Steven Reed Johnson
Portland, Oregon USA
Touch and Go
Blog
I was channel surfing and landed on a PBS (Public Broadcasting) Fund raiser. They had found older rockers to sing the oldy-goldy songs. If they couldn’t find the original rockers they found others to sing in their stead. At one point someone did a rendition of Bob Dylan’s The Times They are A-changing. A pan of the audience. There was your grandmother singing along. Heads swaying back and forth. Are they really listening to the lyrics? Then even stranger. They start singing along to Mr. Tambourine Man. I imagined a small girl spotting her grandmother in the audience. “Mom what’s grandma singing about? Is she going on a trip somewhere?”
Thailand Sojourn
Chapter #13
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.
Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling' ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip
My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels
To be wanderin'
I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it.
I just don’t think its the same as previous generations. Take for example the lyrics from a song my mother would sometimes sing when I was growing up.
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let's sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again
Altogether shout it now
There's no one
Who can doubt it now
So let's tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again
So this guy, a Reed College Student, is probably now someone’s grandfather
Oh this one. Well this is when your grandfather decided to run for King instead of student body president at his college. It was a campaign poster.
My first wife Catherine with a friend, 1965
Photo of my mother and father on their Honeymoon at the Oregon Coast. He had just graduated from Reed College and it was the tail end of the depression, beginning of World War II
A few years back I was part of a 3 day focus group funded by Rockefeller Brothers. There was about 30 of us from around the USA. We were at one of the Rockefeller Compounds near White Plains, New York. Yes, it was incongruous but reminded us also of how philanthropy is an inter-generational thing. Each morning or afternoon we were given a question to discuss. One of the questions was how will we fund social movements in the future. The guy next to me motioned me to look in back of us. The entire wall was a Picasso Painting. "No problem, Dude just roll it up and take it with us."
We are Trying to Get out of the way
Partisan debates during the good old days
Steve sitting on his desk trying to figure out how to create the world brain before there was an Internet
My father, an intellectual, probably reading George Santayana, His first real job, Lewis and Clark College. Hired along with William Stafford, to educate returning vets from the Korean war.
