Bono & Edge join Yoko Ono for inaugural 'John Lennon Day'

Yoko Ono reveals her joy under the newly unveiled tapestry showing Manhattan as a giant yellow submarine with late Beatle at the helm, which was unveiled at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration during the city’s inaugural “John Lennon Day."

Yoko Ono,  Bono ,Edge  and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito marked the city’s inaugural “John Lennon Day” on Ellis Island Wednesday, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the day the Beatle got his green card. “They let him stay, and he is still here. Yoko, he is still here,” said Bono. Ono said that her “heart was crying” remembering her late husband, who battled to get his permanent residency and stay in New York after the U.S. government ordered him deported back to Britain over a pot possession plea.

“I remember how proud and happy he was” to be able to stay in the U.S., she said. “I’m sure John would have felt great to have a New York day.”

Ono recalled Lennon's fight against violence and hatred. She said he was a feminist before his time, taking their son Sean to Central Park every Sunday, and that now she thinks of him when she sees dads pushing strollers in the city.

Ono, Bono, Secretary General of Amnesty International Salil Shetty and The Edge celebrate the 40th anniversary of the day the late Beatle got his green card on Ellis Island Wednesday.

"I just wish John was with us," she said. "Please be kind, be peaceful, and be loving."

The event, organized by Amnesty International, also celebrated Ono's gift of the rights to record cover versions of Lennon's post-Beatles songs to the human rights group, which has raised more than $5 million in royalties.

A tapestry showing Manhattan as a giant yellow submarine with Lennon at the helm — commissioned by Amnesty as a thank you to Ono — was donated to The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation for display at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration and unveiled Wednesday.

Mark-Viverito flashed a peace sign along with Bono, Ono and U2's The Edge in front of the tapestry after declaring July 29 “John Lennon Day” in New York City.

Bono claimed John Lennon and the rest of The Beatles as Irish at a ceremony on Ellis Island off New York City to unveil a giant tapestry marking the 40th anniversary of the Liverpudlian singer getting his US green card.

Speaking in the presence of the former Beatle’s widow Yoko Ono, Bono evoked the famous image of Lennon holding up his two fingers in a peace sign on Ellis Island with the Statue of Liberty behind him.

“That’s why it is fitting to do this here, because John Lennon was an immigrant,” said Bono, before an audience that included U2 guitarist The Edge and Salil Shetty, secretary general of Amnesty International.

“He didn’t sail across the Atlantic in an ocean liner or a yellow submarine. He didn’t come in on a third-class ticket looking for a job in Hell’s Kitchen. He didn’t climb up out of steerage with all his potatoes in a single suitcase. But John Lennon was an immigrant all the same.”

Bono noted in his speech that the first immigrant through Ellis Island was Annie Moore from Cobh, Co Cork, who came through the door’s of the island’s immigration facility on New Year’s Day 1892. 

He referred to the Irish parentage of all four of the Beatles, describing Lennon as “one more Irish immigrant on an island full of Irish immigrants”.

“Let’s claim him, in fact let’s claim all the Beatles not as immigrants but as Irish,” he said to cheers from the crowd.

He paid tribute to Lennon, saying his music registered with him and The Edge growing up as teenagers in Dublin. Lennon offered words like All You Need Is Love to him and others “not as a balm but as a kind of dare”.

“Give Peace A Chance – there’s another dare. Will we?” asked Bono.

Speaking of the day Lennon discovered he had been granted a green card, Ms Ono said “I heard his heart beating fast, I remember how proud he was.” To mark the date, the speaker of the New York City Council Melissa Mark-Viverito declared July 29th as “John Lennon Day”.

The tapestry has been donated to the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation for display at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. The cost of the commission by New York-based Czech artist Peter Sis was covered by Bono, The Edge and music business impresario Jimmy Iovine.

This is the third tapestry to be commissioned by Mr Shipsey. An art piece honouring former Czech president Vaclav Havel, also by Sis, was unveiled in Prague and funded by Bono, The Edge, Peter Gabriel, Sting and Yoko Ono, while a tapestry by Sis dedicated to the late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney hangs in Dublin Airport.

http://www.irishtimes.com/

http://www.nydailynews.com/

U2-funded children get a chance to record song on board ‘Beatles’ bus

Music students from Dundalk Youth Centre taking part in a workshop on the John Lennon Music Mobile an Education Tour Bus. Engineer Jamie Thompson, Conor Loughnan and Kate Rogers play outside the bus at the National Concert Hall today. Photograph: Cyril Byrne/The Irish Times

Students attached to the U2-funded Music Generation project have been given a chance to participate in a venture founded by another musical icon: John Lennon. The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus rolled into the National Concert Hall in Dublin to allow the students to avail of one of the advanced studios on wheels. 

The tour bus is funded by the John Lennon Foundation and endorsed by his widow Yoko Ono Lennon who has maintained that the late Beatle would have loved the project. 

A dozen students from Music Generation projects in Louth and Mayo were tasked with assembling a song, recording it and shooting a video in the space of a day. 

The project has been funded by a €5 million grant from U2 and €2 million from the Ireland Fund. Projects are up and running in 10 local authority areas with two more to be announced by the end of the year. 

Niamh Drum (16) from Dundalk, who plays guitar, piano and ukulele, said she came to master the art of songwriting. She was honest enough to admit her preferences were for contemporary acts such as Taylor Swift and Mumford & Sons rather than The Beatles or U2.

 “I’ve never written songs before today, but I’d be interested in learning,” she said. “It is such a great experience.” 

Music Generation director Rosaleen Molloy said the calibre of the recording facilities, which have been used by artists such as the Black Eyed Peas, would not otherwise be available to young music students.

 “It is a fantastic way of us reaching more than 10,000 children and young people in the programme’s development over the last 18 months,” she said. “It puts them in contact with an opportunity to work with the very brightest and best of music producers.” 

The tour has taken in Cork city, Portlaoise and Dún Laoghaire and will visit Temple Bar on Thursday.

http://www.irishtimes.com
http://www.musicgeneration.ie/
http://www.lennonbus.org/

John Lennon vs. Bono: The death of the celebrity activist

"John Lennon was a hero, not just for his music but for his fearless activism against the Vietnam War," declares Bill Easterly. "Is there a celebrity activist today who matches Lennon's impact and appeal?" (Frank Barratt/Getty Images)

By William Easterly for The Washington Post

The recent release of the Beatles' music on iTunes, coupled with the anniversary of John Lennon's tragic death in New York City 30 years ago this past Wednesday, has brought on a wave of Beatles nostalgia. For so many of my generation, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Lennon was a hero, not just for his music but for his fearless activism against the Vietnam War.



Is there a celebrity activist today who matches Lennon's impact and appeal? The closest counterpart to Lennon now is U2's Bono, another transcendent musical talent championing another cause: the battle against global poverty. But there is a fundamental difference between Lennon's activism and Bono's, and it underscores the sad evolution of celebrity activism in recent years.
Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not.

Lennon's protests against the war in Vietnam so threatened the U.S. government that he was hounded by the FBI, police and immigration authorities. He was a moral crusader who challenged leaders whom he thought were doing wrong. Bono, by contrast, has become a sort of celebrity policy expert, supporting specific technical solutions to global poverty. He does not challenge power but rather embraces it; he is more likely to appear in photo ops with international political leaders - or to travel through Africa with a Treasury secretary - than he is to call them out in a meaningful way.
There is something inherently noble about the celebrity dissident, but there is something slightly ridiculous about the celebrity wonk.

Lennon was no Johnny-come-lately to the antiwar movement. As early as 1966, during the Beatles' American tour, he answered a reporter's question about Vietnam, much to the consternation of the band's business manager. "We just don't like it. We don't like war," Lennon said simply. And when he married Yoko Ono in 1969, they used their honeymoon to stage two seriocomic "Bed-Ins" to publicize the antiwar cause.
Lennon also merged his activism and his music: In 1969, "Give Peace a Chance" became the anthem of the movement after half a million people sung along at a huge demonstration at the Washington Monument. That same year he sent back an award he had received a few years earlier from the queen of England, in protest of British support for the Vietnam War. After moving to New York in 1971, he continued his high-profile opposition to the war, and two more songs released that year - "Imagine" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" - expanded his antiwar repertoire.


Lennon paid a price for his activities. We now know from subsequent Freedom of Information Act releases that the FBI monitored and harassed him. In 1971, President Richard Nixon set in motion a four-year effort to deport him, which failed after the political tide in America turned against the war.
In this role, Lennon was continuing a venerable tradition: the celebrity as a crusader against the wrongs committed by those in power. In the 19th century, the celebrity activists were not musicians but writers. Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and other authors loudly supported the abolitionist crusade against slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe went further and wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to boost the anti-slavery cause - a sort of 19th-century equivalent of "Imagine."
Mark Twain denounced American imperialism and atrocities in the 1898-1902 war against Spain and Filipino independence fighters, publishing his savage satirical essay "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" in 1901. In the imperialist claim to spread "civilization," he detected "two kinds of Civilization - one for home consumption and one for the heathen market." Twain also saw "two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive's new freedom away from him . . . then kills him to get his land." Other Twain essays on the same issue were so politically toxic that he could not get them published during his lifetime.
Alas, today's celebrities seldom challenge power in the manner of Twain or Lennon. Bono's signature effort involves the Millennium Development Goals campaign, a United Nations-sponsored initiative to achieve eight anti-poverty goals by 2015. The campaign stresses that 189 world leaders have endorsed the targets to reduce poverty and hunger and to improve health by the deadline.
In the course of his activism, Bono had regular photo-ops and lunches with President George W. Bush, giving Bush a much-needed publicity boost on U.S. foreign aid and on his campaigns against AIDS. For example, the singer appeared onstage with Bush at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington in 2002 as the president pledged a $5 billion increase in foreign aid. In May of that year, Bono even toured Africa with Bush's first Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, fully aware that the administration was capitalizing on his celebrity.

Easterly argues that U2's Bono is less effective, because he's not a rebel. Here, Bono is pictured with then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on a 2002 trip to Kampala, Uganda. (Reuters/Patrick Olum )

"My job is to be used. I am here to be used," he told The Washington Post. "It's just, at what price? As I keep saying, I'm not a cheap date."
While Bono calls global poverty a moral wrong, he does not identify the wrongdoers. Instead, he buys into technocratic illusions about the issue without paying attention to who has power and who lacks it, who oppresses and who is oppressed. He runs with the crowd that believes ending poverty is a matter of technical expertise - doing things such as expanding food yields with nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants or solar-powered drip irrigation.

These are fine moves as far as they go, but why have Bono champion them? The technocratic approach puts him in the position of a wonk, not a dissident; an expert, not a crusader. (Little wonder that he hasn't cranked out a musical hit related to his activism. It's hard to imagine "Beautiful Day When We Meet the MDG Targets by 2015.") Can you imagine Lennon passing himself off as an authority on the intricacies of Vietnamese politics and history? His message was simpler: This war is wrong.
Bono is not the only well-intentioned celebrity wonk of our age - the impulse is ubiquitous. Angelina Jolie, for instance, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (seriously) in addition to serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. Ben Affleck has become an expert on the war in Congo. George Clooney has Sudan covered, while Leonardo DiCaprio hobnobs with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a summit to protect tigers; both actors have written opinion essays on those subjects in these pages, further solidifying their expert bona fides.
But why should we pay attention to Bono's or Jolie's expertise on Africa, any more than we would ask them for guidance on the proper monetary policy for the Federal Reserve?
True dissidents - celebrity or not - play a vital role in democracy. But the celebrity desire to gain political power and social approval breeds intellectual conformity, precisely the opposite of what we need to achieve real changes. Politicians, intellectuals and the public can fall prey to groupthink (We must invade Vietnam to keep the dominoes from falling!) and need dissidents to shake them out of it.
True dissidents claim no expertise; they offer no 10-point plans to fix a problem. They are most effective when they simply assert that the status quo is morally wrong. Of course, they need to be noticed to have an impact, hence the historical role of dissidents such as Lennon who can use their celebrity to be heard.

 We're hardly starved of moral challenges for our leaders today, in an age that has witnessed Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and enduring wars with unclear objectives and the clearest of casualties. On Bono's signature issue of poverty, for instance, why not call out a few of the oppressive regimes that keep their people impoverished - as well as the leaders, in the United States and elsewhere, who have supported them with economic and military aid? (Bono has acknowledged that "tinpot dictators" were a problem for aid efforts in the past but has not confronted today's despots and their enablers in rich nations.)

We need more high-profile dissidents to challenge mainstream power. This makes it all the sadder that Bono and many other celebrities only reinforce this power in their capacity as faux experts. Where have all the celebrity dissidents gone? It's not a complicated task. All Lennon was saying was to give peace a chance.

William Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and co-director of NYU's Development Research Institute. He is the author of "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

Even though Easterly argues that Bono´s less effective, a survey conducted in the same newspaper doesn´t seem to agree with him:

 

Survey

Who was a better celebrity activist?

 

www.washingtonpost.com

Remembering Lennon

First of two nights at the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane and on the thirtieth anniversary of his death, the spirit  of John Lennon was with the band.

'I remember watching John Lennon sing that song for his son Julian,' recalled Bono after the band had slipped in a few bars of 'Stand by Me' during 'Still Haven't Found'. 'Today seems like a perfect day to do that for John Lennon and his family.'

New light on the inspiration behind 'Pride (In The Name of Love)', when Bono explained, ' This next song is about an idea the great John Lennon whispered in our ears as four teenagers on the North Side of Dublin...'

The Queensland audience went ballistic at this point and why wouldn't they? Beautiful also tonight to hear North Star, one of the unreleased songs back in the set and  to hear Adam at the microphone, thanking the people of Australia for their generosity.

Threatened to rain most of the evening, but nothing could dampen the spirit of another packed house - the vibes were so good Edge could literally walk on them, as you can see above. It was  loud inside - and outside.
'Dear Prudence' announced 'Streets' and at the end of the night, Bono added: 'Goodnight Brisbane, Goodnight John Lennon'.

Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd is at the show.

 Setlist: 

Return of the Stingray Guitar, 

Beautiful Day - In My Life,

I Will Follow, 

Get On Your Boots, 

Magnificent, 

Mysterious Ways - Rain,

Elevation,

Until the End of the World,

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For - Stand By Me,

North Star, 

Pride, 

In A Little While, 

Miss Sarajevo, 

City of Blinding Lights, 

Vertigo - Thunderstruck, 

I'll Go Crazy (remix) - Two Tribes, 

Sunday Bloody Sunday, 

Scarlet, 

Walk On - You'll Never Walk Alone

Encore(s): 

One,

Dear Prudence - Where the Streets Have No Name,

Ultraviolet, 

With or Without You, 

Moment of Surrender

Picture Gallery.

www.u2.com

Happy Birthday,John Lennon!!!

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality. John Lennon

Julian and Cynthia Lennon unveilde a monument to John Lennon in Liverpool

 

Unveiling the statue, Julian said: "We come here with our hearts to honour dad and pray for peace and say thank you to each and every one of you and everybody involved in the celebrations today."

http://imaginepeacetower.com/

www.bbc.co.uk/www.popeater.com

Lennon at 70

Next 9th John Lennon would have been 70 and the media and the fans are ready to celebrate. Concerts  and releases in honour to the great musician are programmed like Sgt Peppers Only Dart Board Band Dodgy,
Gimme Some Truth ( Lennon's catalog)remasters, John Lennon Time Capsule (The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will unveil a Lennon-dedicated time capsule on October 8) a project  in collaboration with Yoko Ono and Jonathan Polk; John Lennon Box of Vision(deluxe box set with all the newly remastered Lennon CDs; Nowhere Boy (The Lennon biopic, already released in the U.K., finally hits American shores October 8);
Imagine Peace Tower (Ono will light the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland on October 9; the event will be streamed live on her website.)

A variety of music magazine to publish Lennon-dedicated issues. Britain's Q magazine plans John Lennon at 70, a collector's edition featuring four different covers of Lennon. Previously unseen images as well as tributes from Ono, Paul McCartney, Bono, and many more will grace the special edition.

 

More news on John Lennon: www.johnlennon.com/www.vancouversun.com/www.popmatters.com/www.examiner.com/beatles-in-national/www.boxofvision.com/nowhereboy.com/http//imaginepeacetower.com/ www.blogcritics.org/news.qthemusic.com