I’ve never understood the desperation not nostalgia. I mean, I get it intellectually. We’re all going to die someday so let’s build a monument of one sort or another to things we’ve done and emphasize their importance–or overemphasize it–so that our egos can be enlarged enough to cover up the truth. It makes us feel like we belong and our belonging cannot be diminished. How sad.

Almost fifteen years after the Beatles rocked the Ed Sullivan Show, Merv Griffin took over the same theater in 1978 for a week of shows from New York and presented the original cast of the musical Beatlemania, which was promoted as “not the Beatles but an incredible simulation.” Because actual memories of and recordings by the Beatles weren’t enough–we had to experience it again through some false reinvention. But that phony Beatlemania never really bites the dust. The holograms keep coming.