I Read the News Today O Boy (Fuck You, Mark David Chapman Edition)

Over at Ragged Thots, Robert A. George runs through memories of John Lennon, who was killed a quarter of century ago today by the worst-ever explicator of apparent urine-swilling proto-slacker J.D. Salinger. Writes George:

I never saw him play live and, in many ways, only got to know him posthumously (I raced out and picked up multiple magazines, books and Beatles compilations…could get my hand on. True fact: My first Playboy was the one on the stands the week after the murder -- with a Lennon/Ono interview that issue's featured article)….I am still thankful for his imagination, inspiration and talent that created treasures for millions.

He also tells a story of how mourning Lennon's death helped forge a friendship that continues to this day. Whole thing here.

The NY Post marks the day with a good editorial, "John Lennon, New Yorker," which recounts Lennon's famous Valentine to Fun City:

"He enjoyed New York very much. He said if he lived in the time of Rome he would want to be in Rome. He said New York was similar in the sense that it was the center of the world, certainly the center of the creative world."

Where were you when learned Lennon had been shot? I was coming home way late from high school reading group where we'd been puzzling over some opaque European modernist novel. As I entered the house, my father--a World War II vet who hated hippies and hardhats with equal vigor and who had stopped paying attention to popular culture once Ernie Kovacs wrecked his car--told me that one of "those Beatles" had been shot. Which one, I asked. "Not the one with the nose," he said. "The one with the wife." (Years ago, I gave props to the much- and unfairly maligned Yoko Ono in the pages of Suck, of all places).

A few years back in Reason, Charles Paul Freund explained "Why we still listen to the Beatles."