Backbeat.  The Hours and Times.  I Wanna Hold Your Hand.  Fictionalized accounts of The Beatles constitute, by now, a genre of their own, and range in quality from the barely watchable to the dreadful (and while not a strict account per se, I utterly loathed Across The Universe).  Joining those films in October is Nowhere Boy, a chronicle of the early days of John Lennon.

While the below trailer for the bio-pic looks, well, like a trailer for a bio-pic, the film stars the reliably amazing Kristin Scott Thomas as Lennon’s Aunt Mimi (a rare, ‘81 clip of the real Mimi Smith follows at the bottom).

I’m also somewhat intrigued by Nowhere Boy‘s director, Sam Taylor-Wood.  She’s the British artist with a thing for decaying still-lives.  If you’ve never seen her A Little Death video, an ode to “the transience of biological life” featuring a rapidly decaying cobra rabbit, check it out here. 

After overcoming two bouts with cancer—breast and colon—Taylor-Wood is now in a relationship with Nowhere Boy‘s Lennon, actor Aaron Johnson, who’s 23 years her junior.  The couple are expecting the birth of their first child somewhere around the time Nowhere Boy opens in the U.S.

 
A voyeuristic and mesmerizing tribute to key Fluxus player and muse to Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys, the experimental cellist Charlotte Moorman. Listen to personal phone messages to Moorman from the likes of John and Yoko, John Cage, Paik and others and drink in that good old-timey analog tape phone machine atmosphere.

 
A Trove of Archival Performances by Charlotte Moorman (UBUWEB)

 
Very powerful and sad clip made by Yoko a few years ago for this amazing tune from one of the best Beatles solo LPs. Tears.

 
Ringo Starr is saying “who cares” to the Vatican’s late embrace of The Beatles. Starr rolled his eyes at the Catholic Church, which praised the group and expressed forgiveness to John Lennon for his comments that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

“Didn’t the Vatican say we were satanic?” Starr said during an interview with CNN. “And they still forgive us?”

“I think [the Vatican] has more to talk about than The Beatles,” he added, alluding to the child sex abuse scandal that continues to plague the church.

The Vatican offered its latest peace offering to The Beatles in its recent issue of L’Osservatore Romano, its official newspaper, on Monday.

“It’s true they took drugs, lived life to excess because of their success, even said they were bigger than Jesus and put out mysterious messages that were possibly even satanic,” the newspaper said.

But, “what would pop music have been like without The Beatles?” it reasoned, describing the band’s music as “beautiful.”

The Vatican doesn’t appear to be extending the same kind of olive branch to other popular bands, such as Pink Floyd, Queen, Black Sabbath and The Eagles.

In 1996, those groups were among several - including The Beatles - that Pope Benedict XVI warned youth against listening to when he was still a cardinal, claiming their music contained “subliminal” satanic influences.

Lennon’s full quote was “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” We suspect the late Beatle would feel the same about the Vatican’s volte-face as Starr does.
 

 
Ringo Starr tells Vatican to ‘Get Back’; dismisses effort to ‘forgive’ The Beatles (NY Daily News)
 

The Daily Telegraph in Australia reports that John Lennon’s lost LSD stash—the one he buried like psychedelic pirate treasure after the Beatles “gave up drugs” in 1967—has been located. Unfortunately, all the acid has dried up and so now you will never know what Tomorrow Never Knows.

HARDCORE fans of The Beatles legend John Lennon uncovered where in the grounds of his Surrey, southern England, home he hid his stash of LSD more than 40 years ago.

Builders digging up the lawn of his old house, Kenwood, came across the remains of a leather holdall containing several large broken glass bottles, The Sun reports.

Legend has it that Lennon buried a large quantity of the drug in his garden in 1967 when The Beatles declared they had given up drugs in favour of transcendental meditation.

But when the band returned from India, John decided he had been a bit hasty and tried to dig it up - but never found it.

Now fans are convinced these bottles contained the missing treasure - though they will never know for sure as the one bottle found intact had a cracked cork, so it was empty.

(Daily Telegraph: John Lennon enthusiasts uncover singer’s hidden LSD stash)

(The Beatles Stereo Box Set)

 
It may take 10 minutes for you to see it, but it’s there. Trust me.
 
(via The World’s Best Ever)

 
An open letter in the underground press that accused the Beatles of going soft and selling out to the establishment, comparing John Lennon’s call for pacifism in “Revolution” to a BBC radio soap opera, and conferring superior revolutionary credentials on the Rolling Stones, so incensed the Beatle that he spent six hours 40 years ago giving an interview to a couple of college students offering a rebuttal that was finally published today in the pages of the New Statesman magazine.

In 1968, Maurice Hindle and a friend hitch-hiked to Surrey to meet Lennon, who picked them up personally at the train station in his Mini Cooper. Yoko Ono fed them homemade macrobiotic bread and jam. Lennon spoke nearly continuously for six hours.

He says “Revolution” was no more revolutionary than Mrs Dale’s Diary. So it mightn’t have been. But the point is to change your head - it’s no good knocking down a few old bloody Tories! What does he think he’s gonna change? The system’s what he says it is: a load of crap. But just smashing it up isn’t gonna do it.

Hindle writes “Lennon demanded Black Dwarf publish his response, which took [writer John] Hoyland to task for his “patronizing” tone, and ended with the defiant challenge: “You smash it—and I’ll build around it.”
 

 
The full interview is only available in the print edition of New Statesman magazine.

Last Friday on Twitter, Yoko Ono announced that she’d answer questions tweeted to @yokoono on her website and mine was one of the ones she answered:

@RichardMetzger
Do you find that children ?��Ǩ?�get?��Ǩ�� your conceptual art pieces better than adults?

@yokoono
Not necessarily. There are kids who think they are grown ups and don?��Ǩ�Ѣt want to know anything that smells like kids stuff. And there are grown-ups who are still kids at heart who clearly get my work.

I love Yoko Ono. I am a complete Yoko Ono fanatic, so this was a wonderful thing. It made my day! You can read the rest of the Yoko Q & A here.

And you can watch her perform “Whole Lotta Yoko” with “The Dirty Mac” (Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell, Keith Richards and John Lennon) as part of the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus below:

If TMZ had been around in the 60s, you can bet that D.A. Pennbaker’s famous film of John Lennon and Bob Dylan “clearly fucked up on junk” in the back of Dylan’s limo would have made it to their blog and been blasted all over the Internet. But it wasn’t until the mid-80s when the videotape trading underground really took off, that copies made their way into collector’s eager hands (I had a copy). Now it’s easy to see, of course, on YouTube.

I’d always read that Dylan was extremely drunk and that Lennon was tripping or else just stoned, but maybe they were on something stronger. Lennon would know, right? It would explain the vomit talk, I guess! Dylan is obviously out of his mind on something and makes little, if any sense. Lennon seems a little embarrassed but still willing to play along. Whatever surreal flights of rock god verbal fantasy they had planned for this filming, the results were something rather less than coherent.

This is history baby. Not like great history or anything, but history nonetheless…

Famous People on Drugs (YouTube link)

Famous People Still on Drugs (YouTube link)

The John Lennon Bit (scroll down)

Dylan vs Lennon (transcript)

I like how he’s confused by the rules of American Football. I doesn’t make any sense to me, either, and I’m American… (HT Mikki Halpin)