WHERE ARE YOU SINCE JOHN LENNON DIED? By Brad Schreiber [For Entertainment Weekly] Twenty years ago, I stood on the Marina Green in San Francisco on a chilly night with hundreds of other people. We held flickering candles and listened as scores of small radios and boom boxes, tuned to a particular station, resoundingly broadcast the voice of John Lennon and the music of The Beatles. It was remarkable, for the songs and messages went down into the turf and welled up, from everywhere. But when the subterranean song was "Happy Xmas (War is Over)," with John singing the opening, "And so this is Christmas/And what have you done?," I cried and cried and a part of me is crying still. And so it's 2000. Friday, December 8 marks the twentieth anniversary of the murder of John Lennon in front of the Dakota in New York City. A "Peace Flame Candle" will be lit in Hollywood next to his star in front of the Capitol Records building at 8:23 PM Pacific, the time of his passing. Simultaneously, another candle will be ignited in Strawberry Fields in New York's Central Park. The Beatles need not be your favorite group, as they are mine, to feel the cruel irony, still, that John Lennon, the embodiment of humor and compassion and irreducible belief in love and peace, should be cut down by an assassin's bullet. When a leader who espouses the better principles of humanity is killed--Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John Lennon, et.al.--a dark bubble forms in the mind. It is the malevolent doubt of improving our world and despite our losses, we must fight it at all costs. We have a legacy given to us by Lennon and The Beatles and it has been duly appreciated in this memorial year. The Beatles Anthology (Chronicle Books) is an unprecedented collection of 1300 images and previously unpublished interviews with the Fab Four, made possible by the cooperation of Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Yoko Ono Lennon. This year also saw a number of Lennon/Beatles TV projects but easily the most resonant of them all was VH1's "Two of Us," written by Mark Stanfield and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Depicting a fictional meeting in 1976 between McCartney (Aidan Quinn) and Lennon (Jared Harris), it captures both the genius of and ambivalence between these two great musician-songwriters. More importantly, Harris has brilliantly provided the definitive TV/film portrayal of Lennon, from giddy anarchy to roiling bitterness. For those willing to look at the darker side of our musical history, political researcher Alex Constantine has written "The Covert War Against Rock" (Feral House), which looks into the suspicious deaths of such rock icons as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Lennon. Constantine makes an important case regarding the govermental war against Lennon, including theft and alteration of his private papers and death threats. When the candles lit in Hollywood and New York are extinguished, there will still be the music, the writings of Lennon, and a reminder of the paths we can take as a people, as a planet. John Lennon's work, unlike his life, cannot be stilled. One great example of that is his son, Julian, whose latest CD, "Photograph Smile" achieves the same emotional depth and beauty of his father's finest work. -- The Brad Schreiber Homepage http://home.pcmagic.net/brashcyber STORYTECH Literary Consulting Service http://www.thewritersjourney.com Alex Constantine Web Site http;//alexconstantine/50megs.com/
