1/11/11: Today is an Evil, Ominous Day

Frankly, I had forgotten that today was 1/1/11. Normally I don't ascribe any importance to numbers or numerology. Certainly not like the superstitious John Lennon who had a thing for the number 9. Remember the recorded gibberish that he and his ridiculous wife, Yoko Ono, heaved up for the White album: Revolution #9? And later Lennon entitled a chimerical entry on the Walls and Bridges album #9 Dream.

I really don't know what that was all about.

I do know that 7/7/77 -- supposedly a lucky day, was one of the crappiest days of my life since I was unceremoniously canned from a political campaign job that day by a lying, cheating, dirty, no good, lowdown politician who later ended up in the U.S. Congress.

8/8/88? Don't remember it.

9/9/99? Don't remember it.

10/10/10? Don't remember it.

So now it is 1/11/11 and I hear from very reliable conspiracy theorists that this is an evil ominous day in numerological terms that has strong connections to the events of September 11, 2001, al Quieda and the Masons.

Just get a load of these evil, ominous facts:

World Trade Center Connections to the Number 11:

* The date of the attack: 9/11 - 9 + 1 + 1 = 11.

* Each building had 110 stories.

* After September 11th there are 111 days left to the end of the year.

* September 11th is the 254th day of the year: 2 + 5 + 4 = 11.

* 119 is the area code for Iraq/Iran. 1 + 1 + 9 = 11, 911 - 119 are opposites - enemies?
11 11 polarity.

* Twin Towers - standing side by side, looks like the number 11.

* The first plane to hit the towers was Flight 11.

* State of New York - The 11th State added to the Union.

* "New York City" has 11 letters.

* "Afghanistan" - 11 letters.

* "The Pentagon" - 11 letters.

* "Ramzi Yousef" - 11 letters (convicted of orchestrating the attack on the WTC in 1993).

* Flight 11 - 92 on board - 9 + 2 = 11.

* Flight 11 had 11 crew members onboard.

* Flight 77 - 65 on board - 6 + 5 = 11.


So there you have it.

This is all way too much for me to cognitively digest. So I'm just going to have to crawl off back to bed and cradle a bottle of Cutty Sark under the covers and cower until a more auspicious date.

Wake me up when it's 11/12/11.

PBS' Lennonyc: John Lennon's Life As Stuff, Nonsense and Balderdash

When Mary Schmich swoons over something, you know there's got to be something fishy about it.

Schmich is one of the few remaining columnists at the ever-contracting Chicago Tribune --as predictably banal as she is predictably liberal.

Last Sunday she phoned in a cutesy column listing her favorite things, among them -- the lights at Lincoln Park, an obscure Russian organic tea and the new PBS documentary about John Lennon's New York days: Lennonyc.

Being in the middle of re-reading Albert Goldman's definitive 878 page biography of Lennon The Lives of John Lennon-- the product of 6 years of exhaustive research, I felt impelled to check out the PBS offering, Schmich's endorsement, nonwithstanding.

The film can be seen on-line here.

And sure enough, the documentary emits the olifactory sensations of a Norwejian herring factory.

Lennonyc is arguably the greatest whitewash of Lennon's life since Hunter Davies' The Beatles came off the presses in 1968. That officially authorized tome was censored in advance by everyone from Lennon's Aunt Mimi to Brian Epstein and offers little of reality. Lennon called the book, "bullshit," just as I suspect he might this documentary.

Yoko Ono's dissembling fingerprints are all over this film.

Make no mistake about it, Yoko is and always has been as PR concious and censorious as Joseph Goebbels. She has spent the past 30 years studiously concocting and maintaining the "Ballad of John and Yoko," a fairy tale picture of her as the loving supportive spouse tragically thrust into the role of grieving widow.

Ono's newly engaged press agent in 1978, Charles Cohen, said that he was immediately impressed by Yoko's keen grasp of the machinery of self-promotion. "She knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it." She kept voluminous files containing every notice and clipping that she had received since 1961.


Fred Seaman, who served as Lennon's valet and gopher during the New York Years, expressed shock and amazement at the eccentricity of the Lennon household and "the total disparity between the Lennons' real life and the image that they presented to the world."

The film was written and directed by native Chicagoan, Michael Epstein. He assures us on the PBS website that while Yoko Ono contributed private footage of their personal lives, she had no control over the film. She was not the witch who broke up the Beatles. She was not a controlling influence in John's life, he assures us.

Yea, sure.

For starters, Ono repeatedly appeared on camera for this film. Prima facie, that is evidence of her controlling influence. She does not cooperate with media entities she does not control. In the mid-80s she incurred the wrath of a Washington Post reporter for holding a news conference at which she refused to take any questions from the members of the media.

She vetoed the casting of an actor for an early 80s made-for-TV movie about Lennon, simply because his last name was Chapman, same as his assassin.

Practically speaking, the movie is at variance with the untidy, violent and hypocritical reality of John Lennon's life in many, many ways.

Here are but a few:

The role of May Pang. May Pang was a Lennon household retainer who Yoko Ono actively told to sexually accomodate John during his "Lost Weekend," foray into California. They conducted an affair that lasted well after his return to New York. According to Goldman, Ono viewed it as finding a controllable geisha mistress for her man -- one much like that enjoyed by her Japanese banker father, during her childhood in Japan.


May is interviewed in Lennonyc, but we are kept in the dark about the true nature of her relationship with John.

Lennon's support for political violence.The PBS film tries to portray Lennon as the subject of evil persecution by the FBI, the INS, Nixon and Republicans, due to his heartfelt desire for peace in Vietnam.

The political commentary is offered by left-wing activists of the era: Jon Weiner, Tom Hayden and Dick Cavett. Their mischaracterization of Lennon's violent sympathies is punctuated by shots of Vietnam body bags and grotesque footage of Vietnamese civilian casualties.


In this vein, Yoko Ono assures us that "John did not want to do it like Abby (Hoffman) and Jerry (Rubin,)" who overtly advocated violence in the streets.

Yet according to radical activist, A.J. Webberman in Goldman, Lennon had provided funds to Hoffman and Rubin to transport two busloads of Yippies down to Miami to disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention as they had the Democrats' conclave in Chicago in 1968. John Lennon was abetting precisely the same act for which Rubin and Hoffman had been indicted.

Little wonder that the feds wanted John and Yoko out of the country.

Lennon's Lost Weekend. John was totally out of control during his 6 month "lost weekend," exile to California, yet the film, while admitting some improprieties, wildly understates the reality. No where do we even hear the word, "heroin" although it was a daily feature of Lennon's (and Ono's) lives.

We do not hear that Lennon was forcibly thrown out onto the street outside the Troubador Lounge after he was loudly and drunkenly disrupting the Smothers Brothers television comeback show. We do not hear about the event where Lennon drunkenly waded into a mob of fans and began shouting obscenities and throwing punches and from which he had to be extricated by his friends before the fans beat him to within an inch of his life.


Instead the PBS film apprises us that Lennon was "a little over the top at times," that he "said things he shouldn't have," and that he was "in never-never land-- I think you know what I mean."

Lennon as doting father.The PBS film degenerates to the level of a Hallmark greeting card near its end, when it shows us footage (no doubt supplied by and orchestrated by Ono) of Lennon as loving father and househusband, lavishing affection on his son and baking bread.

According to a neighbor of the Lennon's, Marnie Hair, whose children played with Sean Lennon, John couldn't stand having his son around for more than an hour or so. On one occasion, days before he died, Lennon flew into a rage and physically threw his son across the room. "He couldn't stand the kids for more than an hour. That's about all he could take. He just broke out into a rage. Yoko was down in the studio. She didn't want any part of this stuff. Sean was crying and screaming and cowering. He had to be taken out of the city to get away from all this," Hair said.

John Lennon was a genius in the sense that Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin were geniuses. Yet he was often an extremely unpleasant, cruel and overtly violent man. He was also haunted by more demons than most of us will ever conjure up.


There's nothing wrong in appreciating Lennon's vibrance and the wonder of his music. But that's all PBS seems to want to do in this wildly unrealistic film portrayal.

Funny, when PBS airs a documentary on United States Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson (a genuine genius) all we seem to hear about is his slave ownership and his tawdry affair with Sally Hemmings. When PBS deals with Kit Carson, he is portrayed as a bloodthirsty Indian killer. When PBS deals with Senator Joe McCarthy, he is shown as a mean and hopeless drunk.

Yet with a left-wing icon like Lennon, all is sweetness and light.

And that is unrealistic. And that is bad art.

Loyola Academy's Link to John Lennon

Earth shattering news today. New Trier High School of North suburban Kenilworth will not be admitting Rahm Emmanuel into its Hall of Fame.

Good for them.

They did, however, today, admit former North suburban Congressman and Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, over the noisy objections of several noisy left-wing alumni.

Good for them.

But nearby Loyola Academy can boast a much more colorful alumni connection which extends all the way to John Lennon -- and his assassination.

Loyola Academy (1909-1994) was a Jesuit College Prep School for boys. First located on the grounds of Loyola University in Chicago, it moved to Wilmette in 1957 -- just down the road from the New Trier West campus.

(A school using that name still exists at the same locale today, but it has only a tenuous connection to the Jesuits and now admits non-Catholics, non-Christians and females -- basically anyone whose parents can manage to pony up its gold-plated tuition.)

Loyola Academy, during its 85 year history, managed to produce one minor and 2 major movie stars.

The bona fide Hollywood superstars were Bill Murray (Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Lost in Translation)and Robert Ryan (The Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch, The Longest Day), both Oscar nominees. It also produced flash-in-the-pan pretty boy, Chris O'Donnell.

According to the definitive 1988 biography of John Lennon, The Lives of John Lennon, by journalist, Albert Goldman, the Loyola Academy -- John Lennon connection is this:

In 1972, Robert Ryan's wife of more than 30 years, Jessica, died. He was so inconsolably bereaved, that he could no longer bear to live at their Manhattan co-op apartment. The apartment was #72 at the famed Dakota, located at the corner of 72nd St. and Central Park West.


John Lennon and the ridiculous, Yoko Ono, had recently moved to New York City and their lawyer arranged for them to rent the apartment from Ryan at the rate of $1,500 a month with an option to buy in three years.

A year later, the Loyola Academy alumnus, Ryan, himself died of lung cancer. His estate asked Lennon if he would want to accelerate his exercise of the option to buy and he did for a mere $105,000. (It is worth more than $2 million today.)

And that is the address that John Lennon claimed when he was assassinated by Mark David Chapman at the entrance to that very building on December 8, 1980.


So New Trier can boast Ann Margaret, Rock Hudson Donald Rumsfeld and Rahm Emmanuel.

But Loyola Academy produced Robert Ryan, the movie star who sold John Lennon his most famous, and very last, domicile.