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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2020 10:00:24 GMT
Yes if you were a culturally alive, curious person. Also what people forget is that people were far more adept at creating their own entertainment. People would make things and display real skill and love in what they did. We are so locked into consumption as answer to happiness, that we can no longer imagine the alternatives. No, I just think you're an incurable romantic. Ha! I'm just engaging in a different way of seeing things, an intellectual parlour game if you like. But I have found myself reading quite a few books on the period which I think was a rather more complex one than many are allowing for in their rather one-dimensional summation of the period ( 'everyone was poor and miserable'). It does feel as if you're digging in your heels here, refusing to imagine the possibilities. I can imagine you on the sofa with your arms folded, "Fuck off! I'm keeping my TV".
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rayge
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Post by rayge on Nov 30, 2020 10:07:53 GMT
Yes if you were a culturally alive, curious person. Also what people forget is that people were far more adept at creating their own entertainment. People would make things and display real skill and love in what they did. We are so locked into consumption as answer to happiness, that we can no longer imagine the alternatives. No, I just think you're an incurable romantic. Romanticism isn't a disease , but I agree that G has got his pink goggles on [edit wrote this before I saw G's post above]. And if I had access to time machine I wouldn't spend ten years of my life wallowing about in something that had already happened and that imagination allows us to experience vicariously anyway. I'd want to go forwards, although of course that same strictures about creative imagination apply. I suppose what I'm saying is that neither the past nor the future actually exist, except as concepts, and physical (as opposed to imaginative, which is what G is indulging in here) time travel is impossible, so I'd prefer to live in the present, where I don't know what is going to happen next.
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Post by tory on Nov 30, 2020 10:12:47 GMT
I think everyone can agree that medical advances have made life a lot easier. Dentistry for example would have been relatively horrific compared to now. You'd be lucky to live past 60 if you worked in a manual job. Childbirth was still risky. No indoor toilets for most people. Life would be more comfortable.
On the other hand, in the countryside life would have been genuinely quiet. The amount of wildlife would be very noticeable compared to today. Very few cars obviously anywhere and I suspect communities in some respects would have been far more closely knit. I don't think it would have been halcyon- far from it, but it would be churlish to admit that we haven't lost anything in those times.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2020 10:13:10 GMT
I think we’re going to see some truly inspirational new tea-cup designs in the next decade. That’s worth sticking around for. I think, for the majority of people, the 1920s would have been grim. The cool stuff would have been worlds away from the man on the Clapham omnibus. Central heating rules! What's interesting is the arguments being put forward for today are so general and non-specific to the character of the age we live in. Central heating, television, supermarkets..you could put forward those things in the 1970s! And although you may sneer at my tea cup example, the point is that exciting and new design were entering people's homes for the first time due to new mass production methods. That would have been tremendously exciting. So you are criticising people for their love of mass produced items now because it was more exciting to be at the beginning of the process of mass produced items? I hate everything about the twenties, shit kazoo jazz and the fucking awful art and design of the times.It was the Bullingdon clubs glory years a never ending toffs playground. I have no doubt the majority of Europe's population were as miserable as sin.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2020 10:15:24 GMT
I'm struggling to understand how I'd have more of a sensory experience in the 1920s. If I were an art student in Berlin, maybe, but as an English prole I'd just have a library card and a radio set. Maybe a Noel Coward play or two. Art, literature, new forms like jazz, opening of cinemas on a mass scale...
All of which people have more access to now than they ever did, though.
I'd take Netflix over Chaplin or Keaton, as great as they were at the time.
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20s v 20s
Nov 30, 2020 10:17:01 GMT
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Post by tory on Nov 30, 2020 10:17:01 GMT
"Kazoo Jazz"?
Sidney Bechet, Satchmo, the move of Jazz to NYC. It would have as thrilling as the sixties to witness.
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Post by Reactionary Rage on Nov 30, 2020 10:18:59 GMT
God ya'll are so prosaic. I'll be in the opium den with G.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2020 10:20:28 GMT
Well let's introduce two caveats to my proposition. 1. You would have no memory of the future you'd come from so you'd be experiencing everything for the first time. 2. You would be in a solidly middle class job. Not fabulously wealthy, but one that afforded you a reasonably comfortable existence. Working for a newspaper or in an architect's office say.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2020 10:26:33 GMT
"Kazoo Jazz"? Sidney Bechet, Satchmo, the move of Jazz to NYC. It would have as thrilling as the sixties to witness. Well, if it's your bag Toby. I just find it the most annoying noise in the history of music. Had Tom Waites been around it would have been better. I mean, to be fair music did get even worse a few years later with that pair of annoying twats Reinhardt and Grappelli.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2020 10:28:00 GMT
You think the average person would have been 'tremendously excited' by that? honestly? Yes if you were a culturally alive, curious person. Also what people forget is that people were far more adept at creating their own entertainment. People would make things and display real skill and love in what they did. We are so locked into consumption as answer to happiness, that we can no longer imagine the alternatives.
But the 1920s was when that world ended! It was the beginnings of Fordism and the idea of entertainment as something produced and consumed.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2020 10:28:52 GMT
"Kazoo Jazz"? Sidney Bechet, Satchmo, the move of Jazz to NYC. It would have as thrilling as the sixties to witness. Absolutely. We are talking of new forms, new ways of seeing, radical changes of expression and perception. Maybe you'd have subscribed to a poetry magazine and felt a dizzying excitement at the latest poem by TS Eliot or Ezra Pound.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2020 10:30:07 GMT
Yes if you were a culturally alive, curious person. Also what people forget is that people were far more adept at creating their own entertainment. People would make things and display real skill and love in what they did. We are so locked into consumption as answer to happiness, that we can no longer imagine the alternatives.
But the 1920s was when that world ended! It was the beginnings of Fordism and the idea of entertainment as something produced and consumed.
So you would have had the best of both worlds!
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2020 10:37:52 GMT
Well let's introduce two caveats to my proposition. 1. You would have no memory of the future you'd come from so you'd be experiencing everything for the first time. 2. You would be in a solidly middle class job. Not fabulously wealthy, but one that afforded you a reasonably comfortable existence. Working for a newspaper or in an architect's office say. Oh, well that's different. I would have a Welsh dresser full of tea cups and lalique hood ornaments. Following the crashing of the economy I could have found a more profitable sideline as a peaky blinder occasionally visiting the cinema for an hour or two of watching randomly falling wooden walls just missing Buster Keaton on a continuous loop. Probably would have gone to the opium den with Dougie.
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Post by cousinlou on Nov 30, 2020 10:47:02 GMT
Well let's introduce two caveats to my proposition. 1. You would have no memory of the future you'd come from so you'd be experiencing everything for the first time. 2. You would be in a solidly middle class job. Not fabulously wealthy, but one that afforded you a reasonably comfortable existence. Working for a newspaper or in an architect's office say. Yes, will think about that. What about having that choice living in, say, 1970. Back or forth 50 years?
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20s v 20s
Nov 30, 2020 11:01:23 GMT
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Post by Mr. FOLLARD on Nov 30, 2020 11:01:23 GMT
Chuckling at 'kazoo jazz'...
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