Canuckflack

70s Diet Advice for Kids

// August 2nd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Happiness, Retro

Undermine your children’s self-confidence if you want them to lose weight, says “Diet and be Slim” an inset from a 70s-era News of the World edition.

His dance music will kick your dance music’s ass

// September 6th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Retro

Ralf Hütter of Kraftwerk revisited London in the early summer, and found it wanting.

“…Politely mortified by the soft, hands-in-the-air atmosphere of the first few clubs we visited, he wondered ruefully what had become of the “hooligan energy level” of London. We finally found some for him at a club called Rage. “You know!” he shouted, gesturing around at the flickering television monitors and oblivious trance-dancers, “if people had been making a film about hell 20 years ago, they would have conjured up something like this. We were doing things like this early on, and one reviewer wrote that ‘Kraftwerk is the death of music.’ ” …” (The Telegraph)

Disco Trade Routes

// August 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Creativity, Retro

Will Straw offers up an examination of the migration of disco trends, effects and artists between cultures and communities in the 70s and 80s:

” … overlapping cycles that sent highly synthesized disco tracks by the Montreal group Lime to southern
European discos and Italian-produced electronic tracks to the gay clubs of Montreal. In the interaction of these cycles, both Hi-NRG dance music and Italo-disco worked out the terms of their commonality and their distinctiveness. More generally, Quebec disco records of the early 1980s were caught up in cycles that led to Italian remakes, Quebecois remixes or remakes of European dance tracks, and to the constant reinscribing of a well-entrenched line of passage between Quebec and southern Europe …”

Music from the Wrong Place: On the Italianicity of Quebec Disco, Will Straw, Criticism, Winter 2008

What sort of disco, you ask? Straw cites “World Invaders,” by Pluton and the Humanoids, as part of the canon of Quebec and Italodisco.

” … The use of synthesizers and vocoder in “World Invaders” has let that track slip seamlessly into the canon of Italo or Eurodisco music that has taken shape over the last decade. The widespread recourse to distorted, machinelike vocals in Italo/Quebec disco was, at the simplest level, a way of using English that displaced the question of base-level linguistic ability onto that of the novelty of vocal effects. The processing of vocals was also a partial resolution of the inevitable illegitimacy that haunts the use of English lyrics in popular music, particularly if these are sung by non-English speakers with accents that might betray their origins …”

More shaggin wagons than you can shake a stick at

// July 23rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Creativity, Happiness, Retro

1977. Wing collars. Rayon shirts. Dozens of  Cargo vans with outrageous panel art. Handlebar mustaches and fat rural cops. These two video clips from promise you all this … and more!

Supervan, the story of a plucky Dodge and her owner, converted to crime-fighting superheroes despite the objections of his traditionally-minded dad.

the country pop crossover chit chat

// July 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // Retro

Ah. The country/pop combo. I forgot how much I missed the forced bonhomie and idle chatter that usually opened the videos for these early 80s crossover hits.

Here’s uncomfortably aged Kenny Rogers weavin’ the sweet sweet talk with Sheena Easton.

How to keep a bus from falling off a cliff

// January 23rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Creativity, In the Media, Retro

How do you keep a bus full of gold from falling off a cliff, and taking you with it? That was the physics problem presented at the end of the original Italian Job. (The one with Michael Caine, not Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch).

What are the ingredients here? Michael Caine, a caper movie, humour, some smashing mod clothing, and an intractable science problem to end the movie.

You see, Caine and the rest of the crew had used 3 Minis to steal the gold from a bank in Turin, and had driven the Minis into the back of a 1967 Bedford Coach. After unloading the gold from the cars, they had pushed the Minis out into the Italian Alps. Unfortunately, some poor driving led to half the coach hanging over a very steep Italian hillside, with no seeming solution for getting both the gold and the gang off the bus safely.

Thanks to the Royal Society of Chemistry and John Godwin, we now have a solution! Mr. Godwin submitted the winning entry in the RSC’s contest to solve the decades-old physics challenge. And it’s quite intricate:

1. Break the third set of windows, using the heel of a shoe, outward.
2. Then reach around and break the second set of windows inward, so that the weight of the glass remains in the bus
3. Lower a team member from each side to deflate the tires, thereby lessening the “springiness” of the bus and making it more stable
4. Drain the remaining gas from the bus by accessing the service panel directly under Charlie Croker
5. Once all this has taken place, it should be safe for one gang member to leave the bus and pass rocks to his colleagues, thereby balancing the bus and allowing for the gold to be slowly removed.

I think the runner-up’s solution is far more exciting:

• Cut the fuel line so it leaks onto the road asphalt just at the fulcrum – the spot where the bus is teetering on the cliffside.
• Ignite the fuel
• Effectively secure the bus to the cliffside by melting the asphalt.

You’re really missing something if you don’t look over the completed contest entries – there’s a hell of a lot of math, physics and chemistry in each of them!

I have a particular fondness for the original Italian Job, and I almost lost my mind when I heard Eddie Izzard riff on the movie:

Why Eddie Izzard loves the Italian Job:

The composer for moustaches and aliens

// December 12th, 2008 // No Comments » // Retro

That’s Gary Schyman, folks.  He’s composed snippets of music for video games like Resistance:Retribution and my favourite, Destroy All Humans. He’s also worked on the sound for classic television shows like Magnum P.I, the “A” Team, and Greatest American Hero.

Ah, the irony. The only person whose career survived and even flourished after that swath of early eighties advernture hijinks was a guy who worked behind the scences.

Now that winter’s back

// November 9th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Advertising, Retro

The original Contac C television ad. I have to admit, I always hoped that once, just once, the bus would jump the curb and hit Mr. “Oh Yes I DO”

The Worst Ska Song Ever

// October 22nd, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Retro

Did Iggy Pop eat too much candy?

// October 20th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Retro

Iggy Pop: “As my teeth started to fall out, they paid to replace them …”

Dinah Shore: “Your teeth started to fall out? Eat too much candy?”

Iggy gets interviewed on the Dinah Shore show in 1977, while David Bowie lurks in the background. And yes, he’s totally grooving on the lady.

h/t to Holly

Vote Ferris on November 8

// October 7th, 2008 // No Comments » // politics, Retro

These are your choices (if you’re an American citizen), come November 8. Pick your Ferris Bueller character carefully.

via stee via reticent magpie via soup via jessicat

Glengarry Glen Ross set to house music

// September 23rd, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Management, Marketing, Retro

In recognition of Alec Baldwin’s Emmy for 30 Rock I’ll just point you to well put-together podcast, heavy on house music and soundbites from Glengarry Glen Ross – “Always be Closing – 40 minutes of house and abuse, hosted by Alec Baldwin“ – over on the21gunsalute.blospot.com.

If you want to read about Baldwin’s stormy, tempestuous, rough, confrontational, challenging career as an actor and a husband, just read the New Yorker essay from earlier this month.

My life is dominated by my teenage years

// September 21st, 2008 // 1 Comment » // observation, Retro

I spent the last three days at a resort in the Muskokas, wedged right alongside the majestic Algonquin Park. There is nothing more relaxing than a crisp and clear early autumn morning, sitting on a deck perched on an outcrop of the giant Canadian Shield, looking over a lightly misted bay framed by a ridge of pines, oaks birch and elm trees tinted in a palette of orange and red hues, the silence only interrupted by the far-off honk of Canada geese.

Which does nothing to explain why THIS was the only photo I took all weekend:

An AMC Eagle on display at the Huntsville old car days. Cherry.

Social media and 16th century pickpockets

// September 21st, 2008 // No Comments » // Criticism, Retro, social media

Plus ca change, baby. Five hundred and sixteen years ago, respectable intellectuals were worried, nay, overwrought, that fantastic new technologies were giving any loudmouth and troublemaker the opportunity to speak to larger and larger audiences with fewer and fewer filters.

“… every grosse braind Idiot is suffered to come into print’, and ‘every scandalous tongue and opprobrious witte … will advance their peddling wares of detracting virulence in the publique Piatza of every Stationers shoppe …”

Anna Bayman, Rogues, Conycatching and the Scribbling Crew, History Workshop Journal, Spring 2007 (sub. only)

See what that fool Gutenberg wrought? Within a hundred years, fantasies and crime stories about the rapscallions of the street – “conycatchers” – were stimulating the masses teeming on the streets.

And here we are, worried that poor strategy, bad language and weak logic is undermining social media.

Fred Perry Brand Tingling at U.S. Open Possibilities

// September 7th, 2008 // No Comments » // , Marketing, Retro

With his defeat of Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray has the potential to be the first male tennis player from the United Kingdom to win a Grand Slam event since Fred Perry won Wimbledon in 1936 – which is opportune, since Murray is sponsored by the Fred Perry brand.

As a global consumer brand, Fred Perry was long ago overshadowed by Lacoste and Polo, and more recently by athletic wear manufacturers like Nike and Adidas. More recently, the brand has been capitalizing upon its appeal to more segemented markets (like hipsters) through targeted efforts like the Fred Perry Subculture microsite, with its music downloads, band features and bar openings.

Too bad, on the day that their brand has reached its greatest popular exposure stateside in decades, www.fredperry.com is down.

And I can’t understand, given the range of colours, patterns and styles in the Perry range, why Murray is wearing that tshirt in bland browns and earth tones.

Maybe I pay too much attention to this brand …

As for Murray the spokesperson:

“… Granted, he can be gauche, tetchy and, in Tim Henman’s measured assessment of last May, ‘a miserable git’ - a criticism that Murray accepted as legitimate and acted upon – but none of these undermines the fact that the faith he has in his ability is genuine. All professionals talk up their chance of reaching the very top, but only a few do so with a conviction that rings true. Murray is one of this handful …” (Guardian)