Fans can now view a video from John Lennon and Yoko Ono that was filmed at the Bar of the City of New York, on 42 W 44th St in New York on April 2, 1973. In the clip, they share the Declaration of Nutopia as a conceptual country. The unearthed clip arrived with an official Citizens of Nutopia website, which you can check out below.
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The video is joined by an explainer from the duo. Yoko began: “In 1973 in New York City, John and I invited the press to announce the founding of a conceptual country called Nutopia. Anybody could be a citizen of this country.
“Citizens were automatically the country’s ambassadors. The country’s body was the airfield of our joint thoughts. Its constitution was our love, and its spirit our dreams. We produced a white handkerchief from our pockets and said, ‘This is a flag to Surrender to Peace.’ Not ‘Fight for Peace,’ but ‘Surrender to Peace’ was the important bit.
John added: “It’s a conceptual country. It has no land, there’s nothing to fight for, there’s no boundaries, there’s no lines to be drawn, no passports, only people.
“We’ve got a flag, but there are no laws. All the people of Nutopia are ambassadors. And citizenship is available by declaring your awareness of Nutopia. Once you say it, that’s it. The flag means surrender and submission and also you can blow your nose on it [laughs].”
Yoko added: “We wished that one day we would take the flag to the United Nations and place it alongside the other flags, as Nutopia was just another concept, such as France, the United States and the Soviet Union. It was not a concept founded to threaten any other.
“John had said that we were all ambassadors of Nutopia. And so we are. When you come to our apartment, you’ll see that there is a gold plaque on the kitchen door that says ‘Nutopian Embassy.’ John put it there. Strangely enough, now friends just like to come in from that door, and not the front door. It seems the plaque made the kitchen door our front door.
“Nutopia was Yoko’s trip. I agree with her, so I wanted to do it as another John and Yoko event. We mean it. It’s not naive or anything like that. It’ll happen when it happens. If you say it enough, it’ll happen. If you don’t say it, it won’t.
“We do it on impulse or instinct, you know. We try and use our instincts, especially for these kind of things which we call ‘Mind Games.’ First of all, we put the thought out. And then we’ll follow it through to see… We’ll react to whatever the reaction is.
Visit Citizens of Nutopia’s official website for more information.