“And you know what? It’s not fun to see members of the Factory as 65 year olds.

Well,,, us 65 year olds were there, and saw it, and it wasn’t all that fun then either because life is mostly working and waiting. Better than now perhaps. Better art, culture, aesthetics, adventure, and with youth.

You see a documentary, and it is all compressed, just the high and low points, but my experience is that most of life is pretty much work, and tedium, punctuated by moments of action and aesthetics, and the bad.

I did not get the article, although it gave a sort of mood of wistful longing to be at the center of some actual cool, young and beautiful, artistic, scene, and a disappointment otherwise.

But I will tell you what it is so amazing about youth. Innocence. Life is the trek from innocence (not having had the experience of something), to Experience (having experienced most somethings.) That is the magic of youth – seeing and feeling all these amazing things for the first time. There is just more and more to try and do and feel – so much grand and wonderful, and so much to think of everything…

And as you get older your capacity to feel excitement and newness is less and less – you have experience, and not innocence – and that is not bad really, but it is more flatlined, the amplitude of life’s emotional sign wave is shallower and shallower – still, one always recalls the amazingness of life being new and so desirable.

I kind of get the feeling the writer is simply finding she has lost the youthful joy of first experience, she seems to have been around the block, and her innocence is now wearing out, and so the jadedness of being experienced is catching her off guard. Like the art/entertainment focus on youth and creativity and beauty passing her, and she is being surprised that she is getting on herself. More like this article is her first stage on that early line: “And you know what? It’s not fun to see members of the Factory as 65 year olds.” I think we all are surprised when one day, we realize we are grown up.

On a packed long-haul flight two or three years ago, I selected the movie on the rock band Queen that came out then, Bohemian Rhapsody. For an in-flight movie it was ok, as I just wanted to pass the time. As the movie progressed, I wanted it over and done with, however. I was rapidly losing interest. On the in-flight entertainment system, there were a lot of movies to choose from, but only one or two had appealed to me. And maybe I had seen them already. And there were many other channels full of stuff, but nothing that was exciting enough to keep me from trying to close my eyes. I ended up listening to music.
The entertainment system on a modern aircraft seems like an extravagance and a folly for the relatively short time in a tin tube flying you to a destination infinitely more appealing than said entertainment system.
Nobody around me had been watching the Queen movie, absorbed as they were in the whole system. That made Bohemian Rhapsody possibly even more difficult to watch.

In the mid-1970s, on another long-haul flight, I recall the air stewardesses setting up a table in the middle of the aisle, plonking a projector on top of it, running it and playing “the film”: a horrendous horror movie whose title I cannot recall. Could have been that stupid Omen one. Everyone on board could basically either watch it or sleep. The brutal, brutal 70s.
The zeitgeist of the Sixties? What was so special about them? You may as well talk about the zeitgeist of the Fifties, or Twenties: but it might be horribly uncool to apply the word “zeitgeist” to any decade other than the hallowed Sixties. The brutal, brutal Sixties.

Where was I?
I suppose being at the cinema is good for measuring the whole audience’s reaction against one’s own. The communal nature of the occasion is bound to appeal. When TV channels were extremely few in number, it was easier to hear, Did you see on TV last night ….? Ironically not so much today. But that long-haul flight and the pod-like nature of the whole entertainments consumption experience said it all about the actual disconnectedness of life today. Slap on top of that now the mask-wearing society.

I recall watching late at night on regular TV a recording of Queen’s live performance in 1975 from (it might have been) Earl’s Court or some such London venue: they on stage and all dressed in flowing white robes, Mercury moving mesmerisingly about the stage. But the packed audience of mostly young people was, perhaps unusually, lit up well and it was just as intriguing to be able to see their faces, their reactions.
And watching that particular concert would have been the ideal way to pass the time on a packed plane, flying across the Atlantic Ocean or Greenland: Queen, the rock band as it, not they, actually was. No movie, no documentary would have done. My tonic was missing.
And if I can find this movie now, on a ridiculously tiny screen, I will not watch it. Just to let you know. The screen’s gotta be big.

Ideally you would have been at the concert, in ‘75. But the cinema, on the big screen, does nicely, even on a big TV. However, so much effort is expended on creating bios, ciphers, alternatives, staged copies of artists and entertainers, plonked often onto ridiculously tiny screens too, that I believe all that buzz is making us unhappy. Time is too short to have so many artists and entertainers and their outputs warped. Documentaries may easily be spoiled. May easily bore.

For instance, people are weeping and wailing at ABBA’s return to the pop fray. Weeping and wailing! Like vital food and drug supplies have arrived! To them Abba are Mamma Mia rebooted! The moment the Abba Darth Vader finally lifts off its helmet. The voyage complete, like.
And all people used to want … was a framed photograph. Whatever happened to ABBA’s Take-A-Chance-On-Me split- screen from 1978 to warm the cockles of the heart?

“Thought of you as my mountain top/ Thought of you as my peak/ Thought of you as everything I’d had but couldn’t keep/ Linger on…” Love, youth and beauty… all gone.