Photo Friday: The Leader of the Pack Edition (1940's-1950's)

Good morning!

IT'S FRRRRIIIIDAAAAY. This week couldn't end fast enough!

I came across this set nosing around on Flickriver, and how. could I NOT. share with you. the following picture:

Is it a publicity photo from some mid forties' programmer of a B picture offering, with a suitably exploitation style title? Wild Boys of the Road? Slow Burn? Teen Gangland? No! It's an honest to goodness photo of the user's dad in 1943 in San Fransisco with some pals. The caption identifies the dad, Louis, as being sixteen or seventeen at the time. Are you kidding me, bub! Who was that assured looking and handsome their junior year of high school? Shockingly handsome and cool looking, right??

Here's the same photo, and it only loses a little flair for being in sepia instead of being hand-colored in eye-popping pastels:

While the other little dudes in the photo look like they may or may not be sixteen, I love how Louis looks like he's ready to stand-in for John Garfield or young Eli Wallach in a movie. The caption said women flipping through the family albums would go gaga over this photo and the dad's movie star like handsomeness. Do you blame them?! When I taught high school, I remember having two or three kids, who honestly, had probably failed more than one grade, who looked like grown men in my French II class. I kept telling the teacher across the hall, "This one guy looks more like he might run a small business or be a mechanic." Teen maturation rates are so wildly varying that the same thickly built, grown looking dude would be sitting next to some bird thin, pencil-neck of a kid, in the same grade. I am glad I don't have to go through being 16 but one time in this life.

A couple years later, stationed in Guam during the war-- wonder what was under that light blue pull over and super cool jacket? Wonder no more!

He looks like the man of steel himself! Think about if you were his wartime sweetheart and you got this glamour shot in the v-mail. I'd be like, well, let's go ahead and send this in to the paper. "SERVICE MAN BREAKS HOTNESS RECORDS ACROSS THE COUNTY" the caption would read, and me, leaning over the counter to the copy man in the newspaper office spelling my name out slowly and clearly, so  the accompanying article would be sure to have my name in it! Hands off, ladies! But seriously, dude looks like an actual movie star, which another caption in the set mentions is how the neighborhood refers to him and his sweetheart-- "the movie star couple".

Here's Louis's better half,  Hazel. Some of the annotations mention she has red hair, and there are some school photos from her childhood in Arkansas where her doe-eyed little face is covered in freckles. She's only seventeen in the photo below! Once again, I would hate to be seventeen and gawky in the same grade with this bosomy, pretty redhead!

Here are the parents together in a photo. Hazel was seventeen and Louis twenty five when they met. Isn't it funny that I think of that as a LARGE age gap in 2013, but I'm sure in 1950, when people got married all the time at eighteen, it wasn't as glaring to people at the time. My grandma on my mom's side was eighteen marrying a twenty-two year old, and on my dad's side, my grandma was sixteen marrying a twenty-five year old (I think those numbers are right)-- so again, not so out of the pale. Still, I cannot IMAGINE doofy little sixteen year old me trying to get married and start a family.  Growing up in the eighties', as opposed to the thirties' and forties', didn't prepare me for grown up life right out of high school (I'm not sure it has at this advanced age of 28, tell you the truth!)).

I gotta get hopping on estate sales this morning, but you can see more photos from this user's family album via this link. As always, if this is your mom and pop, I hope you don't mind me borrowing them. They're SO good looking, I couldn't resist!

How about you? Do you have any hopelessly glamorous photos of your parents or grandparents as young, cool kids around town? Did several members of your family marry at young age and stay together? Which one of these photos do you think is the most like a movie still? Let's talk!

That's all for this week! Have a fantastic weekend, grab good stuff at the sales, and we'll compare notes on Monday, huh? See you then!!!

House Envy: Julia Child at Home (Architectural Digest, 1979)

Good morning!

I meant to say earlier this week, in light of that post I did about how much I haaaaate wearing glasses, that I appreciate all your advice, sympathy, and kind words you took the time to add to the conversation on we four-eyed women of fashion! I think I wrote back to every one of my nearsighted brethren who commented on that post, but I just wanted to add to it a hearty "thanks, man!" to everyone who made me feel a little less grouchy about donning my spectacles against my will. In that post, I mentioned that I have been reading a living ton of old Architectural Digests from the late seventies' and early eighties', and I wanted to show you what I found, before nearsightedness got my ire up enough for me put off telling you about it!

This, Bird readers, is Julia Child, circa year of our Lord 1979. As if you weren't trembling in your boots enough to think of her cheery prowess at la cuisine française, wait until you get a load of the GORGEOUS Cambridge, Mass. house she shared with husband, Paul. Up until  the purchase of the house Child describes in the accompanying text of the article as "Cantabrigian", Julia and Paul Child had led the life of expats together. The couple met in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) while both were members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which Julia joined during WWII when her six foot two frame disqualified her for work as a WAC or a WAVE (first the Rockettes, now the US military! Whaddya have against tall gals?!). They lived in France from the late forties' up until the early sixties'. 1961 marked two big milestones for the not-yet-famous chef-- the US publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and the Childs' long delayed moving into this house, after having purchased it two and a half years earlier while still primarily residing in l'Hexagone. 

The house boasts two living rooms-- and somehow, I don't think Child is talking about how I have a real living room and then a room I call a den which is really a finished garage type deal. These are possibly what you would call a sitting room and a parlor, or a front room and a study. Seriously pretty real estate here! These built-in bookcases and large scale rooms remind me of some of the estate sales I've been to in Belle Meade and its similarly vieux riche environs in Nashville. When I was little, lots of Sunday drives were taken to the 37025 to look at some of the old houses and point, Gomer Pyle like, at how the other half lived. This was before McMansions started popping up on the former sites of some of Nashville's moneyed forties' residences-- apparently living in a 1939 structure meant to look like an 1859 structure was outmoded by faux Italiante villas of the early millennium. Boooo. At any rate, I remember asking my mom, I was maybe eight or nine, "How do you get to live in a place like that?" Her pessimistic response? Something like "Well, those people's parents were doctors, and their parents were doctors, and probably their parents' parents were doctors." Haha, talk about an anti-Horatio Alger speech! I still might live in a house like this some day, hope springs eternal.

See another view of the first living room here. How about that coffee table and the bookshelves over the doorway (correct answer: yes, please)? Can't you imagine nestling up in front of the fire, on that teal couch, under an afghan, reading a book of Robert Lowell poems with your glasses low on your nose? I can, I can!

The dining room, as the staging place of many of the illustrations in her cookbooks, is suitably well furnished-- I like the golden rod yellow and sage green against all that natural wood! If you weren't impressed enough by the dining room table set here, the caption reveals its provenance: "an English mahogany table, [with] French fruitwood chairs depicting La Fontaine's Fables". Bust my buttons! Still, Julia reveals in her commentary accompanying the photos that the dining room is far more often used for photography than for its intended purpose...even this revelation doesn't diminish my yen for a real-live-formal-space-for-entertaining-dinner-guests! I would eat Cheerios at one end of a morning's repast, and Matthew down to the other, each of us peeking at the other over the floral centerpiece. Dreams do come true!

Child mentions in this and other sources that her New England home was the site of her ninth kitchen during married life with Paul. As such, she wanted to make sure the "large and well proportioned room" was used to its best advantage, as the kitchen, in her own words, "is the beating heart and social center of the household". A splendid cook would say that, wouldn't they. The carved woman dominating the picture is a cookie-mold! Did you know? See more here, I would have a million of them if they weren't so expensive online. I have a large wooden one like this of a woman, and a small, metal one of a knight somewhere in my archive of wall-decorations (ie that shelf of junk in the utility room of which I refuse to part with any sole piece), both of which I found at estate sales for less than $10. I hate how estate sales will get me hooked on items (at a low introductory price) that could get me in trouble if I pursued my collector's appetite online! Check out the robo-microwave (which I'm sure was top of the line at the time) to the left of the frame. Each time I see one of these hulking pieces of obsolete technology out in the wild, I'm like...what is this, a replicator? Why is it so ginormous?

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Child's architect, Robert Woods Kennedy, decided to place a pegboard over one of the windows to allow Julia better access to her famous, gleaming copper metal pans. Doesn't this sound insane to the modern day amateur interior design enthusiast (ie you or me)? You want as much light as humanly possible, with natural rays of sun suffusing the room in warmth and color. Yet! When I think about all the times in my tiny kitchen, I've been down on hands and knees in front of the bottom cabinets scrabbling for no not that heavy bottom pan, the other one! with mounting impatience, I guess I wouldn't blame a true artist in the kitchen wanting her tools close at hand and easily arranged for best access.

Paul Child passed away in 1994, and in 2001, Julia decided to leave her residence of forty years for a smaller home in California. There's the happiest ending ever to this story, though--did you know (and you might if you've seen the movie/read the book Julie and Julia...girl, it has Meryl Streep in it, you know I have!) that Julia Child's whole kitchen was donated to the Smithsonian Institute, intact, just as it was in this 1979 spread? You can tour the kitchen online and learn all kinds of interesting little factoids about the space, such as (these are direct lifts from the site):

• Two 25-pound turkeys fit inside the oven in this kitchen (how many people are you expecting for Thanksgiving dinner?! Good Lord!).
• The maple countertops were built two inches higher than in most kitchens to suit Julia's six-foot, two-inch height (finally! A little consideration for us tree-toppers!)
• A plastic-covered Marimekko print tablecloth protects the wood of the kitchen table. (Marimekko! How chic!)

Anyway, I'm in love with that house. Maybe some day I'll have a fine, Cantibrigian homestead of my own!

How about you? What do you like best about the Childs' Massachussetts digs? Are you someone who cooks a lot and is very particular about the kitchen, or do you find you attentions are taken up by other parts of the house? Any celebrity houses you've seen lately that have made you drool? Let's talk!

Have a great Thursday, and I'll see you tomorrow for Photo Friday. Til then!

In Praise of Claude Rains: Deception (1946, Bette Davis)

Good morning!

I was pawing through some jotted down ideas for things to write about yesterday afternoon, when Mr. Tiny over at Wacky Tacky mentioned that he shares a birthday with Claude Rains. "Hm," I thought, chewing my pen, as all bad scribners do, and that got bumped to the top of the list of things I wanted to write about. "Claude Rains! You don't say!" As if an old friend  had clapped his hand over my shoulder in a collegiate show of affection, I thought, in a fit of love for the actor,  I should do a post on Deception.  About a year ago, I bought a copy of this movie on dvd vaguely remembering a classical-music-world-of-the-forties' plotline from a viewing in college on Turner Classics, and boy, did I not fall hook, line and sinker for the high pitch of hysteria of this mid forties' melodrama. I love that movie. There are better Davis/Rains pairings, and better Davis or Rains films, but this one is 110 minutes of high pathos in the old fashioned sense. 

Let's talk brass tacks.

Claude Rains owes his initial movie success to a 1933 Universal release that involves less than probably ten minutes of actual face time on screen. "Claude Rains was the invisible man", you might remember, if you're up on your Rocky Horror soundtrack, and, indeed, Rains took on the H.G. Wells sci-fi role when Boris Karloff came unavailable. It was the British stage import's first major leading screen role, at the advanced age of 44, after decades in the theater on both sides of the Atlantic and a teaching position at RADA.  By the end of the thirties', he commanded juicy, villainous parts in several big box office pictures-- 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood had him as Prince John, squaring away in Technicolor against Errol Flynn and his merry men, and he took the Senate floor as the gone-to-graft Senator Paine in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939, against do-good Jimmy Stewart. Rains also played the Nazi-sympathetic, uranium-dealing husband coming between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock's Notorious (1941), and in 1942 turned in an iconic-performance-in-a-movie-full-of-iconic-performances, Captain Renault in Casablanca ("Round up the usual suspects!" is only one of his many good lines in the picture). 

See, no wonder you didn't recognize him out of costume.

In summation, Rains appeared in seventy-seven motion pictures, many of which are above average to classic films, four of which co-starred Bette Davis, and one of which distinguishes itself from that pack as COMPLETELY. NUTS. That movie, ladies and gents, is Deception.

The movie poster's dreadful, but I do like this lobby card set on Dr. Macro
(maybe could be part of new Bette Davis kitchen montage??)

Reuniting the principals as well as the director of 1942's successful Now, Voyager, Deception is a sudsy noir set in the world of classical concert musicians. Alex Hollenius, as played by Rains, is a celebrity composer/conductor who forms the fulcrum of a romantic teeter-totter between Bette Davis and Paul Heinreid's characters. Davis is Christine, a former music teacher whose true love, Heinreid's Karel, passed a rocky four years in wartime Europe, unable to return to the United States and continue their shared emotional and musical passion due to, you guessed it, fascism. "I thought you were dead. I saw them kill you!" Davis cries out upon their reunion, in her trademark, overstated style, mugging wildly over Heinreid's embrace. She's atypically glamorous in this role, all perfect permanents and high-fashion forties' dresses. In Karel's absence, Christine's living situation has suspiciously improved-- her former lover, still a little off kilter from the last four years of strain, questions Christine on the fine apartment with expensive artwork hanging over the mantle, a full length mink hanging in the hall closet. Isn't this a little....luxe for a working musician and teacher? No, no, she offers dismissively, it's DEFINITELY not that I have a much older, much moneyed boyfriend I've been leaning on for lo, these many years we've been apart. Pull the other leg! You get to the roots of the money tree Christine's been shaking when Rain's campishly imposing, witchy, wry Hollenius shows up, assiduously asserting himself as the real star of the picture. One, his name is Hollenius, which sounds like an import luxury car as much as it does a composer; two, he is CHOMPING. SCENERY. From his first moment on screen. 

Rains has a knack for playing characters that are fey without being effete, sentimental without being cloying, and arch without being bitchy. Much married off-screen, it seems that when not playing arch-villains, the actor's on-screen roles tend towards men who harbor passions for women who are only interested in emotionless, symbiotic relationships with their persistent, perennial suitor. In Notorious, Ingrid Bergman feigns love for Rains in the interest of thwarting fascist powers' access to bomb-making minerals stored by means of a way-station in the Nazi-sympathizer's wine cellar. As the title character in Mr. Skeffington, Rains waits, decade after decade, for the vain, fickle Fanny (Bette Davis again) to succumb to his steady devotion. In this movie, the character of Hollenius is perfectly content to do one of two things, with equal amount of vigor, self-application, and enthusiasm-- one, win Christine back (ummm...probably not happening, given his movie-track record here), or two, destroy Karel, both professionally and personally (in the hopes of, maybe as an offshoot, winning back Christine). Is it wholly evil? I don't think I would be completely on board with my girlfriend, who is essentially 100% financially dependent on me for her glamorous lifestyle and professional success as a musician, dropping me without a second's hesitation the moment handsome Paul Heinreid returns from his emotionally scarring war experience. Hollenius is lined out to be the villain, but if you want my real opinion, as Christine, I would rather spend time in his hopelessly ornate jewel-box of a Manhattan apartment, being the subject of gorgeous sonatas and Rains's obsequious attentions.

Seriously, do YOU have a Louis XVI timpani serving as a side table in your living room?
I didn't think so.

Buuuuut, because it's a forties' melodrama, Christine has to side with wooden, old-world-charm Karel, and guess who's stuck with short stick? She and the still-mentally-dishevelled hunk marry in the very apartment Hollenius underwrote for Christine. The maestro, who has flown across the globe to return in time for the wedding, holds himself aloof upon crashing the reception but is careful to emphasize his role in Christine's life, hinting at intimacies and shared knowledge heavy with context between lobbing acidic barbs at the woman he still loves. Hollenius keeps his relative cool in conversation, but grips a glass so tightly as  his protège/lover plays a complicated, dark piano piece at Karel's behest, that the glasses smashes in his hand. As Christine abandons the baby grand to come to his aid, Rains raps off

Like all women: white as a sheet at the sight of a couple of scratches... but calm and smiling as a hospital nurse in the presence of a mortal wound... Good night!

And leaves the party! If you don't plan on renting the movie (why don't you plan on renting the movie, though?), the whole scene is here, and Rains is fabulous in it. 

THIS is the kind of forties' acting that just makes my heart glad-- not at all in a sarcastic or ironic way, on my part. Emotions are writ BIG across the screen, and there's no mistaking the thunderous disapproval marked by Rains's exit. How could you not see that he was about to hie him hither to the warpath?  Hollenius gets in a devastatingly, deliciously nerve-wracking scene some moments later, in which he tries the already cracked patience and fortitude of a jittery Karel with endless changes to his order in a gourmet restaurant. He insists on bringing Christina and her new husband to the fine dining establishment before an important audition Karel wants to ace, and effectively devastates Karel's chances of a bravura performance with a skin-crawling series of addendums to an already complicated bill of fare. "Stuffed with trooofles," might be my favorite part of the entire exchange.

                               

He's SO GOOD at being SO BAD. It's a treat!

Anyway, I won't spoil any more of the film for you, but let's say that things take a turn for the histrionic near the third act of the play, where Hollenius's machinations to sabotage Karel's career come to a head with Christine's attempts to foil them. You can read a great essay on the picture and its production on the Grand Old Movies blog, or rent/screen the movie yourself in its entirety on Amazon Instant Streaming for the low, low price of $2.99 (side note: did you know there are all kind of old movies on instant streaming there? Type in your favorite old Hollywood actor and find out!), but either way, soak in the no-holds-barred performance in this movie. Though meant to be a Davis vehicle, Rains runs away with the best scenes and gladdens me to no end in a gleefully wicked performance.  I've discovered a major biography of Rains was published in 2008, written by The Monster Show author David J. Skal and Rains's only child, Jessica (oh my goodness, she looks like him!). WE. ARE. EXCITED. ABOUT. THIS. Waiting on the library copy to come back from a checkout, and it is ON. 

What about you? Seen any old time movies lately worth shouting to the rooftops about? What's an undervalued star of the old MGM/WB/Paramount/RKO firmament that you believe needs a revisit in the 21st century? Remember Rains in a particularly good role? Let's talk!

That's all for today, but I'll see you back here tomorrow. Have a great Wednesday, and we'll talk soon! Til then.

Vintage Sweater Weather (Cowichan Sweaters, 1950's-1970's)

Good morning!

I was slogging through vintage t-shirt listings on ebay the other day (like you do), when I stopped about dead in my tracks at a listing for a "vintage 60s 70s FISH wool COWICHAN SWEATER small ROCKABILLY jacket", and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a friendly little fish memorialized thus in all its vintage glory. Look at this sucker! If it weren't $89, I would have already purchased it:

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Sadly/luckily, as a lot of innocent ebaying begins, I spent a good chunk of the next half hour sucked down the rabbit hole of Cowichan vintage sweaters. "Cowichan", which I intially thought was a company name, refers to the type of novelty knitting you see here with large, figural representations of everything from school houses to dancers at a sock hop. It is named after the Cowichan tribe of British Columbia. These sweaters owe their cultural heritage to both that Native American group and the early English settlers of western Canada, who brought with them in the mid-nineteen century domesticated sheep and easy access to wool. And to the kitschy, crazy knitters who kept their needles sizzling with kooky designs throughout the middle of the twentieth century-- popular with fifties' tourists and modern-day rockabilly enthusiasts, the patterns that seem to go for the most money on the online auction sites are the most out there, outlandish ones! What might have mortified a teenage kid on the back of a Fred McMurray type in 1954 is commanding high dollars among collectors! Ain't that always the case, though-- what once was "hick" is "hep'!

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According to Wikipedia, these gaudy, gorgeous garments also go by the handles "Siwash Sweaters, Curling Sweaters or Mary Maxim Sweaters". The former refers to a (possibly slightly unkind?) word for "wild" in the local patois, the middle term for the winter sport (depicted on a sweater, here!), and the latter for a 1950's popular patternmaker (more on those from this blog). I kept scrolling through page after page of whimsical outdoor-sport, wild animal, and novelty composition. Wouldn't you like to have one for every day of the week? From the ebay listing for the above wolf sweater:

"Item condition:--“FLAWLESS BEAUTY!" ” 

One, that's hilarious; two, could you disagree?! The big, bad canis lupus hanging out in wool-relief, tongue lolling, is enough to thrill and chill any grade schooler into looking forward to wearing outer wear in the winter months. Likewise on this sweet hoe-down sweater, complete with a musical staff for a dance floor!

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I'm not a big fan of the hunting-related items (so! Many! DUCK HUNT! MOTIFS.), but I do like the "great outdoors" motif of several big and small game items adorning the knits of these sweaters. Can you imagine somebody's sweetheart hurrying up with the circular knitting in time to finish a shawl collar for Christmas? Some pretty fifties' girl sitting in a wingback chair before a fireplace, exclaiming, "Oh, nerts, wouldn't you know I just-- ugh, Alaska is A-L-A-S-K-A....wonder if Burt will notice I left out an A..." before deciding to unravel back to the error. I hope "ECK" was pleased with the rams' head masterpiece you see below!

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This three-figured price tag item (you're killing me, smalls) features every angle of the tatonka you could wish for. I love that in Googling that word to make sure I was spelling it right, I've been brought abreast of the fact that the Native American word for "buffalo" is also now used to describe undesirable women in the urban dictionary. Buuuuurn, urban dictionary. That ain't right.

These images are from a finished listing, but others are for sale all over ebay

Thought for the day-- where would the well-dressed forties' or fifties' person wear this kind of gear? Novelty knits are not the sole dominion of trend-crazed teenyboppers-- I think a lot of these sweaters were probably vacation wear or weekend-warrior wear for people who would otherwise dress as conservatively as first season Don Draper. Isn't it funny how Hawaiian shirts and wild prints were originally conceived for a way vacationers could "let it all hang out". Fifties' women, usually prim in a girdle and stockings and nip waisted dress and hat and gloves and pumps, could feel positively native in a one-size-fits-all muumuu and a pair of strappy thong sandals. Gents who usually wear a necktie and sportscoat could feel sinfully rakish in leg baring shorts and an eye blinding print. It's vacation, cut loose! I think similarly, for outdoors wear and a weekend at a friend's cabin, why not wear something a little less staid and a little more sportif? See the movie stars below dressed for a ski-weekend in uncharacteristically button-down clothes. How do you like rugged Gable's motorcycle zip jacket and foulard? How about dreamy Gary Cooper's fair isle knit? I love them all! 

Here's what I'm talking about:  "[Gary Cooper] skiing in Sun Valley in 1946 with Rocky [Cooper], Jack Hemingway, Ingrid Bergman, and Clark Gable, 1946" (source)

Easily my favorite sweater of all of these, though? It took some digging, but I did find this Mary Maxim pattered wonder on Etsy (still out of my price range, still magnificent). Check out this ice skating motif emblazoned hunk of AMAZING:

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Come with me and be my love, figure skating sweater. Who even thought of this to have it on a sweater?! Looking through other online listings, I've seen rockets, bowling pins, totem poles, scuba divers, bicycles... anything and everything you could think of! I'm going to have to keep a look out for these in my picker outings, though, as they are too rare for my blood in terms of price! $20 has to be the ceiling for me on something like this, and darned if there isn't a thing under $50 I've been admiring. Le sigh.

The only comparable knit I already have in my closet is this 70's Sears Fashion Store cape.  It features a sun and pyramids on the sides, and....well, whatever the heck native Aztec figure this is on  the back! I very rarely can't remember where I bought something and when, but this must have been so long ago I've forgotten. High school? College? You used to see seventies' kitsch like this all the time at Goodwills and the like, but with the rise of Etsy and Ebay's vintage sellers, much, much less gold is in them thar hills. Still, check it out:

Most hilarious feature? Though the motif is definitely portraying some kind of mesoamerican cultural markers, the buttons, original to the piece, feature the same North American native American you'd see on the old "indian head nickels". No joke, I wish I'd taken a photo. Side note: Ladies-- how do you successfully wear a poncho or cape? I always feel like the portliest character actor in an old PBS mystery when I wear one... think Charles Laughton minus the talent. I've thought to run a belt INSIDE the cape and have it fasten outside through the arm holes to give me a little more form, but I think it takes a chutzpah to wear a crazy cape like this that allergies have robbed me of this week! Still, I didn't mind modeling it for the sake of chiming in on novelty knits.

How about you! Would you wear one of these loud and crazy sweaters, or is this a step too far in vintage wildness for you? Do you have any bizarre novelty knits in your collection? What's the best/worst sweater you've seen out on the streets in this sartorial vein? Let's talk!

I gotta get back to work, but you guys have a great Tuesday! I'll see you back here tomorrow for more vintage tips and quips. Til then!

Antique Clothing in COLOR vs. Black and White (1800's-1930's)

Good morning!

I'm a big fan of reading Two Nerdy History Girls' blog under any circumstances, but recently have found myself completely addicted to the Breakfast Links digest they publish end of every week, detailing items that would be of interest to fellow history enthusiasts. I work every other Sunday, a slow day in the phone room at the bibliothèque, so I always find myself looking for weird, esoteric time-fillers to trawl on the internet. The Nerdy History girls never disappoint! This week's digest included confessions of 19th century murderers (who also happened to be children), a 1747 recipe for "Nothing Pudding", and the tantalizing tidbit: "Let your closet dream big! Catalogue to upcoming auction of Victorian, Edwardian, & 1920s clothes and jewelry" (via this source).

LANDAGARSHEN, FOLKS. They weren't kidding when they said dream big!

If you click the link above, then click "auctions" and scroll down to lot 129, you'll see hundreds of auction collections of hats, coats, purses in various conditions-- lots of jewelry-- AND THEN THESE DRESSES. I chose the best of the hundreds of listings and then tried to whittle it down to just a few, but nope. I'm just going to have to show you a million dresses instead. Can you imagine these were on living, real bodies, in some cases a hundred years before you were born? Something about seeing all these dresses in breathy pastels and frothy prints made me think of an idea that had been nagging at me since last week.

In looking through a book of Kodachrome slides at the library, I was dumbstruck, goofy as it may sound, by how in living color the world was in times that it's hard for me to picture color as it relates to every day objects. Specifically, there's a time period from about 1880 to 1960 that seems to have happened, in my subconscious, in sepia tones or black and white and greys. Where Renaissance times, medieval times, even colonial times all conjure up images in my mind of bright red doublets, gold frock collars the size of a bicycle wheel, royal blue waistcoats with shining yellow buttons, tiny brocade slippers, etc, etc, there's no such color-associations to be made with items that were ubiquitously photographed but monochomatically documented. To see, for instance, these everyday shots from the thirties' and forties', in full color, is almost as jarring as it is alluring. That's not SUPPOSED to be in color! While the change over from portraiture to photography in the mid-nineteenth century meant a drastic jump in realistic, real-life rendering of the memorialist's subject, I think one of the major things we lost was the connection c-o-l-o-r lends to a modern eye. I can't relate as well with the black and white of a downtown city street in the thirties' as I can to this full color slide, from the forties', where the colors lend detail, distinguishing between different materials, gradients in space and shape, etc.

See the difference? source

Let's look at how black and white versus color photography would change our perception of these late twenties'/ early thirties' dresses, which, when photographed on a lively young member of the decade's "youth culture", would likely be captured in black and white, but experienced in color:

Here comes the magic!

Don't you feel just like Dorothy coming to in the Land of Oz? And all I did was sap the saturation out of the same shot! While the dresses are still gorgeous in either setting, would you have guessed the honey on the far left to be a bright fuchsia flowers pattern with perwinkle stamens? All four of these dresses seem to be very similar in black and white, and yet, the COLOR of them in color-- they're as individual as an eyelash!

Let's try it again....guess what color the frocks and frills in this picture are (and don't peek and cheat!!):

Hm, I guessed "cloud grey, grey...darker grey....storm grey?" And look how wrong I was:

They look so lovely and bright in their peacock hues as to make them seem artificial, like someone costuming a 20's movie. I immediately thought of the flapperific dress Debbie Reynolds wears as Kathy Selden in Singing in the Rain-- I remember thinking at the time, watching the movie years ago, "oh GOOD GOD, Walter Plunkett, can we please have something a little less over-the-top-1952-does-1932? Is she supposed to be a flapper or a side show attraction?" Mainly because of the crazy colors of the outfit! Now I look back at the same piece with new eyes-- this was probably as authentic as any of its sister pieces here, color and all!

With the resurgence of interest in the Edwardian period thanks to the crazy-popularity of Downton Abbey (I'm not masochistic enough to keep current with the show, but boy, were the first two seasons GREAT), I can think of 1910's ball gowns with a little more accuracy, but the turn of the century remains, for the most part, bleakly sepia toned in my mind's eye. Look at how vivid the patterns on these eighteen eighties'/eighteen nineties' dresses are! My favorite part, secretly, is that the blue jacket-and-skirt set is too small for the mannequin. People were SO. SMALL. a hundred years ago. Your most slim and diminutive friend might not be able to wiggle into that living piece of textile art! Still, wouldn't it look fabulous not-fitting a mannequin in my own home?

Last challenge! Here's a humdinger of a dress I picked up at the Southern Thrift in Donelson. They never, ever have vintage clothes older than the eighties' (remember my John Tesh run in earlier this year? That's the only other time I've ever seen a forty year old garment in the store)-- so I was just bowled over to find this floor length sixties' gown, hanging out in the formals section. I was positive it wouldn't fit me, and about died when it did. What color do you think it is? No peeking!

Pencils down! 

Ha! I bet you didn't see that one coming! It's that David-Bowie-Life-on-Mars-suit color that I'm always going on about. Now I could perfectly camouflage myself against the walls of my living room! Seriously, I'm wearing this out to the next event I am invited to, however large, however small. It needs some kind of embellishment to break up the green, green, green...I thought of adding several, same color brooches to the upper left hand shoulder, but I'm afraid to run pin-backs through the material. Maybe a really tight-fitting, solid black vest? I might have to settle for wild earrings and some kind of head-covering. Time will tell!!

So! What do you think of my "treatise on color"? What has been your own experience with thinking of eras where black and white photography trumped illustrations for real-life documentation? Do you ever get frustrated flipping through old family albums thinking, "I KNOW that snazzy forties' dress on my great aunt is a color...but which one?!" Had any technicolor antique discoveries lately, brighter and more vivid than pictures would have you think? Let's talk!

That's all for today, but I'll see you back here tomorrow. Til then!

Photo Friday: I Want to Be Like Cliff Edition (1970's)

Good morning!

Have I got a whale of a Flickr find for you all this Photo Friday! As usual, I was trawling Flickriver for keywords like "dad 1976" and "birthday 1970" when this family album set on Flickr, and wow. Just wow. Spanning from the turn of the century to this year in various states of comprehensiveness, the Baron family makes me want to just live inside all their family snaps. Starting with the mother's Mary Pickford sausage curls as a pre-teen in the forties', flipping through pictures of family gatherings in vibrant Kodachrome in the fifties', watching toddlers grow into little men in the sixties'...yet I have to say, the best was yet to come when I clicked on the album laveled "seventies'". Please know that any comments I make regarding the awesomeness of this family are completely sincere-- I keep thinking, what wonderful, madcap little adventures they got into for the WHOLE OF THAT DECADE. To be young and sassy in the seventies'!

Don't believe me? Meet the three boys of the Baron family:

Let's talk about how an indie band of the present day would do well to look as carefully nonchalant as (L to R) Cliff, Craig, and Gary. Stick a guitar, a microphone, and a bass in each of their respective hands and you'd have a sensation on the dance floor at the Five Spot. The fact that the middle child, Cliff, is wearing both a double-breasted blazer and a look of contempt on his fair little face is particularly great, but tall Craig's striped pants with that two-button blazer is ALSO something to write home about. Aren't the colors in Craig's blazer and Gary's pants-and-tie such particularly seventies' colors? I wonder if someone will look back on 2013 some day and say "Oh, light lavender? Really, Mom? That color is so twenty-teens." Did you spy with your little eye the barkcloth drapes?

Now, this was a surprise. Speaking of indie bands, here's your album cover. From what I could piece together, it looks like the whole family participated in competitive roller skating in the seventies'. You heard me right. Not roller disco, or Boogie Wonderland kind of a thing, but as ice skating has its "ice dancing" iteration, so do these dedicated four-wheelers have both singles and pairs roller skating routines. I wish I knew what songs they did these elaborate, costumed performances to, or a video of the self same! There's picture after picture of each of the boys, and even the mom and dad, participating in various competitions, but it looks like Cliff is the star of the family when it comes to rink-prowess. There must be a dozen or so photos of him with similarly tween-aged girls as well as by himself, skating his heart out. I've never even heard of competitive roller skating outside of a disco setting, but isn't it neat to see!! 

If Cliff easily becomes to the star of the seventies' Baron boys album, it's not just because he can roller skate or stare sullenly in formal wear at the ever present snapping camera of family get togethers. But no! Cliff can also ride a unicycle, a feat I think I've only known one person in my life as being able to duplicate. Can you imagine the same parents who are being asked for special skate costumes and skate lessons coming up with a unicycle for a birthday present? These are supportive parents, no joke! The weirdest item like this Susan and I had when we were growing up that was a bright neon pink and green pogo stick neither of us could ever get the hang of (though by Godfrey, we tried enough times that we should have attained mastery level skills in the pogo department instead of just banged up elbows and knees for our troubles). Go, Cliff, go!

This living room set up looks so insistently seventies' that it's hard for me not to have a twinge of nostalgia for my grandparents' house, which boasted a similar, time-capsule look to some late seventies' redecoration that stayed well into the millennium. The crazy pattern curtains, wood paneling, the naugahyde barkalounger, the green couch with hand-made throw pillows...whatever the dad in the picture is wearing...but the point of this is that besides fashion, skating, and unicycling, Cliff can also play trumpet! Later, you see him in the uniform of the marching band. Incidentally, trumpet had to the be the best thing other than bass drum to play in marching band-- you get all the good parts! I was a five year floutist in a stationery, non-marching band setting, and all the trills and spills of the melody were consistently drowned out by awesome brass-section parts of the arrangements. Maybe most full-band arrangements for middle and high school are written by brass players, I don't know, but it hardly seemed fair!

Easily the coolest thing you could get for Christmas when you're like thirteen? A FREAKING MOTORCYCLE. I don't know if this is a motor bike, moped, whatever other two-wheeled beasts are out there on the open asphalt it could be, but what an impact! Doesn't Cliff look, just by dint of sitting on the non-moving motor machine's chassis, like a complete rock and roller? It seems you could become The Wild One era Brando, in one accessorizing move!

Last but not least, a parting glimpse of the handsome, male American Apparel model Cliff became at the end of the seventies'-- still on his motorcycle, clad in a Jaws t-shirt and looking like he rolled off the cover of a magazine! Aaaah!

If you like what I've highlighted of Cliff's place in the family album, check out ALL the albums on this user's Flickr page. I'm telling you, whoever the family photographer was had a streak of Avendon in him/her. Or maybe all the family members are just photogenic. Things got less handsome in the eighties', but good Lord, it was a hard decade for anyone. Understandable. And if this is your family, as always, thanks for letting me borrow some members of it for the weekly showcase!

So! What do you think? Have you heard of competitive roller skating? Have any family member who is outrageously multi-talented and good looking at the same time? Have any pictures of your family in the seventies' that just make you go "Was everything just cooler then? Or am I crazy?" Let's talk!

That's all for this week, but I'll see you right back here on Monday for more vintage mayhem. Have a great weekend, get lots of deals at the estate sales, and I'll see you on the other side! Til then.

Real Life Problems: Super Prescription Glasses

Good morning!

I had thought to do a post this morning on some houses in a 1979 Architectural Digest bound volume I've been not-literally-but-almost-literally drooling over (at least salivating, let's say), when I decided this morning to write something instead on a subject that's been weighing h-e-a-v-i-l-y on me as the seasons change and pollen is anywhere and everywhere. Today is the first day in about a week and a half I've successfully popped contacts into my poor, rheumy little eyes, and I'm telling you, it's changing my life. In celebration, I pulled out this red patio dress I haven't worn yet (so many items in my closet fall under this category, this is from that flea market trip with Rae and Travis a couple months back), and took an outfit photo for the first time in weeks. Don't I look happy to be in glad rags instead of drab ones!

I hope you don't mind a rant today, because that's what's on my mind. Why wouldn't I don my crazy dresses, according to my custom, lo, these many autumn weeks? My glasses get in the way of everything! EVERYTHING. They have turned me into the mercurial thirteen year old I never was, stamping around half dressed in the morning in tights and slip like "I LOOK SO STUPID! I CAN'T FIND ANYTHING TO WEAR THAT DOESN'T LOOK STUPID!"  While I prefer to see, and know it's better to go around in spectacles than with eyes that are so bloodshot I look like I might have escaped from some government-funded secret laboratory in a horror movie, I have been so bummed out about having to wear glasses day, after day, after day. Number one: my prescription is so bad I have no peripheral vision. Every time someone comes up to the nonfiction desk asking for a stapler to my lefthand side, I have to whip around like a guest star in the old Batman tv series. Number two: My glasses are from SEE, and made of some fancy, compressed lenses that once smudged, remain smudged until you clean them with glasses-spray. I tend to inadvertently leave this at home and spend a good part of the day with my vision obscured by my own fingerprints. Number three: I just don't look like myself in goggles. I know you don't believe me, but it's true! The living proof:

I hate, HATE being four-eyed. Plenty of folks look undeniably cute in glasses (many of my fellow bloggers can rock a pair of prescription frames like it was nothing), but I don't think many people with as heavy a prescription as I wear can still look like themselves. Friends close to me have assured me that the glasses are "cute! No, you look fine in those!", but I seriously have had more than one person I didn't know from Adam approach me at the desk to say "Um, excuse me, I just wanted to let you know, you look about a million times better without your glasses. Just sayin'." I am not making this up. Specifically, two patrons in the course of a week, the first said that, the second said "Did you know you look far younger when you don't wear your hair pinned like that and without those glasses? Your glasses make you look much too old and stuffy." Thanks, bro. Now, while these library visitors need to go back to Miss Porter's to finish some courses on etiquette and not saying whatever damn thing comes to your mind every time you open your mouth, I also have to grudgingly agree with them! Please overlook the bags under my eyes from excessive sleep deprivation and compare these two mugs, side by side:

Having worn progressively worsening prescription lenses since the tender age of nine, I think I started around a -3.25 (normal, you should probably wear glasses near-sightedness) and now boast a present day -9.00 in each eye (Mr Magoo sympathizes with your debilitating lack of human vision). +10.00 is the equivalent of a magnifying glass, so imagine I have essentially two inverse magnifying glasses attached to my poor head. This makes my eyes, which balance out my large head and beak and are easily my best feature, reduce to the size of distant dimes behind the lenses. I am grateful that I have vision that can be corrected, it's not that I'm just miserably bemoaning my nearsightedness, BUT-- why can't I just wake up in the morning and go to work looking like myself? It would be like if, according to your allergies, you could either go to work in normal clothes, or have to wear a full length, shapeless, burlap caftan. "Hey Lisa, you look way better in dresses as opposed to this enormous feed sack." Ya think?! I'm afraid to get LASIK because, gee willickers, if my regular optometrist can't pinpoint a reason my eyes are habitually bloodshot and painfully red, what kind of things might he not know about how my weak little oculars would react to being surgered upon? I'm just saying.

Surely, we've made progress since the Victorian era in the science of eye diagnostics? (source)

I've been trying to just accept my fate as being sometimes in-glasses, sometimes out-- but I feel like, as opthamology must be a slightly more scientific field than say, phrenology or... I don't know, the kind of booths you see set up next to the ferris wheel where they can read your fortune out of a painted wagon, why can't my eye doctors prescribe some drop or at least a course of action to relieve my eye issues? I had a small retinal hole corrected in 2003, and iritis two or three times over the years, so it's not all hypochondria and vanity that sends me back to the eye doctor. I want to make sure my peepers are healthy! I've been something like five times in the last couple months, and while twice I did need a steroid drop to clear up inflammation, the other three times, our conversation went like this:

Me: So what's wrong with my eyes?
Doctor: Well, I've checked your retina, everything's fine in both eyes-- left eye looks a little more irritated that the right, but nothing to worry too much about.
Me: Why is there like a red ring around my iris?
Doctor: That's just the load-bearing part of the eye. When your eyes are overworked, they tend to get irritate around the iris.
Me: Is there anything I can do about that?
Doctor: Have you been sleeping in your contacts?
Me: No.
Doctor: Have you been wearing them longer than you usually do, say late into the night?
Me: No, I've been in my glasses for like two weeks, trying to give them a rest. And drinking lots of fluids, and trying to get plenty of sleep. They just won't clear up.
Doctor: Have you tried allergy drops?
Me: You told me last time those might be what's causing the irritation, so I stopped taking them. Doctor: Well, I would just um....let's see...we could put you on the steroid again? See if that clears it up?

As if he were asking ME what I'd like to do! Do you go to the doctor saying "I've been throwing up a lot lately" and your doctor's like, "Well, that could be anything from pregnancy to influenza. Do you feel pregnant?" I hate the subjectivity of it. What the heck do I know about my eyes?! Other than they're not normally this bad?! 

Glasses I've been considering...check out the first pair! 1,2,3

Anyway, lately I've been trying to decide if I'll just accept my fate as be-glassed, and if so, how outrageous a pair of frames can I get away with. Coastal had some cats' eyes I've been looking at, but it doesn't solve my problem of disappearing behind the prescriptive glass! Le sigh.

How about you? Are you blessed with 20/20 vision, or are you a fellow sufferer of Burgess-Meredith-in-the-Twilight-Zone-episode levels of myopia? Do you remember your first pair of glasses? Have you ever been frustrated with a health care professional's lack of, um, professionalism? How would rock a pair of coke-bottle lensed glasses, if you were forced to wear them? Let's talk! And please don't think I'm too bad for wringing my hands over a problem-that's-not-even-that-bad-of-a-problem-- it's been driving me crazy lately, and I had to get it off my chest.

That's all for today! I'm going to go enjoy my contact-lensed self away from this computer screen as best I can. Have a great Thursday, and I'll see you tomorrow for Photo Friday. Til then.