No Longer Past Your Bedtime

Let’s attach something to a news story of June 19th, 2009, wherein Sean Ono Lennon is shocked that Bruce Springsteen should be chosen to headline at the Glastonbury Music Festival. In my blogs of June 14th and June 17th I bring up May Pang, the girlfriend John Lennon left when he returned to Yoko Ono in 1974 (Sean Ono Lennon was born the following year, 1975. Lennon and Ono reunited at an Elton John concert Thanksgiving 1974, a concert in which Lennon made his last onstage appearance - unadvertised, with me in the audience, this being one month after I worked for close Lennon friend Howard Smith). In both instances, Conan O’Brien, the new host of “The Tonight Show”, is included with my reference to May Pang. Now I know that some may think of it as six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but it so happens that the person who plays drums for Bruce Springsteen, Max Weinberg, is also one of Conan O’Brien’s two primary sidekicks (Andy Richter being the other, and before Andy Richter’s return, Weinberg was O’Brien’s main sidekick). If connecting Conan O’Brien to Bruce Springsteen through Max Weinberg is six degrees of Kevin Bacon, then so is the connection between you and your grandparents. Important artistic collaborations are not like two people sitting next to each other on a subway.

I began this blog with the words, “let’s attach something”. There are circumstances when those words are not unlike a person lifting weights, the person being the barbell, the things that can legitimately be attached to the person being weight plates. The analogy breaks down easily however, such as when one considers that how you attach something is a factor, it can lift the person up, weigh them down, be neutral, even vary in effect depending on what day it is, whatever. There are numerous other effects attaching something to a person can have. Attaching something to someone oftentimes is limited to affecting perception of the person. Attaching something to a person can be as variable as a moldable, unsculpted piece of clay added to a sculpted piece of clay.

The father of Sean Lennon, John Lennon, being high profile to say the least, was no stranger to the experience of having many, many things attached to oneself, and it naturally continues. Many would like to freeze the image they have of John Lennon, nothing further to be attached or subtracted, which may be a somewhat inappropriate thing to do with regard to so explosive an entity. I for one am glad that even in death the book does not close so completely regarding certain people.

Much has been channeled by people towards John Lennon, during his life and afterward, and I believe there are many ways in which such channeling has shown wisdom, as it was his special handling of the tidal waves of energy that were channeled towards him that seems to have been among the things that made him so special, so great an artist. So much so, that the channeling/special handling continues to this day, and will perhaps always continue.

It is clear to see in many ways how the biological offspring of John Lennon are “recipients” of much that was John Lennon. This is colloquially known as simple biology, DNA, or whatever words they use to describe it in grade school these days (it all has something to do with sex, or so I’ve heard, although there are also other ways that two people make a baby, storks are involved I think – but perhaps I digress). John Lennon’s offspring have also benefitted monetarily from John Lennon, though from here one could get into a more complicated area: Among other ideas, there’s the belief that our parent’s DNA can include things that have an impact upon certain (money-making) endeavors (musical genius), or the idea that people remembering their love of Lennon and/or their appreciation of Lennon the artist may have contributed, directly or indirectly, to the (money-making) endeavors of Lennon’s offspring.

I believe there exists the standpoint from which one can formulate the theory that John Lennon deliberately chose me as a major recipient of a “certain chunk” of the things that had been channeled towards him, that he saw that I possessed “special handling” abilities to be applied towards things he "sent" to me. To come up with a precise definition for this “certain chunk” one might need to call upon the abilities of a genius, but this complication of having difficulty finding a definition should not in itself obstruct the ability to recognize its existence. I have elsewhere described what I regard as conscious actions by John Lennon in relation to me. Yet it requires imagination to appreciate the idea that a complex artist, the recipient of tidal waves of energy from people all around the world who were outside of his social world, a man whose childhood included living in proximity to but not with his own mother, might develop a complex way of channeling that transcended those immediately in contact with him. I believe Lennon recognized the idea that one in some kind of nearly direct proximity was close enough to throw a football to, or one’s section of a physics equation.

I also believe in the movie, “Hellboy 2”, which I just saw on TV yesterday – just kidding. However, this movie did include a concept that one sees over and over again, the idea that a power can be broken into pieces, and that the unification of the pieces activates the power. This can be true of smaller amounts of money being brought together to make a greater sum, or pieces of ideas that are only powerful when brought together. It is a common concept found in many different areas, not just mythologies. It is a concept that can inspire a person to be an artist, it is the idea that the whole might not always be greater than the sum of its parts, but the whole is almost invariably different from the sum of its parts.

Is there something bigger than a breadbox waiting to come into being from some kind of a coming together between myself and Sean Ono Lennon? Should the proximity between myself and Sean Lennon remain locked in the moment he raised the question of whether Bruce Springsteen should headline Glastonbury? Is Springsteen at Glastonbury really something to complain about? Or is Lennon's statement transparently, for those who read my blogs, apropos of my having, immediately previous to it, repeatedly referred to Conan O'Brien in relation to May Pang in relation to myself?