A quick follow-up on my December 13 posting about John Lennon & Yoko Ono: I’d suggested, there, that Yoko was the second great artistic collaborator of John’s life, after Paul McCartney. Not that controversial an assertion, I suppose, but I was pleased to see this confirmation in the newest (Dec. 23) issue of Rolling Stone, [...]
I closed last time by writing, “When we remember John’s death, that’s the first thing I’d like for us to think of: that rock has had its geniuses, even if it maintains a wary relationship to them.” The other thing is that genius loves company. John & Paul morphed into John & Yoko quite publicly, [...]
When I think of the murder of John Lennon—murder, assassination?—the picture in my mind’s eye is of his iconic eyeglasses, lying at some distance from his body, on the sidewalk outside the Dakota. I’ve never seen such a picture; to the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t exist, unless inside some sealed NYPD or FBI [...]
The Beatles broke up when I was in sixth grade; I remember a kid named Hugh—can’t remember his last name now, forty years on—came to school one day, crying, with the news. I remember, too, that it meant next to nothing to me: an oldest child can languish behind the curve when it comes to [...]
I’m sorry for the false start: I’d said I’d start posting again a week ago, and I really believed it when I wrote it. I suppose that my mother’s death has been more disturbing, more disruptive than I’d anticipated. I’m not immobilized; in part because she had a series of strokes over the past three [...]
I’ve been vowing for a very long time to return to the harmonica. My only instrumental training as a child was keyboard lessons as a teenager; my mother won a Kimball organ on the Hollywood Squares (seriously), and for a couple of years I took lessons from a guy who, after he left our house, went [...]
No time for a long post today, Dear Readers. Just a modest proposal: That on this Independence Day all who love our democracy take a moment to give props to that most unlikely of patriotic magazines, Rolling Stone. of course, got its start as the standard bearer of the counter-culture in 1967, with its famous [...]
With the spring semester now but a fond memory, I’m finally catching up on some of my homework. I think I’ve mentioned here that I taught a senior seminar called “Irony in the Public Sphere”; we were interested, mainly, in the sometimes spectacular ways that very compelling and intelligent ironic projects can misfire when they [...]