Because it's summer: smooth song(s) of the day #9

Diamonds and Rust by Joan Baez and Send in the Clowns by Judy Collins
The Baez song was an odd one for smooth, clean girls in Indian cotton to love but love it they did. Generally, they didn't go for songs that felt like they belonged to the sixties generations unless they were introduced to them by an older sister. This was one big exception. I think they would have loved it a lot less if they'd known it was about Bob Dylan.

It was a song that fits into a category I call anticipatory nostalgia. A girl can sit there listening to a song like this and think how terribly cool it will be to have her heart broken so romantically that she'll really understand what all the words to this mean.

The Judy Collins song, OTOH, felt odd at the time ("a Broadway tune?") but now makes perfect sense. It is, in every way, a vastly superior piece of songwriting. It actually goes somewhere both lyrically and harmonically instead of endlessly circling around the same vaguely expressed lyrical notions over the same boring chord sequence like the Baez song does. You might object that there are much better interpretations out there, and there are, but this one is good enough.

The series starts here.

The next song is here.

Update, I can't resist adding this. Here is a version:

Womanly virtues Friday ...

Homo-eroticism again
I know, I know, I keep coming back to this but not for the reasons you think. What I want to call our attention to is not something to titillate us or to make us laugh. There are already nine gazillion other people doing that. I want to remind us how ordinary homo-eroticism between women is. Here is an image to ponder (Courtesy of James Lileks who doesn't own the image but went to a lot of trouble to find it and scan it so go see what he has done with it).

The product is Bon Ami, a company that has been in business for 120 years now. A name that, as most people already know, literally means "good friend" and that is probably the idea being the image here. The good friend offers to help with the clean up but no need thanks to my Bon Ami. But an advertisement that featured two men looking at one another like that would be the subject of endless comment and snickering. But it is so ordinary between women isn't it?

Why if you were  in the kitchen at the end of a party and you saw one Elaine come in the door and look at Jill that way. You'd feel the erotic spark but you wouldn't think anything unusual was happening. If Elaine came in and looked at Ben that way you'd begin to wonder what was happening between them and likewise if Frank came in and looked at Ben that way. But a frankly erotic gaze between two women is the most ordinary thing in the world.

And remember that this ad was intended to sell products to women.  It would have appeared in a women's magazine.

The woman who has just finished cleaning the counter has an interesting Georgia O'Keefe thing going in front. I always think of this wonderful picture of Edith Wharton when I see something like that.

Note the seam that connects the bodice to the skirt of the dress and then the pattern of the stripes on the skirt; notice particularly the way the over-skirt with the vertical stripes opens up to reveal another layer where the patterns form, of all things, a series of V shapes. Why it's almost as if everything about this dress was intended to remind you of what was underneath.  It seems that way ("seams" that way?) because that is exactly what it was intended to do. (By the way: You'd never guess from that photo what a miserably unhappy sex life Wharton had.)

That a woman presents herself to everyone, including other women, in a frankly erotic way is a very ordinary thing. That is something worth remembering the next time someone tells you there is something unusual about the eroticization of girlhood today. There is nothing unusual at all about this. It's what young women do and always have done.

I'll tell you what is unusual. What is unusual is the notion of an extended period of innocence called childhood. If you go back through history, that is the thing that no one else has ever had.

Because it's summer: smooth song of the day #8

Boulder to Birmingham by Emmylou Harris
There was this girl, I can't mention even her first name because someone will figure out who I'm talking about. Her father was the chief of police and she had a leather bikini. She only wore the top in front of me (usually matched with a black taffeta skirt that looked like it belonged in a vintage western). When she wanted to see my poor little boy brain explode and splatter grey matter all over the walls, she would wait until her parents went out, pour me a glass of her daddy's best whisky, put Emmylou on the stereo and casually remark that it was hot and slip out of her shirt to reveal this leather bra.

For some reason I was firmly convinced that this song was about Martin Luther King (it's actually about Gram Parsons) at the time so I have rather odd associations involving a smooth, clean girl in a cotton shirt and skirt with a leather bra underneath when I read about the civil rights struggles thanks to her.
The series starts here.



The next song is here.

The Canadian sin (2)

The Globe and Mail has actually devoted an editorial to the subject of last night's loss:

The drought is unbearable and unnatural. There are Canadians nearing the age of majority who have never seen a Canadian team win the Cup. The last was the Montreal Canadiens in 1993. It is, in Canadian terms, a deprived childhood.

That is so pathetic I can't begin to comment. I'm almost, almost inclined to think that there is some moral justice that Boston won given that any team whose fans spout moral drivel like that should lose.

The Canadian sin

A fairy-tale season that seemed destined to culminate with the franchise's first Stanley Cup title instead ended in profound disappointment Wednesday night for the Canucks.

But what about the other team's fairytale? They had one too.

I was a hard core hockey fan once. Then I went to see the Edmonton Oilers. Twice. It was the legendary Oilers squad when Gretzky was playing at the height of his powers. I went away depressed, especially the second time.

'Legendary" is the right word to describe famous moments in hockey. If you had, as I had up until that point, gotten all of your knowledge about the Edmonton Oilers from watching games on television and reading articles and books about them there was an important thing about the team you would have been in complete ignorance of. Because the commentary always talked about the brilliant plays, the tactical genius and so forth. They never mentioned that even by hockey standards, which are not impressive, the Oilers were a very dirty team. Especially Mark Messier and Esa Tikkanen.

They weren't the dirtiest team to play the game but they were dirty players and that dirtiness was one of two factors that had much more to do with their winning than anyone wants to admit.

The other was that the game officials protected Gretzky. Gretzky was a brilliant player and would have been effective even if they hadn't been but he was a lot more effective given that every player on the ice knew they could end up in the penalty box for what would have been a perfectly legal body check on any other player in the league.

The Canadian sin is the desire to see the world in terms of fairy tales. We invest ourselves in fantasies about moral destiny based on nothing but our desire that it should be so. Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of the game of hockey knows that high-scoring teams tend to come unstuck in the playoffs. When it really matters, such a team can always be ___ed up and that is what happened here.

It's the nature of the game and always has been. If you had to put hockey on the spectrum of sports it belongs down towards the same end as professional wrestling. It's not anywhere as bad as professional wrestling but it tends in that direction. And the big reason it remains this way is that we Canadians never seem to lose the capacity to look at this vicious frontier game and convince ourselves that we are watching a finesse game with fairytale storyline.

And nothing will even get us to question that. Not even this:

It was the first unleashing of tear gas in the city since the infamous Stanley Cup riots that erupted in 1994, when the Canucks also lost the seventh game of the Cup final.

 I love the Globe's headline on that story by the way "Rioting overshadows hockey as Vancouver reels after Game 7 loss". Yeah, like the way the Lincoln assassination overshadowed a good play.

is there anything more cruel than poetic justice?

Hugh Hefner's 'fiancé' was reportedly playing him:

Hugh Hefner's wedding to Crystal Harris was called off after she secretly planned to ditch the Playboy mogul at the altar in return for a $500,000 media deal, Page Six has exclusively learned.

Harris, 25, was shopping for a big-bucks deal to tell all after she ditched hapless Hef, 85, in front of 300 guests at their wedding at the Playboy Mansion on Saturday, to be filmed for a Lifetime TV special. 

If virtue can be it's own reward, some kinds of vice can be there own punishment.

Because it's summer: smooth song of the day #7

Midnight Blue by Melissa Manchester
Speaking of irony, I think there used to be a porn magazine called Midnight Blue. It was printed on pulp paper and the title was either "Midnight Blue" or something close to that. I remember finding a pile of them in my friend's garage and realizing they must belong to his dad. When this song came out, I remember thinking it was ironic that porn should share the same title as this song which I honestly believed had nothing to do with sex. I believed this for the simple reason that I believed that no smooth, clean girl in Indian cotton I knew could have anything to do with sex (outside of my fantasies about them that is) and so I figured that the fact that they all loved this song meant it couldn't be about sex.

Okay, girls are ahead of boys at that age and my failing to notice what this song was about is further proof of something that needs no further discussion. But, given that all of us boys are now grown up enough that we know what the song is about we might also notice the attitude expressed: she wants sex now because she wants sex and she is even willing to say "maybe it's not the end" when it is clear that it is the end and she is leaving. There is a male song "For the Good Times" by Kris Kristofferson that expresses exactly the same sentiment (added below) but women were not supposed to think this way and yet here they were thinking this way. Liberation? Your call.

Here is the Reverend Al Green giving the Kristofferson song far more care than it deserves.

The series starts here.

The next song is here.