Bum-Ba Bum-Ba

Conversations with John Lennon & Yoko Ono

December 1970, Regency Hotel, New York City: After a spontaneous film festival in the Elgin theatre for which Yoko Ono and John Lennon had produced two new films in only two weeks, the organiser Jonas Mekas and the two artists sat together, exhausted and probably also very happy. They talk about how the audience received the films and how Jonas Mekas managed to draw the attention from the famous couple to their works. Almost accidentially, the conversation touches many topics of creative production, from early childhood influences to collaboration, from hearts beats in a waltz rhythm to electronic music, from realism to catharsis to stutter. Jonas Mekas conducted numerous interviews with artists, some of which appeared for the first time in his 'Scrapbook of the Sixties', published by Spector Books in 2016. This ebook contains the outtake of one chapter of the Scrapbook. The intimate conversation with John and Yoko reveals Mekas as a playful, attentive interlocur with a stunningly agile and honest perception. Jonas Mekas was well acquainted with a great many New York artists. Born in Lithuania in 1922, he came to Brooklyn via Germany in 1949 and began shooting his first experimental films there. Mekas developed a form of film diary in which he recorded his daily observations. He became the barometer of the New York art scene and a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema.