"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.

"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"...

"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).

"The appointed billboard was above a Sunglass Hut, just a few paces from an Armed Forces recruiting station. Times Square was doing its Times Square thing..."

"... total sensory overload. Capitalism on cocaine. It was 8:15 p.m. I waited. Was this actually going to happen or was it some kind of conceptual art prank? And who even is Yoko Ono?

Writes Sebastian Smee in "No matter what the haters say, Yoko Ono was always about peace. Now her message is on a Times Square billboard" (WaPo). The billboard is pink and just says "Imagine Peace."

Answering his question "who even is Yoko Ono?," Smee continues:

Ono had a gift for “event scores” that were by turns mundane, poetic and (poetically) impossible.... [for example] “Disappearing Piece,” which simply commands: “Boil water” (the piece ends when the water completely evaporates) and “Clock Piece,” which instructs: “Make all the clocks in the world fast by/ two seconds without letting anyone know/ about it.”

You can easily imagine one that says: “Sit next to John Lennon throughout the recording sessions for a Beatles album. Do nothing — except when you scream.” Or one that says, simply: “Imagine Peace.”...

Smee discusses Ono's "Cut Piece," from 1964, which I embedded on this blog 11 days ago, here. Ono sits silently and quietly while members of the audience do what she's instructed: Pick up scissors and cut pieces of her clothing away. My embedding had to do with some current fashion that looked as if someone had taken scissors to a woman's ordinary clothes and left them disturbingly lopped off. Smee connects it to her long history of peace activism:

A starkly cut off skirt and top is getting a lot of attention on the internet.

At the NYT, I see "Brief Encounters With a Micro Miniskirt/A low-rise skirt by Miu Miu went viral last month. Here, three perspectives on wearing it." 

And at The Cut, there's "The Life Span of a Micro-Mini Trend How the Miu Miu miniskirt ended up on every fashion-magazine cover."

The skirt has its own Instagram account, so let me embed this: 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Miu Miu Set (@miumiuset)

You see the idea. Very ordinary clothes are lopped off, and it seems to mean something.

This made me think of Yoko Ono's 1964 performance "Cut Piece":

"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:

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.

"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."

John Lennon turns 80.

I love this picture, it reminds me of the bond between us. Happy 80th John. Love Paul#JohnLennon #LENNON80 pic.twitter.com/ePrHqvZxVB

— Paul McCartney (@PaulMcCartney) October 9, 2020

Happy Birthday John!
Happy Birthday Sean!
Yes, you are my angels. I love you!
yokohttps://t.co/AU1ZFRTjOf pic.twitter.com/uvIa3lu2hx

— Yoko Ono (@yokoono) October 9, 2020

A Late Show is thrilled to welcome @seanonolennon for this very special performance of ISOLATION to help kick off John Lennon’s 80th birthday celebration. #LENNON80 #GIMMESOMETRUTH @johnlennon pic.twitter.com/isQDVGlAVd

— A Late Show (@colbertlateshow) October 9, 2020

"A ghost was standing in a public toilet. I suggested that he go up in the sky and be part of the light."

"'I don’t want to do that,' he said./'Why?'/'Because I want to maintain my individuality.' I thought it was interesting that he would rather stand in the public toilet than join the light. Does he really treasure what he perceives as his individuality, or is he just simply afraid of making the move? Tell us what your story is in staying where you are now in life."

From "Acorn" by Yoko Ono, which I just read.

I liked this about the sun: "There are one thousand suns rising every day. We only see one of them because of our fixation on monolithic thinking." And: "All colours are imaginary except yellow. Yellow is the colour of the sun at its height. Other colours are shades of yellow in varying degrees."

"Well, we all shine on/Like the moon and the stars and the sun."

The first words that crossed my mind when the DJ on the Beatles channel on the car radio asked — on the occasion of John Lennon's 79th birthday — what did John Lennon mean to you?



Who on earth do you think you are? A superstar? Well, right you are!

ADDED: Yoko is actually crocheting, but I have a tag for knitting, and I'm interpreting knitting as a form of crocheting, whether it really is or not.

From Wikipedia: "The salient difference between crochet and knitting, beyond the implements used for their production, is that each stitch in crochet is completed before the next one is begun, while knitting keeps many stitches open at a time."

That is a fantastic metaphor. Think of life like that. There are 2 kinds of people in the world: crocheter and knitters. The crocheters complete one thing before they begin the next, and the knitters keep many endeavors open at the same time.

Yoko is crocheting blindfolded. What does that mean — especially related to karma? I'm thinking that the blindfold depicts a lack of awareness of the karmic consequences of ones actions. At no point in the performance does she remove the blindfold. Karma — even instant karma — never knocks her right in the head. But we can all see that she's blindly fixed on a discrete, inoffensive task, and maybe we're invited to see ourselves in that and to see our own inattention to the larger forces of the universe, which will — suddenly some time — knock us right in the head. So "You better get yourself together, darling/Pretty soon you're going to be dead."

The first time we hear about instant karma, it is indeed going to kick you right in the head (and you're reminded, rhymingly, that pretty soon, you're going to be dead). But the second time we hear about instant karma, it's "going to look you right in the face." That won't work too well if you are blindfolded, so you might want to take off the blindfold and — rhyming with "race" — "Join the human race."

That made me think, John was talking about other people as subhuman. These days, you could get canceled if you talk like that. But John quickly escapes the accusation that he's looking down as he leaps to the declaration that other people are not merely human but superstars, shining "like the moon and the stars and the sun."

Then we hear for the third and last time about how instant karma is going to "get" us. First was kick you right the head. Second was look you right in the face. Third is, "going to knock you off your feet." The rhyming line is "Better recognize your brothers/Everyone you meet."  Your brothers, they're all superstars too. They shine on like the moon and the stars and the sun.

In 2 places in the song, John objects to laughing: 1. "What in the world you thinking of/Laughing in the face of love?" and 2. "How in the world you gonna see/Laughing at fools like me?" Laughing corresponds to Yoko's blindfolded crocheting. You don't see what you are doing. Stop laughing and see that we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun.

"Who knows who broke up the Beatles?" said Howard Stern and Paul McCartney said "I do."

"John. There was a meeting where John came in and said ‘hey guys I am leaving the group.' He had found Yoko and John loved strong women. His mother was a strong woman, his aunty who brought him up was a strong woman but, bless her, his first wife wasn’t a strong woman."



ALSO: Paul talks about his experience with group masturbation and his distaste for orgies.

"See, this is my experience, because I’m just not into orgies. I don’t want anyone else there, personally. It ruins it! I would think—I’ve never actually done it. Didn’t appeal to me, the idea.”

Eminent Os, tweeting today.

Obama:

“Low plastic stool, cheap but delicious noodles, cold Hanoi beer.” This is how I’ll remember Tony. He taught us about food — but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown. We’ll miss him. pic.twitter.com/orEXIaEMZM

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 8, 2018

Ono:

Trees dream of you at night. They ask you to be kind and gentle to them.

— Yoko Ono (@yokoono) June 8, 2018

Happiness is a warm gun.

"Sir Paul McCartney remembers Beatles icon John Lennon in New York march against gun violence."

"One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here," he said, "so it's important to me."

He added he was unsure if gun violence can be ended, adding: "But this is what we can do, so I'm here to do it."

ADDED: Perhaps you didn't know that the phrase "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" was based on a headline on a gun magazine. John talks about that in the clip I've embedded, and here's Rolling Stone's description of the song (which it ranked, in 2011, as #24 on its list of "100 Greatest Beatles Songs" (personally, I ranked it #1 for a long time (and don't have any current ranking))):

The title was inspired by a headline in a gun magazine George Martin had showed Lennon that read Happiness is a Warm Gun — a variation on Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz's 1962 bestseller Happiness Is a Warm Puppy. "I thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say," Lennon said. "A warm gun means that you just shot something."

Remember "Happiness Is a Warm Puppy"? It's kind of the worst of "Peanuts":

There were very rare moments of soft cheese in Peanuts'piquancy. For example, Lucy hugging Snoopy and declaring "Happiness is a warm puppy." That moment turned into a pioneering "book," composed of "Happiness is … " messages with accompanying drawings by Schulz, that became the No. 1 "nonfiction" work of 1963, and a prime mover in the Peanuts merchandising empire...

In the strip, Schulz would mock both merchandising and himself. When Lucy tried a second time to snatch Snoopy's warmth for her own happiness, he growled back, "My mother didn't raise me to be a heating pad!" Schulz himself said it best: "Anybody who says Peanuts is cute is just crazy." But he also enabled the merchandising machine....

I associate that non-edgy commercialization of "Peanuts" with a lot of 1960s/1970s idiocy, especially that atrocious cartoon "Love Is..." Unless I'm mistaken, every page of "Happiness is a Warm Puppy" begins with "Happiness is..." and some other damned nice thing. I'm trying to look inside the book at Amazon, and I can't see enough pages to be sure, but I'm grossed out by the introduction: "Now more than ever, we need the simple exuberance that Charles Schulz and his gang of Peanut-sized philosophers so perfectly express."

Oh, that's a new introduction, written for the 2006 edition. I guess "Now more that ever" meant now that we've got the worst President ever, George Bush. Anyway, the original edition came out before the arrival of The Beatles and even before John F. Kennedy was — bang bang shoot shoot — shot.

When The Beatles did arrive, they sold the ultimate niceness: Love. And then we lapped up "Love is..."



Click to enlarge. Yes, adult partners are pictured as naked juveniles who have no genitalia but who are sexually attracted to each other and go to bed together, dressed, at long last, in pajamas. This one-panel comic has been running, in that mind-crushingly limited form, since 1970. I certainly haven't read even a small percentage of the panels that have run over the decades, but I'm just going to bet that neither the man nor the woman has ever said anything as rejecting as "My mother didn't raise me to be a heating pad!"

"Crying is an excellent way of bringing balance and health to your mind and body. Keep crying."

Tweets Yoko Ono.

Among the responses:

Hear that all you poor people? The multi-millionaire Yoko says that crying because of your poverty and desperation is good for your mind and body.

— The Socialist Party (@OfficialSPGB) March 10, 2018

I think that's satire. Please don't destroy my feeling of hope in this world by having that not be satire. I will cry.

I click through to The Socialist Party/@OfficialSPGB — Socialist Party of Great Britain — and it's got the blue check mark of a "verified account." That means they're dead serious, right?

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has been around since 1904, Wikipedia says, offering this photograph of the they looked at their first conference, in 1905:



"Unlike other left groups, the SPGB did not see fascism as a special threat to the working class. Rather than formulating it as the last refuge of capitalism organising to defend itself against the working class, the party’s writers and speakers tended to view it as a particular type of reform movement. The two specific characteristics identified, though, were that it tended to be a form of national consolidation – unifying fragment nations such as Germany, Italy and Spain – and that it tended to have the mass support of the working class. The party's theory made the working class the politically decisive class: thus if the working class supported fascism then fascism would prevail. Answers to letters in the Socialist Standard in the 1930s repeatedly made this point. Early writers noted what Benito Mussolini was able to do with the power of the state on his side, a part of a vindication of the SPGB's approach of the workers seizing control of the state. The SPGB, hence, declined to join anti-fascist fronts or to make a particular issue of anti-fascism, arguing that the pro-socialist case was the necessary remedy for fascism."

Keep crying! It's an excellent way of bringing balance and health to your mind and body.

"Be alone, and you will feel that it is better to be with people. Be with people, and you will understand that being alone is not so bad."

Yoko Ono.