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Late at night, after midnight and before I go to bed, I often watch the TV. It helps me turn my brain off, get into a somnambulant state. For me, TV has always been the best forms of meditation late at night after my mind has been active for many hours, usually about 16 during the day. Many practitioners of the diverse art of meditation emphasize that one of the main aims of this discipline is the achievement of a no effort attitude, of a remaining in the here and now, an avoiding of cognitive analysis, a stilling of the fluctuations of the mind, a relaxing of muscular tension. I achieve this watching TV, but only sometimes.
From time to time there are ads by Time-Life Inc. for a set of CDs. Last night I watched the ad "Flower Power: Music of the Love Generation." Those who watched the ad could buy 8 CDs, 164 hits, digitally remastered for $150 all up. As much as I had enjoyed the music of that generation of flower-power hits and during those years had bought many of the records from the mid-1960s until the mid-1970s, raising children on the salary of a teacher from about 1976/7 on made buying records too expensive. I had no intention of buying this package of music. On a disability pension in the early evening of my late adulthood, I was in no position to make this purchase.
The short segments of a few seconds of songs from many artists-musicians-singers-songwriters from the 1960s and 1970s were stimulating, I must say. I was 15 in 1960 and 36 in 1980--the generation of the first of the baby-boomers, children born in and after 1945--the first of the rock-‘n-roll enthusiasts. Music was an integral part of my life in those years, although listening to music slipped back a few notches as I came to focus on: (a) career, family and community life and its responsibilities, (b) health and the quixotic tournament of issues in the wider society as well as (c) TV and radio programs and my life in the last years of early adulthood and middle age from the late-1970s until my retirement from FT, PT and casual/volunteer work in the years 1999 to 2005. Now in my early sixties I am rediscovering music in its many forms.-Ron Price with thanks to Time-Life Inc on WIN TV at 1 a.m., 15 July 2008.
Where did it all go all those
sounds beginning in the ‘50s
on that little blue radio in that
little bedroom in that little house
in that little town in that little world
that exploded all that small town
smugness all its complacent trinity
of Catholic, Protestant and Jew
and their genuine One True Faiths.
That world was so safe and so
familiar. Indians got creamed
at the movies on Saturdays, yes,
dying copiously amidst popcorn
and candy wrappers. Canadians
like me were always good guys
who did not start wars, were thrifty
and had virtuous sunlit wheatfields.
Ours was a good town; the Chamber
of Commerce told us in the newspaper.
I played baseball in the summer and
hockey in the winter and then a real
winter hit my life in my teens, the cold
was surrounded by music everywhere,
but the music did not warm the winter
cold as it stripped my young tree with
its blasts from the north and the west.
The music was not large enough to house
my impulse to believe—a need which lay
quiet, unhurried and insidious as a seed.
Ron Price
21 July 2008
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