110528 Sat 10:09

I’ve felt guilty about not writing when my mind is so full. But it tends to inhibit the flow when there’s too much to think about. I just posted three disparate, but somehow connected things at HUGObserver: Gil Scott Heron’s obit, a link to lots of Olle Eksell graphics, and a funny comment on religions from Didier Lestrade. All three are synonymous, in my mind at any rate, with the Fifties/Sixties, and each represents a new tendency then that has, still, not reached any kind of resolution. The promise of that era has, pretty much fizzled in every one of those aspects: social equality, neo-socialism, gay liberation, and religious skepticism. If anything, we seem to be moving backwards. Both Scott-Heron and Lestrade have become icons when, at the time, I was only faintly aware of them — funny how the awesomely notorious rebels of our youth begin to seem like friendly contemporaries as we both grow older. It’s different for the ones who die; they are encased in an amber bubble of fame, almost instantly, and stay as remote as they ever were, or more-so if they achieve cult status. Perhaps, though, things are not that much different now and it is I who have lost the optimism of Youth that made it all seem so much more potent.