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    Park Avenue Armory Will Host Yoko Ono’s ‘Wish Tree’ and Jamie xx

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    The Armory’s upcoming season also includes the world premiere of “DOOM,” a new work from the Golden Lion winner Anne Imhof.The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2025 season on Monday, which includes the North American tour debut for the musician and producer Jamie xx’s new album “In Waves” and the largest ever North American installation of the artist Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” a grove of almost 100 trees that will arrive at the Armory for visitors to attach wishes to.“This season, some of the most cutting-edge artists of our time will be invited to the Armory to illuminate complex histories, contemporary society and visions of the future,” Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of Park Avenue Armory, said in a news release.The season opens on Jan. 9 with “In Waves.” The show is a return for Jamie xx, one-third of the British electro-pop band the xx, after that group took over the Armory for 25 performances in 2014. “In Waves,” Jamie xx’s first solo album in nine years, was released this September, and will feature in the four-night residency along with some of his early solo music and songs from “In Colour” (2015).A “Wish Tree” installation in Germany. The ongoing work by Yoko Ono invites people to tie personal wishes to trees; 92 of them will be installed at the Armory.Klaus Ohlenschlaeger/Alamy“Wish Tree,” Ono’s ongoing participatory work where visitors are invited to tie personal wishes to a tree, will have 92 trees in honor of Ono’s 92nd birthday on Feb. 18. It will start on Feb. 14 and run for four days. A two-day symposium with panels and performances will celebrate Ono’s work during the installation.The Armory’s season will also include the world premiere of “DOOM,” a new durational performance piece from the cross-disciplinary artist Anne Imhof, who won the Golden Lion, the top prize, at the 2017 Venice Biennale for her installation “Faust.” The performance, which opens on March 3 and is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, will take over the Wade Thompson Drill Hall with performers, sound and scenery to explore the balance between apathy, activism and resistance.In addition to those productions, the Armory’s upcoming season includes:The North American premiere of “Constellation,” an exhibition of more than 450 prints of the photographer Diane Arbus’s work, some of which are still unpublished.“The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” a musical theater adaptation from the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman of a cult favorite gay liberation fantasy novel, self-published by the activist Larry Mitchell.The North American premiere of “Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow,” a hybrid work from the choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell that uses the form of a dancing runway show on a catwalk to juxtapose everyday gestures and extravagant poses with historical references, pop culture and political rhetoric. More

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      ‘Daytime Revolution’ Review: Coffee and Counterculture

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      John Lennon and Yoko Ono invade middle-American living rooms in this cute but shallow documentary.For one largely forgotten week in 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono transformed the most popular show on daytime television into a forum for ideas that its unsuspecting audience rarely encountered. Joining as the co-hosts of “The Mike Douglas Show,” they repurposed entertainment as a Trojan horse for activist agendas (antiwar, pro-civil rights), briefly bridging the yawning chasm between mainstream America and a counterculture that the Nixon Administration was actively engaged in repressing.That chasm is the real story of “Daytime Revolution,” one that Erik Nelson’s charmingly relaxed, almost cozy chronicle of that week strains to elucidate. Given the flammable reputations of some of the show’s guests, like Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale, the most shocking takeaway from the movie is how tame it feels. The mood is overwhelmingly congenial and playful, with Ono’s dippier contributions drawing titters from the audience and occasional bafflement from her perpetually gum-chewing husband.Everyone, in fact — even a subdued, impossibly handsome Ralph Nader — seems on their best behavior, if slightly on edge, as though expecting an F.B.I. raid at any second. (They probably knew that Lennon was already on Nixon’s naughty list.) Musical segments featuring a vivacious Chuck Berry and the magnificent Broadway performer Vivian Reed keep things grooving and lighten the earnestness, as do engaging present-day interviews with Reed and other surviving guests.But for “Daytime Revolution” to live up to its name and become more than a curious cultural artifact would require a richer historical context, an explanation of why these people mattered and why their views were so feared by the White House.“I did not want to make a film about the thing — I wanted the film to be the thing,” Nelson states in the press notes. As a result, the movie’s quiet star is Douglas himself. Whether gently asking a tense Rubin about his upbringing, or helping Ono with her “box of smiles,” Douglas’s kindness and intellectual curiosity are more compelling than any political argument.Daytime RevolutionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      John Sinclair, 82, Dies; Counterculture Activist Who Led a ‘Guitar Army’

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      His imprisonment for a minor marijuana offense became a cause célèbre. He was released after John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang about him at a protest rally.John Sinclair, a counterculture activist whose nearly 10-year prison sentence for sharing joints with an undercover police officer was cut short after John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang about his plight at a protest rally, died on Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82.His publicist, Matt Lee, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure.As the leader of the White Panther Party in the late 1960s, Mr. Sinclair spoke of assembling a “guitar army” to wage “total assault” on racists, capitalism and the criminalization of marijuana. “We are a whole new people with a whole new vision of the world,” he wrote in his book “Guitar Army” (1972), “a vision which is diametrically opposed to the blind greed and control which have driven our immediate predecessors in Euro-Amerika to try to gobble up the whole planet and turn it into one big supermarket.”He also managed the incendiary Detroit rock band the MC5. Their lyrics — “I’m sick and tired of paying these dues/And I’m finally getting hip to the American ruse” — were a kind of ballad for the cause.Mr. Sinclair, right, with members of the MC5, the rock group he managed, and friends in 1967.Leni Sinclair/Michael Ochs, Archive, via Getty ImagesMr. Sinclair’s command of this “raggedy horde of holy barbarians,” as he described them in his book, was upended in 1969 when Judge Robert J. Colombo of Detroit Recorder’s Court sentenced him to nine and a half to 10 years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer.During the hearing, Mr. Sinclair argued that he had been framed.“Everyone who is taking part in this is guilty of violating the United States Constitution and violating my rights and everyone else that’s concerned,” he said. He added, “There is nothing just about this, there is nothing just about these courts, nothing just about these vultures over here.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Peter Brown, One of the Beatles’ Closest Confidants, Tells All (Again)

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      At 87, the dapper insider is releasing a new book of interviews conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people nearest to it.Peter Brown stood in his spacious Central Park West apartment, pointing first at the dining table and then through the window to the park outside, with Strawberry Fields just to the right.“John sat at that table looking through here,” Brown said, “and he couldn’t take his eyes off the park.”That’s John as in Lennon. And the story of the former Beatle coveting this living-room view in 1971 — and how Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, eventually got their own place one block down, at the Dakota — is just one of Brown’s countless nuggets of Fab Four lore. In the 1960s he was an assistant to Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, and then an officer at Apple Corps, the band’s company. A key figure in the Beatles’ secretive inner circle, Brown kept a red telephone on his desk whose number was known only to the four members.And it was Brown who, in 1969, informed Lennon that he and Ono could quickly and quietly wed in a small British territory on the edge of the Mediterranean, a piece of advice immortalized in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”: “Peter Brown called to say, ‘You can make it OK/You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain.’”Next week, Brown and the writer Steven Gaines are releasing a book, “All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words,” made up of interviews they conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people close to it, including business representatives, lawyers, wives and ex-wives — the raw material that Brown and Gaines used for their earlier narrative biography of the band, “The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles,” published in 1983.Now 87, Brown is a polarizing figure in Beatles history. He was a witness to some of the band’s most important moments and was a trusted keeper of its secrets. “The only people left are Paul and Ringo and me,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Sean Ono Lennon Helped His Parents Send a Message.

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      To keep their legacy relevant for a new generation, he worked on the short “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko.” Now it’s up for an Oscar.Three years ago, Sean Ono Lennon was asked to develop a music video for the 50th anniversary of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” the 1971 protest song by his parents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which has become a rare type of perennial — a warmhearted Christmas tune that doubles as an antiwar challenge, telling ordinary citizens that peace can be achieved “if you want it.”But Lennon, 48, was not interested in making a simple video. That “felt unnecessary” for such a well-known track, he said in a recent interview. What intrigued him more was the possibility of expanding the song’s message through a narrative film. After about two years of work, that project became “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko,” directed by Dave Mullins, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short film.The 11-minute picture is set in a World War I-like battle zone where two soldiers on opposing sides take part in a secret chess game, communicating their moves via a homing pigeon that dodges bombs over a snowy No Man’s Land. In the story’s climax, both armies are ordered into bloody hand-to-hand combat while the opening lines of John and Yoko’s song ring out: “So this is Christmas/And what have you done?”“It’s not about mining the past,” Lennon said of the project. It’s aimed at “people who have not grown up with the same culture and art that most people my age and older take for granted.”ElectroLeagueFor Sean Lennon, who in recent years has gradually taken on the responsibility of managing his parents’ artistic legacies — his mother, 91, has officially retired — the film is part of a continual process to keep that work relevant for younger generations. He is well aware that even a Beatle’s classic can fade away without tending.“It’s not about mining the past,” Lennon said by phone. “You’re competing with generations of people who have not grown up with the same culture and art that most people my age and older take for granted. So, for me, it’s very important that the message of peace and love, which may be a trope, are not forgotten.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Leon Wildes, Immigration Lawyer Who Defended John Lennon, Dies at 90

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      Leon Wildes, a New York immigration lawyer who successfully fought the United States government’s attempt to deport John Lennon, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.His death, at Lenox Hill Hospital, was confirmed by his son Michael.For more than three years, from early 1972 to the fall of 1975, Mr. Wildes (pronounced WY-ulds) doggedly battled the targeting by the Nixon administration and immigration officials of Mr. Lennon, the former Beatle, and his wife, Yoko Ono, marshaling a series of legal arguments that exposed both political chicanery and a hidden U.S. immigration policy.Uncovering secret records through the Freedom of Information Act, he showed that immigration officials, in practice, can exercise wide discretion in whom they choose to deport, a revelation that continues to resonate in immigration law. And he revealed that Mr. Lennon, an antiwar activist and a vocal critic of President Richard M. Nixon, had been singled out by the White House for political reasons.Mr. Wildes was ultimately vindicated by the stinging decision of a federal appeals court in October 1975, which said that “the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds,” and which halted the effort to kick Mr. Lennon out of the country.Mr. Lennon and Mr. Wildes addressing reporters about the case, which centered on Mr. Lennon’s 1968 London conviction for marijuana possession.via Wildes Family ArchivesThe Beatles had broken up in 1970, and Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono moved to New York the next year. Mr. Lennon had been convicted of marijuana possession in London in 1968; that record would normally have barred him from entry, but he had obtained a waiver. The waiver was coming to an end, and the Lennons received a deportation notice.“It was a very frightening moment,” Ms. Ono said in the 2007 documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon.”When the Lennons engaged Mr. Wildes to represent them, he had barely heard of his famous clients. In his book about the case, “John Lennon vs. the USA,” published by the American Bar Association in 2016, he wrote that he was vaguely aware of the Beatles — it was nearly impossible not to be — but that the names of its members had escaped him.“I think it was Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto,” he recalled telling his wife after meeting them in their apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. She quickly corrected him.In the 2007 film, Mr. Lennon is seen telling reporters about Mr. Wildes: “He’s not a radical lawyer. He’s not William Kunstler.”Mr. Lennon had publicly opposed the Vietnam War — he recorded the antiwar anthem “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969 — and he had been involved in protests on behalf of figures in the New Left movement, which campaigned against the war.Nixon administration officials feared that he had outsize influence among the young, who would be allowed to vote in greater numbers in the 1972 presidential election, the first after the voting age had been lowered to 18 from 21. In the paranoid atmosphere then prevailing in the White House, that was enough for administration officials and their allies, notably the conservative South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, to go after Mr. Lennon.Their case centered on the London marijuana conviction. But the appellate court judge, Irving Kaufman, ultimately ruled that the crime was insufficient to make Mr. Lennon an “excludable alien.”The real reasons for the quixotic pursuit of Mr. Lennon, Mr. Wildes argued, lay elsewhere, as he was able to show thanks to his relentless digging through records. Early in 1972, Mr. Thurmond had drafted a letter recommending that Mr. Lennon be thrown out of the country, which Attorney General John N. Mitchell forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency then in charge of visas. Of particular concern was the fact that Mr. Lennon had performed at a rally in support of a New Left figure, the poet John Sinclair, who had been jailed on a marijuana charge.“If Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategic countermeasure,” the South Carolina senator wrote.Ten days later, “a telegram went out to all immigration offices in the United States instructing that the Lennons should not be given any extensions of their time to visit the United States,” Mr. Wildes wrote in his book.For the next three years, the government continued to press its case, in efforts that appeared increasingly ham-fisted as public support for Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono grew. In letters and testimony, many of the era’s cultural celebrities spoke up for them, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, the artist Jasper Johns and the authors John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Joseph Heller, as well as Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York.“The sole reason for deporting the Lennons was President Nixon’s desire to remove John and Yoko from the country before the 1972 election and a new, much younger electorate getting the vote,” Mr. Wildes wrote. “To ensure his grip on power, any ‘dirty tricks,’ including the abusive misuse of the immigration process, were acceptable.”Mr. Wildes, seated, consulted with his partner, Steven Weinberg, at their immigration law office in 1983.via Wildes Family ArchivesThe whole time, the F.B.I. was keeping a close watch on Mr. Lennon. “Surveillance reports on him ran to literally hundreds of pages,” Mr. Wildes wrote.When Mr. Lennon learned of the skulduggery, he was infuriated. “They’re even changing their own rules because we’re peaceniks,” he said in a television interview.The 1975 ruling allowed him to remain in the country. He was killed in front of the Dakota, the Upper West Side building where he and Ms. Yoko lived, five years later.In another breakthrough, Mr. Wildes found that immigration officials had the discretion to deport or not, depending on whether there were extenuating circumstances. The revelation of this policy continues to aid immigration lawyers battling the deportation of noncitizens today.“As part of his legal strategy, Wildes conducted groundbreaking research on the ‘nonpriority’ program, and eventually filed an application for ‘nonpriority status’ for Lennon,” the immigration expert Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia wrote in her 2015 book, “Beyond Deportation.” “Wildes learned that I.N.S. had for many years been granting ‘nonpriority’ status to prevent the deportation of noncitizens with sympathetic cases, but I.N.S. had never publicized the practice.”Throughout what Mr. Wildes acknowledged was the all-consuming job of representing the Lennons, he kept a bemused and friendly eye on his famous clients, sometimes encountering them, as others did, in what he called the “wonderful upright bed” in their Bank Street apartment.“One could meet half the world around that bed,” he wrote — “radical types like Jerry Rubin or Bobby Seale, oddball musicians like David Peel, poets like Allen Ginsberg, actors like Peter Boyle, television personalities like Geraldo Rivera, or even political operatives like the deputy mayor of New York.”Mr. Wildes at his office in 2015. “He’s not a radical lawyer,” John Lennon said. “He’s not William Kunstler.”via Wildes Family ArchivesLeon Wildes was born on March 4, 1933, in Olyphant, Pa., a small coal-mining town near Scranton. His father, Harry, was a clothing and dry goods merchant, and his mother, Sarah (Rudin) Wildes, worked in his store. Mr. Wildes was educated at public schools in Olyphant and earned a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in 1954 and a law degree from New York University in 1958.He quickly gravitated toward immigration law, working for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a refugee aid organization, and helping two Americans who had gone to Israel establish their U.S. citizenship. He founded the immigration law firm Wildes & Weinberg in 1960 and went on to write numerous law review articles on immigration law and to teach at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.In addition to his son Michael, he is survived by another son, Mark; his wife, Alice Goldberg Wiles; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.Immigration law had “biblical import to him,” Michael Wildes, who is also a lawyer, recalled in a phone interview. “My father drew value from helping others achieve their American dream, as he had done — the golden grail of a green card, or citizenship.” More

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      John Cage Shock: When Japan Fell for Cage and Vice Versa

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      After a 1962 visit, a mutual love affair began between the composer and the country’s musicians. A new series at the Japan Society explores this relationship.About 30 miles south of Tokyo is the city of Kamakura, where the American composer John Cage was taken soon after arriving on his first visit to Japan, in 1962.There, D.T. Suzuki, the Zen authority from whom Cage had learned about Buddhism a decade earlier, greeted him and his close collaborator David Tudor at Tokei-ji, an ancient temple. Cage was given special permission to ring the temple bell; a photograph captures him inside the bell, slightly bent over and smiling a little as he listens to the reverberations.As Serena Yang writes in a recent dissertation on Cage and Japan, the discussion at Tokei-ji turned to the music of a Zen ceremony at another temple, near Kyoto. Cage exclaimed “this ceremony must be dominated by silence” — in other words, it must be similar to the works that had, by then, made him one of the world’s most important experimental composers.The similarity was, indeed, profound. The overlap between Cage and Japan went deep; for us today, suspicious of appropriation, it is a precious example of a truly mutual cultural exchange. And it has inspired a four-part series at the Japan Society in New York that begins on Sept. 28 and continues into December.Cage’s vision of life and music — his embrace of indeterminacy and chance; his use of and trust in silence — was shaped by Japanese philosophy, religion and aesthetics. And the influence of his 1962 visit on Japanese composers was such that it came to be referred to as “Jon Keji shokku”: John Cage Shock.His liberating example helped those composers — who had largely been in thrall to European modernism in the years after World War II — broaden their style, including to use traditional music as source material.John Cage conducting Toshi Ichiyanagi’s “Sapporo” at Hokkaido Broadcasting Company in 1962. From left: Yoko Ono, Yuji Takahashi (behind her), Kenji Kobayashi, Ryu Noguchi, Toshinari Ohashi, Toru Konishi, John Cage (with his back to camera), David Tudor and Ichiyanagi at the piano.Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu Foundation“I think that what we played for them gave them the chance to discover a music that was their own, rather than a 12-tone music,” Cage said, referring to the radical path away from traditional tonality that Arnold Schoenberg had charted a few decades earlier. “Before our arrival, they had no alternative other than dodecaphony.”Toru Takemitsu, the eminent composer who became close with Cage, later recalled: “In my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being ‘Japanese,’ to avoid ‘Japanese’ qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.”As Yang emphasizes, the meeting of Cage and Japan did not begin with his arrival in 1962. Avant-garde Japanese musicians had been aware of Cage, who was born in 1912, from the late ’40s, through journalistic accounts of his work and, eventually, scores.“I felt an ‘Eastern’ sense from Cage’s music,” the composer Kejiro Sato wrote in the mid-’50s.In a 1952 letter to the critic Kuniharu Akiyama, Cage wrote, “I have always had the desire to come one day to Japan.” He later wrote to Akiyama that Japan “is the country of the whole world whose art and thought has most vitality for me.”After his early studies with Schoenberg, the prophet of 12-tone technique, Cage had undergone a transformation: a “great leap of the heart,” as the critic Kay Larson put it in “Where the Heart Beats,” her 2012 book on Cage and Zen. Starting in the mid-1940s, he delved into Indian music and philosophy; attended some of Suzuki’s American university lectures on Zen Buddhism; and discovered the “I Ching,” the Chinese text which he began to use as a stimulus for chance techniques in his music. His new course diverged from both tonality and dodecaphony.In 1952, this great leap culminated in a piece that asked a pianist merely to sit at his or her instrument for four minutes and 33 seconds. The music would be all the sound in the performance space that was not music; “4’33,” Cage’s most famous artistic statement, was more a philosophical inquiry into the passage of time, the nature of silence and the distinction between individual and collective experience than a standard concert event.As the ’50s went on, some of the fruits of his innovations began to filter into Japanese publications, which wrote about Cage’s embrace of Eastern art and ideas. Avant-garde critics observed that Cage’s musical choices (like his use of percussion rather than the traditional Western orchestra), his rhythms and his adoption of randomness as a compositional tool were influenced by Eastern examples, including the Japanese concept of “ma,” the notion of empty space or silence.Cage at Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto in 1962. He would return to Japan many times after ’62, including with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu FoundationFor Cage, Zen was not only an aesthetic inspiration; it also spoke to his more general desire to re-energize a Western world he perceived as in serious crisis. At the 1954 Donaueschingen Festival in Germany, he told the critic Hidekazu Yoshida that “America is a mixed nation and has no unified spiritual basis. We rely on material culture and therefore have less and less spirituality. Yet I think the East is totally the opposite. My interest in Zen is based on my hope to recover Americans’ lost spirit.”Inspired by Cage and by European musicians making similar investigations, such as Stockhausen, composers like Takemitsu, Toshiro Mayuzumi and Yuji Takahashi had begun to work with chance; graphic scores, rather than traditional Western notation; and Cagean instruments like the “prepared” piano, adjusted with objects that affected the sounding of its strings. A contemporary music festival in Osaka in 1961, which included works by Cage, brought his brand of indeterminate, malleable music to Japanese audiences for the first time. (The response was decidedly mixed.)This all laid the groundwork for Takemitsu, Mayuzumi and Toshi Ichiyanagi, a composer who had studied with Cage in New York, to invite Cage to visit Japan, under the auspices of the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, a nexus of experimental performance in the 1960s. He and Tudor spent six weeks there: In addition to their trip to Tokei-ji, they toured widely, including Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Sapporo; had the rare honor of viewing a geisha banquet; spent the night at a monastery; and even used a chance procedure to choose the color of a necktie to buy.In Kyoto, they were shown the Zen temple Ryoanji, renowned for a rock garden with 15 stones arranged in a geometric pattern. Cage’s drawings based on the stones, made 20 years after the trip, inspired his highly mutable ensemble piece “Ryoanji,” which will be performed at the Japan Society on Oct. 21 — with some of the performers streaming live from Japan.Cage and Tudor’s concerts during their visit had a galvanizing effect. Performing Cage’s “Music Walk” in Tokyo, Tudor lay under the piano; Yoko Ono, already an important artist and musician who was married to Ichiyanagi at the time, put her body on top on the piano strings. In “Theater Piece,” Tudor cooked rice and stir-fried, with contact microphones attached to objects around the stage: the cookware, a piano, toys.For the premiere of “0’00,” a follow-up silence exercise to “4’33,” Cage sat at a desk and wrote a sentence: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.” Contact microphones had been attached to his pen and glasses, so, as the Cage scholar James Pritchett writes, his action “was both the creation of the score and its first performance.”“0’00,” dedicated to Ichiyanagi and Ono, will be among the works performed at the Japan Society on Dec. 7 in “Cage Shock,” a program meant to convey a sense of the 1962 visit. It was not until 1969 that Hidekazu Yoshida, the critic, used that phrase, and some have suggested it overstates the suddenness of what was actually a more gradual influence.But it is clear that experimental work in a Cagean spirit grew more common in Japan after the visit. Even a composer like Makoto Moroi, who was skeptical about the 1962 performances, took to working with indeterminacy and graphic notation — as well as traditional Japanese instruments — in the wake of Cage Shock.For Cage’s part, Yang writes that visiting the country “corrected his image of Japan. Where he had pictured a Zen-like, ancient Eastern country, he found a vibrant, modern society.” Both sides of the exchange had their ideas of the other refined and deepened.Cage and Tudor returned to Japan two years later on tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and again with Cunningham in 1976 — and then five times in the 1980s. His last visit, in 1989, was to receive the prestigious Kyoto Prize. The citation called him “a prophet who has foretold the spirit of the coming era” through “a new style of contemporary music by his new concept of chance music and non-western musical thought.”By then, Cage was mulling what he called a “Noh-opera,” possibly to be based on works by Marcel Duchamp. But Cage died, in 1992, before he could realize the project. On Nov. 16 at the Japan Society, a team led by the composer and performer Tomomi Adachi will offer a kind of completion of the idea — which, like so much of Cage’s work, transcends traditional boundaries of genre and culture.“It was Cage,” Takemitsu said, “who could ignore all restraints and do whatever he liked, who helped me make up my mind to get out of my own restraints.” More

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      ‘The Lost Weekend: A Love Story’ Review: When John Lennon Strayed

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      There’s not much Lennon music heard in this doc about his affair with May Pang, and given how much Pang trashes his wife, Yoko Ono, it’s no surprise it was withheld.Interest in John Lennon’s personal life goes back to early ’60s Beatlemania, when a waggish producer on the Ed Sullivan Show captioned a shot of the then-moptop, “Sorry girls, he’s married.”As we have learned over and over, the emotionally damaged and frequently volatile Lennon was often no picnic as a spouse.During his second marriage, to the artist Yoko Ono, Lennon had a long and serious affair with May Pang, who had been a personal assistant to the couple in the early 1970s. This sojourn has been nicknamed Lennon’s “lost weekend,” partly because of the drunken acting out he did with Pang in tow. Also because he reunited with Ono in 1975, had a child with her, and entered a period of devoted, near-reclusive domesticity before he was assassinated in 1980.“I’m May Pang, and this is my story,” narrates the 72-year-old Pang in this documentary, which somehow required three directors — Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman and Stuart Samuels — to complete. The film uses a mix of copious archival footage and often melodramatic music to tell it. Oh, and one significant talking-head interview, with Julian Lennon, the musician’s first son, who is a friend of Pang’s to this day.There’s not a lot of Lennon music heard here, and given how pointedly Pang trashes Ono, it’s no surprise that it was withheld. Still, Pang credibly asserts that she was a significant presence not just for instances of Lennon behaving badly, but for high points of his solo career.Whatever the truth of Ono’s manipulations in this affair — and Pang’s claims, including that Ono asked Pang to look after Lennon in an especially personal way, are at times hair-raising — they tinge this saga with a resentment that’s off-putting. Still, if you’re up for a montage of Lennon/Pang Polaroids accompanied by the strains of Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets To Paradise,” this movie is just the thing.The Lost Weekend: A Love StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Yoko Ono Fans Ring In Her 90th Birthday With a ’60s-Style Happening

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      There was singing, dancing and bell ringing in Central Park for an artist who has lived long past the days when she was often vilified.At 90, Yoko Ono has outlasted her detractors, just as she more or less predicted she would in “Yes, I’m a Witch,” a defiant song she recorded in the 1970s.“I’m not gonna die for you,” Ms. Ono sang. “You might as well face the truth / I’m gonna stick around / For quite a while / Yes, I’m a witch.”To commemorate her 90th birthday on Saturday, more than 50 artists and fans gathered at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park to take part in “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono,” a 1960s-style art happening that doubled as a celebration.Many of those who showed up said they had become aware of Ms. Ono decades ago, around the time when she was newly married to John Lennon and the Beatles were breaking up.“I was a big Beatles fan when I was 10, 11, 12,” said the abstract painter Jean Foos, 69, “and I heard a lot of negative stuff about her. But once I came to New York and heard her music, I loved her.”The artist Jean Foos, right, posed for a photo with a Yoko Ono banner.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesStaring at a black-and-white image of Ms. Ono printed onto a banner that hung from a wire on the bandshell stage, Ms. Foos mentioned “Season of Glass,” the album that Ms. Ono released in 1981, less than six months after Mr. Lennon was murdered.“For years in my studio, I would listen to ‘Season of Glass’ over and over,” Ms. Foos said, “especially while grieving different sad things that happened in my life. I just love her so much.”Carla Saad, a restaurateur who described herself as a “huge Beatles fan,” arrived with her 6-year-old son, Harrison Moscona. “I think Yoko is a wonderful artist,” Ms. Saad, 40, said. “She’s amazing, revolutionary, and I don’t think she’s given enough credit.”Her son, who was named after George Harrison, said, “I want to see Yoko — now!”Ms. Ono, who has not appeared in public in recent years, was not there. In 2019, at the Women’s March in Manhattan, she was photographed in a wheelchair. Two years before that, she mentioned that she was suffering from an illness, without specifying what it was. Representatives for Ms. Ono did not reply to emails seeking comment.Phillip Ward, left, and Jennifer Barton, the organizers of “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe event on Saturday was conceived by the writer and curator Phillip Ward in the spirit of Ms. Ono’s conceptual art projects. He organized it with the public relations executive Jennifer Barton. In social media posts before the event, Mr. Ward and Ms. Barton asked participants to “say something nice about Yoko,” “bring your bells” and “make a wish.”A playlist of 39 tracks, including “Yes, I’m a Witch,” boomed out of the sound system as the celebrants gathered in the sunshine on a 32-degree morning. Around 10:30, the artist and activist Peter Cramer climbed onto the stage and grabbed the microphone, announcing, “I’ve got a song about Yoko. It’s called ‘She Thinks She’s Jackie Onassis.’”He danced and rang hand bells as he sang in a sharp falsetto voice: “Yoko! Oh, no! Oh, no! She thinks she’s Jackie Onassis!” A few people who appeared to be tourists stopped and stared at him. Moments after his brief performance, Mr. Cramer, 66, made it clear that he was a fan.“When I was a teenager,” he said, “I was in love with the Beatles — but I found that her music was much more in your face. I was getting into the whole punk scene, and it seemed a little more appropriate. It was aware of the troubles of the world in a way that appealed to my ear.”Peter Cramer, left, and Pascal Perich rang hand bells in honor of Yoko Ono.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAt a table near the stage, celebrants wrote messages to Ms. Ono on cardboard tags and picked up white carnations and button-size hand mirrors that said “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono” on one side. After the event, Mr. Ward and Ms. Barton delivered a white bag filled with the messages to the service entrance of the Dakota, the grand apartment house overlooking Central Park that has been Ms. Ono’s main residence since 1973.In his birthday message to the artist, Pascal Perich, a 51-year-old photographer, said he wrote “We are all dancing in the stars” in French, his native language. Asked to explain what he meant by that, he said, “It was just the first thing that came to my mind.”“I just love Yoko and Yoko’s work,” Mr. Perich continued. “She’s like the hummingbird that takes the little drop of water to the giant forest fire. And the animal tells him, ‘What you are doing is for nothing.’ And the hummingbird says, ‘No, I am just doing my part.’”The writer and musician Jesse Paris Smith, who is the daughter of the singer, songwriter and author Patti Smith and her late husband, the musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, also wrote a message. “I said, ‘Yoko is a true warrior of hope, peace and love for us all,’” Ms. Smith, 35, said. “When I think of her, I think of these wonderful universal truths. It might seem corny or cheesy, but it’s so deeply needed, and she embodies all of those things.”The artist Jack Waters, 68, said that “Grapefruit,” Ms. Ono’s 1964 collection of instructional poems, was a “seminal piece for me,” despite the fact that he didn’t really understand it when he first came across it as a teenager. “I think Yoko made her biggest impression on Beatles fans, but I grew up in a family where there was a lot of art and culture, so we knew her for her artwork,” he said.A pocket mirror that reads “Morning Piece for Yoko Ono” was given to fans.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesPascal Perich wrote a note to Yoko Ono.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMany of the poems in “Grapefruit” ask readers to imagine different scenarios. In an interview with the BBC two days before his death, Mr. Lennon acknowledged that the book had directly inspired “the lyrics and the concept” of his 1971 ballad “Imagine” and expressed the regret that he had not properly acknowledged his wife’s contribution at the time. In 2017, the credits were formally changed to list Ms. Ono as the song’s co-writer.In recent years, she has gained new fans and greater respect among critics. The shift came partly as a result of “Yes Yoko Ono,” a retrospective that had its debut in 2000 at the Japan Society in New York before it moved to other cities. In The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman wrote that the exhibition revealed Ms. Ono to be “a mischievous, wry conceptual artist with a canny sensibility” who was “way ahead of her time in giving acute visual form to women’s issues.”Another wave of appreciation came with the 2021 release of Peter Jackson’s documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.” In his depiction of the group’s rehearsals, recording sessions and rooftop performance in January 1969, Ms. Ono made for a riveting presence.As the author Donald Brackett details in “Yoko Ono: An Artful Life,” a biography published last year, Ms. Ono was once the target of frequent misogynist and racist attacks in British and American publications. “It was horrifying,” Mr. Brackett said in a phone interview, describing the press accounts he came across during his research.John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the 1968 launch of “You Are Here,” their joint art exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London.Mirror Syndication International/Mirrorpix, via Getty ImagesMs. Ono stayed the same over the years, unwaveringly fierce in her art and mostly mild in her public statements. Little by little, many of the skeptics came around. “She once said, ‘You change the world by being yourself,’” Mr. Brackett said. “And she has undergone an evolution, maybe even a transformation, both as a pop culture figure and as a figure in the art world.”In March 1965, when the Beatles’ jaunty “Eight Days a Week” was the No. 1 song in the United States, Ms. Ono performed “Cut Piece” at the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. She knelt on the stage, stoic, as audience members one by one cut off her clothing with fabric shears. That performance puzzled some of those who saw it at the time but is now considered groundbreaking. In “Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance,” an essay published last year in The New Yorker, the cultural historian Louis Menand called “Cut Piece” “a truly great work of art.”Jennifer Barton, left, and Jesse Paris Smith sang Yoko Ono songs into the microphone as part of the 90th birthday celebration.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAs a child, Ms. Ono survived the Allied bombings of Tokyo, the city of her birth. That gave her something in common with Mr. Lennon, who was born during a lull in the Germans’ aerial attacks on Liverpool. Perhaps as a result of their common early experience, Ms. Ono and Mr. Lennon repeatedly explored the idea that the inner life is at least as important as the outside world. Mr. Lennon hit on this theme in the Beatles’ songs “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Rain” and “There’s a Place,” and Ms. Ono seems to have made it a part of her art from the very beginning.“I remember, when we were evacuated during the war, my brother was really unhappy and depressed and really hungry, because we did not have very much food,” she said in a 2013 interview. “So I said, ‘OK, let’s make a menu together. What kind of dinner would you like?’ And, he said, ‘Ice cream.’ So I said, ‘Good, let’s imagine our ice-cream dinner.’ And we did, and he started to look happy. So I realized even then that just through imagining, we can be happy. So we had our conceptual dinner, and this is maybe my first piece of art.”Ms. Ono was among a pioneering group of artists who worked out of former factories and warehouses in Lower Manhattan. While living on Chambers Street in 1961, she came up with the conceptual art piece “Painting to Hammer a Nail,” which instructs the viewer to hammer nails into a canvas.The abstract painter Martha Edelheit, 91, was part of that scene. At the celebration on Saturday, she recalled her first encounter with Ms. Ono: “I walked in when she was doing an art exhibit — I think she was hammering nails into a wall.” Ms. Edelheit, who has a solo exhibition at the Eric Firestone Gallery in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan through next month, added, “I’ve always loved what she’s done for the world as an artist.”The artists Ethan Shoshan and Martha Edelheit paid their respects to Ms. Ono on Saturday.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesJim Fouratt, a gay rights activist and nightlife impresario, said he got to know Ms. Ono because of his role in the music world. At the Central Park happening, he recalled a time in the 1980s when she attended a show by the singer-songwriter Diamanda Galás at a club he ran, Danceteria.“Diamanda was never nervous about anybody,” Mr. Fouratt, 81, said. “But that night it took her 15 minutes to get on the stage because Yoko had planted herself right there. When it was over, and Yoko went backstage, all Diamanda could do was throw her arms around her, and she started to cry. It was a beautiful moment — that kind of recognition of a strong woman doing exactly what she wanted to do. That was the sisterhood between those two women.”In his message to Ms. Ono, Mr. Fouratt wrote: “Never look back. The adventure is the future.”The artists and fans in Central Park weren’t the only ones sending best wishes to Ms. Ono. Her son, Sean Ono Lennon, had set up a website, Wish Tree for Yoko Ono, that allowed people to send their messages online. By Monday afternoon, the site had collected more than 8,400 statements from her fans.It was not clear to people at the Saturday event if Ms. Ono was at the Dakota or at another one of her residences. “I don’t know if a lot of people know what’s going on with Yoko right now,” Mr. Fouratt said.Death was the theme of the Yoko Ono exhibition “Ex It,” which was installed last year at the Bank of Lithuania in Kaunas, Lithuania. The show comprised 100 wooden coffins of different sizes. In keeping with most of the artist’s other works, “Ex It” was hopeful: Each coffin had a fruit tree growing out of it.Ms. Edelheit, in the red hat, wrote a message to Ms. Ono at a table near the bandshell.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times More