AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - In March 1969, newlyweds John Lennon and Yoko Ono skipped a honeymoon and instead staged a “bed-in” in Amsterdam to promote world peace during the Vietnam War.
Dressed in white, the artistic duo received visitors and held press conferences from bed in the presidential suite atop Amsterdam’s Hilton Hotel from March 23-29.
A photo exhibition and other events remembering Ono and Lennon, the Beatles songwriter who was shot and killed in New York in 1980, are being held this week in the Dutch capital to commemorate the events 50 years ago.
Amid flowers and self-made signs reading “Hair Peace” and “Bed Peace”, the couple put forward a simple strategy for achieving world harmony: reject violence of all forms.
“If you believe violence will solve the problem, that’s up to you. I don’t,” John told one reporter.
“Nobody’s ever tried the peace thing.”
The incident was memorialized in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”, released shortly before the Beatles broke up:
Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton / Talking in our beds for a week / The news people said, “Say what you doing in bed?” / I said, “We’re only trying to get us some peace.”
In 2012, Ono released for free “Bed Peace”, a documentary about the Amsterdam bed-in and a second bed-in the couple held several months later in Montreal, Canada.
At one point, Ono dismisses a book of poems and manifestos handed to her by a self-styled “revolutionary”.
“I’m sorry, no matter how beautiful your poem is, if you can’t share with people, it’s crap,” she said.
To honor their memory, a white “Peace Tulip” will be planted outside the hotel on Thursday.
Other commemoration events in Amsterdam include a film evening, concert and tour of the famous room #902.
Fifty years later, world peace has not yet arrived.
Skeptics at the time pointed out that not everybody can afford to stay in bed all day or be as famous as John and Yoko.
“Stop asking if it’s going to work, do something yourself,” an annoyed Lennon told one reporter in the documentary.
“Grow your hair, wear a sign.”
Reporting by Toby Sterling; Editing by Anthony Deutsch and Andrew Cawthorne
source: news.abs-cbn.com
NEW YORK - Before he pulled the trigger that ended the life of rock icon John Lennon nearly 38 years ago, his killer remembers being in a "tug of war" with himself over what he was about to do, and even praying for a way out of carrying out his plan.
In the end, the compulsion to gain notoriety by killing one of the most famous people in the world proved too powerful, a remorseful Mark David Chapman told parole officials at an Aug. 22 hearing that ended in a decision not to release him.
"I was too far in," Chapman, 63, said in a transcript of the hearing released on Thursday by the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.
On the afternoon of Dec. 8, 1980, the former member of the Beatles left his New York apartment building on his way to a recording session when he stopped to autograph an album that Chapman, then a pudgy, bespectacled 25-year-old, was holding. It is a moment captured in a now-eerie photograph.
"I do remember having the thought of, hey, you have got the album now, look at this, he signed it, just go home, but there was no way I was going to go home," Chapman, now leaner and grayer, told the parole board.
But when Lennon returned to his home on Manhattan's Upper West Side later that evening, Chapman was waiting for him, and fired a 5-shot .38 caliber Charter Arms revolver at him, hitting him 4 times in front of his wife Yoko Ono.
The assassination-style murder stunned the music world, a generation that had grown up with "Beatlemania" and the city the British-born musician had adopted as his home.
From his confinement at the Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, New York, just east of Buffalo, Chapman told the 2 parole board members at his hearing his sense of shame grows constantly over the murder, the impact of which he realizes will outlive him.
"A hundred years from now they're going to remember him and they're going to remember him as someone that's been murdered and it's going to be negative," he said.
Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in 1981. He has been denied parole 10 times since 2000 and will not have another opportunity for release until August 2020.
At the hearing, Chapman said he was a changed man who would welcome being released but said he didn't deserve it.
He denied a suggestion by a parole board member that he had channeled his obsession with fame into a ministry he runs with his wife that supplies Christian pamphlets to churches in Africa.
"I honestly have to disagree with that," he said. "We're sustaining Jesus."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
