2013-05-19T17:06:07-04:00 Katie Heindl http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=katie-heindl Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Katie Heindl Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2792231 2013-03-01T17:46:16-05:00 2013-05-01T05:12:01-04:00

Katie Heindl http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katie-heindl/ on the SNL stage, and from the moment I saw her I was transfixed by all the shapes her mouth was making.

Her mouth also roused something in me (gross, relax) that has been getting slowly irked (I said relax) for a while now. Which is this trend or idea or general genre of the female singer-songwriter who somehow has to shrivel to remain sincere. This floppy prospector hat wearing type who whispers her feelings to you while maintaining a little pout and unconvincing posture and about a hundred dangling bracelets that are probably lending to the overall slouch. Why are you sitting on a lonely stool, or in a half-made bed in rain cloud lighting, to express yourself, at best, with what seems like the frustration of someone who cant get a subway turnstile to work right malevolence?

Use your whole body, that is why you have it. It shouldn't have been so jarring to see a woman sing not like a dainty dried out wildflower. And what's with all these allusions to being a gypsy or an untamed rose or an undiscovered Peak Freen flavour, like please do us all a favour and administer some of the same thoughtfulness and care and unabashed embarrassing sincerity to your words and to your music. I am so tired of everybody trying to harken back to a bygone era by acting and dressing 60 years older.

Maybe I am a bit more critical than most, or self-identify too much with the person or people delivering me the music I am listening to, but I want a force who will eat a hot dog with me and run howling down a steep hill in the dark, not an anaemic witch who keeps pushing her hair back and plucking a string that is never gonna be her tune.

Fuck, forgive me, but don't we all just want a best bud in the music we get swept up in? It's not idolatry, it's just isolating the shittier parts of yourself in someone who's expresses them better. Convince me. I want to be convinced. Your music is a reckoning and where are you using it? Is it college rock? How old are they? If this could be the new college rock we'd cure bros for all time. And here's maybe the best part: all the dudes in this band were just wearing shirts playing a thing and you forget about them. You observe the quality and fabric for a second and the way they are playing the thing and then your eyes rove all the way back to her.

What are the "cool" implications of this band I don't know, I don't care. I heard that they met in highschool and Brittany Howard (I should start using her name) went up to one of the guys because he wore "weird band shirts" and I guess that doesn't happen much in Alabama. Maybe they are shitty people (jk I don't think that) or maybe they aren't bred out of some tired-ass scene that is so self congratulatory and insular that the people in it are exhausted before they even pick up a guitar, but that's the sincerity I am driving at. It just feels ingrained. It feels like they give a shit, moreover, that they've had to defend themselves.

It's not anybody's role to tell someone how to sing, but can we all get a little bit better acquainted with the playing field please so we can get closer to levelling it?

And I suppose there's no way around this so I'll just say it, white women, take off your prospector hats and identify with something. Make a song about how you spent one hundreds years knitting a shrug or you got a normal pizza and for a minute thought, "What am I hiding?" Make a song that comes across very angry on purpose. Stop being a wisp of an Aztec print on the side of a wild horse about to get slaughtered for that restaurant you like to eat at. If all you have to say is you are mad at your boyfriend and your Etsy store is tanking then cool, these are white women problems and your built-in audience is basically the universe. Just get away from me and make a new Tumblr about it.

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2193762 2012-11-26T15:28:28-05:00 2013-01-26T05:12:01-05:00

Katie Heindl http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katie-heindl/ really think about the impact Rob Ford being booted from office is really going to have on the city or Toronto, the place it only seems like we remembered we lived in since Ford came along.

Cause it was kind of like waking up, wasn't it? Ever since that first tender cry of Ford, a sound that can only be described as a siren being sped up through a yak bak repeated by a smarmy parrot yelling at you through an intercom -- shrill and persistent and hammering down on your senses -- we were suddenly all awake, galvanized to this frothing renegade on our radar.

Sure we all loved former Mayor Miller and how tall he is, but he ignored the suburbs for a bit too long and they responded in kind by unleashing this red-faced champion on our selvedge-barn wood doorstep. We couldn't help it, we were mesmerized.

Everything he did was newsworthy, on all the national front pages. The whole country was paying attention to Toronto, some saying we finally got what we deserved and vehemently jubilant that our long-toted "arrogance" (or whatever) had finally conjured up its own succubus. We loved it!

Ford was, in his own fumbling toward ecstasy sort of way, successfully rallying the entire country. CNN, BBC, they all started paying attention to Toronto, playing into our forever-the-hated older sibling stereotype and need for attention. Sure, it was embarrassing to have a Mayor who looked nothing like Kurt Russell but wanted to pull some sort of reverse Escape From New York on us, but wasn't it kind of nice to pretend for a minute we had a real live liege lord? And how about having a guy in control that was simply too busy doing his job to look at the road when he was driving, or was finally the one to act out what we were all thinking every time we see any cast member from This Hour Has A Million Too Many Boring Minutes.

And that is -- was? Admittedly it's hard to let go and start talking in past tense here -- the undeniable irony of Ford, that he had us all paying attention.

It is hard to say when there's been such a unanimous, near-voracious interest in a civic politician. Whether or not you were just along for the laughs there was no doubt you were still taking in the politics of the situation as it unfolded. It was impossible to turn a blind eye to a man who refused to get out of the picture, and in doing so rallied an entire city around -- though against -- him.

Even downtown Toronto's favoured fallback argument of blaming the sleepy ol' suburbs, which face it is getting as tacky and predictable as jabs about Ford's weight, fell flat on its face. The 'burbs too began to see the fallibility in the ignorance that was thus far keeping Ford afloat beginning to deflate. Here we all were finally, rallying behind Toronto's new collective city mantra: "What the hell?"

And unfortunately that's where it stopped. No one can be particularly surprised that Ford finally got caught in one of his weird cartoon gaffes, only that this one seems to be on something of the tamer side and that he literally did it to himself. Some might wonder where his staff were but that is easy since they'd most likely bought out all the Motrin in a 100 mile radius and were looking for some at a Rexall in Ajax.

Clayton Ruby is right, Rob Ford did this to Rob Ford, but Rob Ford also did this to us. The turn now is what's going to be interesting. Whether or not we address without predictable finger-pointing the needs of city vs. suburbs, if they can exist separately, if they are able to, if we want them to, basically a whole lot of questions for an ultimately fleeting interim Mayor. And who is Doug Holyday besides a Gollum-esque in-the-meantime?

Are we ready to consider new candidates for Mayor, and if we're looking at a mid-March election does that give anyone enough time to come up with the money to launch a successful campaign against a teen girl dramatic martyred Ford? Who please believe is going to make his comeback campaign look like a Sun News lauded crusade against this new omnipotent "left." These are the open ends left when this type of shit goes down with no option of recall legislation. We're stuck in a leaderless city in a leaderless province singing over and over the requiem of Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again On My Own."

'Cause wouldn't it have been incredible if Ford's last gift and legacy to the city was voting him out on the high-tide of self-hatred he'd stirred up. There is something much more resolute and indisputable in a decision delivered in a thousand swifts kicks instead of one single one by an old white guy. If that had happened we could probably have cast a statue of him and set it outside City Hall with a plaque that just said "HERO."




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