The Case Against Condominiums

"Condos for Boomers: This idea is so funny. I see boomers trying, but they have to dispose of their furniture, and hire organizers. I doubt that there will be mass adoption of the condo by boomers. I do see the upsurge of senior help services to help boomers stay in their houses and neighbourhood. The kind of shoe box currently being built by developers and bought by investors is kind of offensive to the Boomer lifestyle"  from 'Why Are Condos So Crappy' LANDLORDRESCUE blog 5/9/2016

When we mention to friends that, as we are both now in our 70s and either retired or close to it, we will be downsizing, they are most likely to say, "Oh, looking for a nice condo where you won't have to do much as everything is taken care of?" And we reply to their surprise, "Well no, actually - a condominium's not for us".

Being Ian Anderson

Not long ago a fellow boomer recalled for me that I share a name with a now-legendary rock singer. As he happens to be about my height and age, and we share an accent, I have in the past been asked for my autograph. On several occasions when he and his band were in Town, male store clerks handling my credit card jumped to their own conclusion. Rather than demur, I usually decided to make a fan's day. After all, I did once live through the wall from his road manager at my Weybridge, Surrey condo, and was very excited one time to see the great man's white Roller parked outside. Why not fame by association?

On one of my recent browsing safaris I came across a video curiosity that features a very young and hairy Ian Anderson near the start of his career journey.  Called the 'Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus', it features Anderson's band as first up and his now famous flute-playing position, one leg in the air.

Only last year I went to see the flute star do his jump-up pied-piper act on the Canadian leg of his Thick as a Brick world tour. Even balder than me but in better shape from skipping around the stage, Ian still gets his leg up. When I try being one-legged at yoga class I invariably topple fast.

"You are about to be transported to another age, swinging London in the late sixties" brags the VHS cover blurb. "You’ve heard of Oxford Circus, You’ve heard of Piccadilly Circus, Well this is the Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus" boasts Mick Jagger.  For that era, nearby Kings Road in Chelsea was Cool Central when I attended college right at its heart. Hard to believe we were so weird. Were did all that spontaneity go?  Don't you wish you could still leap around like that!

The Little Spacecraft That Could

More often than I like to, I marvel at how few folk other than romantic old coots like me seem to believe any more that comprehending the universe beyond our planet is THE most compelling adventure of our era. Coming of age in the 60s and 70s when Sputnik, Apollo and moon landing were the uplifting stories of an otherwise largely bleak Cold War time, I am thrilled by anything that takes our understanding beyond the planet-bound. I am thrilled too that we're still here when many of us then thought we would have blown up the planet by now.

Voyager 1 passing out of the Solar System on August 25th was a epochal event, a fact recognized by a few quality journalists, although you'd never have known it from the limited attention it attracted from the mass media as a whole.  But think of it - a man-made device has LEFT our star system and is travelling into the Great Beyond!  In 40,000 years, all being well, Voyager One will meet another star.  Imagine time travelling back a hundred years and trying to get acceptance of a fact so far beyond the comprehension of any of our forbears.

Back in the late 1970s when the two Voyagers were launched many of us still thought that John Kennedy had it right in saying that entering space was the next great task for our civilization. Pundits like Arthur C Clarke in his Century stories assumed that well before today humans would be up there making fabulous discoveries. Yet somehow there was not nearly enough gas in the tank for that adventure.

Instead we find ourselves a half century on without any compelling vision of our future other than predictions that are highly dystopian, and where we overcrowd a warming and increasingly polluted world in which the social order is threatened to breaking point. The light has gone out above a picture where intrepid and optimistic humans sail away to see what lies beyond.

The way things are now, within our lifetimes we might see a few very expensive robotic space vehicles mining nearby asteroids for rare metals and one or two additional thinly-manned space stations operating, perhaps eventually even one on or around Mars. But the grand dream, so much beloved of SF writers, of 'generation star-ships' that travel bravely to found human colonies out on ‘The Final Frontier' seems to have died with Gene Roddenberry.

It is all the more important then for us to honour a little unmanned and primitive star-ship which is expected to continue sending us news from space even when I'm no longer. So sail on, brave Voyager, and keep the dream alive in your own small way

The Mystical in the Songs of the World

As one who came of age in the Nineteen-Sixties, for me Brad Wheeler’s now forgotten  2009  review article in the Toronto Globe and Mail remains a seminal read. He was memorializing the 90^th birthday tribute to Pete Seeger on May 3^rd in Madison Square Garden. Titled  'The songs, they are a-changing'  Wheeler's piece was a trip down the memory lane of the big “songs-of-the-times” and a lament for the great pop anthems of our past. Perhaps the last of these was Neil Young’s Rocking in the Free World of 1989.  

Wheeler's obituary for great songs quoted Don McLean, who in 1971 had penned that superb tribute to the rural American South, American Pie, as saying: “Pop culture is illiterate now; nobody cares about words and they don’t care about melody either. In order to write an anthem, you have to be at least reasonably poetic, and I don’t think that people today have the verbal wherewithal”. McLean went on: “People love language, they crave it, but the support for it is drifting away. Society is not going in the direction of poetry. It’s going in the direction of numbers.”

In regretting “the vanished mighty sway of music” Wheeler attributed it to the ever-expanding diffusion of outlets for music so that “..the potential to reach a large audience with a serious topic is diminished”. The possibility of a single and singular artist capturing the ethos of a time in history is disappearing. The ‘do you remember where you were when...’ moments of  today and tomorrow will have myriads of uploaded YouTube snips or their future equivalents. While a few are widely spread by viral means online, nearly all will be without the broad exposure that creates an enduring image in the public mind. 

As there is now so much noise out there, nothing can any longer be definitive.  No single vision can capture a time or place’s dominant mood or emotion. How can there be shared nostalgia for an era, like there is still for the Sixties, when there is no longer a signature tune or memorable picture or quote that forms a collective point of remembrance of how it felt to be alive then? Are we already coming into the time when the truly transcendent, the stuff of myth, can no longer find an entry into our society’s collective consciousness?