i concur

Rising fuel costs? Charges for checked bags? Flight attendants wearing khakis and polo shirts instead of stewardesses wearing tops and belts and go-go boots? You are right, old school. I concur, and concede this week - things were better before.

Should I include a neat non sequitur youtube clip, or is this posting satisfactory as-is?

Old School Opinion: Airline Services Peaked in 1974

In 1974 the Airline of America peaked in their services as a complete experience. Never before and never again will the vast majority of the air traveling public move through the sky's with such a fantastic combination of grace, speed, and style.

Grace
In 1974 you knew you were in good hands when you saw the flight crew walking down the concourse. Not only was their swagger a contagious affirmation of the fact you were about to join the sexiest swinging club in the land, if only for an hour, but the skill in which they glided through the world let you truly relax and enjoy the beauty of air travel.
In 1974, a job in the service side of the airline was considered glamorous and exciting, attracting the skilled and graceful. Now it seems we have cranky old ladies, mad that they have spent their entire adult lives hurtling through the air to go to Omaha.


Speed.
In the 1970's the 747, that purveyor of the world to the young, sexy, able had just come into broad use by the airlines. This double decked beauty allowed the world to find each other while still having time for a martini in the lounge. It was a sign of class and grace while still bringing hundreds of people at a time to the corners of the earth.

Style
This is where the airlines of the 70's truly shined. With gogo boots and short skirts, stewardesses were the sex symbols of their time. What better way to pass eight hours in the air then starring at these flying hotties. Who wouldn't feel like everything was going to be just fine with such fine fashion surrounding you? Perhaps if the airlines wen back to these cutting edge styles, instead of the conservative business can't be bothered look that we find today, there would not be quite so many problems in the airport?

New School Opinion, Somebody has to pay.

While I think that the New Broncos Uniforms are not exactly the sexiest things in the world, how else were they supposed to pay for the new stadium? As far as I can tell, the old Bronco's only had that one uniform, Orange. That does not exactly bring in the jersey sales revenue. At least with these there are a whole bunch of fantastical combinations.
That being said I am too busy to continue talking about this. I have to go back to playing with the greatest machine ever made in the history of the universe, ever, ever.

The Denver Broncos Uniforms

Old School Opinion: The orange jerseys were better

Once among the most recognizable and classic in all of American professional sports, the Denver Broncos' orange jerseys were classy and original, as representative of the Colorado region as Coors beer and John Denver. They have since been replaced with a newer, more modern, completely hideous design.

Though it is true that the Broncos never won a title when wearing their orange jerseys (designed in 1962, slightly tweaked to include royal blue helmets and different sleeves in 1968), at least they were not wearing jerseys that could've been designed by a twelve-year-old girl on Madden 2003. All four of their Hall of Fame players spent all or the majority of their careers in these jerseys (Willie Brown, Tony Dorsett, John Elway, and Gary Zimmerman). The jerseys also coincided with the Mile High Stadium era in Denver, a stadium that was replaced with a big luxury mega-stadium with no identity and which is named after a corporate entity that no longer exists - Invesco Field at Mile High.

The new jerseys, not only are modern and ugly (and blue - how many other teams in the league wear blue jerseys? By my count 14, which is half the league), but they have inspired a whole generation of really crappy looking jerseys littering the ranks of organized American football.

The old jerseys (and logo, and stadium, and quarterback, for that matter) were much nicer looking and representative of the city of Denver, Colorado, and you would be hard-pressed to find many fans that would disagree with me.

The Tape: Missed by No One

New school opinion: Tapes suck

As we've discussed before, old school, Nirvana is best enjoyed on an audio tape (I prefer Maxell, but Dennon or Sony is acceptable as well), however like the late lead singer of that groundbreaking band, the audio tape format is dead and unlike that late lead singer, no one is falling all over themselves with nostalgia over bringing it back.

Rip. Mix. Burn.

Technology has rendered the third phrase of Apple's slogan (from earlier this decade) obsolete, but it is undeniably easy, convenient, and so much more time efficient to take a few minutes to put together a 50-song customized playlist and throw it on an ipod (or zune, if that's how one rolls). It is so simple, it would make the most professional of mix tape makers marvel at the wonder and relative ease of the process and curse their parents for conceiving them twenty years too early.

It is true, that it is difficult to share a playlist with a girlfriend, fiance, concubine, or other meaningful individual, but perhaps it's one of those shared experiences that has been lost into the ether of time, like being part of a dungeons and dragons club with friends in junior high school, or skating hand-in-hand during the couples skate to a Boyz II Men ballad. Sometimes you have to grow up and move on, old school.

Yes, the romanticism of making a mix tape is forever lost by not creating a physical tape with a list that is hand-scrawled, each track carefully picked out and agonized over. Maybe, however, you can take the time saved to write your loved one a poem (I prefer the haiku format), or to pluck fresh wildflowers from a sunny meadow and carefully wrap them in butcher paper that you have painted by hand. There are plenty of other ways to show you care.

Even in Portland, a hotbed of nostalgia and ironic enjoyment of eras long past (actually, mostly just of the eighties), I've not once seen someone with a wall of their collected hand-recorded and pre-recorded audio tapes. I've not seen stores that deal exclusively in vintage-era tapes. I've never seen anyone walking down the street with a bright yellow Sony Sports Walkman.

The tape is dead. Tape quality sucks. No one except your high school girlfriend really miss them. And unlike the Reebok Pump, they're not coming back.

New School Position; Thats Right Make Your Mixtape, make sure you include a neckerchief and an '82 Nissan Stanza for me to listen to it with.

Dear Old School,
You are so cute. Pining for your days of 16 year old love and the fourth Toad the Wet Sprocket album on tape. God that was good wasn't it? She had given that tape so much love, and you listened to it again and again and again and ....SNAP!

Now its broken, and your dumb ass meaningful tape is completely useless. Whats that you say? Oh you say you can connect the tape with scotch tape and it will be fine? Ummmmm...have you seen an 82 Nissan Stanza Hatchback eat a tape before? That thing is gone, unsalvageable. You literally would be better served trying to sew your girlfriend a handbag out of that tape. Which would be quite kitchy, so maybe you should do that. (To late, somebody already did) She can bring it to your DJ set and sit at the bar talking about how cool you look in your neckerchief.

Cassette Tapes are useless in todays world. They have gone they way of DOS, the rotary phone, Reebok Pumps, and the abacus. The modern equivilant, the mp3 playlist is such an amazingly more useful tool that it hardly bears defending. But, because you old school have taken such a ridiculous stance, i will try to compare.

A tape can hold, at most 180 minutes of music. And that was on one of those super long slow play tapes that would suck the batteries out of your walkman faster then you could curse the energizer bunny. Today, even the most craptastic mp3 players (like any of these) hold a minimum of 1 gig, which will give you about 500 songs. Even if every single song was a fantastic 1 minute misfits jam, you still would get 320 more minutes of music then that tape.
In addition, that tape, needed a walkman. Or in my case an 82 Nissan Stanza Hatchback, which was just about as useful as a walkman. No you had to charge around with something the size of a small brick clutched in your hand, or attached to your belt, which then made your pants fall down. It seemed the only people who really mastered the walkman thing were roller-bladers, and i don't think, Old School, that i have to talk anymore about that.

In the end, it is hard to fight the meaning you imbibe in the tape making. But shouldn't meaning by put into anything that meaning was intended to be put into. if you give your significant other a mix, and she doesn't listen to the whole thing and understand every nuance, is that because the technology allowed her to skip around, or because you made a crappy mix? You are stretching to give the form an extra bit of content, when really the content is the same regardless of the form it comes in.

Old School Position; MIXTAPES are superior to all other forms of mixes.

Anyone who had the experience of dating anytime from 1981 to 1998 knows the superiority of Mixtapes to all other forms of mixes. The receiving of a tape from a person you were interested in was an occassion for day dreaming of the pleasures to come. They liked you! They really really liked you! You know how you knew that?

You got a mixtape.

A mixtape took planning, you didn't want to leave to much room on the end, or cut a song off in the midst of it trying to make its emotional pitch. The mixtape could be a specifically directed statement to a potential/current/former lover, it could be the soundtrack for an adventure, the declaration of independence from that horrible junior year, the howling of youth at the moon, or the punctuation of yet another fantastic night out with friends. In short the mixtape was the perfect method for conveying a message through music short of sitting down with a guitar and singing it directly to the intended recipient/moment. And most of us simply cannot drum like Mr. Bonham.

The mixtape is also superior in that the inherent clash of form and content is skewed heavily towards that ultimate in achievement, the triumph of aesthetic superiority (content) despite the acknowledged limitations of action (form). At the beginning of the process, we see the content become embedded with meaning, as the making of the tape requires the listening of every song. One might be compelled to use the quality canceling high speed dubbing technique, but this would be an acknowledgment to the recipient of the problems associated with the form, and by extension, the lack of time and effort put into the meaning of the auditory letter they were now listening too. On the other end, when listened to, it is precisely the fact that one cannot easily skip from song to song that fixes the meaning of the tape as a thing to be considered in its entirety and not as incidental statements unconnected to the content working together.

Nowadays it seems that while undoubtedly superior in ease and use, the MP3 or CD-R mix (things in this form should never be referred to as a mixtape, for this is, again, an insult to the importance of the addition of form and content that gives us meaning) allow for people to drag and drop, click and burn, give and receive without the implied time of investment. These new forms necessarily take the meaning out of the content, because the process allowed by the technology denies it the time and thought commitment necessary to the emotional meaning one might mean to convey.

There is a general outcry in the culture at the fractured nature of modern society. The ennui of living in todays commuter world driving us into the flickering lights of our basements and the closed doors of suburban America. Like the loss of the front porch in American architecture, the failure of the mixtape to live in on in form but in a few stubborn and hopeful souls has had an immeasurable blow on the content of the meaning of our daily interactions with each other.