Finished the Wenner biography. It was a sort of nice trip down memory road of a place that will never be returned to.
In ways, it is a sad autobiography for those that have followed rock and roll with a passion and anticipation for what is/was to come. I imagine it would be even more sadder for those that were around from the arrival of rock and roll, through the Beatles explosion, and to today, because the book really is sort of a eulogy to rock and roll.
Still, in the end, it really seemed like a book about name-dropping, brushing shoulders with the well-known, and some contradictions. For example, Wenner writes quite a bit about the environment but lacks any contrition for all the global jet setting he did (he brags about taking a flight in his new jet while all alone).
As for magazines and culture, for decades I have been a subscriber to many, many magazines over the years and still do (it used to be businesses like Magazineline that offered great discounts for students and they would even let you continue to get these discounts after graduating).
During this time, I have seen many come and go, and right now there is a noticeable change in the ones that cover society, popular culture, and the like. In Wenner's book, he sort of mentioned how the new incarnation of RS involves it turning into a rap magazine (which is partly true -it certainly has moved away from rock and roll as its main subject matter - when each new issue arrives I sarcastically mention to our youngest the absence of any rock and roller on the cover).
A few weeks ago, while going through a bin of my old comic books I came across an old issue of RS from the 80s, and after thumbing through it was shocked at the amount of information it contained and information that is no longer present in today's magazine. It almost seems as if magazine content is now assembled by created technology that has been created that gleans and cuts pieces from the Internet automatically and then allows one to assemble them into a magazine issue.
I don't know if many have seen the movie Vengeance, but there is a great scene in it where Ashton Kutcher (in a role against typecasting) has a profoundly meaningful conversation with the lead actor about how we select the media that we do (be basically states that we feed into the machine what we like so the machine can then regurgitate right back to us the same things we like - it is a bit more than that, but that is the gist of it - oddly, many years ago there was a 60 Minutes piece on how corporations were questioning teens and younger people on what they liked so they could create things to sell back to them).
Anyway, I don't know about others, but I've hit that age spectrum where it feels like the world is passing me by - but as Cousin Ellis in No Country For Old Men tells Tommie Lee Jones - you can't stop what's coming.
