MR YOKO ONO

by Colin Liddell

NOTE: I wrote this take-down of John Lennon and the battle over his dubious legacy for Tokyo Journal in 2000, on the twentieth anniversary of his death, after a visit to the John Lennon Museum in Japan. It is one of the 22 pieces included in my first book Interviews and Obituaries, available on Amazon.

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20 years after he was gunned down outside a New York apartment block, John Lennon is still with us. Here in Japan, he's with us even more, following the recent opening of a museum dedicated to him in Saitama.

SYMPATHY FOR THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES

by Colin Liddell

Their Satanic Majesties Request is, to my mind, the most British and therefore the most authentic of all Rolling Stones albums. Their characteristic hard-driving blues is put on the back-burner and suffused through a veil of psychedelia and English whimsy with which the band were seldom associated.

MANSON AS THE MICROCOSM OF THE CONVENIENCE OF EVIL

Never mind the banality of evil, what about its convenience?

by Duns Scotus

Well, Charles Manson, the well-known celebrity "psycho-killer" has finally passed away. Actually, he never actually killed anyone himself, always getting his followers to do the dirty work. In many ways he was a brilliant and talented man. He certainly had plenty of charisma, and could probably have taught us all a great deal about group dynamics and PUA. But dead he is.

He will partly be remembered as someone who showed the World that the "peace n' love" Sixties had a distinctly dark side.

REVIEW: BLOOD IN THE SQUARE

Blood in the Square
by John Bean
Ostara Publications, 119 pages
Available for purchase from Amazon here

Reviewed by Mike Newland

Few reading this will have direct experience of living in the earlier 1960s – let alone that distant time shortly after the end of WWII.

Much of it to those who were there seems like a dream so great has been our disillusion as the high hopes of sunlit uplands dissolved into a decaying country of which we are being dispossessed. But to understand the now we need to grasp how we got to where we are and how it could have happened.

John Bean’s new novel is shrewdly set in the world of Britain just before our accelerating fall.

2030: WHEN WWII FINALLY ENDS

by Brett Stevens

See, long ago there was a war. This wasn't the first great war, but the beginnings of all modern wars. There were a bunch of peasants and a few kings. One day the peasants rose up and took over and killed off the kings. Thus began the instability. That was 1789, in a place called France.