(no subject)

[rm]

via genders via rosefox:

http://www.spirit-of-the-age.co.uk/jazz_age_garden_party.htm

Oh, if only ....
I need to win the lottery right now.

Because it didn't totally fill me with longing/break my heart until this:

http://www.spirit-of-the-age.co.uk/garden_party_image_gallery1.htm

I can feel what it would be like to climb up into that, _dammit_.

Britain makes me sad; it seems to have so many more mostly lost worlds than we do.

Comments

[marchek.livejournal.com]

My best friend from college spent her early childhood in England and remembered that her parents were always either going to or hosting costumed themed parties with their British friends. I think that the British just really like to dress up and manage to have a great sense of humour mixed with old world propriety.

It's just easier to have a strong sense of history when you are surrounded by so much of it on a daily basis. Something has to exist for over 200 years to even be considered somewhat "old".

I wish I were there.

Now I'm depressed.

[saltbox.livejournal.com]

Well, technically, cultures have existed in the United States for well over 200 years. It's just not what we currently associate with America. But there are a lot of lost worlds here.

I realize that piping in about this seems overly PC and that's really not why it came to mind. It's more just that I've just been on a long bus tour of my state, in which the guide--a professor whose expertise is the cultural history of America, including tribal cultures--was so incredibly amazing I wish I'd known more. He had a neat way of opening our eyes to what's "old" that we never even think about--how landscapes and fauna can themselves be read as history. It was really beautiful.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I'm not depressed. To the British, the past is a living, breathing, thing, still present. History is part of the water in which you swim, the ancestors are the partners of the living.

My maternal relations are all recently British, and it is so.
I inherited their sense of this, paternal Southern Cracker ancestry not withstanding, and share this point of view.

Like them, for example, I am eternally amused by the North American attitude that anything three hundred years old is ancient.
"Goodness, we have cutlery older than that ,and it's not even the good silver!"

[weirdquark]

It's just easier to have a strong sense of history when you are surrounded by so much of it on a daily basis. Something has to exist for over 200 years to even be considered somewhat "old".

When I was in Italy last year I went to San Clemente, which is a 12th century basilica built on top of a 4th century basilica (with a few 9th century mosaics) built on top of a second century Mithraic temple built on top of a god knows how old sacred spring. The top layer had renovations done in various architectural styles over the years, with the most recent one being a 1719 facade and ceiling. Which clash go delightfully with the medieval mosaics and the classical columns they brought in from (several different) Roman temples.

So you have this building, where the newest bits are still older than most of the history of the US. This gives one an interesting sense of perspective.

Not to mention a one-stop look at architecture through the ages. ::g::