The Vintage Reader

Generally speaking, I'm not big on memes, but I really like this one. From Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, by way of Pop Culture Gadabout:

Go to Music Outfitters (a really nifty site all on its own), and enter your graduation year in the search bar. I used high school, since most of the songs from the year I graduated from college sucked even more than the ones from the year I graduated from high school. Then bold the songs you like, strike through the ones you hate, and leave alone the ones you either don't know, don't remember, or don't care about.

Top Songs of 1984

1. When Doves Cry, Prince (Is there anything stronger than the STRONG tag?)
2. What's Love Got To Do With It, Tina Turner
3. Say Say Say, Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson
4. Footloose, Kenny Loggins
5. Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now), Phil Collins (Not a bad song, but reminds me of the time the accelerator stuck on my mother's 1982 Oldsmobile Omega and my entire life flashed before my eyes before I was able to wedge my foot under the pedal and unstick it)
6. Jump, Van Halen
7. Hello, Lionel Richie
8. Owner Of A Lonely Heart, Yes
9. Ghostbusters, Ray Parker Jr.
10. Karma Chameleon, Culture Club
11. Missing You, John Waite
12. All Night Long (All Night), Lionel Richie
13. Let's Hear It For The Boy, Deniece Williams
14. Dancing In The Dark, Bruce Springsteen
15. Girls Just Want To Have Fun, Cyndi Lauper
16. The Reflex, Duran Duran
17. Time After Time, Cyndi Lauper
18. Jump (For My Love), Pointer Sisters
19. Talking In Your Sleep, Romantics (Caravan Ballroom! Yeah!)
20. Self Control, Laura Branigan
21. Let's Go Crazy, Prince and The Revolution
22. Say It Isn't So, Daryl Hall and John Oates
23. Hold Me Now, Thompson Twins
24. Joanna, Kool and The Gang
25. I Just Called To Say I Love You, Stevie Wonder
26. Somebody's Watching Me, Rockwell
27. Break My Stride, Matthew Wilder
28. 99 Luftballons, Nena
29. I Can Dream About You, Dan Hartman
30. The Glamorous Life, Sheila E.
31. Oh Sherrie, Steve Perry
32. Stuck On You, Lionel Richie
33. I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues, Elton John
34. She Bop, Cyndi Lauper
35. Borderline, Madonna
36. Sunglasses At Night, Corey Hart
37. Eyes Without A Face, Billy Idol
38. Here Comes The Rain Again, Eurythmics
39. Uptown Girl, Billy Joel
40. Sister Christian, Night Ranger
41. Drive, Cars
42. Twist Of Fate, Olivia Newton-John
43. Union Of The Snake, Duran Duran
44. The Heart Of Rock 'N' Roll, Huey Lewis and The News
45. Hard Habit To Break, Chicago
46. The Warrior, Scandal
47. If Ever You're In My Arms Again, Peabo Bryson
48. Automatic, Pointer Sisters
49. Let The Music Play, Shannon
50. To All The Girls I've Loved Before, Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson (Argh. Ugh. Please make it go away.)
51. Caribbean Queen, Billy Ocean
52. That's All, Genesis
53. Running With The Night, Lionel Richie
54. Sad Songs (Say So Much), Elton John (RETIRE already, Elton. Otherwise, in 20 years or so you'll be remaking songs that really didn't need to be remade.)
55. I Want A New Drug, Huey Lewis and The News
56. Islands In The Stream, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton
57. Love Is A Battlefield, Pat Benatar
58. Infatuation, Rod Stewart
59. Almost Paradise, Mike Reno and Ann Wilson (#1 prom song of 1984, though I'm pretty sure all my friends and I sat it out.)
60. Legs, ZZ Top
61. State Of Shock, Jacksons
62. Love Somebody, Rick Springfield
63. Miss Me Blind, Culture Club
64. If This Is It, Huey Lewis and The News
65. You Might Think, Cars
66. Lucky Star, Madonna
67. Cover Me, Bruce Springsteen
68. Cum On Feel The Noize, Quiet Riot
69. Breakdance, Irene Cara
70. Adult Education, Daryl Hall and John Oates
71. They Don't Know, Tracy Ullman
72. An Innocent Man, Billy Joel
73. Cruel Summer, Bananarama (Musically, I pretty much hate this song, but I like it because it reminds me of Bell's)
74. Dance Hall Days, Wang Chung
75. Give It Up, K.C.
76. I'm So Excited, Pointer Sisters
77. I Still Can't Get Over Loving You, Ray Parker Jr.
78. Thriller, Michael Jackson (Oh, come on: you have to like Thriller)
79. Holiday, Madonna
80. Breakin'... There's No Stopping Us, Ollie And Jerry
81. Nobody Told Me, John Lennon
82. Church Of The Poison Mind, Culture Club
83. Think Of Laura, Christopher Cross (A SONG about a SOAP OPERA CHARACTER? Give me a break!)
84. Time Will Reveal, Debarge
85. Wrapped Around Your Finger, Police
86. Pink Houses, John Cougar Mellencamp (Remember when MTV gave away a pink house?)
87. Round And Round, Ratt
88. Head Over Heels, Go-Go's
89. The Longest Time, Billy Joel
90. Tonight, Kool and The Gang
91. Got A Hold On Me, Christine McVie
92. Dancing In The Sheets, Shalamar
93. Undercover Of The Night, Rolling Stones
94. On The Dark Side, John Cafferty and The Beaver Brown Band
95. New Moon On Monday, Duran Duran
96. Major Tom (Coming Home), Peter Schilling
97. Magic, Cars
98. When You Close Your Eyes, Night Ranger
99. Rock Me Tonite, Billy Squier
100. Yah Mo B There, James Ingram and Michael McDonald

All in all, I really like the 1981 list at Thrilling Days better. 1981 was a much better year in music. But for most people, the year that spans the last year of high school and the first year of whatever came next has a lot of musical memories. I think that's what makes this so much fun: some of these remind me of high school, which I didn't hate (but didn't like all that much either), and others remind me of my freshman year of college. The high school musical memories are fairly angsty, because senior year was awfully strange, but the college ones are great: Dancing in the streets to the soundtracks from Flashdance and Footloose with my new friends, who were all music theater majors and could really dance (and sing). Ripping the hem out of my tulle skirt with my heel jumping to the Pointer Sisters, then spending a half hour trying to fix it in the ladies' lounge at the top of the Skirvin. Getting into bars at 17, drinking White Russians bought for me by gay boys, and thinking I was truly living a glamorous life at long last. Listening to Purple Rain incessantly. For about three years.

The 80s were really a perfect time to grow up if you had a strong appreciation of the past, because retro was HUGE... but not in an obnoxious way. Sure, there was a lot of cheesy 50s nostalgia around as the early Baby Boomers started to hit middle age, but you could still find Big Band radio shows on Saturday nights... classic cars for a couple thousand dollars... beautiful vintage clothes for a song... whole sets of Fiesta or Russel Wright dinnerware for under $100... pulp paperbacks with lurid covers for a dime...

Oh well. Enough nostalgia from a Gen-Xer about to hit middle age. :-) I'm toddling off to bed now, so that I can get up and trudge off to work tomorrow. Tempus fugit.

The Winds of War. Ordinarily I would have bought this at a thrift store, or a used book store, or tried to find it at Paperbackswap, but I was on a trip, so I paid $16 for a big ol' trade paperback with a flimsy cover and thin pages. Also, the book-within-the-book, a fictional treatise on Germany's actions in WWII, is in a nearly unreadable sans-serif font (with titles in a completely unreadable gothic German font).

However, the book itself is, as the blurb on the front says, "hypnotically readable." I never saw the mini-series, although I remember my mother watching it avidly; as I recall, that was the year I spent mostly shut up in my room, writing daily letters to a friend in another town (the '80s version of blogging) and reading such diverse material as The Fountainhead and My Darling, My Hamburger (for about the 12th time). I remember that my mother bought the book--a monstrous doorstop of a mass-market--and I tried a few times to wade through it, but hadn't yet developed the kind of patience that is required for reading about diplomatic strategy, world history, and military technology (probably why I never quite fit in with the D&D club) along with the character development and such.

Wouk's characters are always interesting, if a little two-dimensional; one of the things I like about vintage reading is that two-dimensional characters are often still interesting, without a lot of the formulaic hooks that mediocre authors use now to make their two-dimensional characters seem more interesting, such as a fondness for something just obscure enough to allow a pretentious reader a frisson of delighted recognition, an unnaturally intelligent pet, or a comically irrational fear (or a combination of all three: "I hugged my hamster, MacHeath, closer to my chest as I approached the closet door. Intellectually, I knew it was unlikely that an elderly nun carrying an umbrella was going to leap out and bash me about the head and face with it, but you can never be too careful. Mack the Knife twitched his whiskers in a way that let me know he understood.").

The war is the plot, and the characters are secondary. While I prefer books like Mila 18, where completely believable characters are tested by extreme external circumstances and show their true selves, the way some of these characters are little affected by the war even as it rages around them feels a little more realistic.

In any event, the book is incredibly absorbing: last night, after reading about an air strike, I found myself getting jumpy when planes flew too low overhead.

At work--if you happen to be charged with cataloging library donations, anyway.

I found this one particularly interesting. In three of my past jobs, I've been responsible for cataloging the donated or unsolicited items, and taking them home and selling them is not something that ever came up in training--maybe because I had those jobs in the days before eBay.

In this case, I can see a huge loophole: apparently, this woman was only taking books that were already in the library system. I'm very curious about the library's policy regarding donated copies that are duplicates of titles the library already owns. If the library's policy for donations is to not add additional copies of books that are already in the system, what happens to the extras? If they're discarded anyway (as they were in at least one library I worked in--we put them out on a table in the lobby with a sign that said "FREE BOOKS"), was she really stealing, or just taking the discards home? And on a related note, was the library planning to devote staff resources to sell those books on eBay for fair market value, or use volunteer labor to sell them at the annual Friends of the Library book sale for $1 each? If the latter is the case, I would say their loss on the Grisham and Cox books is $2, not $300.

Of course, I'd like to think that they wouldn't have actually arrested her, and she wouldn't have resigned, if she wasn't doing something that was definitely, documentedly, wrong. But then, I do tend to put on my rose-colored glasses when I go to the public library.

Knitty offers us a pattern for a lovely double-knitted baby blanket, as made by first lady Lou Henry Hoover. The pattern comes from a letter written by Mrs. Hoover to a woman who had seen her knitting one of the blankets and inquired about it; the lucky woman also received a doll-sized blanket, knitted by Mrs. Hoover to demonstrate the double-knitting technique.

BiblioTravel is a database that lets you search books by locale. Kind of light so far, but a great idea and interface.

This neat article from 1981 profiles a lot of the hottest romance writers of the time, with sometimes-hilarious pictures: Rosemary Rogers striking a seductive pose in what's obviously a suburban tract-house bedroom; Janet Dailey standing outside her infamous Silver Stream trailer; a very young Danielle Steel in huge poufy sleeves, with a creepy fake dog; and my favorite writer of the bunch, "Jennifer Wilde," posing with his mother.

More from The Homemaker, this time about a new technique that "make-up expert" Jack Dawn came up with for an Esther Williams movie:

"The hairdresses are modeled in clay, covered with silk and then treated with Chinese lacquer. These hairdos, when dry and hardened take the place of swimming caps. They are in varied colors for Technicolor effect and can be given a translucent effect by means of a tiny light inside the coiffure."

I have GOT to see this. According to The Homemaker, the movie was called Mr. Co-Ed, and co-starred Red Skelton; I'm guessing that it ended up being Bathing Beauty, which did in fact co-star Red Skelton and lists Jack Dawn as the makeup designer. Maybe Ivan can illuminate.

Yes, that's right: jokes about rationing. Here's one from The Homemaker, vol. 5, no. 3, Nov. 1943:

"...Marjorie Main, who plays a ration Board supervisor in the comedy [Rationing], was telling [Wallace] Beery and other members of the cast about a particularly leathery steak she had had at a restaurant the night before. "That steak was so tough," Marjorie insisted, "I felt I ought to pay for it with my number 18 shoe coupon."

Just as a side note: can you imagine some of today's celebrities confronted by rationing? Some of them--the ones who ordered a Prius before the general public could get one--might embrace it. Others, though, would just have to shrivel up and die of sheer deprivation. For that matter, so would most of the rest of us. It could be a very good thing.

Here's another one from the same publication, from an article about hosting an "our times" party (the invitations specify that you're supposed to walk or ride your bike; party games include "Draft Lottery" and "Fuel Shortage." I suspect I'll be blogging about that later). It's a "variation of the Curious Traveler stunt" (whatever that is):

"The Cautious Motorist got into his car--
He looked to the north,
He looked to the south,
Then to the east,
And to the west.

Then he turned again and faced the north,
Then he faced west,
Then he faced south,
Then he turned to the east,
Where he saw an OPA inspector--

So he got out of his car and walked home!"

Reprinted in Make and Mend for Victory, copyright 1942, The Spool Cotton Company, but I don't know where it first came from; obviously, more research is warranted.



Attributed to Consumer Division, Office of Price Administration.

This is an excellent little booklet, full of useful instructions for making your clothes last longer, but the thing I like best is the descriptions of how to restyle clothes--although they could really use a little more detail. For example:

Problem: Neckline is unbecoming.

Solution:
"1. Take off old neckline finish. Press carefully. Run a machine stitch close to edge to prevent stretching. By pulling up this stitching slightly, a neckline which has been stretched may be eased in.
2. Select a pattern with desired neckline. Cut new line from this pattern, folding garment carefully at center front and center back before pinning on pattern. Apply suitable finish as suggested in pattern."

I really don't know how you'd do that with most modern patterns, although my mother used to be able to do it. The idea that in the 1940s an average woman might have known how to do something like this, without extra step-by-step instructions, is really appealing.

Pop Goes the Library reports on the World Future Society's annual conference. With such insights from Liz's future-looking fellow attendees as "...teens like the Internet. You should have internet," I'm beginning to worry a little about the future of libraries.

The summer of 1984 was mostly miserable for me, and for reasons that I shall not go into here, Gremlins was a big part of that. So much so that for years I shuddered every time I saw one of those icky furry Gizmo toys with the rubber faces. It wasn't until many years later, when my husband made me watch it with him, that I caught the sly humor and sheer ridiculousness of the movie, and admitted that it wasn't that bad. But I still never caught on that it was taking on E.T., the movie that made the summer of 1982 suck almost as much as the summer of '84.