JOHN & YOKO WEDDING
20 March 1969:
John & Yoko get married and begin their lifelong campaign for Peace.
“We decided that if we were going to do anything like get married that we would dedicate it to peace. And during that period, because we are what we are, it evolved that somehow we ended up [...]
Friday QandA day: Ask me an interesting question, tag it #yokoQandA and I’ll answer 10-15 every week on IMAGINEPEACE.com love, yoko
BabyBearHaruka
Is there any way to get rid of depressed feeling? lost my loved one 9 months ago, i don’t know how i start or what should do first.
As you know, I lost mine in a [...]
A QUIET REVOLUTION by YOKO ONO
SPEECH FOR OXFORD UNIVERSITY ON MARCH 10, 2010
A butterfly is hopping from flower to flower. Oh, good. I think. The butterfly is busybodying as usual. Peace reins. But what is the butterfly really doing?
When a tiny movement like the flapping of the wings of a butterfly brings about a big [...]
Yoko Ono is forever associated with the Beatles, yet her aristocratic family life in imperial Japan, long before she met John Lennon, was equally intriguing. For the first time, she opens up the Ono family album.
Yoko is back in Japan for a three-week trip and, for the first time, has agreed to a journalist accompanying her to write about this side of her multi-faceted life. This is also the first time she has agreed to open up in depth about her childhood, her awkward, distant upbringing in a quasi-aristocratic family in Tokyo, and Lennon’s relationship with her parents. Only now is she truly comfortable returning to Japan.
Karuizawa is an old summer resort in Japan very much like the Hamptons except it’s in the mountains. There is a coffee house in a pine forest near Karuizawa. John & I fell in love with the place, and found ourselves going there almost every day with Sean. To get there, you had to go cycling for about 30 minutes from the town of Karuizawa. But we loved going there. There was a big hammock in the backyard, and John, Sean and I used to spend the afternoon lying in it, giggling, singing, and watching the sky…
Many people believe that in this age, art is dead. They despise the artists who show in galleries and are caught up in the traditional art world. Artists themselves are beginning to lose their confidence. They don’t know whether they are doing something that still has value in this day and age where the social problems are so vital and critical. I wondered myself about this. Why am I still an artist? And why am I not joining the violent revolutionaries? Then I realized that destruction is not my game. Violent revolutionaries are trying to destroy the establishment. That is good. But how? By killing? Killing is such an artless thing….
The Other Rooms is a sequel to Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, a now classic artist’s book that was first published in 1964 and became a cult classic following its wider distribution after 1970.
Matching the satisfyingly compact size of Grapefruit, and beautifully bound in white cloth, The Other Rooms is conceived as a series of rooms that unfold the story of, in the words of the artist, “the life of a woman seeing through the eyes of her son.”
Courtney Love: “I’d just had Frances and Kurt came into the hospital with a Yoko Ono boxset and I threw it at his head. I was so offended by it, because of what it meant. He thought that was cool, I did not at the time. He loved Yoko Ono and he loved her work. Then I got round to listening to it and I thought she was quite brilliant. Bizarre but brilliant. She sticks with her own thing. Why was I offended? Because she got so much shit – I wrote in the song: “You don’t fuck with the fabulous four, or you spend the rest of your life picking things up off the floor””.
Yoko Ono is one of the most polarizing figures in rock ‘n’ roll history. The people that love her LOVE her and the people who don’t love her never will. Aside from being married to John Lennon, she also created the blueprint for avant-punk and electronic music, and remixes of her songs have been regularly charting in the top ten of Billboard’s dance music chart for the last decade. Ono has an amazing new CD, Between My Head and the Sky, that continues her artistic progression and has to be the greatest rock record ever recorded by a 76-year-old.
Yoko Ono still wants to reconnect humanity with its long-lost id. From Fluxus to songstress, the 77-year-old has used every free-associative vocal, literary, and visual avant-garde tool at her disposal to help resuscitate the uncensored thoughts of audiences around the world. Born in 1933 in Japan, Ono was the first female artist to market experimental primal wails as legitimate music at a time when demure vulnerability was prized over a woman’s angst-ridden screams. Her proto-feminist punk, often orgasmic vocals were inspired by childbirth; musically, her spawn includes bands like Deerhoof, Animal Collective, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill and the whole riot grrrl gang- who owe their flagrant embrace of the loud and the absurd to Ono’s radical displays of freedom.
Last year, Yoko Ono revived the Plastic Ono Band for its first studio album in decades, “Between My Head and the Sky.” It’s hard to blame her for the delay; her time has been occupied by making art, campaigning for peace and handling the affairs of her late husband, John Lennon. Ono, 76, tells us it was their son, Sean, who suggested bringing back the group – which at points counted Eric Clapton, Keith Moon and Frank Zappa as members – with a new lineup that includes Japanese indie-rockers Cornelius and Yuka Honda. The Plastic Ono Band kicks off this year’s Noise Pop Festival with a performance Thursday at Oakland’s Fox Theater.
by Kimberly Chun, SF Bay Guardian
MUSIC The simplest, most singular words and images have always been Yoko Ono’s most potent artistic tools — depth charges designed for maximum impact, unexpected wit, and subtly change-inducing effect. And though words like “empowerment” feel too tapped-out to draw from the same power source as Ono-connected words like “yes” [...]
The legendary artist reconvenes Plastic Ono Band for her first local shows in years. By Jay Ruttenberg, Time Out New York
There’s a great old yarn about an avant-garde figure who emerges from a mental institution in the late ’60s and attends an event downtown. John Lennon and Yoko Ono make their entrance. “Who’s the guy with Yoko?” the avant-gardist inquires. The anecdote isn’t inconceivable. Before her path collided with Lennon’s, Ono was, of course, a macher in an art underground that paid no heed to popular culture.
Yoko Ono began 2010 by participating in “Art Adds,” a project that exhibits her artwork on New York City taxicabs. Replacing advertisements that traditionally decorate the rooftops of taxis, Ono’s peace-promoting works (along with pieces by Alex Katz and Shirin Neshat) move throughout the city as a kind of public art. In Carol Vogel’s New York Times article about the project, Ono likens the experience to a dance, saying, “The message is always in motion.”
9. YOKO ONO
She has borne herself with more integrity and dignity than all her critics combined. She has generated an incredible body of work — articulate, experimental, feminist, inspirational — as 1992’s massive Ono Box Set proves. She positively influenced John Lennon — possibly the most important popular music icon of late 20th century — encouraging him to lose his misogyny and become politically active. (She was also directly responsible for Lennon’s finest work, the primal scream therapy of Plastic Ono Band.) She has influenced generations of left-field musicians, from PiL to Sonic Youth to Huggy Bear. Ono is America’s most underrated artist.
“Out on the ocean, sailing away / I can hardly wait for you to come of age” (Beautiful Boy, John Lennon)
by Sean Lennon, Times Online
I don’t belong to that group of people who keep their childhoods neatly folded and tucked away, seldom seen, in a dresser drawer. My memories are scattered about the room like dust mites floating in sunlight. I’m unable to climb aboard even the tiniest steam train of thought without running over old origami animals in the Wild West of my youth.
by MitchdeFarla, AltSounds
Yoko Ono needs no introductions. She has been making music for 40+ years, is an artist, a political activist and most famously of all (for me anyway) she was the love of the late John Lennon’s life. Together the pair proved an unstoppable force both making music together and in particular for their [...]
Photo by Greg Kadel ©2009 Yoko Ono
by Tony Bonyata, Concertlivewire.com, Jan. 6, 2010
She’s been referred to as a witch, a dragon lady and, perhaps most famously (and inaccurately, it should be noted), as the woman who single-handedly broke up The Beatles. While Yoko Ono first made her name in the early ’60s through her provocative [...]
Video of live performances of the songs “Calling” and “Higa Noboru” by Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band on Bokura No Ongaku TV Show, Tokyo, Japan 30 Aug 2009.
IMAGINE PEACE TOWER
Viðey Island, Reykjavík, Iceland
with stars, clouds and the Northern Lights.
Christmas Day, 25 Dec 2009, 10:53pm
AFFIRMATION FOR 2010
by Yoko Ono
I would like you to share an affirmation with me.
Think it, say it, with firm belief, knowing that we are all one.
In the name of truth, peace and love:
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Our planet [...]
