John Winston Lennon - October 9, 1940 - December 8, 1980

30 years after the passing of a legend. I still remember that December night. I was in my early 20s, in my first apartment on Prospect Park West and 8th street in Park Slope. Freelancer for a research publisher, copywriter, and film reviewer for a few trade magazines, I was busy hacking away on my portable manual Olivetti typewriter, with a little 8" black and white broadcast TV on in the background, when the news flash interrupted the regular programming. It was a shocking, sickening feeling, that a cultural figure of John Lennon's prominence and magnitude could be killed in New York City, right outside his home. But, coming on the heels of the election of Ronald Reagan just a month before, and the clear ascendancy of many elements of the right in the US that this represented, there was an eerie sense that this was the ultimate formalization of the retrenchment, as the great wave of the 60s, as Hunter S. Thompson had written, had reached its furthest shore only to roll back over the age of Aquarius and all the possibilities that it represented. And the realization that this was, overtly, covertly or metaphorically, an assassination, resulting not only  in the death of this extraordinarily talented world figure, but it also represented the final nails in the coffin of an aspect of an American dream for many young people here and around the world.

--Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn

Coda: Details on Rolling Stone's "Last Interview with John Lennon" by Jonathan Cott here