"Bono has stood by his decision to accept the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, despite admitting to 'looking like a plonker' as President Biden placed it around his neck."

"The U2 frontman, who recently celebrated his 65th birthday, has no regrets keeping the award that he received in January for his humanitarian work in spite of claims that he was morally wrong to do so due to the former president’s track record over Gaza."

From "Bono has no regrets about accepting White House honour/The U2 frontman addresses backlash over accepting the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing his longstanding humanitarian work and collaboration with Joe Biden" (London Times).

According to the OED, "plonker" has meant "A foolish, inept, or contemptible person" since 1955. John Lennon muttered it on TV in 1964. "Plonker" also means "penis." Published examples go back to the 1920s: "Last night I lay in bed and pulled my plonker." I was amused to find that in the OED, but there it was. An older meaning of the word is "Something large or substantial of its kind." You can see how one thing leads to another.

"Long before Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall, she made 'Apple,' a piece of fresh fruit on a stand..."

"... at the Indica gallery in London. (Lennon, naughtily and biblically, took a chomp.) I am not an Ono-phile who wants to wallow overmuch in this kind of art, but applaud Sheff’s book as an important corrective to years of bad P.R. He’s done the opposite of a hatchet job, putting his subject back together branch by branch, like a forester. (Climbing trees is a big theme in her work.) He argues convincingly for her as survivor, feminist, avant-gardist, political activist and world-class sass...."

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Yoko Ono, Demonized No Longer/David Sheff’s new biography convincingly argues for John Lennon’s widow as a feminist, activist, avant-garde artist and world-class sass" (NYT).

"Yoko, meaning 'ocean child,' was born in 1933 in Tokyo to wealthy but cold parents. She didn’t meet her father until she was 2½, and her mother was vain and germophobic. 'Even now I find it unpleasant to sit on a cushion or chair that still retains the temperature of somebody who had just been sitting there,' Ono once wrote."

Nakedness presented as fashion is an old idea: "Robert Altman put an all-nude runway show at the end of 'Pret a Porter' in 1994."

"Anthony Haden-Guest wrote that Grace Jones showed up fully nude at Studio 54 so much that it became a bore. In 2003, Pam Grier said this about her work with the filmmaker Jack Hill in an interview with the AV Club: 'You’re not thinking about some sort of Victorian handicap called, "Don’t show your breasts, it’s considered indecent.'"' Nudity is still a taboo, but people have been challenging that taboo for a long time.... I mean, it looked like a Los Angeles old man/trophy wife couple that had been generated by slightly malfunctioning AI. If she had been wearing underwear, it wouldn’t have even registered as a stunt. It’s not blowing my mind, but it is interesting, if just from a dorm-room stoner 'what even are clothes, man?' point of view."

Said WaPo style reporter Shane O’Neill, in "The controversy over Bianca Censori’s naked Grammys outfit with Kanye West/Unpacking 'naked dressing,' power dynamics and what that red carpet stunt really meant."

I've been avoiding this topic because I like to withhold attention from people who are trying to get attention, but I liked Shane O’Neill's way of addressing the story, which I'm sure you've noticed.

The one thing I'd like to add is that I assume Censori is in on the performance and just as dedicated to it as Yoko Ono was part of "Two Virgins" — way back in 1968:

Happy Birthday to John Lennon!

I don't say happy birthday to John Lennon every year, but just by chance it happened that the first post of the day — "Both VP nominees are now participating in the old tradition of responding to questions written on an orange..."— contained the sentence:

"I struggle to resist re-telling the story of My Dinner With Bruce Springsteen."

The internal link goes back to a post from the first year of this blog:

Go back to the first post of today to see how that connected up. But rereading that old post — which has a Sean Lennon Ono tag (because I sat near Yoko Ono when she was pregnant with Sean) — made me want to check to see what Sean was writing on X today. I see:

What nice synchronicity! It was only by chance that John and Sean were born on the same day and only by chance that on this October 9th, the story of an orange rolled up the aisle of an airplane took me back to the story of My Dinner in the Vicinity of John and Yoko.

If I had to try to think of a meaningful connection, I'd say — as I've said before — I like that Yoko Ono book "Grapefruit."

I resist even examining why I have a strong mental barrier that stops me from reading this article.

"[O]ur mother shattered the protocols of stuffy Washington decorum. 'People were uptight and too concerned about how they appeared'..."

"... my mother remembers. To cure this contagion, she coaxed notables of different backgrounds into unfamiliar situations. A wizard at peer pressure, she compelled her guests to play charades, freeze tag, and capture the flag, and join in rope climbing and push-up competitions. She had Cabinet members fence with bamboo sticks on gangplanks spanning the pool....When Robert Frost visited Hickory Hill after Uncle Jack’s inauguration, she made him judge a poetry-writing contest among government officials and celebrity guests. At a party for Averell Harriman’s birthday the guests came dressed as the Harrimans during some episode of their eventful lives. My mother borrowed life-size wax figures from Madame Tussauds of Harriman, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta, and placed them unobtrusively around the living room to mingle with the crowd...."

Writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family."

"Working as a grade school teacher in Waubeka, Wisconsin, in 1885, Bernard J. Cigrand held the first recognized formal observance of Flag Day...."

"From the late 1880s on, Cigrand spoke around the country promoting patriotism, respect for the flag, and the need for the annual observance of a flag day on June 14, the day in 1777 that the Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes. He moved to Chicago to attend dental school and, in June 1886, first publicly proposed an annual observance of the birth of the United States flag.... On the third Saturday in June 1894, a public school children's celebration of Flag Day took place in Chicago at Douglas, Garfield, Humboldt, Lincoln, and Washington Parks. More than 300,000 children participated, and the celebration was repeated the next year.... Cigrand generally is credited with being the 'Father of Flag Day,' with the Chicago Tribune noting that he 'almost singlehandedly' established the holiday."

From "Flag Day" (Wikipedia).

"Artist and director Em Cooper explored the space between dreaming and wakefulness, working on an animation rostrum on sheets of celluloid."

She painted every frame individually in oil-paint, a labourious process which took many months." 

 

I was alerted to the existence of that new video by the new Wings of Pegasus analysis of "I'm Only Sleeping" on the new "special" edition of "Revolver." Wings take a strong position against pitch correction and explains why it's not an insult to say that John was singing "flat": "Instead of saying 'flat, flat, flat,' we should be saying 'emotion, emotion, emotion'...."

"Writing a song like this can be deceptively easy. First you assemble a laundry list of things people hate."

"For the most part, people are not going to like war, starvation, death, prejudice and the destruction of the environment. Then there’s the trap of easy rhymes. Revolution/evolution/air pollution. Segregation/demonstration. John Lennon got away with it by using his cheeky sense of humor to create a postmodern campfire song all about bag-ism and shag-ism. But in less sure hands one might as well write about the periodic table of elements with built-in rhymes about calcium, chromium and lithium."

Writes Bob Dylan, in "The Philosophy of Modern Song" (p. 78). 

The song under discussion there is "Ball of Confusion"....

 

... which he connects to "Give Peace a Chance"...

"He was the clear extravert of the Beatles … yet 'For No One' is beautifully introspective, and even a song as extraverted as 'Hey Jude' has a contemplative side."

"John rightly gets most of the credit for 'A Day in the Life,' which many point to as the artistic high point of the Beatles’ oeuvre — but it wouldn’t have achieved those heights if it had been all John. Music is all about context, and the dissonant orchestral frenzy wouldn’t have been as interesting if it had gone from John back to John again. It needs to give way to Paul waking up and reeling off the details of his ordinary life, before drifting off into a dream."

Writes my son John, in "Paul McCartney turns 80" (posted yesterday, Paul's birthday), in the first post of a new blog. The blog is titled "Music Is Happiness," and we'll see where that goes. 

John gives high marks to Paul's 2021 recording, "Deep Deep Feeling": 

"In the fall of 1961, [Yoko] Ono gave a concert in Carnegie Recital Hall.... Onstage, twenty artists and musicians performed different acts—eating, breaking dishes, throwing bits of newspaper."

"At designated intervals, a toilet was flushed offstage. A man was positioned at the back of the hall to give the audience a sense of foreboding. A huddle of men with tin cans tied to their legs attempted to cross the stage without making noise. The dancers Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown sat down and stood up repeatedly. According to the Village Voice, the performance finished with Ono’s amplified 'sighs, breathing, gasping, retching, screaming—many tones of pain and pleasure mixed with a jibberish of foreign-sounding language that was no language at all.'... When conceptual artists hit the big time, at the end of the nineteen-sixties, her name was virtually never mentioned.... When Ono and Lennon married, she was a coterie artist and he was a popular entertainer.... She decided that condescension to popular entertainment is a highbrow prejudice. As she put it, 'I came to believe that avant-garde purity was just as stifling as just doing a rock beat over and over.' So she became a pop star.... When 'Imagine' was released, one of Ono’s instruction pieces from 'Grapefruit' was printed on the back cover: 'Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.'"

Writes Louis Menand in "Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance Before she met John Lennon, she was a significant figure in avant-garde circles and had created a masterpiece of conceptual art. Did celebrity deprive her of her due as an artist?" (The New Yorker).

"To wander aimlessly is very unswinging. Unhip."

Said Paul McCartney, quoted in a NYT piece about the big Beatles documentary, "'Improvise It, Man.' How to Make Magic Like the Beatles." That's by Jere Hester, author of "Raising a Beatle Baby: How John, Paul, George and Ringo Helped Us Come Together as a Family" (NYT). 

I remember hearing that line in passing — I'm about half way through the 7-hour Disney Channel extravaganza —  and wanting to think about it, but missing the context. All Hester gives us is:

Even as wine, beer and more flows, the Beatles stay disciplined, working and reworking lyrics and arrangements until they get them right. “To wander aimlessly is very un-swinging,” Mr. McCartney says. “Unhip.”

I'm so fascinated by the insight that there's hipness and swing in discipline and order, and that chaos — wandering aimlessly — is what's really uncool. It's a great hypothesis. Who knows if it's true, but where did it come from in Paul? Without context, one is left to theorize that Paul criticized chaos because the other Beatles weren't rising to the level of organization he wanted, that came naturally to him.

Googling, I found this transcript of the whole conversation (published a few years ago). There's audio too, and it's crisper than the mix in the documentary. It's January 14, 1969 (in Twickenham Film Studios):

"In the Beatles circa 1969, Paul McCartney is the negotiator-in-chief, and he’s aware of every eggshell he has to walk around or smash to achieve greatness..."

"... or just to get shit done.... [H]e comes off as surprisingly aware of the minefield of sensitivities around him... and he’s certainly beyond aware that he’s paying a cost to be the boss. He’s a domineering older brother to George and rival/BFF/frenemy to John, and now he’s playing de facto manager to everyone — not necessarily because he’s taken pole position in the band on merit alone, but because Lennon is suddenly more invested in a woman... Seeing McCartney recognize and articulate all these shifts, and soldier on while he gets a little bit sad about them, is one of the pleasures of 'Get Back.' If you don’t come away from this with just a little more admiration for Paul, you may just be too in the bag for John and Yoko and their bag-ism, but that’s all right. Everybody is going to be your favorite or most admired Beatle, some time before you complete the eight-hour Get Back Challenge. 'Daddy’s gone away now, you know, and we’re on our own at the holiday camp,' McCartney says, about they’ve felt rudderless since the death of manager Brian Epstein. In the contretemps with Harrison where the guitarist famously says 'I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play,' McCartney tells the whole group he’s aware of turning into dad, and he doesn’t like it: 'I’m scared of that one… me being the boss. And I have been for, like, a couple of years – and we all have, you know, no pretending about that.'"

From "Why the Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ May Stand as the Best Rock Doc Ever" by Chris Willman (Variety).

Lots more at the link. I resisted watching this show because I didn't want to subscribe to another streaming service — in this case, Disney. But I gave in, paid the $8 for the first month, and intend to exit as soon as I'm done watching this 8-hour extravaganza. I'm only one hour into it, after 2 sessions. I can only take so much. They look bored, that is, John, George, and Ringo look bored. Paul is more or less everything. That's pretty unpleasant! But I see that's the idea, and I have to watch it slowly enough to appreciate the details, the clues. Is John bored or is he utterly mentally absent, relocated somewhere in drugworld? Is Ringo bored or is he paying intense attention and just essentially, perpetually mute? Is George bored or is he an angry, resentful son of a bitch? 

ADDED: Willman casually used the term "bag-ism" — accomplishing a little play on words. I know what it means. I remember bagism, but I looked up the Wikipedia page anyway:

"Little People, Big Dreams is series of illustrated books for kids of five and over that tells the life stories of what it considers history’s admirable men and women..."

"... Darwin, Mary Shelley, Marie Curie, Malala, Elton John, RuPaul… The books imagine what these high-achieving adults were like as children: bright-eyed and bravely refusing to be cowed. The back of each book explains the conceit: 'All of [these people] achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.'... It’s just plain untrue to say that the men and women of history started out by fantasising about some great achievement. Marie Curie didn’t spend her time hankering for a Nobel Prize, she just got on with studying the science. In no possible world was John Lennon 'the boy from Liverpool who dreamed of peace.' Lennon as a child, in his own words, ‘did my best to disrupt every friend’s home.' What unites great men and women isn’t a capacity to dream big but a love of what they do and a capacity for sheer graft.... [There's a] weird 21st-century idea that childish things are especially virtuous, and that it’s noble, not deluded, to dream of greatness...."

From "Is it cruel to crush your child’s dreams?" Mary Wakefield (The Spectator).

Dreams...

Springsteen's: 

 

Ono's:

Imagine all the people living life in peace. pic.twitter.com/5xA11BVN3p

— Yoko Ono ☁️ (@yokoono) September 11, 2021

I don't know what you think of "celebrity 9/11".... It's a matter of taste, but they are trying, with decent enough sincerity.

"Boris Johnson’s comments comparing Muslim women in veils to letterboxes gave people the impression that the Conservative Party 'are insensitive to Muslim communities'..."

"... an independent report has concluded.... The review, set up in 2019 and led by psychiatrist Swaran Singh... said that 'anti-Muslim sentiment remains a problem' in the party but concluded that there was no evidence of systemic discrimination.... In a statement to the commission, Johnson apologised for any offence caused by his letterboxes remark and said: 'I do know that offence has been taken at things I’ve said, that people expect a person in my position to get things right, but in journalism you need to use language freely. Would I use some of the offending language from my past writings today? Now that I am prime minister, I would not.' Johnson made the letterboxes comment in a Daily Telegraph column where he criticised a law passed in Denmark to ban the niqab, a full face veil with a slit for the eyes, and the burka, a full covering with a mesh over the eyes. He wrote that the law should not tell 'a free-born adult woman what she may or may not wear in a public place,' but added that it is 'absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes.'"

The London Times reports.

Presumably, Johnson was picturing the English-style "pillar box":

It was a rude remark. He could have been more careful. In the words of the great Englishman John Lennon: Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox/They tumble blindly....

"I had to isolate, using Being Famous as an immense excuse for never facing anything. Because I was Famous, therefore I can’t go to the movies."

"I can’t go to the theater. But then sitting in this [Hong Kong hotel] room, taking baths, which I noticed Yoko did, every time I got nervous — I must have had about 40 baths — I’m looking out over the Hong Kong Bay, and there’s something ringing a bell. It’s like, what is it? And then I just got very, very relaxed. And it was like a recognition: this is me! This relaxed person is me!.... I rediscovered [in Hong Kong], the feeling I used to have as a youngster, walking in the mountains of Scotland with an auntie. You know, you’re walking and the ground starts going beneath you, and the heather, and the clouds moving above you, and you think, Ah, this is the feeling they’re always talking about, the one that makes you paint or put it into poetry because you can’t describe it any other way. I recognized that that feeling had been with me all my life. The feeling was with me before the Beatles. So this period was to re-establish me, as me, for myself.... So here I am, right? It’s beautiful, you know. It’s just like walking those hills."

From a December 2020 article in the NYT, "For John Lennon, Isolation Had a Silver Lining/Forty years after the musician’s death, a writer revisits conversations with the former Beatle about the long period of seclusion and self-reflection that inspired his breakthrough as a solo artist, and as a human being." 

I was reading that after listening to John's song "Isolation," which I embedded in a post yesterday, in a discussion of the use of the noun "isolate" to describe a type of person. Obviously, the NYT publishes things about John Lennon every December, memorializing his murder, but this article connected to the coronavirus lockdown, in that Lennon imposed a lockdown on himself (from 1976 to 1980). 

There's a suggestion that we might take something from his experience and turn the negative of the lockdown positive. He was, though, recovering from the distortions of life as a very famous person, so it's hard to adapt that to your own life, especially if you have aspirations to accomplish things out in the world of your fellow humans or if you were already in touch with the real you.

But one thing that might be useful is Lennon's assertion that recorded music — which you can so easily experience alone and at home (or walking along the purple heather) — is preferable to going out to concerts: "All the performers I ever saw, from Little Richard to Jerry Lee Lewis, I was always disappointed. I preferred the record."

Rush Limbaugh, the "isolate."

From "Rush Limbaugh’s Complicated Legacy/He was a gifted entertainer and advocate, but in his later years certain flaws became more evident" by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal: 

To create a community of tens of millions of people in fractured, incoherent America was an astounding feat. To pretty much sustain it over 30 years was equally astounding. 

It is perhaps ironic but probably inevitable that that community was created by a man whom one of his closest friends this week called “an isolate.” Knowing him slightly over a few decades, I believe the most important thing to him was his profession, his show—three hours a day, five days a week, unscripted, with sound elements and callers....

He wasn't just isolated, he was an isolate. Isolation wasn't just a characteristic of his, in this formulation, it was what he himself was. 

I've never noticed "isolate" — the noun — used to mean a type of person. Of course, people are often referred to as "isolated," but "isolate"? It seems like "introvert" or "incel." It's all the way deep into your being. 

Yet somehow you have close friends, close enough that one of them can be referred to as "one of his closest friends." Do you have enough close friends that there's someone who'd refer to himself as "one of" your "closest friends"?! Maybe your "closest friends" are fairly distant. A person with no truly close friends still has his "closest friends." These people might not even know him well at all, just well enough to observe that he is isolated, and coldly enough to call him "an isolate." 

The noun "isolate" is a term in social psychology: "A person who, either from choice or through separation or rejection, is isolated from normal social interaction; also occasionally an animal separated from its kind" (OED).

 

People say we've got it made/Don't they know we're so afraid?

"John Lennon died at age 40, 40 years ago today. I did this blog post 12 years ago, linking to both of my parents' memories..."

"... of being in the same city where he died on December 8, 1980. Both of their posts mention that they named me John when I was born 99 days later. Now I'm almost 40 and I'm living on the Upper West Side, not far from where it happened on West 72nd Street. I've walked by there many times, always thinking about it, never quite believing it really happened here." 

Writes my son John (on his blog). Here's his old post, written in 2008, which links to his father's post, written in 2005, and to my post, also written in 2005. 

I wrote: 

On the day I heard that John had died, I was a law student at NYU. I remember dragging myself in to the law review office and expecting everyone there to be crying and talking about it, but no one was saying anything at all. I never felt so alienated from my fellow law students as I did on that day. I was insecure enough to feel that I was being childish to be so caught up in the story of the death of a celebrity long past his prime. I didn't even take the train uptown to go stand in the crowd that I knew had gathered outside the Dakota. What did I do? I can't remember. I probably buried myself in work on a law review article.... 

How I regret not going uptown to be among the people who openly mourned John Lennon! How foolish I was to think I was foolish to care and to put my effort into blending in with the law review editors who, I imagined, were behaving in a way I needed to learn!

Looking back at that reaction, I realize I was influenced by the shame I'd felt in 1977 when I showed my feelings about the death of Elvis Presley. Did I ever blog about that? It's something I've thought about lately, as I've reflected on my life. It turns out I blogged about that in 2005 — August 2005:

"'What happens to us while we are making other plans,' per Allen Saunders" — what?!

So... that's from today's mini crossword in the NYT, and I and — I guess — a million mini-puzzlers are saying who the hell is Allen Saunders and how have I gone so long attributing this witticism to John Lennon?

 

Wikipedia says: 

Allen Saunders (April 24, 1899 – January 28, 1986)[2] was an American writer, journalist and cartoonist who wrote the comic strips Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Mary Worth and Kerry Drake. 

He is credited with being the originator of the saying, "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans" [published in Reader's Digest] in 1957. The saying was later slightly modified and popularised by John Lennon in the song "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)".

Mary Worth! Is there anything less John-Lennon-like than Mary Worth?