Tag Archives: boomers

The changing of the media guard

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Oswald being shot, photo by Bob JacksonI’m watching “JFK: Breaking the News,” a documentary on WNET, one of the New York area’s PBS stations, about the media coverage of the November, 1963 assassination of president John F. Kennedy. It’s fascinating because in analyzing the way both print and broadcast journalists scrambled in Dallas after the shooting, the program shows how it was a bellwether event in the history of media. It marked the passing of the “breaking news” mantle from newspapers to television. Continue reading →

It wasn’t so long ago…

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CNN this week ran this Associated Press story, about how musicians who’ve been holdouts from the iPod/iTunes bandwagon — the Beatles, Led Zep, Garth Brooks and others among them — will probably cave in and finally allow their music to be downloaded song-by-song.

Apple’s iPod dominates the digital music player market, and iTunes accounts for over 70 percent of the (legal) digital music market. Meanwhile, CD sales have been dropping steadily. The era of the compact disc is over, it seems. Continue reading →

Boomerama

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200px-Bill_Clinton.jpgI’m proud to be a Baby Boomer, because of all the historical implications my generation has had. Not the usual stuff about living through the Vietnam war and rock and roll and Kennedy and civil rights and the space race (all of which is true), but more the fact that simply having such a large cohort of people growing up at the same time forced society and industry and business and culture to change to accommodate us all.

Bill Clinton, who’s the quintessential boomer — the first avowed rock and roller (OK, so maybe playing Fleetwood Mac for campaign music isn’t hardcore, and he didn’t “inhale,” but he’s still more like us, than, say, the first George Bush or Ronald Reagan) who moved into the White House — turns 60 this week, and the BBC had this interview with the guy. Continue reading →

Mako: the passing of an APA hero

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MakoMakoto Iwamatsu died on Friday at the age of 72, of esophageal cancer. It’s a huge loss to Asian Americans.

If you know him at all, you probably know him better as simply Mako, the Japanese actor, who played countless character roles and supporting parts in television shows and movies starting in the early 1960s. Continue reading →

James Talley has passed the test of time

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James Talley, songwriter and real estate agent

The best music – the kind that can stand that clichéd ol’ test of time – has a way of resonating as deeply and fully today as it did back when it was first recorded.

That’s what comes to mind when I listen to “Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, but We Sure Got a Lot of Love,” the debut album by singer-songwriter James Talley. The album was released way back in 1975, but it sounds as fresh and relevant as it did back then – and as a bonus, it sounds downright hip today, even though it was something of an anomaly back then.

Never heard of James Talley? Don’t feel bad, most music fans haven’t. Continue reading →