- From Faith Current: “The Sacred Ordinary: St. Peter’s Church Hall” - May 1, 2023
- A brief (?) hiatus - April 22, 2023
- Something Happened - March 6, 2023
The float right BEFORE the John and Yoko one.
Folks, sorry about that — the site went down yesterday for the most prosaic of reasons, an expired credit card on Autopay. We’re all good now.
…or are we?
I must admit my first thought was all the attackery, hackery and miscellaneous jackery the site’s been suffering over the last year. But no angry Floyd or VU fans were involved. Thank you for all the concerned messages. My favorite was, “Elliot Mintz hasn’t come after you for talking about Yoko and kink, has he??”
To be honest, the single best PR move the Estate could make is to release a statement that John and Yoko were “an ethically non-monogamous couple, in a consensual D/s relationship. As in so many things, John and Yoko were ahead of their time.” Then they’d sponsor themed floats in the Christopher Street Pride Parade, Folsom Street Fair, International Mr. Leather, etc., etc.
WINK: “This float is really gorgeous. It shows John Lennon and Yoko Ono engaged in a voluptuous three-way in early 1969.”
SALLY: “That’s taken from the famous Bag One lithographs, isn’t it?”
WINK: “Indeed it is. According to this sheet, the float is made from white carnations, gardenias, and freesia. And if you look closely, you can see a single Double Fantasy orchid.”
SALLY: “Oooh, I think I see it. It’s sticking out of his—”
WINK: “That’s right, Sally. The flowers will be auctioned off, one by one, with all proceeds going to The Dolphins That Were Choked By All Those Goddamn White Balloons You Released in 1968 Fund.”
Anyway. Let the gabbing about the sex lives of famous strangers recommence. By the way, it’s amazing to me that no one has written a Full Service for the 1960s and 70s. Surely those kinds of arrangements were plentiful. Maybe I just don’t hang out with the right people; for example, after years of being interested in the surpassing weirdness that was Hugh Hefner, I only recently learned of the secret tunnels between the Playboy Mansion and the houses of Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, James Caan and Kirk Douglas.
Patriarchy + earthmoving equipment = trouble.
Related posts:
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Ladies and Gentlemen, The Blues Beatles
Shenk’s “Powers Of Two”: 3 Takes
Discovered! Another bad Beatles lyric
The Bollywood Beatles—I Want To Hold Your Hand
Mob Psycho 100 and the Beatles’ Mop Tops
Why Your Favorite Celebrity Isn’t Who You Think They Are
Marvelous mystery tour
“Get Back” Halftime Report
Emergency forum called — good idea or terrible idea?
It’s Yoko’s birthday. Let the abuse begin.
A John and Yoko movie?
>“Elliot Mintz hasn’t come after you for talking about Yoko and kink, has he??”
Glad I could provide a laugh
Indeed you did! Thank you.
https://oldshowbiz.tumblr.com/post/710485923507421184/buttered-nude
I’m not sure if “Buttered Nude” (“It’s terribly allegorical”) predates Ms. Ono’s creative projects or not, but it certainly sounds like a JohnAndYoko production.
@Michael Gerber,
You gave me a good laugh with this one. I think we’ve touched on this before in one of the comment sections… I agree with you, the kink aspect of John and Yoko is hard to ignore. (Yes, I’m drawing on my own life experience here. Believe me, there is NO shortage of people who like to be told what to do 😀 ).
I don’t know whether John and Yoko thought about their relationship dynamic as kink per se, it’s hard to imagine that they had an overtly acknowledged and negotiated d/s dynamic. But it’s very much the undertone of their relationship – not even the undertone, really. Unfortunately, it ties into some of (what I interpret as) the unhealthy aspects of their relationship: John’s classically codependent vibes, Yoko’s ways of dealing with that, feeding each other’s addictive tendencies, John outsourcing his agency to Yoko, etc.
But back to your post! It would be genuinely smart of the Estate to update the narrative at this point. A great new angle for the 21st century.
@Victoria,
“I don’t know whether John and Yoko thought about their relationship dynamic as kink per se, it’s hard to imagine that they had an overtly acknowledged and negotiated d/s dynamic.”
Re: The first part of your sentence:
Did J&Y think of their relationship as unconventional, extremely sexually arousing, and challenging to others, all things that we’d describe as “kink”? Yes they did, and said as much constantly. Given their overtly D/s public-facing selves–including that photo of John kneeling before Yoko–I find it highly unlikely that they didn’t think about their relationship in the same way contemporary people think of kink, whatever they called it privately. J&Y did the thing we call D/s, they knew they were doing it, they got off on it, but they did it idiosyncratically, because there weren’t websites and podcasts and so forth to standardize the community.
Re: The second part of your sentence:
Two hallmarks of contemporary D/s seem to be 1) the borrowing of a classic “coming out” style paradigm where some folks involved in D/s want it to be something publicly known about them; and 2) the adapting of legal forms in the spelling out of a relationship’s parameters. The first I have no opinion on, but can say that in my experience IN GENERAL even young, even highly sexual people were more private about the particulars of their sexuality in earlier eras. Yes, there were outliers, but identity was constructed, maintained, and circulated very differently prior to the internet, and social media.
Lest you think this is just me making something up out of my own anecdotal data (which to some degree it must be), think about the photos of Robert Mapplethorpe; that kind of content was INCONCEIVABLE 10-15 years earlier as a subject for publication/distribution. Not as a thing people did–people were doing it in 1959 on places like the Reeperbahn, and probably private residences all over too–but as a thing memorialized on film and widely disseminated. Kink is popular culture today, that’s new; if J&Y were in a consensual D/s relationship in 1968 or 73 or even 1980, it would’ve been beyond risky to say so publicly.
This is a long way of saying I think the power dynamic in their relationship was absolutely acknowledged by both of them and whatever they called it, it occupied the same psychological space we assign to “kink”; they practically talked about nothing else in joint interviews. Were they conscious and careful in all the ways contemporary D/s people seem to be, based on digital knowledge sharing and general “best practices”? Probably not. I think they were both impetuous in the extreme and making it all up as they went along.
@Michael Gerber,
As always, thank you for the detailed reply! I’m a bit younger than you (15-20 years?) and from a different cultural context, so your points are well taken.
I agree with you in all this. Add to that, neither of them seem like emotionally stable people. I guess my main point is that I don’t think that their practice of kink can really be separated from the maladaptive aspects of their relationship, which is… unfortunate.
On the subject of John and Yoko and kink, Giuliano wrote that John had a collection of S&M manikins stored in the basements of the Dakota. And yes, that was manikins, the dummies typically used to simulate medical procedures; not mannequins, as in used to display clothes.
It’s Giuliano though… a lot of what he says should be taken with a large grain of salt.