Tuesday's Fortune: 10 April 2012

MEAL: 2 Shrimp Egg Rolls + 1 small order Curry Pork = $6.55 + $1.45 tip

Hotcha! Hank

Something 4 The Weekend # 216

Yoko Ono: A Story: "Yes I'm A Witch" [mp3]

I love Yoko Ono.

Over the years, she's become a litmus test of sorts. When I hear a person making fun of Yoko, or bitch about her, or claim she's only famous for marrying John Lennon, I immediately question everything that person thinks or believes about pop culture, art, and even life.

Yoko Ono was an engaging, challenging, self-contained artist and person before she met Lennon. I'm pretty certain those qualities, among many others, is what made Lennon fall in love with her from the start. And it's not important whether or not one likes her art and music. I'll be the first to admit that it's not for everybody, and even someone like me, who adores Yoko Ono, doesn't like everything she's done. But it's important, to me anyways, that we recognize and respect the fact that she puts herself and her art/music/ideas out there for scrutiny. Especially when that art/music isn't the beige, lifeless kind of pablum that so many of us embrace so readily. Many of us don't want to be challenged or provoked, we just want to be entertained. Those kinds of people are generally as beige and lifeless as their music collections.

I work with a woman who was/is a bonafide '60's hippie. She has a bumpersticker on her Prius that reads I STILL BLAME YOKO. I asked her one day why she hates Yoko, knowing full well what her answer would be - "She's the reason The Beatles broke up."

So I asked her, "Don't you think it was John and Paul's massive egos that broke that band up, and Yoko is just a convenient scapegoat?", to which she replied, "That's just a bunch of nonsense."

I'm at a loss for words, so I'll just say it again - I love Yoko Ono. You don't have to, but you probably should.

"Every time you do what you want to do, you're living."

Hotcha! Hank

Approximately Inevitable Ono Maneuver

Yoko Ono: "Fly"

Hank Mohaski: "Hotcha!"

Delayed Thurston Sideways Maneuver

"Bow down to the queen of noise."

So yeah, this is a video for "Ono Soul", a song off Thurston Moore's solo debut, Psychic Hearts, and it's a tight piece of lumpen cuz I [heart] Thurston, and Psychic Hearts is a damn solid album of SY Pop Lite stylings, and I also [heart] Yoko Ono quite alot. I love her so much, in fact, that I even wrote and recorded two different songs about her..."Onoboner" from approximately 1988, and "Usflux" in 2000. Some sunny day in 2012, I will write a third.

Beatle fans and critics in general who hate Yoko and think she ruined and broke up the Beatles aren't really true fans or good critics. Yoko Ono was the best thing that ever happened to John Lennon as an artist, and probably as a person, and in turn, a more interesting Lennon made for a more interesting Beatles...

We are all products of our influences - even the Beatles, who escaped their Skiffle roots through Bob Dylan and his weed, George Martin's studio prowess, Indian music and spirituality, Buck Owens, LSD, and Yoko Ono, just to name a few. The White Album is a monumental collage of all these influences and dozens more, and it is certainly their most interesting and musical recording, if not their defining one. Personally, I think Sgt. Peppers is a fine pop record, but it's probably only my fifth or sixth favorite Beatle record.

For her part, Yoko was doing her own thing, her own songs and recordings, which were/are just as diverse and interesting as The White Album, if not quite as appealing musically (depending on yr tastes)...Her singing in particular, can oftentimes be tough for Western minds to get with, as we don't tend to like and appreciate atonal music the way Eastern people do...Still, at other times, she sang straightforward ballads that tend to appeal to our Western sensibilities, and they're quite lovely...She worked with Ornette Coleman and John Cage, the guys from Can, and our man, Zappa, to name just a few...To dismiss Yoko Ono as a musical dilettante is definitely short-sighted, and the rest comes down to taste, I guess...

Dada...Fluxus...NYC No Wave...The ButterScotch Threshold...

Those are some of my tastes, and I [heart] Thurston and Yoko and the approximately infinite universe they reflect and inspire.

Hotcha! Hank