Re: Adventures in Time and Space

Mike Schilling wrote:
"lal_truckee" <lal_truckee@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:TNifg.31141$fb2.18865@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Anthony Nance wrote:

AiTaS is a wonderful collection. I was reviewing it in pieces here in rasfw about a year ago and never got to the fourth piece, partly due to distractions and partly...well, because it was such a shock that I bounced so incredibly hard off the Gallagher/Galloway stories.

Cultural evolution. A drunk isn't funny anymore. For a real culture shock, watch the Thin Man movies - there a drunken chain-smoker is the ultra-sophisticated hero (same for the heroine.)


Something I've never been sure of: did people in the 30s and 40s drink much more than we do nowadays [1], or was heavy drinking considered cool, so that wish-fulfillment characters drank like fish?

1. I'm aware that Hammett himself did.

See also movies from the '60s -- say, the Bond movies, or even "The Graduate," or the TV show The Avengers which seems to float on champagne bubbles -- and recall the social power of the cocktail hour.

I had family members who, during the '60s, were caught up in the cocktail hour. I was too young to witness it -- or remember it, I guess -- but from the stories told that I recall, I do believe the alcohol flowed pretty freely. The '70s and disco had a fair rep for alcohol, too, though drugs began to get mixed in.

But those generations -- the '60s and the Depression Era / WWII crowd; the '70s and the Baby Boomers -- have grown older and the ones who survived the binge have allowed the glamour to lapse. I don't see indications that the current middle-class has anything quite like cocktail hour now, though the chillin'n'grillin' crowd may be a near equivalent.

Randy M.

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