Fandango’s Friday Flashback 26 June. Not having blogged that long, I’m re-posting this post I wrote for the Tuesday Photo Challenge hosted by Frank Jansen from 26 November. To see the ‘rules’ for Fandango’s Friday Flashback, click here.

Peace • Tuesday Photo Challenge

Peace • Tuesday Photo Challenge is Dutch goes the Photo latest challenge. It is as brutally simple as imaginative: ‘The challenge I bring to you is to share posts that evoke the sense of peace for you, in whatever form that might take. I expect that many among us have an idea of how we see peace, so I look forward to all of us sharing what that might be like. Who knows? We may bring just a bit more peace to this planet!’

Took this photo many years ago and have always been very fond of it. It was waiting for the right opportunity I guess. The original was shot in colour; I made it black and white using the Apple Photo app and did some further post production in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

For my other entries apart from this Peace • Tuesday Photo Challenge, click here.

Click here to view more of my entries in FFF. And here to view what other bloggers posted as memories in Fandango’s Friday Flashback 26 June.

Fandango’s Friday Flashback 19 June. Not having blogged that long, I’m re-posting this post from 19 December. To see the ‘rules’ for Fandango’s Friday Flashback, click here.

For me as a late baby boomer, my all time favorite pop-song is from 2003

All time favorite pop-song.

I just had to type this post as a response to Melissa Blake’s wonderful post on her excellent blog. While I disagree with the title of her post, ‘Forget Those “Best of 2019” Lists: Why 1999 Was Really the Best Year In Pop Culture’, almost just as much as I disagree with her choice of Christina Aguilera’s Genie In A Bottle as the best pop-song ever, I do so sympathize with her paragraph on what she experienced when she first heard this song, which I do find to be a bloody cool pop-song. And I can very much relate to the sentiment of this song scoring with (late) millennials.

While I do believe the whole notion of generation gap (especially when it comes to music) has been vastly overrated, there is an element of truth in it. I was born in the spring of 1959 and thus qualify as one of the last baby-boomers. According to cultural sociologists, who deem themselves worth their salt, the differences between boomers and millennials couldn’t be starker. They are right I guess, as long as they leave music out of the equation.

My all time favorite pop-song

As of now, 2019 I mean, my all time favorite pop song is from a relatively obscure band called The Stereophonics that dates back to only 2003. It’s called Maybe tomorrow.

Written and produced by frontman Kelly Jones, it was used as the opening theme of the movie Wicker Park (2004) and was played during the credits at the end of the Academy Award-winning movie Crash (2004). Which is when I heard it first, in the Dolby Stereo equipped cinema after seeing that wonderful movie Crash.
I can be brutally brief about its impact, it was one of those rare songs that sent shivers down my spine. Much of the same experience Melissa had (and probably still has) for Genie in a bottle.

And then you just do what every other sane person does…

I went down the next morning to my favorite record shop and bought the CD… actually two of them. One for the car and the other for the home stereo. And I just hit the repeat button and played it at least twenty-five times.
Robert M. Pirsig, you know, the guy who wrote the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance way back in the 70s, called this phenomena dynamic quality. But then, even while it might still be your all time favorite pop-song, bar none, you substitute it for another flavor of the month and shelve the CD. But you always remember where and why, this is after all your favorite song, ever. For the time being. The sense of dynamic quality has shifted towards one of static quality.

That dreaded thing called ‘Generation Gap’

If there is something like brutally trying to kick in the proverbial open door, it must be saying that music evolves. But the point I’m trying to make here is that your taste in music can evolve too. It can become richer, more balanced, more in tune with the times. In my top 10 of all time favorite pop-songs definitely still is Jethro Tull’s Locomotive Breath, which dates back to 1971 when I was 12 or so.

For the puritans under you, this was the original single version, which I thought to be, during most of my teenage years to the best pop-song ever. If you’re thinking now this was just me as a 12-year-old rebelling against his classical music upbringing, you’re probably dead right. To a point. It still sits high on my list of all-time favorite pop-songs.

Last example of evolving all time favorite pop-songs

The song that has been on the top spot, in my book, longest is this one from 1972 which has much more of the jazzy soul-like qualities that I remember from my early teens in the Caribbean where I spent the happiest part of my childhood.

Although it stems from 1972, it only registered with me a decade later when I was completely smitten with Sade’s Smooth Operator.

Just goes to show that if you keep an open mind to wherever music goes (no matter how hard that is) you will stumble on new jewels the size off a rock. So please don’t get stuck only with the favorite pop-songs of when you were young.
As, the late, Herman Brood (of the Wild Romance) once famously said before he jumped off the roof of the Amsterdam Hilton: ‘Get your head out of your ass and look around. You just might discover a whole new world.’

My all time favorite guitar song and solo

It was late last night when I wrote this, and I completely forgot to mention Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. Street-lengths ahead of any other famous song with an even more famous guitar solo (Led Zepp’s Stairway to Heaven, or Deep Purple’s Child in Time, or even the Eagles’ Hotel California). Just not possible I can hear some nay-sayers think, but first listen, then shiver and then finally you pass judgement.

Let me briefly explain how this song came about. George Clinton, the headman of Funkadelic, tripping on LSD, briefed the late Eddie Hazel to write him a guitar solo as if he’d heard his mother just died. And then he had to turn this solo into hearing the news if his mother wasn’t dead after all. Anyway, the original track was so vastly different from anything Funkadelic stood for that the record company didn’t dare to pt this on their latest album and added it in a nondescript sleeve to it. Or so the story goes…

For more about me and my blog, go here

Click here to view more of my entries in FFF. And here to view what other bloggers posted as memories in Fandango’s Friday Flashback 19 June.

Fandango’s Friday Flashback • 22 May. Not having blogged that long, I’m re-posting this post from 22 December that I put up for Silent Sunday. To see the ‘rules’ click here.

Silent Sunday • 22 12 19

If you’d like to keep on enjoying your Silent Sunday, click here.

Click here to view more of my entries in FFF.

Fandango’s Friday Flashback • Treasure Hunt. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of Lens Artists on #FFF is from February 24.

Treasure Hunt • Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #85

The #85 edition of the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge by Tina urges us to go on a ‘Treasure Hunt’ in your photo library. For details, see the link.

Challenge items

While the setting sun is a bit of an after-thought, here’s a more obvious and cliché one. Notice the outline of the moon right above the sun.

Extra credit items

So, this treasure hunt of the #85 Lens-Artists Photo Challenge seriously depleted my photo library.

You can find more entries in photo challenges here.

Fandango’s Friday Flashback • Insane51 Berlin Mural. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of Monday Mural on #FFF is from February 17.

Insane51 Berlin Mural • Monday Mural

We found this mural at the foot of the Oberbaumbrücke in Berlin.

With the help of scooj (https://scooj.org/ and see his comment below) the artist is a Greek by the name Insane51. It is kind of a 3D mural, with a blue lens you get to see the woman, with a red lens her skeleton.

Sami then pointed this YouTube video out:

That also led me to his video of how he makes his art:

Discovered on December 3, 2018. Entry in Sami’s challenge February 17. For more of my entries, see for instance this.

All-in-all I find this ‘collaboration’ of an Insane51 fan for this Monday Mural post truly great!

Fandango’s Friday Flashback • Ali Bombaye!. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of Three Things Challenge #170 on #FFF is from March 10.

Ali Bomaye! • Three Things Challenge #170

Ali Bomaye! • Three Things Challenge #170 is my entry into this challenge by pensitivity101.

I totally forgot the birthday of the (self-proclaimed) Greatest which was on January 16. The prompt of fight, wound and blood however immediately made me remember. Here’s a small tribute to correct this faux-pas.

He had been spoiling for the Rumble in the Jungle. Certainly the greatest fight of his career. The chance to redeem himself. After he was stripped of his World Champion title for political reasons, he was lusting for blood. It still is a miracle he emerged victorious without so much as a wound n his face. And a beating he took the first 6 or 7 rounds. While many (wrongly) accused him of rope-a-doping, there are those who point out that it was a combination of his unrivaled skills, strategy and his loud mouth. But no matter who’s right or who’s wrong, that single fight in Kinshasa, Zaire proved once and for all that he was the Greatest. Ever. Ali Bomaye!

If you’d like to see the Greatest outfighting the Strongest check out this link.

Or watch the Oscar-winning documentary When we were Kings for FREE on Hulu, by clicking here.

You do not have to read the next part, as it contains nothing of interest or any value. To please Google – according to their own Analytics nobody ever clicks on this link – click here to read my other submission into this writing challenge. And to appease this pompous almighty one even more I have to include this one more time. Three Things Challenge #170.

Fandango’s Friday Flashback • How do you remake magic? • Blogging Insights#7. I’ve not been a blogger nearly long enough to be able to go a year back. So this re-post of Dr. Tanya’s Blogging Insights#7 on #FFF is from January 2, 2020.

How do you remake magic? • Blogging Insights#7

Dr Tanya – in her great blog Salted Caramel – has been running her Blogging Insights series for nearly three months. In this quest she has unearthed a wealth of insights from bloggers, and by keeping this all in-the-public-eye so to speak it can be of tremendous value for bloggers. Not in the least for rookie-bloggers like myself. So far she has fired off 11 salvo’s, or sets if you will, of questions. Some of these are pretty easy to answer. Others require some ‘soul-searching’. Now she has given us, who like myself are pretty new to this form of ‘mental exercise’, the opportunity to catch up with the front-runners.

So here is my answer to the 7th question:
How do you write fresh content when everything that is worth saying has already been said ?

For me, coming from the advertising world where everything worthwhile saying has been said dozens of times over, the real question behind Dr Tanya’s question is a different one.

Is it really about finding fresh content, or is it more about finding a fresh way of phrasing the same old tired content?

In my mind, isn’t this what we’re all struggling with from time to time? Or, taken this question and re-framing it slightly:

How do you remake magic when you (or somebody else) has struck gold the very first time?

Coca-Cola has started claiming Santa Claus (yes, I know, there are some pundits even claiming it invented Santa Claus), and they have more or less kept the same message, or content if you will, alive and kicking to this day.
The famous Coca-Cola Santa Claus is the brainchild of really three greats of the old advertising industry: Fred Mizen, Archie Lee and the Michigan native Haddon Sundblom.

Fresh consistency seems to be the key concept here. All very well for the one who first leveraged the magical story I can hear the critical reader think. All’s very well once you’ve ‘fathered’ the initial magic. Your only challenge then is to keep it the magic fresh. This is by no means a small feat however. Remember the (in my mind) equally great Polar Bears campaign? Which they let die because they couldn’t keep the magic fresh?

Consider yourself M&M’s trying to do a Santa Claus ad?

Sheer folly? This territory has been taken? There is simply no way in remaking the magic that Coke has so powerfully managed to keep consistent yet fresh?

W R O N G !

Try this one on for size:

“Actually buddy, I think you made it even better’ is the wonderful last line in this TVC that sums it all up.

So here’s the stone old trick to answering this question with the same sentiment: ‘How do you remake magic?’ Do N O T go for fresh consistency. Forget about the last part. Find a different spin on the subject. Your spin.