John & Yoko: Two Virgins

Know what I'm so incredibly sick of I could retch? The stupid "Yoko Broke Up The Beatles" argument- soooo done to death! If I had a dime for every time some jerk at a party noticed my Beatles tattoos and tried to impress me with some half-baked and redonkulously uneducated hypothesis about Yoko "Lady Macbeth" Ono's she-wolfish tendencies and the pain she inflicted upon Paul McCartney and subsequently, the world, well, I'd probably be about two dollars richer.

Fact of the matter is, Yoko made the Beatles better than they would have been without Yoko. Yoko Ono made the world better than it would have been without Yoko. Yoko Ono is every last smidge as innovative, genius, and relevant as Johnny Lemon, and if you want to fight me about this, well, you might as well go dig your own grave. My Yoko-love is packed so tight it could break every last one of your knuckles and kneebones, you hypothetical Yoko-hating jerk-off.

In my sophomore year of college, I wrote a paper about Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama and how they were the only two artists of the nineteen-sixties who took the principles of psychedelia and ran with them. I forget every point I made in the paper except for that one, but I think it was pretty good. I think I got an A minus on it, and the minus part only came about from my slackery tendency to forgo formatting a Chicago Style annotated bibliography because I'd just been up all night jamming out a ten-page paper and couldn't be bothered.

The funny thing about my Yoko Ono essay was that when I wrote it, I'd never seen the work of hers' I discussed the most, 1968's Two Virgins. I mean, it's pretty self-explanatory: serene, muted images of John & Yoko's faces spliced together, a kissing scene, and some acidic Yoko wailings as the soundtrack. See, this all happened in Ye Olde Olden Days. You might not believe this, but there was actually a time when Youtube didn't exist- I know!!! Weird, right? Or maybe it did exist, but it was so new it was practically pre-natal, and all I could ever find on it were things equal to or less than, say, the Strawberry Fields Forever video, on the obscurity-meter.

But oh how the times have changed! Two Virgins has finally been uploaded to Youtube, in all of its placid and transcendent glory. I was a little bit nervous to watch it, in case halfway through the film was punctuated by the presence of a foxtrotting cartoon puppy, and I'd totally ignored it in that paper I wrote! That would be so embarrassing! I'd never be able to show my face to my sophomore Feminism in Art professor again! And that would definitely be the end of the world.

You know, they weren't ACTUALLY virgins:

Part One: Their Faces

Part Two: Smoochin'

PS: If you can prove to me that you watched every single second of those two videos with absolutely no skipping forward, e-mail me at laura@nogoodforme.com, and I'll send you a limited-edition foxtrotting puppy etching made by John Lennon when he was five years old.

Posted by Laura in Favorite Things
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