Old-ish Songs That Should Enter More Earholes

You know how you sometimes have to play a tune a couple times before it will snag onto you? I feel like each of these are love at first listen. How is it these songs weren't hugely popular? They're so hit-worthy it hurts!

So let's correct that, shall we?

I'm a bit biased on this one as I pretty much love everything Buddy Holly ever did. For some weirdo reason, "Heartbeat" only reached #82 in the charts in 1958:


I've been crapping my pants about this song since I heard it four years ago, telling pretty much everyone I meet that they should listen to it. It was recorded in 1968 and never made it on the charts. A little while ago I heard it in that weird Seth Rogen mall cop movie and felt like I should have gotten credit for it somehow. The song, not the movie. Totally not the movie:


This song did alright - reaching #5 in 1968 - but seems to have been rather forgotten unless you're already a Donovan fan. My poor old roommate Will would barf if he found out I still listen to this one as I used to put this song on every.single.day when we lived together. And speaking of crazy, is it just me or does young Donovan kind of remind you of Kristen Stewart?:


I love Terry Callier's voice. It's kind of Hendrix-y, no? This track didn't make a blip on the charts when it was released in 1973. Pity.


I think this is one of the best We're-Probably-Going-To-Break-Up songs ever. It reached #9 in 1985, which is great, but it was dwarfed by The Boss's other better-known hits:


Share your favourite underappreciated songs!

Read more...

Sew Excited!

Guess what I did yesterday?

Trimmed your moustache?

Yes.

But I also went to my first sewing class! Relearning how to sew has long been on my list of to-dos for a lot of reasons - capabilities are good, I've always wanted to try to make my own clothes and home decor items, and I don't want to be a total moron when I eventually take on the 40s War Wife Experiment (eeee!), whose mantra of "Make Do and Mend" involved far, far more skills than I currently possess (and I doubt my strongest ability - yelling at the TV during Bachelor Pad while ignoring the little voice inside my head that says I should read a book instead - will be of much use).

Yesterday's was the first of six 'learn to sew' classes I'm taking at The Make Den in Toronto and it was awesome! It's during the afternoon, so there were only four of us there; two of us were the self-employed type, one was a Masters student and another girl who had an employer that basically lets her work from home and on her own hours (if only all offices were like that). In other words, three out of four of us taking the class were modern-day bums. Hurrah!

Along with learning how to thread the machine and checking out the different stitches, we made our first project - a headband with an elasticated back. Here it is modelled on moi - the girl who can't take a front-facing shot of herself to save her life:

Here's a shot that nine out of ten brooding teenage Twilight fans prefer:

Oooo. Can you feel the angst?

Before you know it, I'll be making other crafty headware, like the kind modelled on this lady from the I-shit-you-not-it's-actually-real cover of the July 1974 Women's Circle magazine:

If you thought the 50s housewife was a little nuts, I'm telling you, she had NOTHING on the 70s crafty housewife. The magazines I have from that era are full-on crazeballs (I'll scan some pics from those shortly. Total goldmine.).

I like to think that it's actually these women that got men on board with 'women's lib'; her husband would come home from work to discover his wife had spent the entire day making bizarre skunk hats, shitty teddy bears and a meal made with heaping amounts of 'healthy' margarine and Sweet n' Low.

"Honey, maybe you should get a job," he'd say as he'd bewilderedly stare at the growing collection of macramé owls and aluminium foil sculptures decorating the home.

"Oh, hush," she'd say, as she'd glue a googly eye onto her latest piece of art. "Do you really want a wife who works outside the home? I wouldn't have the time to do all these lovely things around the house. That reminds me, I made you a new vest ..."

Image Source: Handmade By Mother

I promise that this sewing class won't be the gateway drug into bad crocheted items. I hope.

Read more...

We Be Hatin': First Lady Edition

In Canada, we don't really have a "First Lady" culture in politics. The spouse of our Prime Minister is just that - "the wife of the Prime Minister" (or for a split second in 1993, "the husband of the Prime Minister").

Even though we're in the midst of an election, I think we'd be fairly hard-pressed to find people who know the names of the spouses of our political party leaders. Until I Googled it just now, I was going to guess that Prime Minister Harper's wife was named Arleen. Total stab in the dark. He seems like the kind of guy who would marry an Arleen, right?

(I was close. He's married to someone named Laureen. Now we all know!)

With the exception of Maggie Trudeau, Canadians have been just as disinterested in the private lives of our politicians as we are of politics in general. There's never really been any official roles for the spouses of our politicians to play. After all, they're unelected private citizens - just like our Senate.

All this obviously isn't the case in the United States. The ladies are front and centre - and right in the line of fire, it seems. I have to admit, I was rather stunned by all the backlash to Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign - an initiative to educate and inspire parents and kids to deal with the very real problem of childhood obesity. Suddenly, the First Wife is being attacked for being the "food police" and "dictating" what people can feed their children and "shoving vegetables down our throats". And those are just the critiques on her clearly evil communist-fascist-anti-American-pro-celery-lobby agenda. Then there are the comments about her (gasp!) sleeveless dresses and how much money she made before becoming First Lady and how she's clearly Satan.

I don't recall people being so vile about Laura Bush and her childhood literacy project that "shoved books down peoples' throats". I think the biggest critiques lobbed at her had to do with her choice of husband, no? Well, that and killing a dude.

And so I wondered whether hating on the First Lady was a new phenomenon in a culture that increasingly seems to be getting more petty and hostile toward people in public life.

To the bat cave my vintage magazine collection I went - and it turns out, we've always been hatin'.

Thought the great Eleanor Roosevelt was always adored? Not the case. Here's a snotty little letter to the editor (from Ladies' Home Journal, February 1943) from someone complaining that Mrs. Roosevelt should be less in everyone's face and more in her own home where she belongs:

Snark!

Eleanor Roosevelt had a column in the Ladies' Home Journal that was meant to help and inspire the women holding up the home front during World War II. She'd answer reader questions in a section called "If You Ask Me". Here's a note from the editor mentioning that some of the mail received for the First Lady wasn't exactly polite. Probably had them wondering if they should change the magazine's name to HoBags' Home Journal:

It seems that it doesn't matter that the world was gripped by a horrible war and that everyone was being asked to pull together - the big problem for some people was this outspoken wife of the President. Ah, hate mail: American's favourite past-time.

In some of the questions Mrs. Roosevelt received, you can definitely sense the "what makes you so special?" mentality some people had toward her, like in this one questioning why Eleanor Roosevelt made a trip to visit soldiers overseas (how dare she!):

Eleanor Roosevelt really did have a great way of telling people to go fuck themselves. Like in this Q & A:

The wives of Democratic presidents weren't the only ones who got lambasted by the public. Check out this article about Pat Nixon, 31 years after these Eleanor Roosevelt examples, from Woman's World February 1974:

Here, the article opens with the public perception of Pat Nixon - a cold, robotic woman (sounds like current critiques of Nancy Pelosi!) who hasn't taken on any projects to help make America a better place.  Sounds like they're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't.

All yet another reason I love this goofy, boring country of mine. I imagine the "Arleens" of the Canadian political world agree.

Read more...