Ray Davis Announces New Canadian /US Tour

Ray Davies has announced plans for a North American tour focusing on his latest solo album Working Man’s Café.

Ray Davis is something of a legend--a new appreciation for the Kinks and their artistry is making it possible for Ray Davis the Kinks legendary singer songwriter to play a series of acoustic shows, beginning on the July 11 in Ottawa. According to the UK's Uncut


After performing three shows in Canada he will move down the coast to Oregon and Washington concluding the tour in California on July 22.

The tour dates are:
Ottawa, ON Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest (July 11)
Winnipeg, MB Winnipeg Folk Festival (13)
Calgary, AB Jack Singer Hall (14)
Edmonton, AB Francis Winspear Centre for Music (15)
Portland, OR Crystal Ballroom (18)
Seattle, WA Showbox SoDo (19)
Anaheim, CA The Grove of Anaheim (22)

New BabyBoom Review Companion Website to this Blog Gets Launched

The Press Release issued today includes the following

Today Baby Boom Review was launched as a new social networking site with the goal to start fighting back the media criticism that places babyboomers on the defensive when they start to talk about their legacy. "We want to celebrate the books, movies and music of the sixties in particular" says co-founder and lifelong educator Laurence Peters who began the website with his brother, Mike Peters.

"We want to start a generational conversation--one grounded on our appreciation of the books media and unique culture of the period" commented Dr. Peters.

With the use of wiki enabled discussions the brothers hope that the conversation will flow naturally --focused on the great work of the era.

"it will all help us sort out what will last and what deserves to be forgotten--better we do it as boomers than leave it to others who may not understand the context of the times when the stuff was set down." says Mike Peters, a London based teacher and lecturer who will provide a UK perspective on the times.

To start a conversation just click on one of the buttons "Books, Albums, Movies" and you are immediately sent to a wiki where you can start the discussion.

We hope that these wiki conversations will lead to published collections of articles and essays --right now we have a plan to produce a unque Best of BabyBoomReview Annual Collection. "This I believe is a unique innovation in the blog and wiki world--a way that everyone can see a way to evolve their expressions into a more permanent form-benefiting from the input they receive in the wiki forum." says Dr Peters a former college writing teacher himself and author.

Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez--brother!

Obama is a Dylan Fan--Likes to Listen to Maggies Farm

Now the test of who you vote for is not necessarily their views on the issues --but their musical tastes. The question we will shortly be asking of all candidates is the one AP asked Obama--"What's On Your i-Pod?" It turns out that predictably Obama's taste is ecletic

The Illinois senator's playlist contains these musicians, along with about 30 songs from Dylan and the singer's "Blood on the Tracks" album. Jazz legends Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker are also in the mix.

"Actually, one of my favorites during the political season is 'Maggie's Farm,' " Obama said of one of Dylan's tracks. "It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric..n the song, Dylan sings about trying be himself, "but everybody wants you to be just like them.."

Obama also likes Springsteen. A study will no doubt be done soon of all Presidential candidates and their musical tastes..

George Carlin dead at 71--Change Agent for a New Kind of Comedy

Richard Zoglin the Time magazine writer has some insightful things to say about Carlin's career in reference to the Boomer era in an interview he gave to Pacifica Radio's Amy Goodman

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Geroge Carlin, how his style evolved, who he was.

RICHARD ZOGLIN: Well, in the late ’60s, when this country really went through a cultural revolution, you know, he was the guy, I think, who brought stand-up comedy into that cultural revolution. I mean, he was short-haired comic, sort of skinny-tie guy, who did sort of straight-laced material on the Ed Sullivan Show. He looked around in the late ’60s, and, you know, he was hanging out with musicians, he was singing with the protest movement, and he was seeing what was happening. And he decided he was doing material for the enemy. He wanted to talk to a different audience, the college audience. He wanted to go back into the coffee houses. And this was a radical thing for a guy to do with a successful career. So he started all over again, and he started doing material that really reflected the attitudes of that counterculture generation

Dylan about to come out with new album!

According to Neil McCormick who blogs for London's Daily Telegraph, Dylan is about to come out a new CD!
Modern Times as McCormick notes was two years ago.
If McCormick's sources are right-we won't have too long to wait--
the tapes are somewhere in the bowels of London' SonyBMG studios.
Quite a scoop!

BabyBoom Review News Items

The kind of discussion we are hoping for here is to reflect on what leading boomers are doing, new trends that are making the boomers either nervous or happy about their situation and anything you find funny or interesting in the world that you think of interest to boomers. Some for examples follow:

Three items caught my attention today:

1. The Woodstock Museum opened--controversial and interesting landmark in our view of this event and this period judging by some of the pre-opening coverage that involved Senator Hillary Clinton's move to find federal money to fund the new building.

2.Dylan and his son in the Barack camp.

3.An unexpected interest in Dylan Thomas life--from Mick Jagger of all people.


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First the Woodstock Museum:



Yesterday--June 20, 2008 the Woodstock museum opened:






Woodstock Museum opens

"This was the museum, after all, that sparked campaign-season digs from Republicans last year after Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to help earmark $1 million for the museum. Visitors can watch videos of conservative critics skewering Woodstock, but fair warning: listening to Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese describe the ’60s as a decade of self-indulgence on the way out the door might be a buzzkill.

People who were there, and remember it, can step up to a microphone to record their own experiences for posterity.

Visitors wishing to see the main stage area and imagine what the grassy hillside looked like loaded with hippies can drive down the hill from the museum and park by a marker that has been the main historical attraction here for years.

On a recent day as workers put finishing touches on the museum, Jens Haulund drove his minivan from Trumbull, Conn., to visit the marker with two young visitors from Europe. Haulund came to the United States from Denmark in 1996, and as his daughter climbed on the monument he talked about how as a young man, the Woodstock message of peace and love resonated across the Atlantic.

“It’s one of the main reasons I came to the U.S.,” he said."

_________________


New interest in Dylan Thomas's life

See the Guardian Film Blog for the article in full but the details sound intriguing

"Why the Dylan Thomas, dead for 55 years, still continues to fascinate. And, moreover, fascinate the famous to an unusual degree. If a rock star, or indeed a film star, has heard of a poet, then that poet is going to be Dylan Thomas.

Mick Jagger, for instance, owns the rights to his 1939 collection, The Map of Love, and made John Maybury, director of The Edge of Love (about Dylan Thomas's relationship with his wife Caitlin and Vera Phillips) remove everything from that book that had been in the film, under pain of legal action. For Jagger intends to make his own film about the poet."
____________________________________________
The Dylan family seems to be backing Obama. It seems young Jakob--was responsible for the Yes We Can video that wowed voters in the primaries and his old man was pleased with the work.

New interest in Dylan Thomas's life --Jagger's surprising interest.


The Dylan family seems to be backing Obama
http://rogovoy.com/news1589.html

Woodstock Museum opens

"This was the museum, after all, that sparked campaign-season digs from Republicans last year after Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to help earmark $1 million for the museum. Visitors can watch videos of conservative critics skewering Woodstock, but fair warning: listening to Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese describe the ’60s as a decade of self-indulgence on the way out the door might be a buzzkill.

People who were there, and remember it, can step up to a microphone to record their own experiences for posterity.

Visitors wishing to see the main stage area and imagine what the grassy hillside looked like loaded with hippies can drive down the hill from the museum and park by a marker that has been the main historical attraction here for years.

On a recent day as workers put finishing touches on the museum, Jens Haulund drove his minivan from Trumbull, Conn., to visit the marker with two young visitors from Europe. Haulund came to the United States from Denmark in 1996, and as his daughter climbed on the monument he talked about how as a young man, the Woodstock message of peace and love resonated across the Atlantic.

“It’s one of the main reasons I came to the U.S.,” he said."

Boomer Items Worthy of Note

Leonard Cohen's concert in Manchester.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/live_reviews/article4161404.ece

Vanishing American blog has a few good references to a Hitchens piece and some other quite intellectual content about the boomer contribution. Vanishing American seems of the view that the boomers took a few wrong turns--but does not explain clearly enough for this readers' satisfaction as to why he believes that to be the case.

Boomer Related Blogs to Read

In our continuing series of blogs to read –it is worth checking out Brian Appleyards’. As well as being Sunday Times' cultural critic he is a prolific author and radio and TV personality--a sort of new generation Clive James. His blog Appleyard’s Thought Experiments: The Blog is as its name implies a highly intellectual affair but nonetheless highly readable and well organized. For those who don’t regularly read his Sunday Times columns they are collected here in the form of selected articles.

He notes in his excellent piece Reassessing the 1970s that it is only now that decade best remembered for bad Abba records and flared jeans is being remembered as a precursor for our current age because a “second wave” of boomers are coming of age. As he writes:

. In part, this is a matter of simple chronology. The first wave of baby-boomers, who came of age in the 1960s, have had their say, and now it’s time for the second wave – who, in Haslam’s terms, “arrived too late” – to have theirs.

One can dispute the way he connects the “supreme” 1970s movie Chinatown with the recently released There Will Be Blood (“both involve dark forces, a sinister tycoon, a precious resource – water or oil – and a bleak, violent, hopeless conclusion), or his conclusion that the BBC series Life on Mars was the “best British television series of recent years” , but be fascinated by his deeper reflections on the era. These reflections were fueled by his conversations with Bruce Schulman, professor of history at Boston University, who informs him that “the shape of contemporary America was born in the crucible of the 1970s”. In his book The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, he speaks of “the long 1970s”, lasting from 1968 to 1984. From 1968, he argues in his book the postwar settlement began to crumble. In politics, the leftish consensus, known as Butskellism in Britain, was proving incapable of adapting to the demands of affluence. The hyper-individualism that was the flip side of 1960s idealism was undermining the communality of the old consensus. The power of the liberal, consensual northeastern American intellectuals was undermined by the new assertiveness of the southern “sunbelt”.” The shocks of terrorism in the form of Black September, the IRA and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army led to a culture that was far more individualistic and less community centered –a mood that fed the art of the period as he shows in the work of David Hockney as well as the movies of the time “Scorsese’s films Mean Streets and Taxi Driver showed an individualistic, Hobbesian war of all against all as the systems and laws of the old consensus collapsed. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now threatened the defeat of a demoralised West.”

Good provocative wide ranging ideas that we like on this blog—that will hopefully lead to equally interesting discussions.