I found it impossible to stop watching HBO’s broadcast of the 25th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert last night (there’s an encore presentation Monday) — even though I hated myself in the morning. Okay, hate is strong. But I wasn’t loving my generation’s ceaseless celebration of itself, and I’m as guilty as the next boomer. 

Admittedly, I set myself up by watching WLIW on Saturday evening. We had just completed the stupefying drive from western Pennsylvania to Brooklyn and my entertainment bar was pretty low, low enough for Ed Sullivan’s Rock and Roll Classics — The Sixties and earlier excerpts from the RNR HOF concerts to slide under. If you could wade through the hour-plus of public television infomercial that surrounded the Sullivan performances (WLIW gives new meaning to the phrase “handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged”) you glimpsed a few startling live numbers: the Stones ripping “Satisfaction” out of the night air, the Animals playing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” as if the joint was on fire. By the time we got to the RNR HOF show (excerpts from concerts given over the last 25 years) I had seen the heroes of my youth grow old and, for the most part, wide. And the pledge lines were just ringing off the hook!

The anniversary show (four hours, edited down from the eight-hour-plus concert held at Madison Square Garden last month) reunited some of those same acts (Bono & Springsteen anyone?) with some surprises: Bonnie Raitt singing “Love Has No Pride” with David Crosby and Graham Nash harmonizing on the chorus; Metallica paying homage to Lou Reed on “Sweet Jane.” 

But many of the best moments came when youth was added to the mix. Fergie, singing the Merry Clayton part, helped Mick revitalize “Gimme Shelter,” while Jeff Beck’s phenomenal young bassist, Tal Wilkenfeld, makes you think they won’t have to put all this music in a museum after all. 

I like looking in the rearview mirror as much as the next person: Crosby, Stills & Nash was the first real concert I saw (in 1969!) and I’m glad to see them all alive. (It was touch and go for at least two of them, for years.) But do I really need to hear “Almost Cut My Hair” ever again? And where the hell was Neil Young? He wrestled with the question of growing old with rock and roll long before his contemporaries on songs like “Hey Hey, My My” — which is maybe why you seldom see him at these things. Rust never sleeps, you see.

It’s flu season, which means we’re drinking a lot of tea in our house. I just got a new box of that perennial favorite, Celestial Seasonings’ Sleepytime tea — a blend of chamomile and spearmint, with just a hint of lemongrass — and had a startling revelation:

The Sleepytime Bear has gone solo.

You know the bear. He’s adorned the boxes since forever, dozing in a green chair before a raging fire, a cut curled asleep in his lap. He’s wearing a night shirt and a red cap with a ball on it, so you know he’s in for the night. Beside him, on a small table, is a teapot and cup, a few uneaten biscuits and some jam. Makes you sleepy just thinking about.

For a long time you could turn the box over for the next panel — papa bear sleeping in chair while mama bear leads two bear cubs off to bed. She was holding the baby bear while her daughter (well, she’s wearing a dress) has her head turned and her mouth open. “Goodnight, papa!” I used to imagine her saying, while the old man snored on.

Goodnight forever more. Because on the new box the family is missing. Gone. Kaput. And there are a few other alarming developments: the cat, once in papa’s lap, is now on the floor. (Some post-divorce tension, perhaps?) And while the rest of the room appears unchanged, there is now a blue radio and what looks like a still-life of pots and baskets hanging on the wall.

What happened here? Did papa bear trade in the missus for a younger model, who likes listening to racy music on her blue radio? Is she some kind of artist, making bad paintings and hanging them on the wall? Is she out at night, playing the floozy, while hapless mister bear still snoozes in front of the fire?

More alarming, the new Sleepytime Vanilla tea gives us the bear asleep in a hammock, far from the madding crowd, in a pith helmet no less. Did he abscond with office funds (a small matter of an overdraft) and flee to some sunnier clime? Or more unthinkable, kill off his whole den for a little peace & quiet? Dark days, indeed.

I finally got around to seeing the Coen Brothers’ latest film, A Serious Man, and it wouldn’t be fair to say I was disappointed. One person had already told me how much she hated it, and even the best reviews were somewhat ambivalent. The idea that the Coens were going to try and tackle, or even graze,  some big topics (the existence of God, the meaning of life, the appeal of F Troop) filled me with trepidation. But The Big Lebowski is about as deep as I like my movies, and it’s three-word credo, “The Dude abides,” is about as close to profound as I expect in a comedy. 

So the overall misanthropy of A Serious Man didn’t really surprise me (honestly, could any of those actors have been made to look any uglier?) and I was ready to give the Coens a free pass on their own version of Jewish self-loathing; Philip Roth went a long way with that, after all, and came out on the other side to become a writer who does deal with some universal truths, and sometimes truthfully. But I did not expect them to mess up on the pop stuff. 

A Serious Man is set in 1967, and the story of the trials of college professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, who carries the film about as well as any one man could) culminates with his son’s bar mitzvah. One of the many plagues that visits the long-suffering dad is in the form of a Columbia Record Club salesman who wants him to  pay for the records his son ordered without his dad’s permission. It’s all meant to be a sort of anti-climax when the guy finally gets him on the phone (Gopnik has much bigger worries) but then the salesman mentions that the one of records is Santana’s Abraxas. Which was released in September 1970.

Verisimilitude is one thing (for that matter, how does the kid seem to have the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow recorded in his transistor radio? did he possess the prototype of the Walkman? did he travel through time to get the first iPod?). But the film’s loving attention to other period detail (from the color of the family’s walls, to their clothes, cars and glasses) makes you wonder what the Coens are trying to signal with this anomaly — that it’s just a fantasy, anyway? that they’re in charge and can switch historical details at will? that they just liked the sound of the “Abraxas,” a multifaceted god in Gnostic mythology that Carlos Santana plucked from the pages of Hermann Hesse’s Demian? 

The last possibility might imply that the Coens are trying to Tell Us Something, after all, about the film’s big questions. But I think that gives them too much credit. The fact that they chose to have a venerated rabbi quote the lyrics of Darby Slick’s “Somebody to Love” as if they contained profundities is insulting enough. (And how come the rabbi knows the names of everyone in the band except the drummer?) The anomaly of referencing an album that would not be recorded for another three years to me just implies that they don’t care enough about their audience, let alone the meaning of life, to try and be consistent. Which might be forgivable if it was funny.

It’s time to thank Al Gore for the internet again. A woman I did not know in Seattle found my blog looking for stories about Chris Whitley, whom I had known and written about (for Vogue) in the early nineties. She in turn hepped me to a video of Chris’s daughter, Trixie, fronting a Daniel Lanois project called Black Dub. (Lanois essentially discovered her father, almost twenty years ago.) And last night I went to hear Trixie with her own band at a bar in Williamsburg — and we spoke about  me writing something about her for a different fashion magazine. Closing some kind of circle. 

It was hard for me to get used to the idea of Trixie fronting much of anything since the last time I saw her she was probably seven years old, but time makes a monkey of us all, as the lady said. She’s prettier than any monkey and a most accomplished singer and musician. Some of that talent may be genetic — it’s hard not to hear echoes of her father’s music in her singing and guitar playing — but she also worked at it. According to her website she has been singing, playing and dancing professionally since she was in her teens and learned to feel at home in studios in NYC and New Orleans, at the foot of her father. (You can hear her in the background or his last album, 2005’s Soft Dangerous Shores.)

She mentioned her dad a few times last night, first when introducing a sort of rap song she wrote when he was dying (he passed away four years ago) and then before closing she dedicated a quieter number to him. “Strong Blood” is the title. 

When I walked outside it was a little after midnight; I just turned 55. I know, that sounds old. But consider the alternative. I was moved by this example of musical legacy; Trixie calls herself a “daddy’s girl” and having one of those myself, I counted my blessings. The moon above Brooklyn was quite full, and free to all. You don’t have to do anything, it just shows up like that. Though sometimes you have to be patient.