But there has been great art from that era, cinema became a serious art form during that time, as did pop music. Both are collaborative arts, collective work, many individual artists, technicians, managers and businessmen who bring it all together and make it happen. Consider the difference between the utter bilge the “serious” electronic musicians of the time were doing (John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen) and what these drugged-out hippies were producing. Especially when you consider they were British hippies, a race never really known for its musicians, as opposed to say, its poets, writers and dramatists.

This music is irresistable. When I first heard Pink Floyd, I remember telling myself “A thousand years from now, this is what starship crews will listen to when they’re off watch .” As Ted Sturgeon once put it, 90% of everything is shit, but sometimes, every once in a great while, everything comes together just right. And the funny thing is, when you give “The People” real quality, they recognize it and they buy it. 741 weeks on the top 100. Even a record company executive can understand that.

John Ruskin’s age had its ‘ships of the line’, our generation had rock and roll. And I am so proud I was there.

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Its ironic that that poetry, and that performance came from Pink Floyd. Just on the basis of that alone, and nothing else, their life was not wasted.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I’d something more to say.

Whooda thunk, back in the ’60s, busily protecting the US as the bastion of freedom, democracy, free markets, all that was good, that we’d reach this age and this time.

Happy birthday! May I suggest a Bowser family tradition. Every birthday and every Christmas I purchase a present for Bowser. To Bowser from Bowser with love.

It’s always something I want but didn’t think I should spend the money on.