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  1. Fletch

    The Olympic torch relay it was all Adolf Hitler's flaming idea

    Nuh uh. The posters literally flashed by - a split second apiece.
  2. Fletch

    Photos of American Children in the 1940s

    My grandpa used to tell me about living in the county seat town of Boone, IA, in the late '20s and early '30s. He would page thru pictures of neatly groomed frame houses and tidy 2-story brick downtown blocks and say, "I can't believe how junky everything looked" compared to his concrete-block...
  3. Fletch

    The Olympic torch relay it was all Adolf Hitler's flaming idea

    Here's a puzzler. Tonight during the run-up to the opening tableaux, NBC flashed a cascade of posters from past Olympics. As far as I could see, once they got to 1928, they went straight to 1948. I can understand skipping over Berlin 1936. But why skip Los Angeles 1932? Was it the official...
  4. Fletch

    Myths of the Golden Era -- Exploded!

    Those who do not remember the pasta are doomed to reheat it.
  5. Fletch

    Do you think there could be a second Great Depression?

    Gee, yesterday you taught me about rum-sprung coast-defenders, and today you come around with saltheads.
  7. Fletch

    A commercial that promotes the worst of today

    Spindoctors, fearmongers, opinionmakers. Trend-peddlers and image-marketers, flacks and hawkers, paid by people in the public eye to help keep them lodged in there like irritating cinders, because the more the eye waters, the more the greenbacks grow.
  8. Fletch

    The general decline in standards today

    There's been a backlash attitude from metrosexuality that says men ought to be more dominating - and women ought to go along with it.
  9. Fletch

    meditations on doing yesterday's music today

    Again, look to the lost social function. As Lizzie notes, back when we were all starved for sex and entertainment, dancing mattered as a civilized interaction and a romantic ritual, and the music and bands mattered as things-in-themselves. There was room in that scenario for medium fox trot...
  10. Fletch

    A commercial that promotes the worst of today

    You approach it from a saner perspective than the media often do. It ought to be a debate about the common good, but is too often twisted to deflect resentment onto individuals or bolster stereotypes.
  11. Fletch

    meditations on doing yesterday's music today

    I hope you have the chance to hear Des Moines' Ballyhoo Foxtrot Orchestra sometime. I do a lot of their sax and clarinet work. We play mostly for private functions, but I think we strike a nice balance between faithfulness and relevance.
  13. Fletch

    The general decline in standards today

    Just be careful whom you do believe. There are sectors of the media that are falsely labeled Not The Media so they might be held above criticism - just as there are sectors of the government that are falsely labeled Not The Government for the same reason.
  14. Fletch

    A commercial that promotes the worst of today

    All I can say is don't get too hung up on the issue of individual entitlements. It may be all the buzz these days, and it may appeal to our fear of the future if we're past a Certain Age. But it's just another media-made distraction from some very real and difficult problems with our shared...
  15. Fletch

    Myths of the Golden Era -- Exploded!

    With respect to your experience and your right to your opinion, we here at FL do have a blanket rule about postings that approach politics. They've led to unresolvable disagreements in the past. It's the moderators' call, but after about paragraph 7 your words above seem to turn firmly political.
  16. Fletch

    Who is today's Steve McQueen?

    Danny is beyond cool. He makes child's play of cool.
  17. Fletch

    Who is today's Steve McQueen?

    This might have been a founding influence on cool, but it has died out of our modern concept. The archetypical cool man (and let's face it, cool is about 98% masculinity) laughs at nothing but pain - his own or others'. And he may not take himself seriously, but he stops well short of showing...
  19. Fletch

    Myths of the Golden Era -- Exploded!

    Myth Turned Fact: Nothing even tangentially relevant to our times began before the 1950s. Anything before is primitive, is background, is irrelevant in the extreme. Color photo of NBC-TV mobile unit at 1939 World's Fair. Full-size file taken offline, because why should we care?
  20. Fletch

    meditations on doing yesterday's music today

    I don't know if this will pull anything together, but... Being a musician almost always means playing with others. That means respecting the common tradition. That, in turn, means leaving behind what hasn't lasted. What makes this tough is that it's art in some ways and totally-not-art in...
  21. Fletch

    meditations on doing yesterday's music today

    I'll agree that there is little casual, social dancing to big band music. The interest today, and the reason for the revival, is mostly in the skills involved. Case in point: the dance history movement of our time effaces the great orchestras and musicians in favor of the dance stars. It's a...
  22. Fletch

    meditations on doing yesterday's music today

    OK, I really did misspeak there. I will stand by the assertion that most really good bassists don't slap. It's more a classical instrument today than it was decades ago, and that's a profane technique in classical circles. Even in jazz, it's often thought of as gimmicky now - it's embraced only...
  23. Fletch

    Who is today's Steve McQueen?

    To be frank, blokishness is a necessary component of cool. Being all suavity and polish was what preceded cool - say in the '30s, when there was no cool.

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