abraham Zapruder‘s film of John F. Kennedy assassination invasive? How is a picture of a person riding a public subway invasive? Voyeurism seems obviously invasive, but when a nude person poses for the camera, as many, many subjects in this exhibition did, does their exhibitionism not change the level of voyeurism? A lot of questions seem to revolve around an idea of rights that the exhibition did not explore; for example, does not the notion of `invasive’ change when a person falls into the territory of news. A lot of the time I was thinking that it wasn’t the camera or the taking of the photograph that was invasive, but the construct of art, the freezing of the moment to invite interpretation, that was the invasive act. Plus the surveillance portion of the show was a drag and provoked no ideas of interest. Still, it was cool to see the pix. After that, I tramped back to Willis House, stopping off for a bite under an old covered mall called Leadenhall Market, dating from the mid-19th century, where a bar band was playing sixties songs and patrons were dancing in the street.  Hearing These Boots Were Made for Walking and especially Don’t You Just Know It put me in a particularly cheerful mood.

On Saturday I got up early and did the public tour of The Palace of Westminister, also known as Parliament. It was fabulous; if there was a downside, it was the crisp 75 minute tour did not permit lingering, and man, if anything deserved lingering, it was the incredible art that hangs in the joint. Most breathtaking were the two giant (45′ x 12′) frescoes in the Royal Gallery by Daniel Maclise, The Death of Nelson and The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher. The heroic paintings are just brilliant, but tragically, humidity from the Thames caused the colors to deteriorate, and now the pictures are almost monochrome. It was a great treat to stand on the backbench of the government’s side in Parliament. After that, I hiked down down Millbank for a about a mile to the Tate Britain, to see a merry exhibit called Rude Brittania, which showcased Britian’s splendid satirical and comic artists. I was delighted to see work by William Hogarth, the great Regency satirists Thomas Rowlandson and my main man James Gillray, the Victorian George Cruikshank, Ralph Steadman and the great Gerald Scarfe. I got a particular kick seeing the hilarious puppet of Margaret Thatcher that was used on Splitting Images. The exhibit was great fun, and after that I wandered around the rest of the museum for a while and absorbed a nice fat blast of culture. Then it was back to the airport and into the clutches of American Airlines, for a long, cramped, punishing eight hour flight home, whose tortures were relived only by a very pleasant chat with my seat mate, a young schoolteacher from Rockland, Illinois, named Sara, who was returning home from a month in Spain–a month that included the once-in-a-lifetime night she spent in Saville watching Las Rojas capture La Copa Mondial, and joining he celebration that followed. What a night that must have been!

Before George Lois went to work at Esquire and became a giant of the magazine industry, he was a giant of the advertising industry. Thus it makes sense that for its August issue, Playboy would turn to Lois for some comments on Mad Men, which begins its fourth season on Sunday. Now, this does not mark Lois’s first opinions on the series; he’s spoken about it before, and he doesn’t like it. He thinks it shortchanges ethnics, the Jews and Italians (and Greeks, like Lois) who were transforming the industry with audacious and creative campaigns. He is also sore that the show shortchanges art directors (of which he is among the most brilliant) in favor of copywriters. “Mad Men has given the world the perception that the scatology of the Sterling Cooper workplace was industry wide. In theor advertising, the show’s creators have the balls to proclaim that “Mad Men explores the Golden Age of advertising,” but surely they know that they are shoveling shit. Their show is nothing more than soap opera set in a glamorous office where stylish fools hump their appreciative, coiffured secretaries, suck up their martinis, and smoke themselves to death as they produce dumb, lifeless advertising. . . .The more I think and wrote about Mad Men, the more I take the show as a personal insult. So fuck you, Mad Men, you phony gray-flannel-suit, amle chauvinist, no-talent, WASP, white-shirted, racist, anti-Semitic Republican SOBs.”

Well, far be it from me to take issue with one of my heroes. And with a genius. And with a guy man who on the scene while I was literally in short pants. Still, I think Lois is taking the show entirely too personally. For one thing, all those years that he was involved in making ads that ran on Bonanza, did he think, “Yes, this is it, this is exactly what cowboy life was really like.” When his ads ran on that earlier show that involved an advertising agency, Bewitched, did he say, “Boy, you have to admire the documentary qualities of this show about a suburban witch.”  The truth is, Mad Men is brilliant not because it is about advertising, or even about the sixties. It’s about us–about people who are so sure of everything who are in the process of discovering that everything they’re sure of is falling apart. That in a nutshell was the experience of the sixties, and it has been the hugely uncomfortable experience of the last two years. I’m sorry, Mr. Lois, you’re looking at the show through the wrong side of the lens. How Mad Men handles the facts is irrelevant; its vision is brilliant.

Wonder Woman has a new look. Tim Gunn approves. “I love Wonder Woman’s new look,” Gunn told Newsarama writer Alan Kistler. “This new look says, ‘I’m confident, I’m powerful, I’m sexy, and don’t mess with me.’ Furthermore, she looks like a citizen of the real world rather than a creature from another land. I would imagine that this new look will allow Wonder Woman to morph into situations in a less noticeable manner and, thereby be even more effective at combating evil doers. It’s no longer a costume, it’s real clothes.” It seems to me that the new clothes look terrific, but does she really look like Wonder Woman?

Camille Paglia certainly rocked the Times the other day: “The implication is that a new pill, despite its unforeseen side effects, is necessary to cure the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country. But to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class? In the 1950s, female “frigidity” was attributed to social conformism and religious puritanism. . . .The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety. As respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and repression became the norm. Victorian prudery ended the humorous sexual candor of both men and women during the agrarian era, a ribaldry chronicled from Shakespeare’s plays to the 18th-century novel. The priggish 1950s, which erased the liberated flappers of the Jazz Age from cultural memory, were simply a return to the norm. Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution. But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells. In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure. Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium. Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left. . . .Furthermore, thanks to a bourgeois white culture that values efficient bodies over voluptuous ones, American actresses have desexualized themselves, confusing sterile athleticism with female power. Their current Pilates-honed look is taut and tense — a boy’s thin limbs and narrow hips combined with amplified breasts.‘‘ Not American but British, David and Victoria Beckham will serve as poster children quite nicely.

Recently my younger daughter, age 16, shared with her mother the following revelation. “I need new sneakers,’’ she said, “but not, you know, sneakers.’’

Confronted with this Delphic utterance, my wife, like a character in a Dan Brown novel, sought to penetrate this mystery by showing my daughter a website devoted to sneakers. “How about this one?’’ she helpfully suggested.

“Mesh?!?!?!?’’ replied my daughter, her voice conveying the utter revulsion customarily reserved for villains who commit crimes against humanity. “I hate mesh.’’

As a loyal father, I couldn’t agree more: mesh is despicable. Of course, easy agreement on fashion matters has long been part of my successful strategy to maintain peace by limiting my involvement in my daughter’s fashion choices to a few broad comments—a bland “You look nice’’ that is bereft of details, lest I over-praise or under-praise some particular feature; non-judgmental interrogatories like “Do you know that it’s raining (or freezing, or hailing frogs) out?’’, and firm citings of legal precedent, like “The law forbids you to drive in flip flops’’ or “You will be arrested if you do not wear more clothing than that in public.’’ But sometimes curiosity gets the better of me, and I wonder: why does she wear what she has chosen to wear?

For enlightenment, I turned to an expert, my friend, the author and fashion consultant Holly Brubach. “Years ago,’’ she told me, “people floated the theory that fashion is really a coded language spoken only by women. I’m not sure I ever entirely bought it, but if there is ever a time in a women’s life when it’s true, it’s when she is a teenager. Fashion is a way of expressing identify, and at that age, usually nothing is more important than fitting in with one’s peer group.’’

Hence the outfit that most of the girls in our local high school wear most of the time: a pair of preferably brand-name jeans, and a close-fitting top. Not too many have the inclination or the will to deviate for long. As it happens, this is a flattering look for my daughter, but that’s not the name of the game here; the girls seem more driven to own cool than to actually look cool. But it’s not as if girls in this group could be counted on to objectively analyze what they actually look like.  Self-image is susceptible to distortion at any phase in life, but perhaps never so much as during the generally narcissistic and hypersensitive days of adolescence.

But the safety of conformity can be confining, of course. “I think girls might have had some things working in their favor before,’’ says Brubach. She recalls that her high school that didn’t require a uniform, but it did forbid jeans. “That almost forced us into wearing a wider variety of clothing. We got to wear more things, we got to see more things, a wider range of choices was acceptable, and from that, we began developing a more individual style.’’

Which, slowly but surely, is what is happening with my daughter. You can see her taking steps, tentative though they may be. A few months ago, she and her best friend co-hosted a Sweet Sixteen. Each selected a long, beautiful gown, special jewelry, a special hairstyle, and—to round off the look—a pair of high-topped tennis shoes (in a matching color, of course—and without mesh.) Their messages were clear: to their friends, they were saying we’re taking this glamour look seriously, but not too seriously; to mom and dad, they were saying that [our] heads and bodies may be veering into adulthood, but at bottom, we’re still kids.

Last month my daughter was given a ticket to a concert by Britney Spears, a performer who had not previously ranked among her favorites.  She brought home two souvenirs: a Britney trucker cap, an ordinary item that could serve as a badge indicating that she’d been to this cool event, and a loose-fitting T-shirt bearing the phrase “It’s Britney, Bitch,’’ from one of the singer’s recent songs.  For a moment, I felt my inner Church Lady rising to the surface, but I soon got the message: she’s may not be ready for hot pants and halters, or to emulate Britney’s brazenness in full, but with this shirt, she’s telling us something important.  Think of it as a flag planted on the unexplored shore of adulthood.

Notably, she has yet to wear it to school, to subject the garment, and her message, to the judgment of her peers. But the time may come. “Eventually, most of us stop trying to fit in by being like everybody else,’’ my friend Holly comforts me, “and we start trying to fit in as ourselves.’’

(This article recently appeared in BG, the magazine of Bergdorf Goodman.)

The topic of this article is supposed to be Why Men Don’t Like to Dress Up, but I’m having some difficulty with it, because the premise is obviously untrue.  Men love to dress up.

If you have any doubts, go to a football game—NFL, NCAA. Look in the stands. You’ll see tens of thousands of men who have taken enormous care with their day’s wardrobe, starting next to the skin with the luckiest of their lucky T-shirts and building to the regulation team parkas. They will wear the official jersey of a current star, or the throwback jersey of a retired idol in order to help draw the mystic power of mighty ancestors into the day’s conflict. They will top off the ensemble with a well-chosen cap, or imitation leather helmet, or plastic pig snout, or styrofoam cheese head, and they will feel that they have dressed perfectly for the occasion.

And they will not be alone in their sartorial exactitude. Civil War reenactors in blue and gray will scour the hinterlands to find the precise regimental button to wear to their mock conflagrations.  Star Trek devotees will never be caught wearing items from their Deluxe Captain Kirk Uniform Packages from the original series when they meant to be wearing Gold Kirk Uniform Shirts from the 2009 film. A yachtsman will have his special windbreaker and a golfer will have his special sweater and slacks, and many a tennis player will continue to sport his short McEnroe-ish tennis shorts long after his slender McEnroe-ish figure has joined John in retirement. One need look no further than the example of Mr. Elmer Fudd, who always wears the same cap with the side flaps snapped together at the crown whenever he hunts that cwazy wabbit.

What most men do less and less, and what many men no longer do at all, is dress up for work. There was a time, as we see on Mad Men, when men were expected to dress for the office, and that the more successful you were, the better you were expected to dress. None of this came to anyone as a shock, since the world was still governed by a relatively small elite, and they mandated fashion and taste. Appearances mattered, often too much: men who had the right look often rose higher than men of greater ability who didn’t.  And even those who challenged the powers that be—Martin Luther King Jr., Lenny Bruce, Chuck Berry—wore versions of the suit and tie. They wanted to change, challenge, join the power structure, not destroy it, and their clothes demonstrated that.

But as Mad Men shows, not all men take to a suit and tie. Don Draper looks great and takes pleasure in the power that his appearance brings him. But Pete Campbell, young and unformed, doesn’t so much wear his suit as is worn by it; the suit is like the outline of a drawing that he is filling in. And for poor Harry Crane, deskbound and thickening, wearing a suit is a yoke of servitude, another obligation that society, family, marriage imposes upon him.

The sixties, of course, changed everything.  The new fashion freedom men enjoyed  fell on peacocks and drones alike. But over the years, the easygoing spirit of Casual Friday took over, and in many places became Sloppy Whenever. “Suits’’ became a synonym for executive power that was clueless and stodgy. Instead of the Don Drapers pulling the Harry Cranes to dress up, the Cranes pulled the Drapers down.  “The only people in Los Angeles who wear a tie,’’ a friend from the television business recently noted, “are the agents.’’

“It’s appalling how men dress today,’’ Tim Gunn, the creative director of Liz Claiborne said to me in a recent phone call. “More and more, I’m meeting men who have attained some professional stature, who not only don’t wear a tie, but who don’t know how to tie a tie.  I’m flabbergasted. It’s like they’re wearing a sign that says `I have arrested development.’ What are they signifying?’’

What indeed.  Back in 2005, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Ben Bernanke gave a speech in which he answered that very question. “The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work,’’ the former scholar and researcher told his audience. “Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what. . .Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call ‘signalling.’ You have to do it to show that you take your official responsibilities seriously.’’

Bernanke’s right (although you’d think a guy who’s able to understand credit default swaps could find himself a comfortable suit.) Men should be as willing to demonstrate their pride in their families and their professions as they do in their teams. And don’t forget: a lot more people are going to admire the way you look in a suit and tie than the way you rock a cheese head.

This article originally appeared in BG, the magazine of Bergdorf Goodman.

Jane Fonda, 28 years old, in a photograph taken by Dennis Hopper, at Malibu in 1965. Thanks to Vanityfair.com.