What Have You Done?

Twenty-eight years ago, when I heard a voice on the radio say "John Lennon is dead" ...

Instinctively I steered directly to my old job, to the student newspaper office at Illinois State, to see what I could find on the UPI wire machine and to help with whatever the staff was planning to run. There I met another friend who had the same idea. We were both townies, both still lived near after our respective college "careers," still kept in touch with the newspaper staff. Both of us puzzled at the emptiness of the front offices and the lack of activity in the production room, until the new editor came in. He guessed what we were there for, saying, "Yeah, we heard the news, but wanted to meet the printer's deadline."

1980 and things had changed before our eyes, those who came after had already chosen a new and unexpected path from our own. We would have run a special issue, "deadlines be damned," but these "kids" (three or four years our junior) were too young by birth to carry any unconditional love for Beatles. That's how it was in the those days: you were either old enough to remember seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan's show or you thought Paul McCartney was just the guy who had a band called Wings.

1980: To most of the disaffected youth we knew, Jimmy Carter gave peace a bad name in his failure to deal with pretty much everything, while Reagan picked up enough of those who still felt they had to care about something, coloring the campus world in hues far different from the post 60s era we tried fruitlessly to keep flowering. Hindsight shows a view of us being too busy with a culture we were too young for, that we never got around to making one pure of the past and unquestionably our own. What kind of youth movement revels in the past, instead of rejecting it? Or, is that the way it always appears to be from the outside?

Whatever the past, our future would be one without Lennon the man. His works, his words, his thoughts would continue and we could use whatever time was left to make some sense, something good with them.

So this is Christmas and what have you done?

Not done yet, John...

Leave your own memories here.


WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It) from Yoko Ono on Vimeo.

Phone Good

I've noticed a consistent problem pattern while learning how to text message with my LG phone. It uses the T9Abc mode, the so-called predictive mode that gives you the most common result for your pattern of keypunching -- for example, when I press 4-3-5-5-6 the word “Hello” appears.

The accuracy of the mode is very impressive. I also appreciate that the mind gets some type of exercise during composition of the most innocuous phrases, as well, when the word you want does not appear. You just have to come up with another word. However, I really wish I could type the word “home” – you know, like when you want to say, “I’ll be home, soon.” “Home” – pressing 4-6-6-3 -- always comes out “good”. “I’ll be home, soon” becomes “I’ll be good, soon.” “Call me when you get home” becomes “Call me when you get good.” “Are you home?” becomes “Are you good?”

Moreover, if it had been around during the Sammy Sosa/Mark McGwire baseball battles it would have been extremely inaccurate. “Home run” becomes “Good run.” Or Dorothy would have been texting over and over "There's no place like good. There's no place like good. There's no place like good."

What would E.T. have done with this? “Phone home" becomes “Phone good.” Sounds more like an endorsement of AT&T by the Frankenstein monster… but perhaps that is what this somehow has all been leading up to, another form of advertisement. “Phone good.”