Yoko Ono

You are currently browsing articles tagged Yoko Ono.

For every action, a reaction, so it makes sense that John C. Lilly’s sensory-deprivation tanks, his next radical step into self-enlightenment after LSD wore off, are making comeback in a time of endless buzzing, pinging and vibrating. Those seeking a calm state if not an altered one are flocking to the chambers. A fad is reawakened, but is it something more lasting this time?

From Julie Turkewitz of the New York Times:

The practice was once billed as a path to enlightenment and even hallucination for those on the creative frontier. Developed in 1954 by a neuroscientist named John C. Lilly, float tanks took off in the 1970s, bolstered by claims that they could stretch artistic, spiritual and even athletic boundaries.

Dr. Lilly had used the tanks for research, but Mr. and Ms. Perry began building and selling them for commercial use. Mr. Perry described his first float as “scintillating.”

“We thought of it sort of as a spiritual project,” he said of the business. “We considered it our assignment.”

Early accounts of floating took on a poetic quality. “Blinking is an audio event,” one floater wrote in 1977 in a magazine called Coast. “Shifting my ‘vision’ in the darkness to my dominant left eye produces a rumble like a distant thunderstorm.”

Yoko Ono began to float. So did Robin Williams and many of the Dallas Cowboys. Then the AIDS crisis hit, and centers shut down amid public health fears.•

Tags: , , ,

This prime 1972 episode of the Mike Douglas Show features John & Yoko as co-hosts. At the 34:20 mark, there’s an appearance by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who has been right about so many things (airbags, corporate greed, conservation, etc.) and so wrong about one–the 2000 American Presidential election.

There was no difference between the two major-party candidates, Nader said, staying in the race until the end, which turned out to be very bitter for the country. The difference between Dubya and Al Gore was 4,500 U.S. troops dying or not, a 100,000 Iraqis dead or alive, a focus on environmentalism or business as usual as the clock kept running out. For some–perhaps for all–it was the difference between life and death. Adults who can’t see shades of gray always stun me, but it was the same impulses that drove Nader’s righteous career which led him to be the spoiler in 2000.

Tags: , , , , ,

I’ve posted a couple of clips of John Lennon and Yoko Ono being interviewed by David Frost, but here is the full-length version of their 1972 encounter. Brace yourself–there’s a “Box of Smile.”

Tags: , ,

At the Financial Times, Simon Schama presents a portrait of Yoko Ono at 79. An excerpt about the bold performance art she made before she was a Beatle bride, which showed a really good understanding of neuroscience:

“In a cold-water apartment on Chambers Street, New York, she gave a series of performances and concerts in which minimalist ‘instructions’ and transient experiences replaced the static, monumental pretensions of framed pictures. The prompted eye and the receptive brain made the pictures instead. The technique was lovely, liberating and genuinely innovative. ‘I thought art should be like science, always discovering things afresh, and I wanted to be Madame Curie.’

So when she and Lennon had their momentous encounter at Indica in 1966, Ono was already established as an avant-garde conceptual artist. She insists she really had no idea who he was or what he did. ‘I just saw this rather attractive guy who seemed to be taking my work very seriously.’ Of pop music she knew nothing, ‘not even of Elvis Presley; just maybe some jazz.’ Of what was about to hit them both out there in Beatlemania land she had no clue. ‘I was naïve. We both were … we thought that it was going to be really great.’ It wasn’t. ‘My work totally disappeared and John, with all that power he had, was going to go down too.’ She falls quiet for a moment; a flicker of sadness clouding the wide, expressively sunny face. ‘I feel very badly if maybe I was the cause of it.'” (Thanks Browser.)

••••••••••

“The Cut Piece,” 1965:

Tags: ,

Pierre Trudeau dominated Canadian politics for more than 15 years beginning in 1968. A politican as rock star, he’s still the country’s Prime Minister best remembered outside of Canada and likely the most divisive one within the nation.

Trudeau responding to personal attacks, 1972:

Trudeau meets with John and Yoko, 1969 (no sound until :30):

Tags: , ,

As much as conservative cartoonist Al Capp hated Rev. Sun Myung Moon, he deplored John Lennon and Yoko Ono even more. From Capp’s brief, belligerent visit to the Bed-In for Peace in Montreal in 1969.

Tags: , ,

Yoko Ono performance art, “Cut Piece,” from 1965. Audience members were invited to come on stage and scissor pieces from her clothes. The phrase recited at the beginning is an inscription on the Georgia Guidestones.

Tags:

One of John and Yoko’s odder gambits for world peace, Bagism, 1969.

Recalling the origins of Bagism with Dick Cavett, 1971 (at 2:28):

Tags: , ,

Confrontational theater breaks out at David Frost’s show in 1971 when John Lennon invites hecklers to discuss their feelings.

Tags: , ,

A pre-Nixon, pre-knighthood David Frost welcomes John and Yoko in 1969.

Tags: , ,