Reader,
I didn’t marry him. That’s not the reason for my quietness of late. No, my numerous arch-foes have succeeded in silencing me for the past two weeks. But don’t worry, I’ve got a sucker punch or two in me. And that’s your last warning, arch-foes!
That said, I have little to declare, except Oscar Wilde’s genius, as well as some fragmentary documentation of my own muted thinking from this lost time. (Warning: Sacvan Bercovitch fans, you'll be disappointed.) Some shards that have crossed my mind:
-The Bob Spitz Beatles bio ended up spouting every tired, racist cliché about Yoko Ono you could ever imagine (at one point he even describes John as the innocent caught in a villainous tug-of-war between two manipulative Asians, Yoko and the Maharishi). It’s a shame that Spitz has the research skills, but then is in the end, at best, a lazy hack.
-The thirty or so seconds of John singing “Ah, Ah” in “A Day in the Life,” directly following the “woke up, got out of bed” interlude, constitute one of the top two or three most sublime moments in pop music history.
-Oh my god, Joe Harvard commented on my post about his Velvet Underground book for the 33 1/3 series! Ok, ok, I admit to tracking down his band’s myspace page and sending him a link, but he responded at length, with extreme grace, and without requiring any further harassment. He even spilled the beans about whether he went to Harvard, but you’ll have to read it yourself to find out.
-Ok, ok, Destroyer is really good.
-Should I try to write a post about the Sports Club Network? Do people know what this is? I’ve been considering it, but it might just turn into a rant about Creed (the band, not the fragrance—was there not a lawsuit? Could that have been a way of stopping them?). Nonetheless, there seems to be a genre of “Straight-to-Sports-Club-Network” videos that might merit comment. Or maybe that is the comment.
-One of the final memories of my marriage—perhaps the last not directly related to splitting up—is of waking up and hearing my ex-wife say, in an uncharacteristically deadpan voice, “I had an erotic dream about Jack White.” This memory actually makes me kind of happy; there’s something aesthetically pleasing about it.
-Whenever I hear some cable news pundit refer to “what they’re saying in the blogosphere” I fully intend to raise my glass to him or her (i.e. to the TV). Or if I’m not holding a glass, something else. My ass comes to mind, but probably not.
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4 comments:
Racism aside, for me the blame-Yoko question is: Would Lennon have undergone the same transformation from impish genius to humorless prig without her?
Oh, and who among us hasn't had an erotic dream about Jack White? Scott Stapp, now -- that'd be a bigger issue.
As I’m sure you’d agree, the issue is that these writers portray him as the victim of a scheming dragon lady, and not as having himself chosen to take the path he took. As for that path, what I think is this: he was basically a very smart guy who, while still very young but having already experienced more things than most of us ever will, realized his smartness and began to feel like the lifetime he’d already lived didn’t represent his actual life, was only so much fluff. Which of course isn’t true or, if it is, isn’t bad, but I think he went through a kind of deferred adolescent crisis about it. Still, you couldn’t get involved with someone more interesting and exciting than Yoko Ono—and the thing that gets obscured in all the anti-intellectual descriptions of her artwork (Spitz’s writing embraces this horribly tedious, middlebrow, knowing, of-course-we-all-know-this-is-bullshit tone)—is how much humor pervades her work, like appearing in a bag on stage or making portraits of people’s asses.
I would hope to have already divorced someone who would have a Scott Stapp dream.
I do indeed agree, Major -- of course Lennon initiated all his personal and career choices, even those that put Ono (inadvisedly, IMO) in front of a live microphone. And I agree with your analysis of his "deferred adolescent crisis." It's just a shame -- given my perhaps-selfish assumption that Lennon's musical production should have superseded his mental health -- that Ono's influence on his output was no more pleasant than on his personality, however genuinely provocative or witty her conceptual art.
I kind of love Yoko Ono. And I kind of love the fact that John Lennon loved her. In fact just typing that made my heart swell up a bit in one of those uncontrollable ways to which I am subject.
However I'm also one of those people who—no matter how regrettable it can be when musicians we love decide to take a new path down which we feel disinclined to follow them (for me case in point #1 is David Bowie)—thinks that a person's own life, and a person's own freedom to create, is more important than what other people think about what that person creates. And one reason I kind of love Yoko Ono is that I doubt she'd disagree with me. Plus she's all fluxusy and shit.
So, even though Mick Jagger still looks good singing Satisfaction, I'm happy for David Bowie that he's not singing Ziggy Stardust. And I love everything having to do with the thought of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, separately or together (though together sometimes the sound of it all can be too much, yes).
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