Before pulling the trigger as he held that harmless Beatle family album that Mark Chapman waited to have autographed outside the Dakota at tea-time. What did he think he was destroying when he pulled the trigger at 10.50 p.m.?
If Ono rescued him from one kind of disaster, he appeared to have landed in another: the uncritical admiration of an entire generation of Americans – photographers oozing unction, self-promoting interviewers, minor pop stars with alcohol problems, and the battery of servants who showed the depth of their devotion by filching and flogging off Lennon memorabilia and memoirs after his death. In Lennon’s circumstances, flattery is as dangerous as heroin, and Coleman’s account of his circle shows him as almost wholly lacking contact with any intellectual or artistic equals. Almost all the photos in Yoko Ono’s sad assemblage give the impression that he doesn’t really know where he is.
There is an insistent sense that, against one’s hopes, corporate America had killed Lennon long before Mark Chapman got to him.
Source review Ray Coleman's book on John Lennon in London Review of Books.
If Ono rescued him from one kind of disaster, he appeared to have landed in another: the uncritical admiration of an entire generation of Americans – photographers oozing unction, self-promoting interviewers, minor pop stars with alcohol problems, and the battery of servants who showed the depth of their devotion by filching and flogging off Lennon memorabilia and memoirs after his death. In Lennon’s circumstances, flattery is as dangerous as heroin, and Coleman’s account of his circle shows him as almost wholly lacking contact with any intellectual or artistic equals. Almost all the photos in Yoko Ono’s sad assemblage give the impression that he doesn’t really know where he is.
There is an insistent sense that, against one’s hopes, corporate America had killed Lennon long before Mark Chapman got to him.
Source review Ray Coleman's book on John Lennon in London Review of Books.
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