DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: August 10, 2025

Fearful Flier? Captain Ron To The Rescue:

Captain Ron (real name Ron Nielsen) is a 78-year-old former commercial pilot who teaches a free class for nervous fliers roughly once a month. He has the wholesome look of a small-town minister: rectangular glasses, short-cropped white hair, and a whimsical tuft sticking out of each nostril. He’s like the aviation equivalent of Rick Steves—the kind of guy who, after a class that goes particularly well, exclaims, “It should be against the law to have that much fun!”

A fear of flying, Captain Ron explained, is nothing to be ashamed of. “You’re not broken.” The anxiety looks different for different people. Some worry mostly about external factors, such as crashes and terrorism. Others dread a panic attack—and how fellow passengers might react to it.

Sitting next to me was a retiree named Mike who had been coming to Captain Ron’s class regularly to address his claustrophobia ahead of a long-anticipated flight: a two-hour trip to Reno to visit his grandson. Across the table, Stephanie and her husband, whom she’d brought along for moral support, were planning a trip to Cambodia. “Over water,” someone across the room offered. Stephanie’s eyes were wide. We understood completely.

Recent events notwithstanding, most aviation fears boil down to a lack of control, Elaine Iljon Foreman, a clinical psychologist and co-author of Fly Away Fear, told me. Sometimes these fears are triggered or exacerbated by a specific flying experience, or major life changes.

Well, yes, ‘specific flying experiences’ might make you more afraid to fly.  That would seem to be–rational.  But perhaps this (no other way to put it) pop psychology might help you.

The Storm That Moved A Mountain:

On a small ledge in the Swiss mountains, 200 people were enjoying a summer football tournament. As night fell, they had no idea what was coming.

The photos alone are worth the price (free) of reading.

The ‘Souldie Sound’ Of SoCal.  I’m a fan.  Perhaps you’ll be too:

For over 60 years, a soft-touch style of soul music has traversed generations of Chicano culture in Southern California. It has provided the soundtrack to car club meet-ups, carne asada, ball games, birthday parties and, yes, bedroom rendezvous. While many of the same songs have held down the stereo for decades, a fresh-faced wave of bands and singers has emerged, updating the tradition in hopes of creating future classics.

The music has been called brown-eyed soul, Chicano soul, rolas or lowrider music; this latest incarnation, marked by a deep romanticism, is known as “souldies.” The vocalists favor falsettos and sweet harmonies, singing about hope and heartbreak over sparse and breezy instrumentation. And now, with the help of labels like Penrose Records, it’s beginning to catch on beyond Southern California.

W-what? You say you wanna hear some.  Well alrighty then:

‘Sunset Boulevard’–As Seen By ‘Old Hollywood’:

It was January 1950, and a new motion picture had just finished its first preview screening for a select Hollywood audience. The movie wouldn’t open to the public until Aug. 10, but 300 of the industry’s most important studio executives, producers, directors and stars were crowded into the theater. The movie was called “Sunset Blvd.,” and the word was that it was nitroglycerin.

As the end credits came up over the final image of silent film has-been Norma Desmond advancing on the camera, her fingers curled in a demented come-hither dance for the audience, the assembled glitterati staggered out, astonished at what they’d seen: a Hollywood movie that pulled back the tinseled illusion of their company town, revealing the decay. Many of the guests clustered around the movie’s star, Gloria Swanson, a legend of silent cinema making an unparalleled comeback. Actress Barbara Stanwyck got down and literally kissed the hem of Swanson’s gown, a wonderful we’re-not-worthy moment that briefly reinstated the old order.

Over in a corner, however, MGM head Louis B. Mayer — arguably the most powerful man in town — fumed to a group of yes-men, fulminating about “that lowdown scum Wilder.” According to Sam Staggs’s 2002 book, “Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard,” Mayer spied the director of “Sunset Blvd.,” the Austrian-born Billy Wilder, crossing the lobby and stalked over, red in the face, screaming, “You befouled your own nest! You should be kicked out of the country, tarred and feathered …”

Wilder’s response has been variously reported as “Go f— yourself” and “Go s— in your hat,” but Mayer’s rage is understandable. The man helped create the system that “Sunset Blvd.” exposed as a sham — a star system in which human beings were tweaked and polished and remade until they were gods of the screen.

The answer turns out to be disarmingly simple: There were movie stars of an earlier generation, but an industrial revolution had banished them from sight. The coming of talking pictures in the late 1920s was a comet that killed off dozens of dinosaurs, internationally known and adored performers whose value was suddenly nil. A handful survived — Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, a newly minted ingenue named Joan Crawford. Most vanished into ostentatious mansions or dwindling roles; some threw in the towel and walked away; some took their own lives. The point is that no one ever saw them age, and so the town’s secret, the big lie, was safe.

That should be enough of a tease.  The movie, unlike everyone who worked on it, will live forever.  It still resonates today. Immerse yourself in the real Hollywood story that Billy Wilder told for the first time.

Only one choice to segue us out: