White tie with dinner jacket was a fad in the '20s. You'll see the combo on Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys in "King of Jazz" (1930). I kinda like it.

Of all the lost silents, top of my list is "The Great Gatsby" with Warner Baxter.

I don't remember anything politically incorrect about it, but just as unavailable is "Rhapsody in Wood", a George Pal Puppetoon telling the secret origin of Woody Herman's clarinet.

I didn't realize that was unavailable. I saw it on the big screen in original release. It definitely deserves better than a bottom drawer somewhere.

I found a copy and listened to it twice through. I'll give you most all of your description - somnolent, aquatic, restrained, an exercise in mood [though not an expressive one, at least for me - the mood of that last breath before sleep, maybe]. It is less obnoxious than the way I remember the rest of the album. Yet…

I thought of Toad first. But I don't remember the storyline well enough to be sure if he [or Puck, for that matter] are in it.

You're serious about Green Team and The Movement, aren't you? Egad.

I understand that much [though Monk is getting pretty un-melodic for me]. My question here is, when people on this very thread say that Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is one jazz album everyone can agree on, what am I not getting? But if you also don't care for bebop, maybe someone else is going to have to answer.

Rubi-kun, I'm not exactly looking for a good stand-alone episode. I'm looking for a shortcut to Amy/Rory/River. Their arc in particular, in a lot less than 30 hours.

It's more likely that I quit earlier than I remember. A quick review of Wikipedia [the show was 20 years ago, after all] says Worf joined in S4 to boost ratings, and I remember him a little. So I probably gave up during S4, and no later. I do remember we never went very long without a Bajoran priest or intimations…

Beginning isn't the hard part. Getting past Parker and Gillespie is the hard part.

The only way I've ever been able to understand jazz is that it's music for musicians, and particularly for the musician playing. I'm not a musician [beyond high school choir] so that realization didn't exactly open any doors, but at least I get why I don't get it. It's not for an audience at all.

I like Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov plenty, but I can't stand dance. Actually sitting through a ballet makes the music seem eternal, and not in a good way.

I'm just enough of a geek to want to know what I'm missing in the stuff I don't like, especially when it's highly-praised by people who have explored the form.

Maybe I'm trying too hard, but in my case it's not the quantity, but trying to appreciate something without a point of reference. Bebop and later jazz is opaque to me. I've tried Ken Burns a couple of times and I still can't get through Charlie Parker.

I looked it up and now I know it's one of the cuts on "Kind of Blue", so that's a yes. I don't know which cut it is, but I can only take about a minute of any of them. That sound will send me out of the room for the furniture's sake. I'm cool with it being "not for me", and yet part of me still wants to know what…

On the other hand, they did a really dumb thing by rebooting so many with crap. Challengers of teh Unknown was dumbed down so much it was painful - and I love Ordway.

Of your parenthetical classics, only Amstrong can I take more than a couple of minutes of, and even he's way more accessible before about 1945.

And yet I was just told there's no way to understand Rory/Amy/River short of watching the last 2.5 years.

It's that # 2 that's the flap-you-arms-and-fly step. "Every episode at least once" is exactly what is meant by "too extensive to start."