I don't know about you, but this always felt like a real friendship to me. Commenter @Hologram Sam dropped this into a comment thread but I thought it was worth making into a post. In Elton John's new autobiography, Me, he tells of a meeting he had with Yoko Ono in the early 80s (had to be some time before January 1984, for reasons you'll see in a second). If you're reading this site, you know that Elton John and John Lennon were good friends, and Elton was apparently one of the few people John socialized with during the Dakota years. Unlike [...]

This morning I had a stray thought: what would John Lennon have done if he'd survived? Where would he have gone? Now don't get too excited: I was all set to write a big long thinky post about this, but today has been nothing but furious fingers typing typing typing, so I will keep it short, and let the commentariat do the opining for me. In Life After Death for Beginners, my novel about a Lennon-like character who survives an assassination and has to find out who shot him and why, I put the main character here in Santa Monica. I am [...]

Lennon with a "UFO Detector," 1965. Photo by Brian Duffy. October 9th is, as every Beatle fan knows, John Lennon's birthday. I am sure he is celebrating along with us, probably on some distant planet. ("Dear People of Earth, all I want for my birthday is an impeachment. You know who.") An old family friend sent me a link to an article: "Five Things You Didn't Know About John Lennon." I knew them, and you would too, so I'm not linking to it. But that led me to another site about Lennon's famous 1974 UFO encounter (which we talked about here). John's [...]