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An New Look at Fifty+



Here's an article with an interesting take on middle-age. The writer indicates that prominent over-fifties rock stars are setting a standard. Following are excerpts:

http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/john_walsh/story.jsp?story=392712

Where has it gone, the lifetime?
Search me. What's left is drear.

Unchilded and unwifed, I'm

Able to view that clear:

So final. And so near.

It isn't, thank goodness, like that any more. Since Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Pete ("Hope I die before I get old") Townshend went roaring past the half-ton milestone with no strain of credibility, there's been less stigma attached to 50 than ever before. The model Marie Helvin can announce her return to the photo-shoot  although the coverline to the accompanying article asked "Do You Think I'm Fifty?", as if amazed that anyone could admit to such antiquity. For Tony and Marie and Pierce and Ruby and Michael and the other 50-imminents, life is no longer dominated by thoughts of death and the dwindling of their powers, but with how organised their lives have become: their careers and relationships mobilised, their emotions equilibrated, their health properly assessed.

<snip>

Fifty is now the watershed year for redundancy and panic about one's mortality, but also for a new self-empowerment among the rock'n'roll generation. Heaven knows whether such thoughts will occupy the mind of Tony Blair when he celebrates his half-century on 6 May. But if he should wonder whether the colossal strains of his current office might usefully be swapped, from now on, for a new life spent playing the guitar every evening in some lamplit bistro in the Camargue, he would, assuredly, not be alone.


keets


Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation,
Aquarius, Aquarius.

-James Rado & Gerome Ragni




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