… John Waters on the death of the century …
Missing John Lennon Part 1
Missing John Lennon Part 2
“And here is the greatest of all ironies. One of the main legacies of what we remember as the Sixties revolution was the final redundancy of God. The idea of man’s subjugation or inferiority to some external power became an acute sense of embarrassment to those of us who thought ourselves citizens of this modern age. And yet, the period since the 1960s has been characterized, particularly in Europe, by unparalleled attempts to establish an alternative, earthly seat of power, to which we might hand over control of our lives. All our great beliefs are still in powers outside of ourselves – in the free market, the European Union, the United States, the Internet, the motivating effect of self-interest. The age of individual freedom has yielded a generation more passive, less enterprising and possessed of less faith in itself, or in the power of people or peoples, than perhaps any previous generation in the history of mankind….It is hard to imagine all this taking place had John Lennon been still around to name it. And it is inconceivable for someone who understood human freedom in such a profound and transcendental way would not have railed long and loudly against the abuse of the revolution he had been a central figure in fermenting … He taught us how to be brutally honest and then to realize that, no matter what we come to say, it’s never anything like the full truth. ‘Language and song is to me, apart from being pure vibrations, just like trying to describe a dream. And because we don’t have telepathy or whatever it is, we try to describe the dream to each other, to verify to each other what we know, what we believe is inside each other. But no matter how you say it, it’s never how you want to say it. Because the words are irrelevant’.”