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Post by richardsok on Feb 26, 2021 1:51:04 GMT
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Post by retiredat48 on Feb 26, 2021 16:38:15 GMT
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Post by richardsok on Mar 3, 2021 15:08:00 GMT
Filled in a largely fuzzy spot in my knowledge of history reading a biography of Woodrow Wilson by H. W. Brands.
A few comments --
Progressives believed people might be improved with better education, better working conditions, better housing, better laws. During The Great War leftist encouragement often became coercive. The Espionage and Sedition Acts were part of that coercion. Also the drive for 100% Americanism aimed at German Americans and all immigrants of all origins as they fell under suspicion. Communism in Russia triggered fears that bolshevism might be coming to the US with East European immigrants. The 18th Amendment (prohibition) swept through Congress over Wilson's veto and took the nation by the throat in 1920. Later the Nineteenth Amendment securing the women's vote became law. (One reason women won the vote was that many in government believed the ladies would be relatively conservative and could blunt the far-left tendencies of newly arrived citizens.) But America turned away from Wilson's idealistic enlightenment and involvement in world affairs . The post-war decade was the Jazz Age, a reaction against the Progressive Era. After his death Wilson became a scapegoat for our collective disillusionment. He was never taken to task for his lifelong virulent racism. Had he actually died from the stroke that felled him while barnstorming around the country campaigning for the League of Nations and a just peace settlement, Wilson might have been regarded a second heroic martyr alongside Lincoln. But he lingered on, cosseted away by his wife Edith, his chief of staff, Tumulty, and his physician, Dr. Grayson. No one, not even in the highest reaches of the legislature was ever told how destroyed he really was.
Largely forgotten now, Wilson was a masterful, soaring orator, at times approaching Lincoln himself.
“ The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves, as we have wished to be known in the councils of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and justice and the right exalted.”
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Post by richardsok on May 31, 2021 14:03:08 GMT
As no one else is reporting on their reading, I guess I'll give it another go this Memorial weekend. I just finished Strachey's EMINENT VICTORIANS, which I'm not going to recommend in its entirety; too much in it of little interest to many of us. But I will recommend the final section, "THE END OF GENERAL GORDON". It's a relatively short read, about sixty pages or so, in the sort of crafted English one wants to savor slowly to enjoy the account of the siege of a city and an extraordinary life; another one of those unique, eccentric Victorians from a long-gone time and temperament. It's the sort of story that grips one's imagination and won't let go. If you know anything about Gordon, you probably remember him from the film KHARTOUM, starring Charleston Heston and Lawrence Olivier. As movies go, it was quite true to real events. Rather than a poor attempt at a review, I'll close with a couple of brief quotes of some characters in the tale.
"...... his soul revolted against dinner parties and stiff shirts; and the presence of ladies—especially of fashionable ladies—filled him with uneasiness. He had, besides, a deeper dread of the world's contaminations.
"He was an English gentleman, an officer, a man of energy and action, a lover of danger and the audacities that defeat danger; a passionate creature, flowing over with the self-assertiveness of independent judgment and the arbitrary temper of command.
The enemy: " He was the Mahdi.....The tall, broad-shouldered, majestic man, with the dark face and black beard and great eyes—who could doubt that he was the embodiment of a superhuman power? Fascination dwelt in every movement, every glance. The eyes, painted with antimony, flashed extraordinary fires; the exquisite smile revealed, beneath the vigorous lips, white upper teeth with a V-shaped space between them—the certain sign of fortune. His turban was folded with faultless art, his jibbeh, speckless, was perfumed with sandal-wood, musk, and attar of roses. He was at once all courtesy and all command. Thousands followed him, thousands prostrated themselves before him; thousands, when he lifted up his voice in solemn worship, knew that the heavens were opened and that they had come near to God. Then all at once the onbeia—the elephant's-tusk trumpet—would give out its enormous sound. The nahas—the brazen wardrums—would summon, with their weird rolling, the whole host to arms. The green flag and the red flag and the black flag would rise over the multitude. The great army would move forward, coloured, glistening, dark, violent, proud, beautiful. The drunkenness, the madness of religion would blaze on every face; and the Mahdi, immovable on his charger, would let the scene grow under his eyes in silence.
Gordon arrives in Khartoum, ostensibly to evacuate the city, but defies his orders: "The glare and the heat of that southern atmosphere, the movement of the crowded city, the dark-faced populace, the soldiers and the suppliants, the reawakened consciousness of power, the glamour and the mystery of the whole strange scene—these things seized upon him, engulfed him, and worked a new transformation on his intoxicated heart. England, with its complications and its policies, became an empty vision to him; Sir Evelyn Baring, with his cautions and sagacities, hardly more than a tiresome name. He was Gordon Pasha, he was the Governor-General, he was the ruler of the Sudan. He was among his people—his own people, and it was to them only that he was responsible—to them, and to God."
No one writes like this any more.... you can even read it on line, I'm sure. Highly recommended.
(BTW I believe you can still see the entire movie version on youtube)
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Post by Chahta on May 31, 2021 15:18:49 GMT
I am not sure our financial system is sustainable either. The pace at which debt is added by either side is questionable. Everyone seems to go along willingly. Spending is never a question. Please don't give me % of GDP rhetoric. I suppose that someday the gumment will print enough money to wipe the debt out and, BTW, our private wealth too. All the while providing shiny object for distractions.
I finished Killing the Mob, the tenth in the Killing series. I don't generally read so serious of a topic. Part of that period was my early years (J Edgar Hoover era). Yes he was part of the corruption in the FBI back then. It was quite enlightening about voter fixing and corruption back then and how much the Mob controlled senators, unions etc. Nothing new today.
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Post by chang on Jun 1, 2021 4:34:56 GMT
As no one else is reporting on their reading... This will be of almost no interest to anyone, but I have been spending 90% of my time reading physics literature. I just sent a paper off to a peer-reviewed journal with the hope that it will be accepted and published. (I had another paper published last December.) The blind review process takes several weeks at a minimum, depending upon how long it takes the editor to locate two appropriate reviewers, and how long it takes them to respond. There may follow a Q&A phase between the reviewers and the author, which can lead to corrections and amendments to the paper -- at that stage, the paper has usually been provisionally accepted. The other 10% of my time has been devoted to a lengthy job interview process, which has gone through stages of rough and detailed business plans, analysis, research, specific proposals, etc. Now I am waiting for the outcome of a proposal to the company board of directors. When I have truly free time for relaxing reading, I almost always read P. G. Wodehouse, my favorite author. Indeed, I am overdue to grab one of his novels off the shelf.
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Post by chang on Jun 1, 2021 4:40:33 GMT
Filled in a largely fuzzy spot in my knowledge of history reading a biography of Woodrow Wilson by H. W. Brands. richardsok A few years ago I read this book about Garfield. Talk about a nail-biting page turner! I highly recommend it. He was an incredibly gifted and remarkable man, who in different circumstances could easily have been the greatest American who ever lived. Regrettably there just weren't any major crises during his short presidency, and his life was even more regrettably cut short. He had more character, brains and menschlichkeit than anyone else I can think of. www.amazon.com/Destiny-Republic-Madness-Medicine-President-ebook/dp/B004J4X33O
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Post by Chahta on Jun 1, 2021 13:24:30 GMT
Thanks for that tip on a book. I will look that one up. The author seems to like the topic of presidents since she has a book about T. Roosevelt.
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Post by rhythmmethod on Jun 1, 2021 14:16:25 GMT
Just finished the HBO one season series "Mare of Eastown". I thought it was riveting and the best acting Ive seen on TV in quite some time!
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Post by richardsok on Jun 1, 2021 14:42:20 GMT
chang -- You and I have seriously overlapping interests. I favorably reviewed "DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC" in my M* posts a couple of years ago. (It has disappeared with the old M* format, but I probably have a hard copy of my post somewhere in my journal.) Although I have lamentably found I now simply forget most of my past readings -- sometimes to the point of complete erasure with passage of time -- the Garfield bio is one that stayed vivid over the years. I remember being enraged at the block-headed doctors who actually killed Garfield with their imbecilities. Great read, indeed. Agree also on Wodehouse. I have at least three thick anthologies of his on my shelves, which I save for rainy days, glum days, or the blues. I'll pick up any random story and no matter how discouraged I am, in a few minutes I'm apt to roll over on the sofa and howl with laughter. Extended reading is too much of a good thing, IMO. Another thing about Wodehouse, he did some video introductions when PBS dramatized some of his short stories and in person Wodehouse appears EXACTLY like you'd expect; an awkward, jolly, inept, odd, lisping old Brit deary -- just dripping with eccentric charm and talent still. There's an American Wodehouse Society and several videos of him and a few of his dramatized works on youtube. Cheers.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 1, 2021 21:20:00 GMT
The last book I read on a financial topic was The Bond Book by Anette Thau. I read most parts of it - that was about 20 years ago.
Recently I look for something on Netflix. Last watched Ragnarok (Danish Norwegian) and Who Killed Sara? (Mexican) I prefer reading subtitles and hearing the native language spoken rather than dubbed English. It interesting to find Americanism incorporated into their conversations. The latest expression was 'staycation.'
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Post by chang on Jun 3, 2021 5:48:54 GMT
richardsok Yes indeed Garfield's doctors basically killed him. A tragic story. Wodehouse - some years ago Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry made a superb series. Fry was much younger than the real Jeeves was intended to be, but the show -- along with all the other characters and actors -- was fantastic (as was the superb musical scoring). More recently there was a TV series called "Blandings" starring Timothy Spall. While it's entertaining and mildly amusing, it is a butchery of the Wodehouse stories and shouldn't even really be considered an adaptation. I have both series on DVD. Of course, his genius was in the way he manipulated the written word and the English language -- only Mark Twain comes close in that area -- so no television adaptations can really capture the essence of PGW.
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Post by BearMkt on Jun 5, 2021 1:20:39 GMT
I read, research, and unfortunately watch the local AND national news too much. I love history but also cultural, and political current events. I'm having more trouble believing and finding truth in the media.
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Post by Chahta on Jun 5, 2021 12:30:14 GMT
I read, research, and unfortunately watch the local AND national news too much. I love history but also cultural, and political current events. I'm having more trouble believing and finding truth in the media. I quit watching "news" and nearly all opinion TV. Once in awhile I tune in to both but quickly tune out.
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Post by BearMkt on Jun 6, 2021 12:16:07 GMT
I read, research, and unfortunately watch the local AND national news too much. I love history but also cultural, and political current events. I'm having more trouble believing and finding truth in the media. I quit watching "news" and nearly all opinion TV. Once in awhile I tune in to both but quickly tune out. That's almost certainly a good thing!
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Post by acksurf on Jun 6, 2021 17:32:15 GMT
I read, research, and unfortunately watch the local AND national news too much. I love history but also cultural, and political current events. I'm having more trouble believing and finding truth in the media. I quit watching "news" and nearly all opinion TV. Once in awhile I tune in to both but quickly tune out. Yeah, me too. When I "cut the cable", I stopped watching news and sports. I don't miss either but do catch the Masters or other major sporting events from time to time. It's an odd thing that some people feel like they have to know what's happening every second of the day. My life is much better not being inundated with the outrage of the day
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Post by richardsok on Jun 7, 2021 12:05:46 GMT
chang & norbert --
Just finished an interesting read. With your interests, I think you may appreciate WINGS OF MADNESS by Paul Hoffman, a biography of Santos-Dumont, the national hero of Brazil and early pioneer of flight, contesting with the Wright brothers over who actually flew a true heavier-than-air craft first. The physics of the time suggested that powered airplanes were impossible. You needed more power to compensate for the wind drag of the wings get aloft, but to lift the motor AND the man you had to INCREASE the size of the wings, which would cause more drag, so you needed an even heavier motor, etc. Much more on the problems of early flight; dealing with variable winds, developing controls, how drag ropes were used on early balloons, how to insure oil & fuel continuously flows into the motor even when airplane is steeply banking, etc etc. Diminutive, plucky, incredibly courageous. rich, eccentric, dandy, repressed homosexual, gourmet, competitive fame seeker – Dumont did his work -- first primitive spherical balloons, then powered balloons, then cigar shaped balloons and finally true airplanes – all of it in front of the crowds of Paris. In contrast, the Wright brothers worked in secrecy, and so invited doubts on exactly what they did and when. They were terrible businessmen and tried to sell their earliest planes without actually showing them to their customers or demonstrating what they could do. Dumont did all of his work – triumphs and catastrophes – in front of wildly cheering French crowds. There is a famous photo of him aloft, rounding the top of the Eiffel Tower. Paris loved him. He met with Edison, who never worked on flight because he correctly judged there would be no patent in it. Also predicted to Dumont that his big balloons were a dead end; that they would always be at the mercy of the winds. Make your balloons SMALLER, he advised Dumont, until you can eliminate them altogether..... and that is exactly what Dumont did. Developed the first build-it-yourself plane, the graceful little DEMOISELLE, which had designs published in POPULAR MECHANICS for hobbyists.. Dumont never tried to patent his crafts and was later horrified airplanes were used extensively in WWI and so many people died in crashes. Henry Ford thought to do for airplanes what he had done for automobiles, but abandoned the project when his test pilot was killed. Later as history and events passed him by, Dumont became reclusive and depressed. Lindbergh invited him to his gala celebratory dinner in Paris. Dumont declined. Today Cartier still makes a Santos-Dumont watch, and his memory is revered in Brazil – where they sneer at those yanqui imposters, those Wright brothers.
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Post by chang on Jun 8, 2021 0:52:49 GMT
Thanks richardsok, that sounds fascinating. I'll look for it. I like good biographies. (Incidentally, pretty naive not to realize how valuable an airplane would be in war.)
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Post by Chahta on Jun 8, 2021 11:19:44 GMT
I read the article completely this time. They make some very good points that are true about "renewable" energy and never thought about by the "green new deal people".
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Post by richardsok on Jun 16, 2021 23:05:02 GMT
I approached THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE with a good bit of initial skepticism. Like many of my generation, I'd been reading about WWII since I was twelve years old and thought, "What is this ink-stained wretch going to write that I don't already know?" As it turned out, plenty.
Author Erik Larson concentrates on the secondary characters around Churchill during the first year of his Prime Ministry; the advisors, secretaries, generals, ministers -- like Pug Ismay, Halifax, Beaverbrook, etc. Makes little attempt to put together a coherent historical narrative, but divides his book up into over a hundred mini "Chapters", some less than a single page long, but each able to stand on its own. Discusses children; the ingenue Mary flitting about town in one social whirl after another while bombs are falling and dissolute cuckold Randolph who loses his wife, Pamela, to American representative A. Harriman -- and deserves to. It would appear sexual mores evaporated during the Blitz. Evidently clothing was shed with alacrity when bombs fell. Who knew?
When the superstitious Rudolph Hess deserts and flies on madcap "peace mission" to Scotland, Hitler, furious, has his astrologer thrown into concentration camp. There's a lesson to remember somewhere in there; but I don't know what it is. One thing about Larson; the author makes few demands on his reader. This is the easiest-flowing 500-page history I've ever read.
I don't recall who recommended this book, but whoever it was, thanks.
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Post by richardsok on Jun 28, 2021 15:57:40 GMT
I believe there must be more bought-but-never-read copies of Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" than your average 'science for the masses' book. You may remember some years back Hawking had a terrific media buzz about him -- his book, his illness, his brilliance, all that. His "Brief History" became at least one major documentary and there was even a Hollywood flick about his early life and romance. All faded now, of course. In the end, the book just demanded too much from the non-academic reader and now a million tomes in a million homes rest on shelves, gathering dust.
Well, it seems the book has been thoroughly re-edited & re-worked for me and for America's other physics illiterates.
It is now "A BRIEFER HISTORY OF TIME" co-written with Leonard Mlodinow.
Call it mental isometrics for liberal arts majors; big thoughts, vast distances, deep wonders to consider elasticity of time and space and, in the end, a humbling read to attempt to ponder our relative insignificance in the cosmos.
This book is a keeper.
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Post by chang on Jun 28, 2021 22:43:56 GMT
I read Hawking's A.B.H.O.T. many years ago. It's an excellent layman's book about cosmology. Hawking was always something of a celebrity in science circles, and yes partly because of his disability. He co-authored a book about gravitation with Ellis in 1973 that is the standard reference for the field (I have it), and with Roger Penrose discovered some important theorems about singularities (places where the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite). Penrose received a Nobel prize a few years ago for his earlier work in the 1960s. Incidentally he too has written a number of "popular" layman's) books about physics: www.amazon.com/Roger-Penrose/e/B000AQ045A/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1"Big thoughts, vast distances, deep wonders" is a good description! If you think this stuff is mind-boggling, try adding the math and seeing/understanding the formulas that describe the behavior of objects (and light) around dense bodies like neutrons starts and black holes, and it will really blow your mind. It gives one an appreciation for the genius of Einstein, who could see that time and space are stretchy things and intimately connected. You've heard about the twin paradox, where you stay at home on Earth while your twin brother goes racing about in space and comes back younger than you are? That's because our "speed" through spacetime is actually constant. If you stand still (no speed through space) then your "speed through time" is maximized--you age faster. If you race around in space at high speed, then your speed through time is slower (you age more slowly). This has been confirmed by sending very precise clocks around the world in an airplane and then comparing their elapsed time with identical clocks that remained at rest. This is actually an example from "special relativity" which applies when spacetime is flat (no gravity). Add gravity (i.e., heavy objects, like planets and stars) and things get even weirder.
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Post by chang on Jun 29, 2021 1:07:26 GMT
OK, here's a "weird thing". Probably everybody knows that one of the (easy) consequences of Einstein's theory is that light bends in a gravitational field. It was big news when Eddington led an expedition in 1919 to photograph a solar eclipse, and by comparing pictures they calculated the angle of deflection of the light from a star as it passed near the Sun, and it was exactly what the theory predicted.
So now let's consider a very dense object -- a black hole. A black hole is created when you squash an object with mass M down to a size that fits within a sphere of radius R = 2GM/c2. (G is Newton's gravitational constant, and c is the speed of light.)
The gravity close to the black hole is so strong that light can actually orbit the black hole. But unlike a material object (with positive mass), which can go into orbit at any altitude, light quanta (photons) are massless and only travel at one speed -- the speed of light. So they can orbit at only one altitude. It turns out that light can orbit a black hole at the exact radius 1.5R = 3GM/c2.
So.... imagine that you gently descend toward a black hole, and as you pass the radius 1.5R you look left or right -- you will see the back of your head. Because light orbits the black hole in a circular orbit, so if you shine a flashlight forward, the light will travel around the black hole, reflect off the back of your head, and return along the same path and reach your eyes. Two people could stand back to back, and see each other face to face!
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Post by chang on Jun 29, 2021 1:33:02 GMT
Incidentally, when I said dense, I mean dense. The radius R = 2GM/c2 (called the Schwarzschild radius) for the Earth, which has a mass of 6 x 1024 kg (that's 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg) is only 9mm (about 0.35 inches). You'd have to squash the entire Earth into the size of a marble.
The radius R for the Sun (which has a mass of 2 x 1030 kg) is about 3 km.
Once you squash an object into a volume that fits inside its Schwarzschild radius, it becomes a black hole. What that actually means is that gravity takes over and continues to pull the object toward its center -- you can stop compressing it now, it will actually collapse inward to a point, and all the mass will disappear into that point (a singularity). Anything which crosses the radius R will be sucked into that point and also disappear.
It's kind of interesting that there are some very dense objects in the universe, which are not dense enough to become black holes, but they are close. Their radii are larger than the Schwarzschild radius, but not by much. So they don't collapse into a black hole and disappear: they are just very, very, very dense objects. These are neutron stars. They are so dense that the atoms are smashed into a sea of electrons and protons and neutrons, and even the electrons and protons are squeezed together to make only neutrons. The neutron star is one big ball of neutrons. And when I say "ball", I mean ball. Because the gravity is so strong, a neutron star will be incredibly smooth. The highest "mountain" on a neutron star 10 km in diameter would be no taller than a grain of sand. A neutron star would be much, much smoother than any billiard ball you every felt. Of course, you could not touch a neutron star: you would get sucked into it, and plastered over the surface until your body was no thicker than a few neutrons high. It would be a quick but very unusual death.
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Post by anitya on Jun 29, 2021 18:02:48 GMT
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Post by johntaylor on Jun 30, 2021 15:30:05 GMT
Very interesting re physics.
Because Gilder's Life After Television (1990) proved somewhat prescient, now skimming Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of Blockchain Technology (2018).
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Post by Chahta on Jul 19, 2021 22:02:04 GMT
Watching McCartney 321 on Hulu. Very interesting and fun. Recommend it for us old guys.
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Post by rhythmmethod on Jul 22, 2021 14:21:48 GMT
Just saw "Summer of Soul" last night - An amazing documentary of the 1969 Harlem Culture Festival. (Same year as Woodstock as some may remember). Regardless of politics/social leanings, this was a music movie of WOW!! Stevie Wonder, 5th Dimension, Staples Singers, Mongo Santamaria, Mahalia Jackson and lots more. I still have goose bumps from some of the performances. Questlove did an amazing restoring old footage, audio enhancement and interviews. It's winding down it's run here in D.C. area. Lovers of 1960-70's soul music will probably love it!
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Post by Chahta on Jul 22, 2021 22:00:15 GMT
At the time I was not such a big fan. But years later I really enjoy it. It brings back so many memories from the day.
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Post by richardsok on Jul 25, 2021 23:11:29 GMT
Just saw "Summer of Soul" last night - An amazing documentary of the 1969 Harlem Culture Festival. (Same year as Woodstock as some may remember). Regardless of politics/social leanings, this was a music movie of WOW!! Stevie Wonder, 5th Dimension, Staples Singers, Mongo Santamaria, Mahalia Jackson and lots more. I still have goose bumps from some of the performances. Questlove did an amazing restoring old footage, audio enhancement and interviews. It's winding down it's run here in D.C. area. Lovers of 1960-70's soul music will probably love it! Now you're talking memories. I have long felt that 1955 thru to 1970 or so was the golden age of pop music that blossomed just as the main stream of standard song music/Tin Pan Alley and Broadway show tunes were tiring. Presley was no king; Little Richard was -- and he lasted unbloated, just as great at the end as at the start. And, strictly personal, I always felt the creme de la creme were the fabled girl groups: The Ronettes, Martha, The Crystals, Chiffons, The Shirelles. (Talking here about He's So Fine, De Du Ron Ron, Be My Baby, One Fine day, Lover's Concerto, etc. ) It was a happy, hopeful time and, looking back, incredibly optimistic & innocent. The Supremes were equally wonderful, but in time became over-produced and, well, too commercial and bland -- popular only on TV with aging hipsters. Never forgave Warwick for walking out on the trio.) Excepting only the sainted Linda Ronstadt and Mama Cass, the white girls were largely one-hit wonders: Dusty Springfield, Leslie Gore, Nancy Sinatra. Remember "Leader Of The Pack"? Ick. Later, a lot of the white girls, like Cher and Streisand, polluted their music with a political persona. I can't abide music produced today, not even rockabilly. And rap -- like fingernails dragging down a chalkboard -- too inexpressibly ugly to endure.
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