Emblems of senseless loss

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

IN THE MIXED-MEDIA exhibit opening this week devoted to John Lennon’s life in New York - and his death, of course, on the sidewalk just a block from my home - I inevitably reflected as well on news of a young woman who was born almost a decade after he was murdered.

Last week Wesleyan undergraduate Johanna Justin-Jinich (above center), a mere twenty-one years old, was also gunned down – allegedly by an obsessional man in his twenties, another one who like Lennon’s killer had the traditional American ease of access to lethal weaponry. (In this recent case, pointedly for a New Yorker, two young lives from different parts of the country had first blown together in the vortex of this city when they each attended a New York University summer school.)

 

During a preview of the Lennon exhibit, at our media capital's downtown "annex" to the national Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the ex-Beatle’s widow Yoko Ono trod a difficult line between a Big Apple celebration and still-resonant mourning, almost thirty years after her husband's murder.

 

She described the exhibit as "a small, big show, with a powerful wind blowing in it from the past. Like Manhattan itself. And like Liverpool”.

 

When I questioned whether John Lennon: The New York City Years (which I did indeed find small in size, though big in impact - visually, textually, musically and verbally) could ever become permanent … and maybe bigger too … the main curator Jim Henke was politely guarded. He after all is from the annex’s Hall of Fame mothership in Cleveland – where a lot of the Lennon-related artifacts more usually reside.

 

The most compelling items, however, have been loaned by Ono herself, and she told me that having a Lennon mini-museum in place for good in his adopted home-city was “an interesting idea to pursue”.

 

  

 

WHATEVER HOPES THERE MAY BE for the future, the limited run of this show contains a particular and more pressing purpose, closely connected to some of those very personal objects on view.

 

A whiteboard mounted on the wall is getting covered, freshly each day, with signatures and short messages from visitors. It’s near a photograph that Ono took of the eye-glasses Lennon had been wearing when he was shot, with one lens cracked and bloodied (above right). To this image she affixed the total figure of people killed by guns in the US during the years since her husband was shot.

 

The toll has of course just gone on growing. Johanna Justin-Jinich turns out to be about Victim Number 1,112,250.

 

Between the photo-poster and the whiteboard of signatures is a paper sack, containing Lennon’s clothes (labeled "Patient’s Belongings") which were given back to Ono by city officials after he was pronounced dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. “It just broke me down,” she said, “because it was the coroner's office, and I just got this brown paper bag on my lap."

 

When the exhibit closes in January 2010 the collected names on the board will be submitted as a petition for stricter gun control to President Barack Obama.

 

The American media seem generally impressed, or alternatively very queasy, about the sheer number of fresh policy initiatives the still new President is embarking upon. I trust he will not let either of these attitudes affect his commitment to sensible, now long-overdue and essential, gun control.

 

As a US Senator, Obama sponsored legislation initiated by New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg (speaking for more than 30 local and state law-enforcement organizations) that would tighten the current fatally lax rules.

 

His White House website says he’s still committed to real, susbstantive improvement. The lifeless bodies of John Lennon, Johanna Justin-Jinich and the still endless list of others, cry out for it.

 

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