Heart, 1976
Although more associated with Seattle, Heart hit the big time while based in Vancouver. Like many young American men during the Vietnam War, Mike Fisher fled to Vancouver to evade the draft. Eventually his brother Roger, Ann Wilson, and others from the band Hocus Pocus joined him in Vancouver and together they formed Heart. Nancy Wilson became their guitarist in 1974, and the next year they recorded their debut album, Dreamboat Annie, at Can-Base Studios (later renamed Mushroom Studios) at 1234 West 6th Avenue on the Mushroom label.
Dreamboat Annie didn’t catch on at first, and Heart continued to play clubs around Vancouver, the Lower Mainland, and Western Canada. One night after getting fired from a dive bar in Calgary for insulting the establishment’s cuisine on stage, Heart’s manager told them he scored a last minute gig opening for Rod Stewart in Montreal. Unbeknownst to the band, a Montreal radio station had been playing Dreamboat Annie, so at their first big arena show, Heart found themselves playing to an audience familiar with their songs. The album was soon a smash hit, first in Canada, and then the US and around the world.
Heart’s relationship with Vancouver was short-lived, in part because Mushroom published a creepy full-page ad in Rolling Stone Magazine bragging about Dreamboat Annie’s success. The ad showed the bare-shouldered Wilson sisters along with the caption “It was only our first time!”, implying the two were having an incestuous lesbian love affair. When a reporter asked Ann Wilson about her “lover,” she was so infuriated that she went back to her hotel room and wrote “Barracuda” about the Mushroom executive responsible for the ad. (The song was in the news in 2008, when the Wilson sisters sent a cease and desist letter to stop the Republican Party from using it in its election campaign; ”Barracuda” was Sarah Palin’s nickname in high school). After a drawn out legal battle with Mushroom, Heart switched labels and left Vancouver.
Heart endured other sexist indignities throughout the years, especially over Ann Wilson’s weight gain, but their persistence paid off big time and helped paved the way for other women in the macho world of hard rock. This year Heart was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in December the Wilson sisters made a big splash at the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Led Zeppelin with a lavish rendition of “Stairway to Heaven” that made Robert Plant teary-eyed.
Source: Behind the Music: Heart, via YouTube
This year at E3 during the Xbox panel during a scripted “trash talk” bit someone made a scripted rape joke (male gamer to girl gamer who sucks at a game: “just wait, it’ll all be over soon.”) and then they acted like it wasn’t a big deal and then they released an expensive, anti-consumer (DRM on physical games) piece of hardware. And then Sony just released the PS4 which is just the PS3 but better graphics and $100 cheaper than the Xbox. So THAT happened.
But then Nintendo just quietly released a bunch of great looking sequels for all of it’s major franchises (Mario, Pikmin, Donkey Kong, and Smash Bros.) and every single one of those games interestingly features playable female characters who haven’t been seen in decades like Dixie Kong and Princess Peach - and Pikmin now has a new female hero.
One of my favorite things about Peach in the new Mario game is that one of the power ups is a literal “cat suit” and Peach’s “cat suit” doesn’t sexualize her at ALL. You can’t even see her boobs. She just looks like she’s wearing over-sized footie pajamas it’s so cute. Also they added a pink letter to the Mario logo just to accommodate Peach’s re-inclusion into the franchise as a character with actual agency!
So at the end of the presentation they tell you to go to the Smash Bros website to find out about new characters. And then they announced this character, Wii Fit Trainer, on the site. And in an interview the director said he gets thousands of requests for almost every video game character under the sun and he’s gotten absolutely zero requests for this character and he put her in the game to be funny and defy fan expectation. This character is literally “hey fuck you we’re the ones making the games around here, and we’ll be goofy and funny if we want to and also check it out another female character in Smash.”
Also the inclusion of the Animal Crossing villager is interesting because Animal Crossing is VERY popular with girls and even though the villager is male I’m 100% certain his alternate costumes will include the girl default villager character. So that’s neat. The three Smash characters they announced were two girl(ish) characters from two girl(ish) games and then Mega Man.
Also in the new Animal Crossing game boys are allowed to cross dress and all of the animals are explicitly genderqueer in the dialog. Characters say stuff like “Boys can ware make up if they want to, I mean, it’s 2013, who cares?” and just today a jock rhino was looking deeply into my eyes and asking me to hike a football and I asked him if he loved me (which was one of the option out of other options about sports) and he was like “Oh I guess a lot can happen when you look into someone else’s eyes like that, huh?” He didn’t even care that we’re both guys. Also in the new Pokemon game you can be black.
Basically what I’m saying is Nintendo is quietly and systematically making their games more socially progressive and Microsoft made a rape joke and then said “what? it was a joke.”
Dorothy Lamour, circa 1930s.
(Source: ewwjess)
Living Within Limits: A Collaboration With Nature by Shawn Gust
Kazumasa Ogawa (1860-1929)
Top: Japanese Lotus Flowers (1896)
Bottom: Japanese Peony (1896)
My pork meatballs w/minced bacon, garlic, carrot, parsley & crumbled goat feta, rolled in chickpea flour, served on quinoa pasta. #glutenfree
Lunch with my pops for his birthday featured this amazing roasted chicken, papaya & avocado salad. #yum (at Water Street Café)
Missed one! Our first stop of #theburrardbikecrawl was oysters & Kopstootje chez @killjoybar thx to @barjonesing! #latergram (at Killjoy)
life:
June 6, 1944: D-Day
In color photos taken before and after the invasion, LIFE magazine’s Frank Scherschel captured countless lesser-known scenes from the run-up to the onslaught and the heady weeks after: American troops training in small English towns; the French countryside, implausibly lush after the spectral landscape of the beachheads; the reception GIs enjoyed en route to the capital; the jubilant liberation of Paris itself.
See the photos here on LIFE.com
These color pictures are amazing.
Take a moment today to think of what the young hipsters of the 1940’s accomplished a bunch of years ago today. Unimaginable courage against unthinkable evil. The Eastern Front may have been deeper, more prolonged, uglier hell, but for those few months the casualty rate in Normandy was even higher. It still fascinates because in these muddy times its very hard to even imagine, but on this day it all happened and a bunch of teenagers saved the world. So stop your tweeting for five seconds and show some respect, jerks.
Well, I never forget this day, but then it’s also my dad’s birthday. (Love you, pops!)
My trusty mount, @brooklynbikes @theburrard # 4 #theburrardbikecrawl #latergram (at Alibi Room)
Stop # 4 on #theburrardbikecrawl is @alibiroom - my poison is a Pimm’s Cooler (at Alibi Room)
Enjoying Banga # 2 on Stop # 3 at @theunionvan #theburrardbikecrawl (at Union)
Orchard Hill cider & delish nibbles at @tapandbarrel, our second stop on #theburrardbikecrawl (at Tap & Barrel)