# Crazes, phases...



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

In the playground, there are crazes that take over - marbles one week, hopscotch the next. In our teens, there are pop fads - Beatlemania in mine, & suddenly everyone was saying 'fab' & 'you said it!' But many of us carry on with 'crazes' in adulthood. Sometimes they last; sometimes not. Here are some of Taggart's and my own dafter forays:

practising *jive routines in the kitchen*
playing *pick-up sticks*
wearing *open toe sandals*
speaking *'monkey-language'* (take first letter, put to end of word, add -ay: Oday ouyay eesay?)
playing *pub-cricket* in the car (take turns to bag the next pub you pass; score however many legs there are on a pub sign: _*Horse & Hounds*_ wins; or you might be unlucky & get *The Salmon & Ball*.)

There are also musical phases. I am hoping that Classical Music (baroque) is here to stay. But whatever happened to - 
*South American* 'Flight of the Condor' nose-flutes?
*Ladysmith Black Mambazo*?
*Phil Harris* (actually, must get back to the Darktown Poker Club...)

Have *you* had crazes - *musical or otherwise* - that you can share with us, or look back & laugh at? Thanks in advance for any replies. :cheers:


----------



## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Interesting question - the only immediate thing I can think of is that I've never tired of buying adidas retro-style footwear (even though the styles were somewhat less retro when I first started wearing them in the 70s). The plainer and more understated they are the better - all these multi-coloured and over-busy designs are anathema to me:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/411PRA63NhL._AA160_.jpg

These are the kind I like. I won't post a picture of the sort I don't like as I wouldn't want to risk causing offence in case anyone here has a pair.


----------



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Of course, the latest 'craze' for me is TalkClassical, but I think this one will last. I'll have been here a year on February 10th; Taggart joined on Valentine's Day . 
'Posting mania' takes over every so often, and then dies down again. I've noticed that some members (just as I did) when they join go on a posting splurge, but that does seem to fade - maybe the human spirit can only stand so much?


----------



## Couac Addict (Oct 16, 2013)

Ingélou said:


> playing *pub-cricket* in the car


Glory to the _Million Hare_ in London.


----------



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Books & magazines are another 'craze' with me. I remember getting hooked on Winston Graham's Poldark Series, set in eighteenth century Cornwall. He's not a bad writer, and he based his amazing plots on real-life stories found in authentic newspapers of the day, but still, there's a bit of potboiler here, a bit of bodice-ripper there, and a whole hunk of choccy box melodrama - just the ingredients to send me scuttling to the local library, getting them booked and set up in their correct order, too. 

I just can't see myself doing that now, not at my age...!


----------



## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

One year I had a Vivaldi craze. It started with Biondi's recording of L'Estro, and I had a Who Is This Guy moment. I ended up buying every Biondi recording I could find and buying scores and reading books. It cooled down after that year, fortunately. I was getting geeky.

What got me back into classical music was hearing Satie's fifth Gnoissienne. Everything from my Vivaldi phase happened then also. 

I'm fortunate to have a longsuffering wife who knows I can get like this, and she lets it go on long enough to be fun and subtly lets me know I'm going too far.


----------



## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

Ingélou said:


> ...there's a bit of potboiler here, a bit of bodice-ripper there, and a whole hunk of choccy box melodrama...


I read mostly literature (Nobel prize-winners and the ilk  ) from my twenties until about the turn of the century. I got tired of reading books in which nothing much ever really happens and rediscovered Westerns, a genre I grew up with. I like the action (see Ingélou's quote :lol: ), but I am finding that the plots are starting to get repetitive, so I'm starting to get more selective about the ones I choose to read.

I was on a serious Stockhausen kick in the mid-'70s, a minnesänger/troubadour phase in the mid-'90s and a Rammstein mania about two years ago. I still listen to all of these musics, but not 24/7. Is classical music in general to be a craze? I don't think so. I've been into it since the '70s, when it was an alternative to my usual fare, but over the years, it has become my staple.

I went through a _peacock_ phase in the late '80s. I had all kinds of expensive European designer shirts and pants and accessories. I found that these clothes wore out as quickly as my normal shirts and jeans, but they cost me three times as much, and I tired of them very quickly, while my regular clothes feel right year after year.

I used to collect books. I had filled more than two walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves in a small 'reading' room. I had read them all. When I moved, I realized that I would not read them again, so I got rid of them all. Now, I pick up used books to read and trade them in as soon as I'm done. I don't treat my CDs the same, however. I plan on keeping them and I play each and every one of them at least once a year. I'm not sure how long I will be able to make that claim, if my buying continues at the rate of the last two years 



elgars ghost said:


> I've never tired of buying adidas retro-style footwear...


Those are pretty much what new footwear is going back to, since 'minimal' is supposed to be healthier than the bulky cushioned shoes that were developed subsequently. If they weren't so expensive, I would have gone back to them, too.


----------



## Headphone Hermit (Jan 8, 2014)

a really big craze on TC recently has been 'let's slag off Lang Lang' 

other music crazes that have disappeared (or gone dormant) might include - 8-track cartridges; lazerdiscs; turntable is better than CD player; prosletysing about MP3 players; wearing ties/socks/underpants with a poor cartoon of a composer on them; denigrating British music (if you're British); Britannia Music Club (remember to say you don't want the CD of the month!); performers pretending they have a working class accent and weren't brought up in a middle-class household ..... any more?


----------



## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

I'm glad to see that nobody remembers the TC craze for polls or the death matches between composers. 

One craze that does seem to have gone from strength to strength is Early Music. All the way from Dolmetsch building harpsichords for William Morris - to be suitably Arts and Crafts, through David Munrow to the latest group with people like Jordi Savall.


----------



## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Back about 1980 I was heavily into the genre that came to be called "New Age" music, though back then we thought of it as "space" music. Of course now it is so unfashionable it tries to disguise itself as "ambient" or "downtempo." Whatever you call it, I enjoyed it. It was relaxing, it created space in the 3 dimensional sense using the latest technologies and its fan base claimed it to have some healing properties. I don't know about all that, but it did seem to steady my hand for using triple ought detail brushes in my artwork and it featured lots and lots of my most beloved instrument, the synthesizer.

_Music From the Hearts of Space_ was the public radio show in the US championing the style, and many got their first exposure through that, unless you count proto-new-age acts such as Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Pink Floyd, etc. I used to play the genre quite a bit, along with the occasional spacey classical work like Debussy's Nocturnes or Gorecki's 3rd Symphony (which still sounds rather like New Age to me) at the various art shows I helped to run throughout the southeastern US.

These days I find genre more than a little tedious. It's odd that I should have such a profound turn around, but that is one phase I definitely outgrew.


----------



## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

Hey, I don't have crazes. I have phases of development.


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Ingélou said:


> Books & magazines are another 'craze' with me. I remember getting hooked on Winston Graham's Poldark Series, set in eighteenth century Cornwall. He's not a bad writer, and he based his amazing plots on real-life stories found in authentic newspapers of the day, but still, there's a bit of potboiler here, a bit of bodice-ripper there, and a whole hunk of choccy box melodrama - just the ingredients to send me scuttling to the local library, getting them booked and set up in their correct order, too.
> 
> I just can't see myself doing that now, not at my age...!


LOL, that is unless a forum member manages to bait you with the perhaps as of yet unexamined series of Swedish Detective novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the Martin Beck sequence of ten novels:

Roseanna (Roseanna)
The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Mannen som gick upp i rök)
The Man on the Balcony (Mannen på balkongen)
The Laughing Policeman (Den skrattande polisen)
The Fire Engine That Disappeared (Brandbilen som försvann)
Murder at the Savoy (Polis, polis, potatismos!)
The Abominable Man (Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle)
The Locked Room (Det ****na rummet)
Cop Killer (Polismördaren)
The Terrorists (Terroristerna)


----------



## Sonata (Aug 7, 2010)

Currently on a major reading craze
Music craze.....well yes for the last 8 years!
Tennis: my husband and I belonged to a recreational tennis league when we lived in the Upper Peninsula years ago. Pre-children! He played about 5-6 days per week for a couple of summers! I didn't do quite as much, but I did spent a lot of time at the tennis court!
A brief video game craze when I was newly married in my early twenties. my husband is a video game fan and he hooked me onto a couple of different games. I rarely play now.


----------



## Tristan (Jan 5, 2013)

Well, during freshman year of high school, I was really into geocaching. 

I thought my love for dubstep would be a phase, but here we are a few years later and I still love it. 

I used to be obsessed with wearing Vans--it was pretty much the only brand of shoes I wore for a while. Solid-colored red, orange, and purple shoes were my favorite. That has since changed.

Musically, around the time I joined this site, for a few months I was obsessed with "transitional" composers between the Classical and Romantic eras and focused especially on Weber, Hummel, and Spohr. 

Other than that, most of my interests have remained relatively the same.


----------



## TurnaboutVox (Sep 22, 2013)

Headphone Hermit said:


> other music crazes that have disappeared (or gone dormant) might include... turntable is better than CD player;


Well, they're certainly better for playing LPs. 

Pure nostalgia and definitely not just a phase or craze for me. A nice turntable, tonearm and cartridge is just such a beautiful piece of engineering and will always have a place in my living room. What's that you say, dear? All right, in the office. The office in the garden, yes, OK then.


----------



## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Well, I don't think I'll get out of my Russian phase anytime soon.  I've been bitten by Russian music and literature too long. Even when I have "nothing else to read" I'm probably just going to reread things over again. I still got a wish list of things, a few Dostoevsky short stories including the brilliant Notes from Underground, and Turgeneev is next in my interest. Unlike Dostoevsky and Tolstoy who wrote dramas, Turgeneev wrote real Romances that focus more on the lives of women, supposedly the best writer about women in his time.

Anyone here heard of having a "horse phase"? Obsession with everything to do with horses? Supposedly most girls go through that. But I never did. :-/


----------



## samurai (Apr 22, 2011)

elgars ghost said:


> Interesting question - the only immediate thing I can think of is that I've never tired of buying adidas retro-style footwear (even though the styles were somewhat less retro when I first started wearing them in the 70s). The plainer and more understated they are the better - all these multi-coloured and over-busy designs are anathema to me:
> 
> http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/411PRA63NhL._AA160_.jpg
> 
> These are the kind I like. I won't post a picture of the sort I don't like as I wouldn't want to risk causing offence in case anyone here has a pair.


 What memories you have evoked in me with that wonderful picture!  I used to own and wear those Adidas in all different colors; for my hi-tops, I would only wear Converse {Cons}, also in a variety of colors. Of course, back then, we--and our "kicks"--were anything but "retro". Alas, now it is a far different story, at least with me. I no longer think of myself as being in the cutting edge or vanguard of anything, except maybe growing older at a far rapider pace than I ever could have possibly imagined back in the long gone days of my carefree and reckless youth.


----------



## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

samurai said:


> What memories you have evoked in me with that wonderful picture!  I used to own and wear those Adidas in all different colors; for my hi-tops, I would only wear Converse {Cons}, also in a variety of colors. Of course, back then, we--and our "kicks"--were anything but "retro". Alas, now it is a far different story, at least with me. I no longer think of myself as being in the cutting edge or vanguard of anything, except maybe growing older at a far rapider pace than I ever could have possibly imagined back in the long gone days of my carefree and reckless youth.


PF Flyers......

I've read about these legendary sneakers in an Ancient American History Book.


----------



## denkirk (Feb 6, 2014)

I love hats, baseball caps, flat caps, woolly hats, beanie hats, trilbys, pork pie hats etc. my wife has a clear out every year and says 'it has to stop' but the year after there we are again.....

I also had a craze on ukuleles, read the books, bought them, note them not just one, watched George Formby films, and now....you guessed......never touched unless I'm showing my grandchildren how George Formby played!

I'm now stuck into Scandinavian drama, Borgen, Wallander etc

Like all things it'll pass, but I a true interest and love in church music, have for as long as I remember and hope it'll never pass!

Denis
><>


----------



## techniquest (Aug 3, 2012)

I like to think that the crazes and fads I have had over the years have become strata in the bedrock which makes up my life; so I can dip in and out of them as the fancy takes me while still being able to add new ones.


----------



## MagneticGhost (Apr 7, 2013)

Chronologically

Noddy Books
Graduating to all Enid Blyton
Doctor Who
Tolkien
80's pop
Genesis - the band
All music - making and listening
Luton Town Football Club
Girls
Cigarettes and Alcohol
Unrequited love
Books about unrequited love
Russia - it's art, literature and language
My Wife
My Family


----------

