#john&yoko

[muzaktomyears]

John and Yoko in the Apple office at Savile Row in June 1969

(source)

[amberwaaves]

[cousin-quartz-of-house-paradox]

god i fucking love them

[mishivae]

John Lennon shot twice on the back

While giving peace from a love bed

[muzaktomyears]

Yoko’s life revolved around her acquisitions, but her most valuable acquisition was John. By marrying Lennon she had established herself as a celebrity and financial power to be reckoned with. It was the process of acquisition – not the object itself – that kept Yoko going. Antiques were routinely delivered, examined, and carted off to Apartment 71 or to the basement for storage. Clothes were bought and hung up, never to be worn. Once she had acquired something, Yoko lost interest in it. She lost interest in John after they were reunited and she lost interest in Sean after he was born. She treated them both with an icy reserve bordering on contempt.

Life became complicated for Yoko because John was not an inanimate object, but a human being – one with an active imagination, a strong sex drive, boundless energy, and a terrible temper. Indeed, Yoko lived in fear of John’s occasional outbursts of anger and frustration. Although he remained quietly behind closed doors most of the time, she knew well that John’s passive and self-absorbed behavior masked an overwhelming restlessness. Like an old lion, he could turn and bite your head off when you least expected it. Whenever John got a little stir-crazy upstairs and threatened to become “difficult”, Yoko attempted frantically to appease him with vague promises, or she would scare him with ominous psychic predictions and mystical mumbo jumbo. Usually, Yoko could keep John in line with a few carefully chosen words. One of her favorite ploys for controlling him was to tell him that the planet Mercury was going retrograde, a perilous astrological period during which accidents were likely to happen. When I asked John what Mercury being retrograde meant, he explained that it was an astrological period when the planet Mercury, “the messenger”, appeared to move backward against the sun, causing massive disruptions in communications and generally creating “chaos in the cosmos”. Yoko was always to tell me that we had to keep John isolated for his own good. Once in a while, John would try to circumvent Yoko’s strict rules, but he would often regret it soon afterward. For instance, one day John was listening to radio station WBAI when he heard a very eloquent, urgent plea for contributions. New subscribers were to receive a copy of a book titled The Devil Was a Woman. John wanted the book, and as WBAI was one of the radio stations he frequently listened to – he was particularly interested in nutritionist Gary Null’s health show – he impulsively ordered me to call up and contribute one thousand dollars on his behalf. Immediately, the station announced the contribution. When Yoko heard about it, she read me the riot act. She reminded me angrily that whenever John acted impulsively, I was to bring his behavior to her attention before following his orders. I was to consult her about all matters involving John and “human relations”, or his having dealings with the outside world. “After all,” explained Yoko, “I’m here to protect him.” I assured her I understood perfectly. Yoko had the key to John Lennon, and she used it to make John her sole possession by taking him out of public circulation. The old lion had pulled in his claws eagerly and agreed to give up rock and roll and its deleterious lifestyle. Because of his self-destructive behavior when he was on his own, John believed that the only sane alternative was to isolate himself. Moreover, Yoko had offered him the opportunity to try parenthood all over again. When she managed to give birth to Sean against all odds, John took it as a sign of divine intervention. He told me that both he and Sean were “riding on Mother’s good luck”. His childlike dependence on Yoko was so great that he dreaded the thought of Yoko dying before he did. “I hope I go first,” John had told me, “because if Mother died before me I wouldn’t be able to face life on my own.” He had resigned himself completely to the proposition that he could not survive without Yoko. Thus, John willingly sacrificed his freedom for the illusion of safety. And it was part of Yoko’s Faustian pact that she had to keep John, for better or for worse, and remain an appendage to John’s fame and to the pervasive Beatles legend, no matter how much she craved independence and personal fame. It was no wonder that she bitterly resented John, even as she was constantly conscious of the need to retain his loyalty. Without John Lennon, Yoko Ono was just an eccentric lady with no money and no power – and for this she would never forgive him.

John Lennon: Living on Borrowed Time, Frederic Seaman (1991)

[muzaktomyears]

[John] was so excited about Yoko’s arrival that he could not stop talking and the subject on his mind was sex. He said that working always made him very “horny” and that he could not wait to “jump Mother’s bones.” He told me that when he appeared on stage with the Beatles, he would often demand that a female fan be held in the wings so that he could have a “knee-trembler” – which was Liverpool slang for quick stand-up sex – before or after the performance (or, occasionally, even between songs). “I was always obsessed with sex,” John confessed. “I’d run after girls and feel them up, put them up against a wall, that sort of thing.” He said he lost his virginity at age fifteen with his first girlfriend, Barbara Baker, a buxom, buck-toothed beauty. John then described the deflowering. “Barb wasn’t wet and I had a hell of a time shoving it in,” he said nonchalantly. “I was frantic to get inside her, and when I couldn’t, I got so frustrated and angry that I started to curse her: ‘You dumb cow, what’s wrong with you? You’re tight as a rat’s ear!’” John paused, shook his head and smiled. “It wasn’t her fault, of course. But what did I know? I was just a weird, psychotic kid covering up my insecurity with a macho façade.” Ruminating about his clumsy, often violent approach to love-making, he said that he never used to engage in foreplay; he would immediately attempt penetration. “I had no idea you were supposed to take your time,” he laughed nervously. “I thought the idea was to get in and out as quickly as possible.” He also told me that he would sometimes write his girlfriends erotic letters. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they show up one of these days, hopefully after I’m dead.” John paused briefly to sip the beer and light a fresh Gitane. “I think after my mother was killed, I felt betrayed by all womankind,” he continued. “I used to have fantasies about torturing women to death. I still have a lot of violent fantasies, but I manage to keep them under control.” He said that if he let his imagination run wild, he would imagine crucifying women, actually nailing them to a cross, and then disemboweling them. “It wasn’t until I met Yoko that I realized that men didn’t have to be aggressive, didn’t have to be macho, that men could be gentle and tender. That’s the lesson Yoko taught me.”

John Lennon: Living on Borrowed Time, Frederic Seaman (1991)

[muzaktomyears]

One to One: John & Yoko — ‘It was difficult to be married to him’

For his new film the Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald was given 25 hours of the Beatle’s unheard phone conversations, handed over by his son, Sean Lennon

In the 18 months between leaving the UK for New York in 1971 and their fateful move to the Dakota building on the Upper West Side in 1973, John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived in a small apartment at 105 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. It was there, lying with his wife in a bed made from a church pew, that Lennon, still only 31, came to terms with no longer being a Beatle. “I can’t believe I’m speaking to a myth,” a caller on a New York radio phone-in told the singer at the time. “Myth World or Myth Universe?” Lennon shot back. “I’ve been wondering exactly how the Beatles are as people,” another caller said. “Well, the Beatles don’t exist any more,” Lennon said. “I don’t wanna recreate the past. I wanna be me now.”

Moments like those fill One to One: John & Yoko, the new documentary by Kevin Macdonald, an intimate, moving and artistically fresh film on a subject that had seemingly been picked clean. “Is there any room for another Beatles film?” is the question Macdonald asked himself when he was invited to make a documentary about the couple. He had been offered access to restored footage of Lennon’s One to One concert at Madison Square Garden in 1972 — the last full-length show he played. Yet the Scottish director — who redefined the dramatic possibilities of documentary in 1999 with the Oscar-winning One Day in September, his riveting account of the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics — isn’t the sort to settle for making a bog-standard concert movie. Even one featuring Lennon, Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack.

“The only way was to do something different,” Macdonald says. “You can’t just have the same old white men reminiscing about the time they met John in Greenwich Village.” He hit upon a brilliant solution. The period depicted in the film, the intertitles tell us, was one when Lennon and Ono were “mixing with artists and political radicals . . . and watching a lot of TV”. That new circle included the poet Allen Ginsberg and the activist Jerry Rubin, but it was the TV that gave Macdonald his stroke of inspiration, letting him build his film as a kaleidoscopic collage of what the couple might have seen on the box. The rise and fall of Richard Nixon, protests against the Vietnam War, neglected mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State School in New York and adverts for pasta sauce are intercut with moments from the concert and previously unheard telephone interviews.

Worried that his phone had been bugged by the American authorities — which it had — Lennon recorded his phone conversations, 25 hours of which were handed over to Macdonald by Lennon’s estate. “I feel like a student again,” Lennon says in one exchange, and living in the apartment must have felt like that compared with Tittenhurst Park, his mansion in Berkshire. Some of the conversations have a comic surrealism, such as Ono’s assistants’ epic quest to obtain hundreds of living flies for one of her art pieces. Elsewhere the lack of grandness is striking. Lennon gets through to someone’s receptionist and asks, “Will you tell him John Lennon called?” She replies, “Can you spell that?”

A thrill for Macdonald was presenting the One to One concert in its full glory, the sound remastered by Sean Lennon, the son of John and Yoko. The initial response to it had been “really bad”, the director says. “That was a big shock to Lennon and that’s why he didn’t do it again. Phil Spector was in charge of the sound in the auditorium and the sound for the recording and he totally f***ed both up.” The film also features shots of the Bank Street apartment, meticulously recreated by Macdonald’s wife, Tatiana Lund, a set decorator, who filled it with the correct books, records, guitar and amp.

Macdonald pitched the film to Sean, who had taken over control of the family estate from his mother, who is 92. “Sean said, ‘That sounds like something my mum would like: an art piece.’” The allusive documentaries of Adam Curtis were a touchstone, as were the two Life in a Day films Macdonald made with Ridley Scott using YouTube footage shot on the same day around the world.

“You’re not looking for logic, but an emotional journey,” he says of the collage approach. “Are there ways of representing the past which are more immersive than the normal talking-heads documentary, which allow the audience to make their own connections?”

An elegant 57, Macdonald comes from film-making stock — his grandfather was Emeric Pressburger, who with Michael Powell directed such classics as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, and his brother is Andrew Macdonald, the producer of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later. We are talking in Macdonald’s office at 3 Mills Studios on the banks of the Lea River in east London, where he is in preproduction for his next film, The Runner, starring Gal Gadot. It sounds a lot better than Gadot’s Snow White.

“It’s unlike anything I’ve done before,” he says. “A mainstream thriller a bit like Speed — a woman has to run across London and can’t stop or somebody’s going to kill her child.” Macdonald, who was educated at Oxford, is one of the few directors to move with success between documentary and drama. He made his name in documentaries with One Day in September and the Bafta-winning Touching the Void (2003), his extraordinary account of a mountaineering disaster, before segueing to fiction with The Last King of Scotland (2006), for which Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for playing Idi Amin.

While making the Lennon-Ono film, Macdonald was struck by the parallels between the early Seventies and today. “An attempted assassination of a populist politician [the presidential candidate George Wallace], the first black woman presidential candidate [Shirley Chisholm], Gaza, the first era of environmentalism. It was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re living through some kind of shadow of that period.’”

Macdonald has experience with musical icons, having made documentaries on Bob Marley, Whitney Houston and Mick Jagger, the last of which was taken away from him by Jagger and re-cut. Macdonald had to watch it at a retrospective of his work in Brazil. “It was excruciatingly embarrassing. Every documentary since then I’ve had control over the cut, including this one.”

Sean Lennon proved more amenable. “He is incredibly conscious of the importance of his parents’ work, but I don’t think he really enjoys being the guardian of their legacy,” Macdonald says. This film, though, was an easy sell. “It’s not talking about affairs and drugs; it’s them through their own words, so there’s little to get upset about. Sean said he’d shown it to Yoko and that she liked it.” It helped that the film views events from her perspective as well as Lennon’s. “It becomes about how difficult it was to be married to him,” Macdonald says. “She’s trying to say something and he often cuts her off.” “Yoko, take your legs out of bed,” Lennon snaps at her during one TV interview at their apartment.

Ono’s reflections from that time are poignant. “I was considered a bitch; since I met John I was upgraded into a witch,” she tells one interviewer. “Some of [John’s] closest friends told me I should stay in the background. The whole society wished me dead. I started to stutter. I considered myself an eloquent woman, also an attractive woman. And suddenly because I was associated with John I was considered an ugly woman . . . because I took your monument away from you.”

Even more moving is the rarely told story of Ono’s daughter, Kyoko, from her previous marriage to Anthony Cox, an American film producer and art promoter. After Ono married Lennon, Cox vanished with Kyoko, who was aged eight at the time, changing her name to Ruth Holman and bringing her up in an American Christian cult called the Living Word Fellowship. Ono didn’t see her for 27 years. “I couldn’t bear seeing children,” she says in the film. They were reunited in 1998.

“The theme of the film is children and childhood,” Macdonald says. “You’ve got John talking about his own difficult childhood and being left with a chip on his shoulder, and you’ve got Yoko.” Hence why the plight of the thousands of children at Willowbrook, many of them with hepatitis and covered in their own faeces, struck such a chord with the couple, who donated the proceeds of the One to One concert to help them.

“These children are almost symbolic of all the pain on earth,” Lennon says in the film. There was more pain to come, but Macdonald ends on a sweet note with footage of a party for the Willowbrook kids and the birth in 1975 of a baby called Sean.

One to One: John & Yoko previews at Imax theatres on Apr 9–10 and is in cinemas from Apr 11

(source)

[muzaktomyears]

right. okay.