Mature Talk: The Yoko Ono Legacy

[majormilo]

YOKO ONO LEGACY:

Why is she Famous?
Yoko Ono will fairly or unfairly be cast as the woman that came between the greatest band of all-time, the Beatles. But beneath the surface, Yoko is
so much more.

Quick Bio:

Born into a wealthy aristocratic family on February 18, 1933, in Tokyo, Japan, Yoko Ono is the eldest of three children. With a degree in philosophy from Tokyo's Gakushuin University, Ono -- whose first name means "ocean child" -- crossed the ocean and pursued philosophy and music at Sarah Lawrence College after her father was appointed president of a bank in New York. Soon afterwards, she married Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi in 1956.

This was followed by a second marriage with art promoter Tony Cox in 1963. Concurrently, Ono was making a name for herself in performance art, which is what ultimately led to her meeting third husband John Lennon, at a progressive art show in London in 1966. The psychological bond between the artistically gifted Ono and the popular Lennon blossomed into marriage after news of the affair became public in 1968. The "Ballad of John & Yoko" marked a most utopian of relationships. One would channel their creativity through the other, that is, until Lennon's untimely assassination in 1980.

Ono not only influenced Lennon, but also an entire generation of bands, from Talking Heads and Blondie to The B-52's. Lennon and Ono's agenda crossed over from music to social commentary, as evidenced by their numerous "bed-ins" -- most notably during their honeymoon in Amsterdam in 1969. In the years that followed, Ono has been busy with everything from films and concerts, to albums of her own.


Q: Does it bother you that some people ask you what role you played regarding the fate of the band?

Are you tiptoeing around the word "break up" and I was responsible? (laughs)

Q: Hey, you said it, not me (laughs)...

It was what you were thinking, no? But I do think that it was very unfair to blame any one person... no one person could have broken up a band, especially one the size of the Beatles. And it was not just John, some of the other guys were having some thoughts about the band, so it happened.

Q: What did you think about the Barenaked Ladies writing "Be My Yoko Ono" and would you ever sing it live?
I thought that it was cute, but I would never sing it at one of my shows... (laughs).

Q: Is there any style you would not try?

I just go with the flow, so any style can be in my music -- that makes it exciting.



Q: You and John seemed to have a great relationship; what advice would you give to couples?

Be understanding of one another and be willing to compromise. I mean, I think that life with another person is always difficult. The alternative however -- being alone -- is also very difficult.

Q: Your children are always going to be in the shadow... how was it, as a parent, to shelter them?

I tell them that they have to think for themselves. Whether they want to be artists, accountants or lawyers, they have to want it themselves.

Q: What do you want people to think when they hear "Yoko Ono"?

Your friend.

Q: What advice do you give people who want to enter show business?

You are in it as soon as you wanna be in it. What you do with it and where you go is the key.

Q: Tell us your thoughts on every decade.

1960s: Discovery. 1970s: Action. 1980s: Solidity. 1990s: Reality. And 2000s: To solidify the wisdom that we have received up to now.

Q: What are your thoughts when the anniversary of John's death passes?

Well, unlike others, I think of John every day, 365 days... we were close, so there is not a day that I do not think of him. I do try to block it, but December 8th is not the only day I think of him.

Q: If John was here with us, what would he be doing?

He would be doing the same: He would be innovating, he would have jumped on computers and the Internet... and he would probably come to the conclusion that they are overrated! (laughs).

Q: Thank you very much for your time Yoko, and we wish you luck in everything you do.



Source Material: Some excerpts from the interview - www.askmen.com/toys/interview/57_yoko_ono_interview.html (http://www.askmen.com/toys/interview/57_yoko_ono_interview.html)

[majormilo]

Yoko Ono Biography:
Few women in the history of rock roll have stirred as much controversy as Yoko Ono. Although her romance with John Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/John_Lennon/P4744/P4744/0/0/0/) was hardly the only factor straining the relationships between the individual Beatles (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Beatles/P3644/P3644/0/0/0/), she made a convenient scapegoat for the group's breakup, and was repeatedly raked over the coals in the media for the influence she held over Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/), both in his life and his music (http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Ono,_Yoko/Biography/). Ono's own work as an artist and musician didn't mitigate the public's enmity toward her; to the average man on the street, her avant-garde conceptual art seemed bizarre and ridiculous, and her highly experimental rock roll (which often spotlighted her primal, caterwauling vocals) was simply too abrasive to tolerate. That view wasn't necessarily universal (or true), and in fact the merits of her work are still hotly debated. Regardless of individual opinion, Ono has left a lasting legacy; she was an undeniably seminal figure in the history of performance art, and elements of her music prefigured the arty sides of punk and new wave (whether she was a direct influence is still debated, although the B-52's did admit to drawing from her early records). Moreover, between Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/)'s assassination and the myriad drubbings she's taken in the press and the court of public opinion, an alternate portrait of Ono as a strong, uncompromising survivor has emerged in more recent years.

Although her link with John Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/John_Lennon/P4744/P4744/0/0/0/) will always be foremost in the public's mind, Ono's own life story is fascinating in its own right. She was born February 18, 1933, into a wealthy Japanese family in Tokyo. Her childhood was somewhat lonely and isolated; her father, a banker and onetime classical pianist, was transferred to San Francisco a few weeks before she was born, and her socialite mother was often busy throwing elaborate parties. She didn't meet her father until age two, when the whole family moved to San Francisco. However, they returned to Tokyo three years later to avoid the anti-Japanese backlash that was beginning in the United States in response to Japan's growing military expansionism. Ono was educated at the Gakushuin School, the most exclusive private school in Japan (the Emperor's sons were her classmates). She began classical piano lessons at a very young age, and later received vocal training in opera. In 1945, her mother took the family to the countryside to escape Tokyo, in time to survive the massive Allied bombing of the city; however, rich city dwellers were unwelcome, and the Ono children were often forced to beg for food.

(excerpts)
Source material: http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Ono,_Yoko/Biography/

[majormilo]

Once back in New York, Ono resumed her art career to considerable attention from the avant-garde community; by this time, George Maciunas (http://www.starpulse.com/music/George_Maciunas/P254736/0/0/0/0/) had become the leader of an art movement dubbed Fluxus, whose philosophies were compatible with (and even influenced by) Ono's, prizing abstraction and audience interaction. Ono performed at the Carnegie Recital Hall for a second time in early 1965, and debuted her seminal "Cut Piece," in which audience members were invited to cut off pieces of her clothing with scissors. In September 1966, she traveled to England for an art symposium, and "Cut Piece" helped make her a sensation in the London art world. In November, she got her own exhibition at the famed Indica Gallery, which was ardently patronized by John Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/John_Lennon/P4744/P4744/0/0/0/). Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/) was impressed by her work, particularly a piece where the viewer was required to climb a ladder and hold up a magnifying glass to read a small inscription on the ceiling that said "Yes!" The two read each other's writings, and Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/) financed an exhibition in which Ono painted various everyday objects white and cut them in half. In the meantime, Ono and Cox (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Cox/P10356/0/0/0/0/) had begun making experimental films (http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Ono,_Yoko/Biography/), usually centered on the repetition of simple movements; their fourth effort, Bottoms, consisted of 365 close-ups of nude buttocks (the idea was to fill the screen with motion when the subjects walked). British film censors were scandalized, and Ono became an even more notorious public figure with "Wrapping Event," in which she wrapped the lion statues beneath Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square with white cloth and tied herself to one. She also sang in concert with pioneering free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Ornette_Coleman/P65603/P65603/0/0/0/) at the Royal Albert Hall. The avant-garde was becoming increasingly suspicious of her visibility, which only intensified when Ono and Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/) began having an affair that spring.

Fans of Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/) the pop musician couldn't understand what he saw in Ono, but it's important to know that Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/) was an art student prior to falling in love with rock roll, and had long harbored an interest in avant-garde art. The difficulty with understanding Ono's art was that its impact came largely from her ideas; from putting new contextual frames around everyday objects, or asking her audience to complete an experience with their own imaginations. For example, most of Ono's pieces were white, so that the audience could imagine their own colors (or, in the case of her all-white chess set "Play It By Trust," to create ambiguity); even her so-called "Blue Room" was all-white (viewers were supposed to stay in the room until it turned blue). Her first musical composition, 1955's "Secret Piece," existed only in her mind (she was unable to transcribe the notes of a bird song effectively), and, in 1968, she announced a 13-day dance festival that would take place entirely in the imaginations of anyone who participated. In 1971, she took things a step further by presenting an imaginary art exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and filmed the spectators as the real works of art. As an artist, Ono dealt in concepts, not craft (i.e., practiced, developed technique and training in a specific medium). Her work wasn't what most people recognized as art, which was why many Beatles (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Beatles/P3644/P3644/0/0/0/) fans dismissed her as a talentless charlatan. Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/), on the other hand, saw someone who could help him find a new direction.

Source material: http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Ono,_Yoko/Biography/

[majormilo]

Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/) and Ono's first musical collaboration was on the highly experimental Unfinished Music, No. 1: Two Virgins (http://www.starpulse.com/music/John_Lennon_2526_Yoko_Ono/P4744/0/R43020/3/0/), which was recorded around the beginning of their affair and released toward the end of 1968. None of Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/)'s fans knew what to make of any aspect of the album; not the odd snippets of noise, faint dialogue, and sounds from the immediate environment, and not the fully nude photographs of the couple on the record jacket, taken from the front and rear. They were further dismayed with Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/)'s participation in Ono's bizarre public events, such as appearing together in black plastic bags as a statement about judging by appearances. (Ono herself long suspected that fans' hostility was due to their discomfort seeing Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/) with a woman who was not only strong-willed, but of a different race.) After Ono's divorce from Cox (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Cox/P10356/0/0/0/0/), the couple married in Gibraltar on March 20, 1969, and took advantage of the publicity surrounding their honeymoon to hold "Bed-Ins for Peace" in Amsterdam and Montreal (the latter of which produced the single "Give Peace a Chance"). Cox (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Cox/P10356/0/0/0/0/) was later able to gain custody of Kyoko, pointing to Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/) and Ono's drug (http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Ono,_Yoko/Biography/) intake, and disappeared with the child, whom Ono would not see again for 25 years.

The second Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/)/Ono album, Unfinished Music, No. 2: Life With the Lions, was released not long after their wedding; it spotlighted Ono's cathartic, wailing vocal improvisations, as well as addressing her first of several miscarriages. It was quickly followed by The Wedding Album (http://www.starpulse.com/music/John_Lennon_2526_Yoko_Ono/P4744/0/R43022/3/0/), one side of which featured more Ono improv, the other of which consisted of nothing but the couple calling each other's names. Over the next few years, Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/) and Ono continued their peace activism, and entered primal-scream therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov, which began to inform both of their individual careers. In 1970, they each recorded an album backed by the Plastic Ono Band; predictably, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band was the less structured, more avant-garde of the two. Ono followed it in 1971 with the double-LP Fly (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Yoko_Ono/P19685/P19685/R46034/3/0/), which featured more conventionally structured songs as well as her typical experimentalism. 1972 brought the Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/)/Ono protest-song album Sometime in New York City, which was roasted for the simplicity of its sentiments. Ono returned in 1973 with two of her strongest solo statements, the brutally intense, explicitly feminist Feeling the Space and the more varied Approximately Infinite Universe (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Yoko_Ono/P19685/P19685/R67637/3/0/), both of which featured less musical involvement from Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/). Perhaps that was symptomatic of the problems the couple had been having; they split up for a year and a half toward the end of 1973, exhausted from their constant time together and their battles with U.S. immigration over Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/)'s threatened deportation. Ono recorded a more accessible album, A Story (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Yoko_Ono/P19685/P19685/R308319/3/0/), in 1974, but it was shelved and remained unavailable until 1997.

***************
Source material: http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Ono,_Yoko/Biography/

[OldiesLover]

Yoko Ono... :grovel: :grovel: :grovel: :grovel: :grovel: :grovel:

[majormilo]

The couple got back together in early 1975, and Ono was finally able to bear a child, Sean Taro Ono Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Sean_Taro_Ono_Lennon/P158961/0/0/0/0/), who was born on John (http://www.starpulse.com/music/John/P4744/0/0/0/0/)'s birthday, October 9. Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/) dropped out of show business for several years to raise his son and effectively become a house-husband, while Ono took charge of his business affairs. Although she contributed some of her most accessible songs to his 1980 comeback album Double Fantasy (http://www.starpulse.com/music/John_Lennon/P4744/P4744/R11538/3/0/), she did not return to solo recording until after Lennon (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Lennon/P4744/0/0/0/0/)'s assassination on December 8, 1980. The harrowing, grief-stricken Season of Glass was released the following year to highly complimentary reviews. Ono followed it in 1982 with the more hopeful, pop-oriented It's Alright (I See Rainbows), and had a minor success with the single "Never Say Goodbye." 1985's Starpeace (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Yoko_Ono/P19685/P19685/R59715/3/0/) continued that optimistic trend, and teamed Ono with producer Bill Laswell (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Bill_Laswell/P6948/P6948/0/0/0/) and other downtown New York scenesters, but failed to connect as her previous two efforts had.

Ono gradually returned to visual art, creating installations and also exploring photography. Interest in her previous work led to several retrospectives over the course of the '90s, and in 1992, Rykodisc reissued her complete back catalog on CD (http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Ono,_Yoko/Biography/), as well as the six-CD box set retrospective Onobox (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Yoko_Ono/P19685/P19685/R65810/3/0/). In 1995, she recorded a new album for Capitol called Rising (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Yoko_Ono/P19685/P19685/R228857/3/0/), which featured son Sean (http://www.starpulse.com/music/Sean/P158961/0/0/0/0/) and recalled the harsh experimentalism of her early recordings. The same year, her musical play +New York Rock debuted off Broadway. 2001 brought another new album, Blueprint for a Sunrise, which updated the feminist tone of Feeling the Space while being somewhat more accessible. Steve Huey, All Music Guide



Source material: http://www.starpulse.com/Music/Ono,_Yoko/Biography/

[majormilo]

When I sit and think myself about what Yoko and John did it is truly amazing - from both the pop music (rock and roll world) to the jazz and movie world - to the many facets of life that both of these people touched on - When you think about the period of time that this was and what was going on in our world at that time, it was amazing what these two did in not only the music world but also in the environment and about relationships -

so many people did not understand this realtionship and still to this day I do not think they do - (my own opinion about NOT) - but as Lennon was prior to the rock and roll days an artist first - John had a true love for Yoko - OldiesLover and I talked about this for quite some time, and I just felt it was a time to pay a true homage to a woman who has changed many things about art - rock and roll - music - and relationships - she is in her 70's now so it is worth paying a homage to a mature asian woman.

thank you -

[OldiesLover]

I once saw Yoko Ono and John Lennon in-person. I actually shook John's hand and nodded to Yoko. It was 1970 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They had come to town to do a Concert to Free a 60's Radical named John Sinclair, who had been put in prison for 25 years for 2 joints. :eek:

My store issued tickets for the Concert. John and Yoko, along with some other musicians, stopped by my store while they were walking around town enjoying the hippie scene. :p

It's one of those things you don't think about when it's happening... but it sticks in your brain forever. ;)

I have always been a big fan of the one & only... Yoko Ono. :grovel:

[majormilo]

Here are some nice pictures of Yoko

[majormilo]

“When people get cynical about love, they should look at us [Yoko and John Lennon] and see it is possible”

*********************************

“I believe in people so much that if the whole of civilization is burned so we don't have any memory of it, even then people will start to build their own art. It is a necessity -- a function. We don't need history.

*********************************

“At this time I think it's important that we remember John for what he contributed to the world. For people who still love John's music and for those now getting into John's music, this opens up a whole new world in which they can appreciate John's music again.”

*********************************

“If he's observing me from up there, I'm sure he's proud of me. It's going to go on and on. This is what I love now, so it's great.”

*********************************

“Remember, each one of us has the power to change the world. Just start thinking peace, and the message will spread quicker than you think.”

*********************************

“So many people have approached me and said, 'Can I do a musical of John,' ... It's a very simple idea, you know - wow, a musical of John! But I've said no. This time, I said yes, because I liked the idea of having these different actors playing John. Because in the years after John's passing, John has transformed into something else. People in Asia think of him as their hero. People in Africa think of him as their hero. He was a hero for the whole world, and not just a white hero. So it's great to have a black performer singing as John. For me, this play is a revolution, a quiet revolution.”

*********************************

“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.”

*********************************

“I saw that nothing was permanent. You don't want to possess anything that is dear to you because you might lose it.”

*********************************

Everybody's an artist. Everybody's God. It's just that they're inhibited.”

*********************************

I wonder why men get serious at all. They have this delicate, long thing hanging outside their bodies which goes up and down by its own will. If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself.”

*********************************

“Cosmetics is a boon to every woman, but a girl's best beauty aid is still a near-sighted man”

*********************************

“All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!”

*********************************
Source Material: http://ww.thinkexist.com/quotes/yoko_ono/

[OldiesLover]

Here is Yoko chatting: http://uncutvideo.aol.com/videos/1e4b3b9ebb37f738c8d347b2e4c96143 ;)

Here is Barenaked Ladies, "Be My Yoko Ono." (Note: You may need to watch a commercial... Deal with it! :eek: ) http://us.video.aol.com/video.index.adp?mode=1&pmmsid=1362735&referer=http%3A//aolsearch.aol.com/aol/search

Here is Yoko "Forgive Us" video (Again, might get a commercial. :p ) http://us.video.aol.com/video.index.adp?mode=1&pmmsid=1776806&referer=http%3A//aolsearch.aol.com/aol/search

Here is Yoko's Web Site: http://www.yoko-ono.com/

[OldiesLover]

This is Yoko Ono's Cut Piece... Listen carefully, you will hear crying in the background. :eek:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1hekrMheGk
EDIT 11/8/08: Damn this vid got pulled for Copyright.
:cry:

[OldiesLover]

Some more assorted pictures of Yoko Ono! ;)

[OldiesLover]

Some more Yoko Ono! :cool:

[OldiesLover]

And a few more! :inlove:

[OldiesLover]

Assorted Yoko Ono Pictures... Mostly Shown With John Lennon. The One On The Beach (Attachment #1) Is One Of My Favorites. ;)

[OldiesLover]

Attachment #2 is of course... Famous, but just try to get a HQ copy! :o

[OldiesLover]

Attachment #1: Yoko with her parents. Attachment #2: Yoko as a lil girl. ;)

[Lustor!]

I once saw Yoko Ono and John Lennon in-person. I actually shook John's hand and nodded to Yoko. It was 1970 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They had come to town to do a Concert to Free a 60's Radical named John Sinclair, who had been put in prison for 25 years for 2 joints. :eek:

My store issued tickets for the Concert. John and Yoko, along with some other musicians, stopped by my store while they were walking around town enjoying the hippie scene. :p

It's one of those things you don't think about when it's happening... but it sticks in your brain forever. ;)

I have always been a big fan of the one & only... Yoko Ono. :grovel:
Oldies... that is cool. You are right. At the time things, even when cool, seem as they should. But as the years pass you realize how short and special the moments are, such as just to see John, who has been dead longer than he was in the public eye. It had always been a dream of mine to make it in music and then talk with him. After he died, something died in me. I wish I could have even just shook his hand. More power to you, man.

Yoko, on the other hand... There's a very complex relationship. I like some of her work, but think she lacks the tough upbringing needed to make her art anything more than just a rich kid's endeavor.

If you ever come to Japan, check out the John Lennon Museum. I've been there a few times. I like it, but my problem with it is that it courted Yoko Ono and so the theme of the museum turns out to be about a lost boy (John) who's goal in life was to find Yoko. It's a bit one-note in this way and practically ignores his first marriage and child. Because of this, I joke about it really being the Yoko Ono memorial museum. In fact, if you buy anything in the gift section, they all have a copyright notice in small print on each item that says, "John Lennon is a copyright trademark of Yoko Ono Lennon". If that doesn't say it all. But I do like the place and am glad it's close by in Japan.

[majormilo]

I find some of this to be very interesting about Yoko Ono;

In 1975 gave birth to Sean Taro Ono Lennon.

In 1963 gave birth to Kyoko Chan Cox.

****************************************************
The term "Yoko factor", referring to the influence
of wives or girlfriends on a band's politics or business,
comes from her constant presence (and kibitzing) at
latter-day Beatles recording sessions. (John broke the
longstanding no-wives -or-girlfriends rule the Beatles
had in the studio, to bring Yoko there.)
*******************************************************

In 1982 she won the Grammy Award in the Album of the Year
category for Double Fantasy with John Lennon (http://imdb.com/name/nm0006168/) and Jack Douglas.
Avante-guard poet, performance artist, composer, and vocalist.

*************************************************

In 1959, she moved to join her family in Scarsdale, New York,
where she attended Sarah Lawrence College.

*************************************************
Mother of Kyoko Ono Cox (http://imdb.com/name/nm0185119/) and Sean Lennon (http://imdb.com/name/nm0005141/).
*************************************************

Yoko Ono name translates into English as "Ocean Child".

*************************************************

Before meeting John Lennon (http://imdb.com/name/nm0006168/), the only Beatle Ono knew by name
was Ringo, as the word means "apple" in Japanese.

************************************************

After her husband John Lennon (http://imdb.com/name/nm0006168/) was fatally shot, she took a
photograph of his bloodstained eyeglasses laying on the pavement.
In 2002, this photo sold for thousands of dollars.

************************************************

Returned to music in 1995 with her son Sean Lennon (http://imdb.com/name/nm0005141/) and his band
Ima Rising.

*************************************************

Played her first public concert at the age of four, and her first
composition "Secret Piece" was in 1955.

As a child she attended the prestigious Jiyu-gakuen Music School
in Japan, the training school for many Japanese composers. She
was taught piano and composition, as well as voice training in both
opera and German Lied singing.
**********************************************

Measurements: 34C-26-36 (at time of "Two Virgins" LP), (Source:
Celebrity Sleuth magazine)
**********************************************

Owns the copyrights and masters to her Apple Records releases,
including "Two Virgins" and "Life With The Lions", recorded with
'John Lennon' ; with none of the records initially selling well, Lennon
had to pay Apple for them, as part of the Beatles' partnership
settlement. In the 1990s, with interest regenerated, Ono re-released
her music through Ryko, after turning down another label that only
wanted her albums with John.

*********************************************
Ranked #84 on VH1's 100 Greatest Women of Rock N Roll
*********************************************

In 2003, at the age of 70, she topped the US dance music charts
with a reworking of "Every Man Has A Woman Who Loves Him", a
song she co-wrote with John Lennon, to support gay marriage:
"Every Man Has A Man Who Loves Him". She also recorded a
lesbian version of the song.

**********************************************
Elton John (http://imdb.com/name/nm0005056/) is the godfather of her son Sean Lennon (http://imdb.com/name/nm0005141/)
**********************************************

Some time after her husband's murder, Ono began a relationship
with antiques dealer Sam Havadtoy, which lasted until 2001. They
were never legally married.

*****************************************************

Appointed Honorary Ambassador of Peace for the Harvey Ball
Foundation along with Jackie Chan (http://imdb.com/name/nm0000329/), Brooke Shields (http://imdb.com/name/nm0000222/), Jerry Lewis (http://imdb.com/name/nm0001471/),
Prince Albert of Monaco (http://imdb.com/name/nm0697604/), Jack Nicklaus (http://imdb.com/name/nm1455354/), Greg Norman (http://imdb.com/name/nm0635504/), Phil Collins (http://imdb.com/name/nm0002015/),
Jimmy Buffett (http://imdb.com/name/nm0119364/), Sergei Khrushchev (http://imdb.com/name/nm1111677/) and Winnie Mandela (http://imdb.com/name/nm0541692/).

***************************************************

Has a stunning amount in common with Linda McCartney (http://imdb.com/name/nm0565371/), Paul (http://imdb.com/name/nm0005200/)
McCartney (http://imdb.com/name/nm0005200/)'s late wife. Both women were raised in extremely wealthy
environments. Both shunned relying on this wealth and attempted to
make it on their own (McCartney as a photographer, Ono as an
actress and artist), only to later be accused of marrying their husbands
for their money despite their families' wealth. Both attended Sarah
Lawrence College (at different times) and left without finishing degrees.
Both married a frontman for the Beatles, and these weddings took
place eight days apart in March 1969 (the McCartneys were first).
Both women were pregnant at their weddings (Ono later suffered a
miscarriage, McCartney later gave birth to Mary McCartney (http://imdb.com/name/nm0969695/)). Both
had a daughter from a previous marriage. Both had mentally unstable
former husbands (Ono's later kidnapped their daughter and took her
to a fundamentalist Christian commune; McCartney's committed suicide
in 2000). Both were accused of playing a major role in the Beatles'
breakup. Both suffered personal attacks by fans and by the press.
Both suffered attacks on their musical talent (particularly vocal) by
fans and the press. Both were older than their husbands. Both were
activists.

*****************************************************

Is portrayed by Linda Ko (http://imdb.com/name/nm0461911/) in The Linda McCartney Story (http://imdb.com/title/tt0240683/) (2000) (TV).

******************************************************

Personal quotes

"Arnold Schwarzenegger" [Her response to an interviewer's question
as to which historical figure she most identifies with.A]


"When I met John I was at the point of disappearance, in the eyes
of other people and myself. Where could I go after I'd done the
silent music and they still didn't catch up on it? You see, the things
that I did then I feel were in a field that no one has really touched
on yet. I think I had something to offer but people did all sorts of
things to misunderstand me and I was very lonely. I just can't stand
that loneliness and always being at the point of disappearing. So I'm
quite happy screaming and all that, making my presence clear, and
it's a healthier thing to do."


"If John was still alive we would have retired to Cornwall. He said we
would be sitting in rocking chairs together, waiting for a postcard to
come from Sean."

"I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun."

*******************************************************

Source Material: Biography for Yoko Ono @ www.imdb.com/name/nm0648780/bio (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0648780/bio)

[OldiesLover]

Oldies... that is cool. You are right. At the time things, even when cool, seem as they should. But as the years pass you realize how short and special the moments are, such as just to see John, who has been dead longer than he was in the public eye. It had always been a dream of mine to make it in music and then talk with him. After he died, something died in me. I wish I could have even just shook his hand. More power to you, man.

Yoko, on the other hand... There's a very complex relationship. I like some of her work, but think she lacks the tough upbringing needed to make her art anything more than just a rich kid's endeavor.

If you ever come to Japan, check out the John Lennon Museum. I've been there a few times. I like it, but my problem with it is that it courted Yoko Ono and so the theme of the museum turns out to be about a lost boy (John) who's goal in life was to find Yoko. It's a bit one-note in this way and practically ignores his first marriage and child. Because of this, I joke about it really being the Yoko Ono memorial museum. In fact, if you buy anything in the gift section, they all have a copyright notice in small print on each item that says, "John Lennon is a copyright trademark of Yoko Ono Lennon". If that doesn't say it all. But I do like the place and am glad it's close by in Japan.


Some very interesting thoughts. I believe what John and Yoko had, was very very special. Their love held togther under tremendous pressures. Yes, John had his one year Walk-A-Bout... (with another Asian babe by the way. :p ) but in the end, he was with his Yoko.

I also believe John did his best and most creative work when Yoko was there with her influences. I certainly feel he enjoyed his work the most during that period.

I hope we can have an interestin' discussion here about this very interesting relationship. ;)

[OldiesLover]

More Assorted Yoko Ono!

[OldiesLover]

Attachments #2 & #3 are from Yoko Ono's Cut Piece performances... ;)

[OldiesLover]

Attachment #4 is one of the Famous "John Nude On Yoko" Pictures: :p

[OldiesLover]

Attachment #1, again, another Famous "John Nude On Yoko" Pictures, which ran on Cover of Rolling Stone. ;)

[OldiesLover]

More of the One & Only... Yoko Ono: :grovel:

[OldiesLover]

More Yoko, including with the Queen. :rolleyes:

[OldiesLover]

The Famous Ladder...

The ballad of John and Yoko famously began on Nov. 9, 1966, when Lennon visited a London gallery that was exhibiting her work. He climbed a ladder to peer through a magnifying glass at artwork hanging from the ceiling, in which he saw a single word: "YES." "That 'YES,'" Lennon would say, "made me stay" to meet the artist. Thus began a dialogue that led to their marriage three years later and changed both their lives. But what the public is only now beginning to suspect is that meeting Lennon was less a coup than a curse for Ono's promising career.

(From The Above Post.)

[OldiesLover]

I Posted the above piece (Post #28)... because is presents quite well what I believe is now happening for Yoko Ono. Finally, people are beginning to see her for the inspiring force that she was, and still is to a very large degree.

She stood tall as she was a conduit for all sorts of prejudice and distaste for both women and Asians. Finally, people are beginning to understand what she has endured and her own work in a proper perspective.

As far a Asian women, the basis of this Forum itself, Yoko Ono blazed the trail for us to be doing what we are doing inside this Forum, today. She showed Asian women that they are beautiful, and she did it with the force of the very Western media who disliked her.

This little 72 year old babe... was the one who started it all. ;)

[OldiesLover]

Some more assorted pictures of Yoko Ono... :inlove: :inlove: :inlove:

[OldiesLover]

This Statement Was Just Released By Yoko Ono, November 29, 2006

forgive us

December 8th is near again. Every year, on this day, I hear from many people from all over the world who remember my husband, John Lennon, and his messages for peace. They write to tell me they are thinking of John on this day and how he was shot and killed at the prime of his life, at age 40, when he had so much life ahead of him.

Thank you for your undying love for John and also for your concern for me on this tragic anniversary. This year, though, on December 8th, while we remember John, I would also like us to focus on sending the following messages to the millions of people suffering around the world: To the people who have also lost loved ones without cause: forgive us for having been unable to stop the tragedy. We pray for the wounds to heal.

To the soldiers of all countries and all centuries, who were maimed for life, or who lost their lives: forgive us for our misjudgments and what happened as a result of them.

To the civilians who were maimed, or killed, or who lost their family members: forgive us for having been unable to prevent it.

To the people who have been abused and tortured: forgive us for having allowed it to happen.

Know that your loss is our loss.
Know that the physical and mental abuse you have endured will have a lingering effect on our society, and the world.
Know that the burden is ours.

As the widow of one who was killed by an act of violence, I don't know if I am ready yet to forgive the one who pulled the trigger. I am sure all victims of violence crimes feel as I do. But healing is what is urgently needed now in the world.

Let's heal the wounds together.

Every year, let's make December 8th the day to ask for forgiveness from those who suffered the insufferable.
Let's wish strongly that one day we will be able to say that we healed ourselves,
and by healing ourselves, we healed the world.

With deepest love,

Yoko Ono Lennon
New York City 2006

[majormilo]

Yoko Ono

Conceptual artist Yoko Ono became an international celebrity when she married musician John Lennon of The Beatles in 1969. The couple worked together on music and promoting world peace until Lennon's tragic death in 1980.

Yoko Ono was born on Feb. 18, 1933, in Tokyo, Japan. Both of her parents were from prominent families, and her father was head of the Bank of Japan. Ono attended an exclusive school and also received private tutoring in English, ballet, and religion. She briefly enrolled at Gakushuin University before moving with her parents to New York, where she attended Sarah Lawrence College for three years but did not earn a degree.

Yoko Ono became acquainted with the avant-garde scene through her first husband, musician Toshi Ichiyanagi, and by the 1960s was an active participant in the Fluxus movement. Her artistic displays and events frequently encouraged viewer interaction. An exhibit called "Apple" consisted of a pedestal with an apple on it for people to bite. For the performance piece called "Cut," Yoko Ono wore a wedding dress and had audience members slowly cut off bits of the garment until she was naked. Her book 'Grapefruit' (1964) presented similar art ideas readers could perform. Her filmmaking ventures included 'Bottoms' (1966) and 'Fly' (1971).

Yoko Ono obtained a divorce from second husband Anthony Cox in the late 1960s to wed John Lennon, whom she had met at one of her shows at London's Indica Gallery. Being in the public eye made it difficult for Yoko Ono to continue doing her artwork, but the media also helped her and John Lennon forward their causes, such as their 1969 "bed-in" at a Toronto hotel to promote world peace.

The Beatles broke up in 1970, and rumors circulated thatYoko Ono was the cause. John Lennon and Yoko Ono (or John and Yoko, as they were popularly known) had already put out a few albums--including the controversial Two Virgins (1968), the cover of which featured a photograph of them naked--and continued to perform together and alone. Two of Ono's solo albums were Approximately Infinite Universe and Feeling the Space (both 1973). Her musical compositions often featured electronic instruments, everyday sounds, and a shrieking style of singing.

The couple led a private life following the birth of their son Sean in 1975. (Ono also had a daughter from her marriage to Cox.) Yoko Ono managed the family's money and used savvy investment skills to turn it into a substantial fortune. Yoko Ono and John Lennon returned to the recording studio to make Double Fantasy (1980), featuring seven compositions by each. In December of 1980, John Lennon was murdered in front of Yoko Ono by a crazed fan. The cover of Yoko Ono's Season of Glass (1981) displayed John Lennon's blood-stained eyeglasses. She later worked on various John Lennon memorials and oversaw the release of some of his unpublished material.

The Whitney Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of Yoko Ono's artwork in 1989. Her rock opera 'New York Rock' debuted at New York's WPA Theater in 1994.

Source Material: http://members.aol.com/macsbug/thinkdiff/lennon.html

[majormilo]

Yoko Ono's "New" Album
Posted on 11-30-06 by Paul Tao

Yoko Ono (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Ono) will be releasing her new album Yes, I'm A Witch in February 2007 on Astralwerks; however, Yoko chose a bunch of different artists she wanted to work with (including Flaming Lips, Cat Power, Le Tigre and more), gave them access to her back catalog and asked them to rework one of her songs each. Essentially this has become a compilation of Yoko Ono remixes and covers. In March, Astralwerks will follow up with a compilation of dance remixes to Ono songs.

Source Material: http://www.absolutepunk.net/showthread.php?t=192093

[majormilo]

Quote
http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/common/images/transp.gif
"I don't know if I am ready yet to forgive the one who
pulled the trigger. ... But healing is what is urgently needed
now in the world." Yoko Ono

(AP) John Lennon's widow is calling for the anniversary of his
death to become a day of worldwide healing.

In a full-page advertisement appearing Sunday in The New York
Times, Yoko Ono urges readers to mark the anniversary by
apologizing to those who have suffered because of violence and war.

"Every year, let's make December 8th the day to ask for forgiveness
from those who suffered the insufferable," writes the musician's
widow, who signs the letter with the name Yoko Ono Lennon.

In the open letter, Ono urges readers to take responsibility for
failing to intervene on behalf of victims around the world.

"Know that the physical and mental abuse you have endured
will have a lingering effect on our society," she writes in a portion
of the letter directed to victims. "Know that the burden is ours."

Ono was with the former Beatle when he was gunned down as
he returned home from a recording studio on Dec. 8, 1980. The
shooter, Mark David Chapman, remains in New York's Attica state
prison. His fourth request for parole was denied last month.

Of her own loss, Ono says: "I don't know if I am ready yet to
forgive the one who pulled the trigger. ... But healing is what is
urgently needed now in the world."

"Let's wish strongly that one day we will be able to say that we
healed ourselves, and by healing ourselves, we healed the world."

Source material: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/26/entertainment/main2208818.shtml

[majormilo]

For all of you Yoko fans, it looks like there will be at least one thing worth salivating for while waiting for the US vs John Lennon film to come out. Yoko herself gets the DVD treatment in this pricey video. It seems quite expensive, however you do get some unreleased footage of JohnandYoko. I don’t know if I would do the whole money transfer things in a Japanese bank, but here’s the scoop. Maybe the library will order it.



Here’s more information on the film taken from our favorite Yoko Ono (http://www.a-i-u.net/original_dvd.html) web emporium.



“Original (Genten) - YOKO ONO” (English version): This new DVD of Yoko Ono will be released by art media K.Y. (http://amky.org/japanese/shop/original.html) in Japan in summer 2006.
According to the manufacturer this DVD is region free.

The content of the English version of the DVD

Yoko Ono: This is Not Here
(1971, 16mm Film, 18min.)


A valuable document of Yoko Ono’s exhibition “This is not here” held at Everson Museum in NY, 1971. Yoko: “This is the beginning of a quiet revolution.” John: “I believe that this show brought out a revolution in museum and art world.Early Works Yoko Ono
A photograph album mainly consisting of the works exhibited at the “This is not here” exhibition, portraits of Yoko’s early works, art pieces, and film/video.
An extra film (2006)
A controversial film with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Pop and Avant-Garde, that has never been released before, will be featured with the images of them.
The DVD package includes a brochure with a Yoko Ono interview by Takahiko Iimura from 1971, one of her most radical statements involved.



Source Material: http://beatle.wordpress.com/2006/08/08/new-yoko-ono-dvd/

[majormilo]

Yoko Ono To Buy Up Happy Christmas Billboards

Yoko Ono, the wife of the late John Lennon, will reprise the couple’s 1969 Happy Christmas (War Is Over) war protest in 2006.

The original billboard campaign in New York will be given a global campaign in some of the world’s largest cities later this year.

The Lennon’s conducted the original protest in retaliation against the war mongering tactics of the Nixon administration. The Yoko 2006 protest sends a message to the Bush administration.

John Lennon was hounded by Nixon, who had to try and have the British rock star deported from the USA for speaking out. Nixon resigned from his position as US president in disgrace before he completed his chore.
Never in a million years, did we think that promoting World Peace could be dangerous. Were we naive? Yes, on that account, we were. John sings: 'Nobody told me there'd be days like these.' That was his true confession," says Yoko Ono in a statement, "These songs have become relevant all over again. It's almost as if John wrote these songs for what we are going through now."

The story will be told in the new movie ‘The US vs John Lennon’ due shortly from Lionsgate Films.

The movie, done with the full support of Yoko Ono, features pieces together historic news footage to tell the tale.

"I believe John would have loved this film," says Ono Lennon, "It's the kind of cool film he would have liked even if it were about somebody else. It's not tabloid, but rather it tells it like it was. 'Gimme Some Truth,' indeed. If John were here today, he would have felt good about being represented by such a film, and the fact that we took the chance to make it and present it to the world. War Is Over (If You Want It)."

EMI Records will release the soundtrack to the film on September 26.
It will feature a previously unreleased live version of the Lennon’s ‘Attica State’ and the movie’s theme instrumental based on the Imagine album track ‘How Do You Sleep’.

Source Material: http://www.undercover.com.au/news/2006/jul06/20060728_yokoono.html

[majormilo]

Yoko Ono wants Lennon anniversary
to be day of 'healing'

On December 8, 1980, the world lost one of its favorite musicians when Mark David Chapman approached John Lennon at the entrance of his famous Dakota home and shot the former Beatle four times. With the 26th anniversary of John Lennon's death fast approaching, his widow, Yoko Ono has sent an open letter to the New York Times asking for forgiveness.

Rather than simply mourning the loss of John Lennon, Yoko Ono wishes to transform December 8 into a day of worldwide healing, in which everyone can apologize to anyone who has suffered from violence and war. Ono, a well known advocate for world peace, also wanted to thank the people who have given her comfort throughout the years since John Lennon was murdered.

In a full-page advertisement in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, Yoko Ono Lennon was quoted by MSNBC as asking, "Every year, let’s make December 8th the day to ask for forgiveness from those who suffered the insufferable." Yoko Ono appealed to readers to take responsibility for not intervening on behalf of the victims of around the world, "Know that the physical and mental abuse you have endured will have a lingering effect on our society," Ono urged, adding "Know that the burden is ours."

With an optomistic outlook, Yoko Ono pressed her message, as the CBC quoted her as urging, "Let's wish strongly that one day we will be able to say that we healed ourselves, and by healing ourselves, we healed the world. While preaching the message of forgiveness, many people wondered if Ono had brought herself to forgive John Lennon's murderer, Mark David Chapman.

Ono was quoted by the CBC as saying "I don't know if I am ready yet to forgive the one who pulled the trigger, but healing is what is urgently needed now in the world."

With an altruistic undertone, Yoko Ono's message ended with a hopeful outlook, which was quoted by CBS News, "Let's wish strongly that one day we will be able to say that we healed ourselves, and by healing ourselves, we healed the world." The message Yoko Ono delivered is in keeping with the work that she and John Lennon had done while together. Ono and Lennon were married in 1969, and were well-known for their protests for peace and their demonstrations against the Vietnam War. In 1969, Lennon would record the song "Give Peace a Chance", a song that would become anthemic for the anti-war cause. In 1971, Lennon recorded "Imagine", which to this day, still rings out as a call for international peace.

Yoko Ono's message, printed on the back page of the "Week in Review" section of the New York Times was signed "With deepest love, Yoko Ono Lennon, New York City 2006," according to the CBC, and came complete with a sketch of John Lennon and Ono with their son, Sean, holding a balloon.

As for the man who shot John Lennon, Mark David Chapman is currently serving a 20 year to life sentence for the second-degree murder of John Lennon. Chapman, who was arrested sitting calmly outside of Lennon's estate clutching a copy of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, is currently serving his sentence at Attica State Prison, near Buffalo, New York. Chapman was denied parole for a fourth time in October.

Source Material: http://www.actressarchives.com/news.php?id=2998

[majormilo]

Yoko Ono
Rebirth of a renaissance rebel

John Lennon once described his wife Yoko Ono as "the world's most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does." But Ono wasn't merely ignored—she was reviled. Over the three-plus decades that hers has been a household name, Ono has been vilified for busting up the Beatles, sneered at for her activism, derided for her art, then pitied for losing her husband. Through it all, she never stopped doing the work she believed in while waiting patiently for the world to catch up.

Now, at the age of 70 plus —yes, 70 plus —Ono finds it finally has. Her persistent campaign for peace—she was a prominent face at rallies opposing the war in Iraq—has seldom seemed more relevant than in recent weeks. Her artwork is being fêted in a major international retrospective. Her music is attracting new audiences. Even the staunchest Beatles fans have accorded her grudging respect for her fierce guardianship of Lennon's memory. By refusing to be bowed, ignoring boundaries and surviving her detractors, Yoko Ono has made the extraordinary journey from villain to hero.

In a recent interview at her home in New York City's historic Dakota building, Ono revels in the transition. "Isn't it great?" she exclaims, raising a fist and grinning broadly. "Now people are starting to understand I was doing some work as well as being Mrs. Lennon." Ono looks remarkably unchanged from the black-and-white photos of her younger self, though the famous hippie locks have long been replaced with a short do flecked with bronze. Blue-tinted glasses rest upon those relentless cheekbones. Dressed in stretchy, black knits, she perches like a spider on a yellow director's chair at her kitchen table, sometimes darting in her movements and at other times perfectly still. And while it's clear she's delighted at the newfound accolades, she has gone through too much to consider it much more than a bonus. "I'm lucky," she adds a touch wryly, "to be around to witness it."

She does not add that her biggest fan is not. The ballad of John and Yoko famously began on Nov. 9, 1966, when Lennon visited a London gallery that was exhibiting her work. He climbed a ladder to peer through a magnifying glass at artwork hanging from the ceiling, in which he saw a single word: "YES." "That 'YES,'" Lennon would say, "made me stay" to meet the artist. Thus began a dialogue that led to their marriage three years later and changed both their lives. But what the public is only now beginning to suspect is that meeting Lennon was less a coup than a curse for Ono's promising career.

Born into a powerful zaibatsu banking family, Ono was raised in Japan and the U.S. and was encouraged by her cultured parents to explore the arts. After being the first female philosophy student at Tokyo's prestigious Gakushuin University, she moved to New York City in 1953 and joined an influential group of avant-garde artists called Fluxus. Ono's star—and notoriety—quickly ascended with pieces such as Bottoms, a film featuring 365 swinging behinds; Grapefruit, a book of instructional poems ("hammer a nail into the center of a piece of glass"); and Cut Piece, performance art in which audience members were invited to snip away at her clothing.
Despite her powerful and provocative exhibits—or perhaps because of them—her union and artistic collaborations with Lennon triggered virulent attacks. "People had no idea what to make of her work," says Kim Gordon, bassist for American indie band Sonic Youth and a longtime admirer of Ono. "It wasn't pop; it was conceptual." Beatles fans burned copies of Ono and Lennon's Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins album and record stores refused to carry it because they appeared nude on the cover. The xenophobic Western press, meanwhile, mocked her English with headlines such as JOHN LENNON'S EXCRUSIVE GLOUPIE and snickered at their Bed-Ins for Peace.

Ono and Lennon sought privacy in the '70s to focus on their projects and on raising their son, Sean. Lennon's departure from the Beatles—though the source of great relief and artistic rebirth for him—drew still more venom for Ono. It bothered her, she says, but "my work kept me going. I always felt that artists should concentrate their energy into their work rather than explaining it. So when people were trying not to know my work because I'm a woman or Asian or whatever, I didn't fight it."

Then, on the night of Dec. 8, 1980, the couple was returning from a session for Ono's single Walking on Thin Ice when Lennon was shot dead by deranged fan Mark David Chapman in front of their home. In the outpouring of grief that followed, their final recordings together brought Ono a taste of critical acclaim.

Her album Season of Glass broke the Billboard Top 50 in 1981. She responded at the time, "If it brought John back, I'd rather remain hated."

Her art, too, gathered admirers. "I discovered the great richness and complexity of her work," says Alexandra Munroe, an expert in postwar Japanese art, "and realized just how prescient and seminal she was over and over again."

Munroe launched a widely praised retrospective of Ono's work in 2000 at the Japan Society Gallery in New York City, which she directs. The retrospective has toured the U.S., and is scheduled to open this year in Japan and South Korea.

Younger generations, unsaddled with the preconceptions of their parents, are discovering Ono on their own. Club deejays from New York to London to Tokyo are remixing Ono singles such as the 1971 Open Your Box. "Her music is funky, shocking and timeless," says Yoshi Horino, a Tokyo-based deejay. Her books, including Grapefruit, continue to sell. "We still get fan mail for her," says Takato Satomura of Kodansha Bunko, one of her publishers.

Miyuki Sugaya says most of the visitors to her gallery in Tokyo's hip Omotesando district are in their teens or 20s. "They don't know much about Ono's art," she says, "but when they see it, they get it." And feel good about it. Says Kosuke Miki, a cosmetics marketing director: "Yoko Ono is Japan's national pride."

Twenty some years after Lennon died, Ono cares most about the inner peace she has now achieved. She maintains a tight relationship with Sean, now 27 and a musician ("he probably thinks I call too much"). And she has renewed a relationship with long-estranged 39-year-old daughter Kyoko, from her former marriage to American artist Tony Cox. Now living alone, Ono says her life feels complete. "I love the changing seasons. I love to walk in the park. I love the human race. I have my family and my work. These are the things that make me happy."

Source Material: http://www.time.com/time/asia/2003/heroes/yoko_ono.html

[majormilo]

The Importance of Yoko Ono (PART ONE)
( even though this is written in 2000 - it shows how the importance of Yoko Ono in our society today is)

******************************
Originality, it is said, usually means coming from somewhere else. "Somewhere else" can be many places: another time, another culture, the other gender, despair, madness-- anywhere, except familiar here and everyday now. John Lennon has told of his first magical meeting with Yoko Ono, when he wandered into her one-woman show at the Indica Gallery in London on November 9, 1966, a pivotal date in the ferment remembered as the Nineteen Sixties, and was intrigued, as well as mystified, by what he saw. Invited by Ono to pay five shillings to hammer a nail into a piece of plain wood shown as artwork, Lennon made a counter-offer: "Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." "That's when we really met," Lennon later recalled. "That's when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it, and, as they say in all the interviews we do, the rest is history."

All lovers know the moment when complicity leaps like an electric spark, but in their case, founded on what? Outwardly, the two had nothing in common. Lennon had come from the "genteel poverty" of a dysfunctional working-class family, via art school and sweaty teen-age dance hangouts in Liverpool, England, and Hamburg, Germany, to world fame and an honorable fortune as a rock-and-roll musician, composer, and role model for the first generation of Western youth to remember nothing of World War Two. Ono, seven years his senior, remembered all too well the apocalyptic end of Japan's Pacific War, the hunger and despair that had followed the defeat and enemy occupation which she had seen at first hand. But her own roots were in wealth and privilege: her mother Isoko came from the Yasuda banking family, and her father, Eisuke Ono, himself a banker by profession, descended from a long line of samurai warrior-scholars. Yoko had known little personal experience of deprivation, and had been educated among Japan's business and intellectual elite. Just the same, like had recognized like, at that mythic London meeting.


Why? The explanation lies half-buried under the decades of Japan's new prosperity. By 1966 Lennon, was emerging as one of the gurus of the disillusioned, questing mood called "The Sixties" in the West. Yoko Ono had been there, spiritually, long before. Something very like the mood of the Sixties first took shape in Tokyo in the late 1940's; Japan's confused, hungry years were the "somewhere else" Yoko Ono came from. Even then, and there, it was the amalgam, rather than any of its elements, that was really new. Radical pacifism and politicized feminism had both erupted in spiritually defeated Europe after the First World War, where they had found artistic voices in the instant arts of gesture and performance, made somewhat more durable by photographs, and in the perversely intellectual anti-intellectualism of Dada.

Bereft of social and political protest, however, Dada became just another style, and it was as an avant-garde style that Dada in the 1920's reached Japan, which had suffered next to nothing, and gained much, by the First World War. By the late 1940's, however, after the Second World War, Japan was in a state of despair even deeper and longer-lasting than Europe had known after the first war and by the mid-fifties Japanese art had found a similar expression, this time not as an imported style but with its own emotional authenticity. Japanese ingredients, notably the cerebral anti-intellectualism of Zen Buddhism, flavored a mixture which was original, distinctive, and more than the sum of its parts. Yoko Ono was the prophetess who, with the help of John Lennon, brought the amalgam to a West at long last ready to reconsider its own values. By different paths, Lennon and Western youth had arrived at a need, Ono at its fulfillment. More justifiably than most lovers, John and Yoko knew, in an instant of enlightenment at the Indica Gallery, that they were of one mind.

Ono's Upbringing

Ono's route to the rendezvous was the more devious of the two. She was born in Tokyo on February 18, 1932, the year Japan set up a puppet state in Manchuria, a long step towards the catastrophe of 1945. Two weeks earlier, her father had been transferred to San Francisco with the Yokohama Specie Bank, the financial arm of Japan's expanding empire. His wife and daughter soon followed, and Yoko from infancy heard both English and Japanese, the foundation of her subsequent bilingualism. In the spring of 1937 as Japan began full-scale war in China Yoko, her mother and younger brother Keisuke, born in December 1936, returned to Tokyo, where Yoko was enrolled in the kindergarten of the Peers' School, a Tokyo institution then open only to relatives of the Imperial family or of members of the House of Peers (her maternal grandfather, the banker Zenjiro Yasuda, had been ennobled in 1915). In 1940 Yoko's mother, fearing that all Japanese might be interned if Japan and the United States went to war and that she might not see him for many years, bravely rejoined her husband, by this time stationed in New York, taking her two children. The family sailed from San Francisco for the last time in the spring of 1941. At the time of Pearl Harbor Yoko's father was working in the Hanoi branch of his bank while Yoko was enrolled in a Christian primary school in Tokyo, run by one of the Mitsui family for Japanese children returned from abroad.
Takasumi Mitsui's school gave Yoko a safe and liberal refuge for most of the war. She continued studying in English and was listed as a primary school student well after her twelfth birthday, when most boys and girls her age became liable for war work, often risky. She was still living in Tokyo and being privately tutored in The Bible, Buddhism and the piano when a quarter of the city was burnt out in the great fire raid of March 9, 1945-- an inferno she survived in the Ono family bunker in the affluent

Azabu residential district, far from the incinerated downtown. Only then did her mother move her three children to a small farming village near the still fashionable Karuizawa mountain resort. The choice of refuge proved fortunate, as Yoko and her brother and sister, in the desperate days of the defeat and the collapse of the Japanese economy, were able to help their mother barter family treasures for food. One notable deal yielded sixty kilograms of life-sustaining rice for a German-made sewing machine. At the end of the war the family returned to Tokyo, where Yoko rejoined the re-opened Peers' School in April, 1946.

Founded in Tokyo in 1877, the Peers' School, like its rough equivalents Eton in England and Groton in the United States, has been more noted for social than for academic status. Its campus near the Imperial Palace survived the fire raids more or less intact, and its first post-war intake was like the pre-war ones. When the peerage was abolished in 1947 the school became theoretically open to anyone, including foreign exchange students (a classmate of the present Crown Prince Naruhito was the son of a plumber from Melbourne, Australia) but, like Tokyo itself, the Peers' School has since recovered much of its high-society glitter.

The view from the school windows, however, has changed beyond recognition. When Yoko and her classmates looked outside the school's high walls in the spring of 1946 they saw a city all but returned, as General Curtis E. LeMay Jr., U. S. Army Air Corps, had promised, to the Stone Age. Whole districts were sterile wastelands of twisted iron and blackened stones. People lived in holes clawed in the ground, roofed with stray sheets of metal. On every corner of what had once been shopping streets, famished men and women tried to sell trinkets, clothes, anything for food. Every train from the countryside brought farmers loaded with rice and vegetables for the black market. In makeshift bars in dank cellars, workers formed lines to gulp industrial alcohol. To sharpen the misery, smartly-turned-out, well-fed American soldiers tootled around the ruins in jeeps, driving on the side of the road they were accustomed to, the right-- the rare Japanese vehicle simply got out of the way. In a terminal degradation of Japanese martial values, American servicewomen smiled for souvenir snaps in rickshaws pulled by Japanese men still wearing the tattered remnants of military uniforms, eyes turned down in exhaustion, hunger and shame. Few would have recognized in this desolate scene the seedbed of a great and original flowering of art and cinema-- unless they had seen Berlin in 1919, or Moscow before Stalin.

Japan under occupation was a paradox; democracy imposed by a conqueror under the iron rule of General Douglas MacArthur, "the Macarto," more autocratic than any shogun had been for centuries. The occupation supposedly freed the Japanese press, but two weeks after it began, occupation censorship was imposed, and mention of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for instance, was blue-pencilled. The predictable result was to turn the atomic bombs into monstrous symbols of evil, beyond all rational discourse, in which shape they haunt Japanese and the rest of us to this day. Some accused Japanese war criminals were arrested and leisurely trials began; but Emperor Hirohito, who (as all but a handful of the Japanese elite believed) had directed Japan's war in person was free to visit the conqueror-- and the resulting photograph, of a stiffly correct Emperor and a showily casual general, was as ambiguous as the occasion. The trials were intended to show the Japanese their war crimes-- but the Soviet judge was from the nation that still held a half-million Japanese as war prisoners, many never to see homes and families again.

Most Tokyo residents, like those of any war-devastated city, were engrossed in the search for food and shelter. Even from an island of privilege like the Peers' School, the world outside no longer made sense. That America's war had been wholly just ("the justest war in history," U.S. propaganda claimed) and therefore Japan's totally unjust was by no means so clear to these puzzled young people as it was to the victors. Yes, there had been crimes and cruelties, on both sides, and who could strike the balance? And how could these crimes have been averted? The best answer seemed to be that war itself was to blame. Pacifism has been, for Japanese, the most enduring legacy of those years: "make love not war," the slogan of the Western sixties, well expresses the mood of Tokyo in 1946, as of starving Berlin in 1918. Right up to the present, PEACE (a brand of cigarette) and LOVE (with an arrow-pierced heart) are English words almost every Japanese knows.

END PART ONE -
Source Material: http://www.jpri.org/publications/occasionalpapers/op18.html

[majormilo]

The Importance of Yoko Ono (Part Two)
( even though this is written in 2000 - it shows how the importance of Yoko Ono in our society today is)

******************************
Postwar Pacifism

More than a half-century on, any Japanese politician who suggests that Japan might one day go to war again is sure of an angry reaction. We have proof, from the Peers' School itself, that pacifism impacted with particular force on Yoko Ono's generation. Prince Akihito, now Emperor of Japan, returned there, as she did, in April 1946 from the same mountain refuge, the Karuizawa area, and saw the same fire-ravaged cityscape from its windows.

The Crown Prince was tutored in English and world history by an American, Elizabeth Gray Vining, selected by Emperor Hirohito with full knowledge that her Quaker faith enjoins strict pacifism. Thirty-four years later, when Akihito acceded to the throne he swore to uphold the constitution, the first Japanese emperor ever to do so-- and to Japanese this can only mean Article Nine, renouncing war.

One of the new Emperor Akihito's first official duties was to plant a tree in Nagasaki, whose mayor, Hitoshi Motoshima had not long before been shot and seriously injured by a right-wing fanatic after urging Japanese to reflect on their role in World War II, for which, said the mayor, Emperor Hirohito "shared responsibility." Meeting the mayor-- it could not have been by chance-- Hirohito's eldest son wished him a speedy recovery. Within the restraints of his office, Yoko's schoolmate could not have made his abiding pacifist views plainer.

Feminist agitation was more prominent in Japan's early post-war years than it has ever been since. Women were given the vote by the largely American-written 1946 constitution, and pressure from the new female members of parliament finally led in 1958 to the abolition of the licensed brothels, into which poor girls had been sold into debt slavery.

The law making adultery a crime for wives but not for husbands was repealed in 1947. A few professions, notably teaching, introduced equal pay. However, the feminism that reverberated in the Japan of the post-war years was less ideological than situational, the feminism of hard times. War, especially in Japan, has been a hyper-masculine pursuit, with the homoeroticism found in all military societies.

The utter defeat of 1945 temporarily, perhaps permanently, discredited the warrior ethos. Strong, resourceful women like Yoko Ono's mother, who had kept homes and families afloat through eight years of war saw Japan's surrender as simply another man-made crisis to be somehow survived. Thousands of Japanese women, "pan pan girls," prostituted themselves to American soldiers, often for food for their families. Others hired out as the victors' maids, cooks and nannies.

In close to a millennium, only one part of the English-speaking world has known such total defeat. Novelist Margaret Mitchell, in Scarlett O'Hara, imagined a strong woman's response to the shipwreck of Southern male pretensions very like the reaction of many Japanese women in 1945. In Woman is the Nigger of the World by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, we can hear, behind the offensive racial slur, the anger of a privileged girl at what her humbler sisters had once had to do, just for survival.

One of the first arts to revive in Japan was cinema, by which a mass audience could be reached for the price of a seat in a drafty hall. The great director Akira Kurosawa had a script in shape for his enigmatic Rashomon as early as 1947, although he took until 1950 to find finance and finish it. Its theme, the impossibility of arriving at reliable truth about any event by way of the self-serving distortions of witnesses and participants, was a plain parable of Japan's situation.

The first voice to speak from within defeated Japan and be heard outside, Rashomon began the process, still incomplete, of explaining the pariah nation to a suspicious world. Kurosawa had added an important aside to the bleak vision of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who wrote the two stories on which it is partly based and suicided, at thirty-five, in 1927. Kurosawa's addition has the woodcutter, one of the witnesses whose version of the rape of a samurai's wife and the murder of her husband by a bandit cannot be trusted, adopt a baby abandoned by the ruined city gate which gives the film its name. Life, says the film, goes on, the human spirit rebounds, there is always hope.

A quarter-century later, John Lennon was to climb a ladder at the Indica Gallery and through a magnifying glass read the one word Yoko One had written on the gallery's ceiling, YES. "At least" Lennon later recalled, "her message was positive."

Kurosawa apart (Rashomon won the gold cup at the 1950 Venice film festival and became an international hit) all that the outside world heard from Japan in the immediate post-war years came through the propaganda megaphone operated by the U.S. occupation. MacArthur's headquarters censored not only what the Japanese media reported in Japan, but what the corps of foreign correspondents stationed in Tokyo could send to their readers. The publication of John Hersey's searing Hiroshima (1946), the century's most influential piece of journalism, was only possible because Hersey wrote it in the offices of the New Yorker, far from the occupation's censors.

The year 1945 in fact marked the sharpest discontinuity between generations in all Japanese history, but few outside Japan could distinguish this reality from the claims of MacArthur's personal publicity machine-- and, as with all such breaks with the past, much continued unchanged, and a reverse current soon set in, guided by the same occupation authority. What many Japanese still remember as the years of post-war democracy all too soon ended. The role in the world assigned to Japan was changing. In 1949 the Soviets broke the U.S. nuclear monopoly, the Chinese Communist Party won its civil war, and the Korean War broke out in June, 1950.

Already the occupation had begun its "reverse course." No longer an enemy to be punished and reformed, Japan became a potential ally to be courted for the threatened new world war with communism. Korean war spending, the opening of the huge U.S. market to Japanese products, the revival of Japan's wartime production system with its close ties between banks, bureaucrats and favored industrialists-- the celebrated "Japan Inc."-- got Japan back on the dual road to economic recovery and social counter-revolution.

Good times, however, are not necessarily propitious for the arts. By 1951, when Yoko Ono graduated from the Peers' School, the creative ferment of the postwar years was subsiding, as everyday Japan settled down to take advantage of the "reverse course" and its material payoffs. Feminism stalled, Japan's new pacifism was entangled in the alliance with the nuclear-armed U.S. Early in 1952 Yoko was accepted by the philosophy faculty of her school's associated Peers' University as its first female student of that most cerebral of disciplines, but after two semesters she dropped out.

Approaching her twentieth birthday, her most impressionable years behind her, Ono rejoined her family in Scarsdale, New York, where her father was once again a banker. She enrolled in nearby Sarah Lawrence College, then strong in the visual arts (painter Bradley Walker Tomlin had taught abstract expressionism there). This led her to American avant-garde circles, where she experimented with painting, music, film and the various performance arts. By 1962 she was back in Tokyo, exhibiting with some success as a member of the Japanese artistic avant-garde, some of whom called themselves Neo-Dadaists, part of the Dada stylistic revival taking place world-wide.

The original Dada (from French baby-talk "dada," a rocking-horse, a word intended to be meaningless) had arisen first in sidelined, neutral Zurich during the First World War. By 1918 it had spread to Berlin, then to Paris and later to New York. Taking a hint from Marcel Duchamp, who had exhibited a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool as an artwork in 1913, the Dadaists hoped, by exhibiting themeless objects, to condemn the futility of war and to shock the bourgeoisie out of the materialism and complacency the artists believed had exacerbated its horrors. Dada attracted some attention in the European cities plunged into something like the despair of Tokyo in 1945, but by 1924 that war was receding, the bourgeoisie were again complacent, and the Dada movement, bereft of social concern, had retreated into style.

As Japan's America-oriented prosperity grew into the early 1960's, the Japanese neo-Dada movement became similarly fragmented and dispirited. Resistance to the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (ANPO), mostly from students, attracted some of its practitioners; as did opposition to the 1964 Olympics, seen by most Japanese as a milestone in Japan's revival; anti-materialism inspired such notable art as Genpei Akasegawa's Great Japan Zero-Yen Note, mocking the preoccupation of most of his compatriots. But the creative despair of the late 1940's was long gone.

Via two failed marriages and a parting from her only daughter, Kyoko, claimed by her American ex-husband Anthony Cox, Yoko again left Japan eventually to find her way to a small London gallery specializing in the avant-garde, then beginning to find the wider audience it always does in times of social upheaval. It took the aristocratic Ono some time to discover what the untutored, instinctual Lennon really had to offer her-- the wide world, as an audience for her art.


END PART Two -
Source Material: http://www.jpri.org/publications/occasionalpapers/op18.html

[majormilo]

The Importance of Yoko Ono (Part Three)
( even though this is written in 2000 - it shows how the importance of Yoko Ono in our society today is)

******************************
Lennon's Trajectory

How had John Lennon reached his side of the mysteriously fated rendezvous at the Indica Gallery in 1966? Born in 1940, his adolescence, the 'fifties, was a time of self-satisfaction in the English-speaking world, of growing affluence, of endless war movies presenting the victors as supermen (but not yet as superwomen-- just as war had deflated the male values of Japanese, it inflated those of the Western winners, whose women were ejected from the jobs they had held while the men were away fighting, and theoretically went back to being full-time housewives and mothers).

Prosperity not known since the 1920's did little for adult women, but a great deal economically for adolescents, now called "teenagers," who commanded real wages and competitively bigger parental allowances in economies finally freed of unemployment. Teenage purchasing power made a new market for records, and the performers correspondingly rich-- none richer than the Fab Four from England, the Beatles.

The Beatles owed their huge success to a creative tension between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who wrote most of their songs-- Paul the syrupy and tuneful, John the tart realist. Advised by their astute manager, Brian Epstein, to present a wholesome image unthreatening to British parents, the Beatles were made Members of the Order of the British Empire (a medal usually given to civil servants like postmasters) in 1965, and they duly acquired wholesome girl friends and/or wives to suit.

With a blonde English wife, Cynthia, and an infant son, Julian, Lennon later described feeling "trapped" in "a happily married state of boredom." Money had never been his main motivation-- rather, as wordsmith and intellectual of the partnership, he sought self-expression, meaning expressing the feelings of his contemporaries, the normal rebellion of any generation against the one before it, delayed for Lennon and those who thought like him by the huge (and not unjustified) self-satisfaction of their elders who had won the war, the peace and in their own minds, the game of life itself.

Aimless, shapeless discontent among young people who felt themselves overshadowed and marginalized by the war generation had already inspired James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Alan Ginsberg's Howl (1956), John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). These one-offs by unknown outsiders, meaningless to mainstream adults, could be ignored-- whereas the Beatles were the Western establishment's own lovable young rascals, with teenage followers in just about every English-speaking home. All that remained to complete the radicalization of youth in the later 'sixties was a new war, a spectacular crisis calling for immediate public action.

I happened to be in Vietnam, covering the first big search-and-destroy operations by American regular troops, in the very same month that Yoko met John. War was again a front-page, news-dominating story. After an on-again, off-again courtship, Lennon left his wife and their posh stockbroker-belt country mansion and set up house with Yoko in a London flat.

In 1968 they released Unfinished Music #1: Two Virgins, a collage of electronic sound recorded on their first night together, with a self-shot nude photograph of the couple on the cover. They married in March 1969, promising to stage many "happenings." The wedding was the first, followed by "Bed Peace" in an Amsterdam hotel, then the huge billboard in Times Square, New York: "WAR IS OVER-- if you want it."

The two Lennons had become the emblematic leaders of a universal cultural revolution. Long matured, the preoccupations of Yoko Ono's vivid Tokyo adolescence had meshed with John Lennon's energies, and given his showy, empty life a sense of purpose, and her art a world audience. Like the o's in Yoko Ono, another train of political and artistic wheels had at last come full circle.

MURRAY SAYLE, an Australian writer long resident in Japan, contributed this account of the intellectual origins of Yoko Ono, in slightly different form, to the catalogue of the multimedia retrospective "YES YOKO ONO," which opened at the Japan Society Gallery, New York, on October 16, 2000. We thank the Japan Society and Ms. Munroe for permission to reproduce the essay as a JPRI Occasional Paper.

END PART Three-
Source Material: http://www.jpri.org/publications/occasionalpapers/op18.html

[oldies8ladies]

why is she famous?
http://www.askmen.com/images/test/spacer.gif
Yoko Ono will fairly or unfairly be cast as the woman that came between the greatest band of all-time, the Beatles. But beneath the surface, Yoko is so much more.

quick bio
http://www.askmen.com/images/test/spacer.gif
Born into a wealthy aristocratic family on February 18, 1933, in Tokyo, Japan, Yoko Ono is the eldest of three children. With a degree in philosophy from Tokyo's Gakushuin University, Ono -- whose first name means "ocean child" -- crossed the ocean and pursued philosophy and music at Sarah Lawrence College after her father was appointed president of a bank in New York. Soon afterwards, she married Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi in 1956.

This was followed by a second marriage with art promoter Tony Cox in 1963. Concurrently, Ono was making a name for herself in performance art, which is what ultimately led to her meeting third husband John Lennon, at a progressive art show in London in 1966. The psychological bond between the artistically gifted Ono and the popular Lennon blossomed into marriage after news of the affair became public in 1968. The "Ballad of John & Yoko" marked a most utopian of relationships. One would channel their creativity through the other, that is, until Lennon's untimely assassination in 1980.

Ono not only influenced Lennon, but also an entire generation of bands, from Talking Heads and Blondie to The B-52's. Lennon and Ono's agenda crossed over from music to social commentary, as evidenced by their numerous "bed-ins" -- most notably during their honeymoon in Amsterdam in 1969. In the years that followed, Ono has been busy with everything from films and concerts, to albums of her own.

To an entire generation, Yoko Ono's legacy will forever be that union with one of the Fab Four. We were most grateful to sit down with the Ocean Child herself to see what she has been up to recently.


http://www.askmen.com/toys/interview/pictures/interview_gif.gif

Q: It is an honor to speak with you Yoko. Tell us about "Kiss Kiss Kiss."

It was on Double Fantasy, the last album for John, and the song was on the album and it was a B-side as well.

Q: When you put out music, do you make an effort to have a "Beatles-link" or do you try to avoid that?

I was not trying to make it related, but in many ways, I guess I was (laughs).

Q: Besides the music, what have you been busy with?

I have been working on a new album -- now I am ready to go in the studio again.

¿ Quick fact ?
With a career as a writer, producer, director, and composer, her latest foray into music was marked by the release of 2001's album, Blueprint For A Sunrise, the first album of new material since 1995's Rising.

Q: Which artists do you like these days?

I just love anybody that does anything in the art world and the artistic world. We just have to keep working and I want everyone in the field to know that we support them.

Q: Where do your influences stem from?

I would say from everywhere, but some people say that it is like the Old Spanish classic theme... but I do not know where they come from, I would say from everywhere...

Q: What do you think of today's boy bands, like 'N Sync, the Backstreet Boys, Bazooka 'N Tulips -- will they have any longevity?

It is okay... but I think that the kind of music that we are doing is okay too... it is like flowers -- we do not all like the same flowers, but they are all nice.

Q: What are your thoughts on the 1960s?

I think that the 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves. Those are nice thoughts, but today we have to know what we want to do and have a sense of what we want; so it is similar I guess, but in a different way. Some things were not right.

Q: Do you still listen to older stuff, like the Beatles?

Yes, once in a while... I still make some judgments on it; what the Beatles did was something incredible, it was more than what a band could do and we have to give them respect...

Source Material: askmen.com

[HongKongDr]

some pictures of Yoko............................................

[HongKongDr]

some more pictures of Yoko..................................................

[HongKongDr]

one more set of Yoko..................................................

[OldiesLover]

Well, well, well... recently, I actually watched Yoko Ono singing in a concert I had heard about, but had never seen. Then the other night, I'm doin' my usual channel surfin'... and guess what? There's Yoko singin' with the Rolling Stones. I'm going to haveta chase that DVD down one of these days.

While watching her in this concert, where she was almost the center of attention, I thought about how brave she had to have been to get on stage with a number of big name rock n' roll stars and hold her own.

Remember, Yoko had limited musical exposure before John came along. Yet, when the two of them got together, within months, Yoko was on stage.

I also watched her in Larry King's Beatles Interviews with Paul, Ringo and George Harrison's widow. It was very obviously that Yoko and Paul are getting along much better in their later years. Which is cool.

Yoko, you're still tops in my book.

I hope if you've accepted my e mail invitation, that you've stopped in and seen this Thread. If you have, please send me an e mail and let me know.
:love:
OldiesLover

[HongKongDr]

NOTE: This is for OldiesLover so he can go to New York and see this show in April;
**********************************************************

YOKO ONO: touch me
Yoko Ono’s first solo New York exhibition since 2003.

In touch me, Yoko Ono will present an interactive painting, film, conceptual photography and sculptures that comment on different facets of the female experience, calling upon the viewers to make direct and deeply personal connections.

Ono’s first New York exhibition since Odyssey of a Cockroach at Deitch Projects in 2003, touch me affords the audience an opportunity to experience her work in a new way.

The exhibition will open to the public on Friday, April 18, from 6 to 8 pm.

For over 40 years, Yoko Ono’s works have defied categorization, existing in the interstices between performance, music, objects and film. As one of the first conceptual artists, and one of the founders of Fluxus—an association of experimental, interdisciplinary artists and writers in the ’60s and ’70s—Ono is cited as a major influence on contemporary artists. She has redefined the boundaries between various movements: conceptual art, performance art, feminist art, and more. Many of her actions have bridged the distance between art and audience participation- which has always been a hallmark of Ono’s work.

A participatory element is central in touch me, in which Ono urges the audience to revitalize and rethink a personal connection to the most current situation women are facing.

The centerpiece of the exhibition will be a large canvas covering the entire width of the gallery. Openings will be cut into the canvas, and viewers are invited to insert body parts through. Encompassed in this simple act are opposing elements of isolation, exposure, vulnerability, and defiance. The viewer will have the option to photograph themselves with supplied cameras; these photos will be displayed together on another canvas with the participant’s own comments and thoughts written underneath the photos, furthering the inclusive nature of this new work.

A 4-screen installation version of Yoko Ono’s 1964 performance Cut Piece, filmed at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965, will act as a counterpart for the metaphoric 2008 work.

Complementing this contemporary work will be Vertical Memory, in which a composite of a male face—combining Ono’s father, husband and son—is contrasted with the artist’s succinct and moving texts describing her passage from birth to death.

Also on view will be Memory Paintings, intimate 19th-century portraits of women; and a sculpture from the series "Family Album (Blood Objects)," representing her mother.

Sky TV will serve as an anchor of hopefulness to the entire exhibition touch me.


In addition to having received the College Art Association’s 2008 Distinguished Body of Work Award, she is also the recipient of the 2002 Skowhegan Medal for Assorted Mediums. Solo exhibitions have recently been presented at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (Sao Paolo), Kunsthalle Bremen, Berkeley Art Museum, Museo di Santa Caterina (Treviso, Italy), and Portikus im Leinwandhaus (Frankfurt), among other venues. She is featured in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and currently on view at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. This August, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld will present a solo exhibition of Ono’s work, entitled Last Supper.


Exhibition: Yoko Ono: touch me
Date: April 18 - May 31, 2008
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 6 pm
Contact: Stephanie Joson, 212 315 0470 or stephanie@galerielelong.com


Source: New York Times

[OldiesLover]

Hummm... I gotta see if I can get ta this... For Sure!
:beautiful::beautiful::beautiful:

[HongKongDr]

Yoko Ono is one of the artists scheduled to perform at the inaugural season of Liverpool's revamped Bluecoats arts centre, which reopens next week after a three-year, £12.5m extension.

Ono - returning more than 40 years after her notorious performance there in 1967, in which she invited her audience to "fly" from a stepladder and handed them shards of a broken vase - will be inviting visitors to write down and share their "wishes", as well as giving a typically unpredictable live performance on April 4.

Ono performs as part of Now Then, a celebration of the history and architecture of the Bluecoat centre, which is central Liverpool's oldest building. It gave Picasso, Van Gogh and Cézanne their first major UK exhibition outside London in 1911.

The new wing, designed by Dutch architects BIQ and opening on March 15, will contain art galleries and a 200-seat performance space.

Among the works on display will be a new painting by twin sisters Amrit and Rabindra Kaur Singh, depicting the Bluecoat and the city during its year as capital of culture, and a monochrome wall painting of plants by Liverpool-born artist Paul Morrison.

Returning to the Bluecoat is, it seems, part of Ono's continuing love affair with Liverpool.

"I fell in love with Liverpool the first time I went there as an artist," she said. "When I arrived, the first thing that caught my eyes was the elegance of the city by the water. Performing at the Bluecoat is an experience I've never forgotten."

SOURCE: The Guardian (british)

[OldiesLover]

Oh yes, Yoko Ono at 75 years old... is still a fighter:

NY judge promises quick ruling in Yoko Ono suit

AP
Posted: 2008-05-20 20:31:33
NEW YORK (AP) - A judge has promised a fast decision in a lawsuit brought by Yoko Ono to get the song "Imagine" taken out of a movie challenging the concept of Darwinian evolution.

A lawyer for the movie's distributors has warned that the litigation could wreck the movie's political message by preventing it from impacting viewers in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential campaign.

The movie, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," features Ben Stein challenging Darwinian theories and suggesting life could have originated through intelligent design. About 20 to 30 seconds of the song are played in the movie.

Ono has accused the movie's producers of infringing the song's copyrights by using it without her permission, giving the impression that the Lennon family had authorized it.


Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

[OldiesLover]

Hummm... After a quick look at this Thread, I don't see Yoko's Web Site, so here it is: http://www.imaginepeace.com/imaginepeace.html

Damn, I love this babe!!!
:beautiful::beautiful::beautiful:

[OldiesLover]

NOTE: This is for OldiesLover so he can go to New York and see this show in April;
**********************************************************

YOKO ONO: touch me
Yoko Ono’s first solo New York exhibition since 2003.



Ok HongKongDr, I am headed to the City May 29th. Hopefully, I can get my meeting over with and get to the Gallery before it closes at 6:00...
:dribble::dribble::dribble:

I'll let ya know if I make it!!!
:love::love::love:

[OldiesLover]

Ok HongKongDr, I am headed to the City May 29th. Hopefully, I can get my meeting over with and get to the Gallery before it closes at 6:00...
:dribble::dribble::dribble:

I'll let ya know if I make it!!!
:love::love::love:


Hummm... Before I forget, or HongKongDr gets back from her trip to the earthquate site in China, I must tell everyone about my lil trip to Yoko Ono's Exhibit.

Yeah, I had a meeting in the City on May 29th, which, along with the usual traffic mess, ran a lil long... But I made it.

It was a fantastic Exhibit. A lil Touchy & Feely for me, but quite interesting in its own way.

Ta tell ya the truth, I liked some of the side exhibits about Yoko and John a lil more. However, you really see how innovative Yoko's mind is. There is nothing guarded about her work, which is interestin' given the turmoil she has been put through.

The whole time, I was hoping that I would see her... but unfortunately, I didn't. But I did walk away with a feeling that for a short time, I was close to her.

Yoko.... You are The BEST!!!
:love::love::love:


P.S. Unfortunately, they did not allow any pictures of the Exhibits.

[OldiesLover]

Finally, I bumped into a halfway decent picture of "Two Virgins."
:exhausted:

The story goes that John and Yoko recorded Two Virgins on May 19, 1968, and then made love for the very first time. hence... 2 Virgins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfinished_Music_No.1:_Two_Virgins

[OldiesLover]

Here's some more Yoko Ono Pictures:
:love:

[OldiesLover]

Here's some more Yoko Ono pictures.

I love to tease my Lil Korean Dragon Lady with Attachment #3, telling her that she better look like Yoko Ono does at 75 years old, when she gets to 75...
:blush:

[OldiesLover]

Of course, Yoko Ono and The Beatles are forever connected...

So here is a rare photo of The Beatles I have never seen until now.

This is The Beatles in 1963, one year before they became famous, and only 5 years before John met Yoko.
:nice:

[OldiesLover]

Some more pictures relating to Yoko Ono.

The first one is at Imagine Circle. The last is of an exhibit at a Wax Museum.

[OldiesLover]

Hummm... I've got this lil Group of Yoko pictures. Kind of an assortment of stuff...

I believe you'll recognize the other Rockers in Attachments 2 and 4:

[OldiesLover]

Some more assorted:

[OldiesLover]

Hopefully I'm not double postin' too much. My Yoko Ono file is sorta thick...
:blush:

[OldiesLover]

And some more stuff...

[OldiesLover]

To Yoko,

I hope you are having a fantastic birthday today.

You are without a doubt, the sexiest 76 year old babe I know of...

keep in touch,


OldiesLover