September 16th, 2009, 1 Comment »
Via a recent Slate Culturefest episode, I learned about L Magazine’s five-part series of video essays on the evolution of the modern blockbuster. They’re a terrific middle-brow exploration of the blockbuster movies and related pop-culture of two years: 1984 and 1989. Here’s the first in the series:
I was ten years old in 1984, and I’m surprised how many of the movies I recognize from that year. I saw some of them in the cinema, certainly, but I must have watched a lot more on video. I wonder, did we have our Betamax VCR by then, or were we still, hilariously, renting one from the video store?
Having clumsily experimented with it myself recently, I’m quite fond of this essay-as-narrated-video treatment. When writing about the medium of moving pictures, it feels like the right format.
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August 25th, 2008, 4 Comments »
The other, I impetuously twittered “317, what does that number mean?” Ryan immediately replied on Twitter with “find out today, meet you at The Bay.” Filmgoerjuan added “maybe it’s a secret code…or a special combination…”.
To most people, the phrase means absolutely nothing. However, it ought to resonate with a lot of Vancouverites of a certain age. It’s part of a radio jingle that’s been in my head for, oh, about two decades now. It was for a style of jeans–probably from Levis, given the 3-digit name–sold at The Bay. There are a couple of pairs up for sale on eBay.
I was exchanging emails with Filmgoer (last name, Juan), and we decided that the ads must have appeared on LG73 in the mid to late eighties. After about 1989, I switched to listening to some AM classic rock station, so it probably preceded that.
Does anybody else remember this jingle (the Internet is no help)? Can you sing (and therefore transcribe) the whole thing? I’d appreciate it, as the lyrics might send the tune back down the memory hole, where it belongs.
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May 3rd, 2008, 9 Comments »
I went clothes shopping today. Specifically, I was looking for a couple of pullovers that I wouldn’t have to iron and could wear under a jacket to a business meeting. I made a foray into a bunch of shops in Victoria (admittedly, a relatively small trading area). My conclusions:
- The eighties are back with a flaming (in every sense of the word) sword of vengeance. Stripes! Primary colours! Sleeves rolled to the elbow! Big buttons! Skinny jeans! And that’s just the men. It’s all awful.
- Like magazine racks, men’s wear departments are suffering increasing incursions by departments for women. This is on top of the usual ghettoization of men’s wear (”Oh, yeah, we’ve got some men’s shirts in the basement, down that hatch in the floor, behind some cardboard boxes. Watch out for rats.”) Clearly my gender is not spending enough on clothes.
- Thankfully, my underwear of choice–pride of Truro, Nova Scotia–remains the same.
- I would kill and pay a premium for a store that could streamline my clothes shopping experience.
Tunics and Pajamas
I specifically visited two hemp and organic fashion stores in Victoria: Hemp & Company and Fiber Options. I didn’t find any of the pullovers I was looking for, but I did get a couple of casual shirts at the latter store.
Both were combinations of bamboo and organic cotton. One was from HTnaturals, and unfortunately made in China. The other was a cool t-shirt (er, unflattering product shot) from Salts Organic Clothing (they also have a blog). It’s made in Canada.
In both stores, I did didn’t find any clothes that I would wear that would qualify as (an awful term, but bear with me) ‘business-casual’. All of the hemp products looked like pajamas, or hung off me like tunics. They weren’t even a little cool.
This has consistently been my experience at stores that sell clothes made of hemp. I’ve begun to wonder if there’s a chicken and egg problem with these stores and their suppliers:
- The average person won’t buy the current offerings in hemp clothing AND
- The people who buy hemp clothes aren’t interested in what the average person might buy.
This is all speculation, and I’ve only taken a very small sampling thus far. Still, I wish I could find a store that offered great clothes made of organic fabrics that ranged from pajamas to business suits. I know Vancouver has more to offer–maybe I’ll look around the next time I’m in town.
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July 3rd, 2007, 3 Comments »
Then join the Facebook group I just started. I know this applies to roughly 0.01% of my daily readership, but bear with me.
I went to Glenmore from grades one to four, from 1981 to 1984 (it’s only three years because I skipped grade one). Because of budget cuts and declining enrollment, and despite the protests of students, teachers and staff, the school was closed in 1984.
It subsequently became a ritzy private school called Collingwood. I added these facts to Collingwood’s Wikipedia entry, and regularly defend them from deletion.
Anyhow, I’m pretty sure I have a few readers who are at least occasional readers of this site. Go forth and sign up!
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June 27th, 2007, 18 Comments »
Does anybody else remember that phrase? It bubbled up out of the hazy corners of my memory today, as it does every once in a while. There are only three results for the phrase “rattan to go” on the Web, but Nadya over at Retro Junk offers a good introduction to this strange local commercial from the eighties:
What was it advertising? I think it was a furniture store; in fact, I could be almost positive it was a furniture store. Yes, actually, it had to be. Now that I’m recalling the deeper meaning of the lyrical content, there’s no way that it couldn’t be an advertisement for a furniture store. As a child, it was just an astonishing, mesmerizing array of visuals, accompanied by a few scant lines of dialogue containing words that were meaningless to me, as I didn’t understand them. Allow me to illustrate: an ebony-skinned man with a large smile, wearing a white suit and white gloves and matching white top hat, slinking around a darkened environment.
Stavros fills in a few more details.
I wonder when in the eighties that was? Some time in the mid-eighties, I’d guess. You probably have to be over thirty to remember it.
I recall that the actor–one Blu Mankuma, apparently–had the darkest skin I’d ever seen in my young life. There was a very kind of colonial, Caribbean groove, and there may have been a woman dancing around in the background. I’m probably confusing that with an ad for champagne from the same period (I can still hum the jingle. The woman sounded like Julie Andrews and the name of the wine sounded like ‘hawktala’).
Do you remember this ad?
I’m incredibly tempted to give Mr. Mankuma a call, and see if he has a copy of the video.
18 Comments »
May 18th, 2007, No Comments »
While searching for the origin of a weird live recording I have, I discovered Little Hits. There doesn’t appear to be an official description anywhere, but as far as I can gather it’s an MP3 blog of undiscovered, regionally popular gems from the past 40 years. I just spent an enjoyable few minutes clicking around.
Plus, I like the writing style:
A cover of a 1951 R&B hit by Peppermint Harris that came out just a few months after “Stranded in the Jungle,” “I Got Loaded” is a tune about drunken jocularity sung by bassman Dub Jones in an oddly genial, almost avuncular way that makes inebriation sound like a most agreeable way to spend an evening. See, if getting drunk made me feel like this song sounds, I’d get drunk just all the damn time. But frankly, when I get drunk, everything sounds more like the Shaggs.
I’m sure music lovers and Pitchfork writers will know all of these bands, but I maybe recognized two.
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