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.

WHEN JOHN MET MARK

Another kind of double fantasy.

by Andy Nowicki

Their brush with one another was the paradigmatic encounter between the Celebrity and the Nobody, the "have" and the "have-not" of the postmodern age, an era which hypocritically blasts endless PSAs about "equality," "democracy," and "self-esteem" while implicitly deriding non-celebrities as losers, wastes of space, and living beings unworthy of life.

The meeting outside of Manhattan's tony Dakota building between John Winston Ono Lennon and Mark David Chapman would result in the former's murder and the latter's lifelong incarceration. It would provoke numerous public expressions of grief from hundreds of thousands of people who felt their lives were somehow affected by the death of a man they'd never met.