A new hippydom!  Pass the smelling salts.

No offence, John.

LOL!  You're a bugger sometimes, you know that?

Weller's Janis Joplin in drag.

You won't find me defending Weller. His decline is a defining moment in my middle age. I can't watch or listen to him now. No groove, no soul, no relevance. And the hair and the expensive but awful clothes. No, Chico Hamilton is my new pin-up. Him and Jerry Garcia and Ken Kesey.

TM

Tony Perkins, Zero Mostel and Marty Feldman for me.  Straight up.

Ivy is a less mainstream and more subtle part of the retro movement, a way of dressing that's all, I've even heard that it's not compulsory to like jazz.  When you start ascribing philosophy and 'lifestyle' (hate the expression) to a mode of dress then you're getting close to talking a load of tosh.

Nostalgia for bygone times has been around since the Industrial Revolution.  As the pace of change accellerates and life becomes less familiar and more scary so the tendency to look back on the past with fondness increases - up to a point. I say up to a point because all we are talking about here is an indulgent way of using some of our disposable income.  If you lose your job and your house is repossessed you probably stop worrying about whether Bass Weejuns are still as good as they used to be.

Big Tony's description fits in with all those programmes on the telly 'My Three Sons' etc. Times were good and getting better. Consumption was conspicuous.

What's not to like?

''President John F. Kennedy passed the largest tax cut in history upon entering office in 1961. $200 billion in war bonds matured, and the G.I. Bill financed a well-educated work force. The middle class swelled, as did GDP and productivity. The U.S. underwent a kind of golden age of economic growth. This growth was distributed fairly evenly across the economic classes, which some attribute to the strength of labor unions in this period—labor union membership peaked historically in the U.S. during the 1950s, in the midst of this massive economic growth. President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–69) dreamed of creating a "Great Society", and began many new social programs to that end, such as Medicaid and Medicare. The government financed some of private industry's research and development throughout these decades, most notably ARPANET (which would become the Internet).'' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United_States

Sounds pretty good to me - unless you are some sort of bleeding heart.

Last edited by D. Adams (2010-09-16 15:09:45)

My ideal is to look - more or less - conservative: in a kind of 50s West Coast sense.  It's that look I strive for.  My original point - before Toffeeman went off on one after Big Tony's very reasonable posting - was about 'image'.  Style over substance again?