Halloween 2012 (Adam Ant and Joan Crawford)

Good morning! Can you guess who these two glamourites are?

Halloween is smack dab in the middle of the week this year, which makes it awkward for we responsible types in our late twenties' to even go out (on a Wednesday?! A school night?! [what have I become]). On our favorite holiday of the year! Egregious amounts of schoolwork made me lose heart in my ability to get down in a grave manner as in years past. However! We did get our ya-ya's out this weekend at a really neat party in the Nolensville Rd area. Friends Kate and Trey always go all out for their Halloween celebrations, and for their first year in their new house, we were excited to see what tricks and treats were up their sleeves. You know it's a good party when you're driving down the people's street trying to find it, go "Please, please, please let it be the one with the spooky strobe light in the front yard!"....and it actually is!

The above picture was taken by the host's brother and one of Matthew's good friends, Chad-- he took them on a modified vintage Polaroid Land Camera and then photographed the results with a digital camera. Modern meets analog! I really think this is one of the best pictures ever taken of my Bab and me!

But what are we, you ask? The completely obvious pairing of eighties' new wave rocker Adam Ant, and sixties' era Joan Crawford! Naturally. I know they didn't hang out, but they obviously should have. 

Like ships in the night...

My costume was primarily that black sequin dress you guys might remember from a few months ago, black elbow length gloves I've had since high school, some high wattage rhinestone costume jewelry from my collection, and the black fur cape from the estate sale mixup with Eartha and Rae (which has honestly become my new favorite article of clothing). Add eyebrow pencil, towering beehive with fake bangs (I just Victory rolled my own hair and pinned it), and a wire hanger, and you get this:

I buy you beautiful dresses, and you treat them like they were some dishrag! You do! Three hundred dollar dress on a wire hanger!

Luckily, my hair on the actual night of the party (above) was much less Bieber-esque than from the test run I did in the kitchen with the hanger (the triptych above....though my makeup might have been better), and we had a great time. My one regret is that I forgot to take more shots of Bab's costume! Here's a full length shot of the jacket and pants:

The jacket started out life as a woman's collarless blue blazer, to which I added tons of braid and gold ribbon. The sleeves, which was the hardest part and naturally the part you can't see in this picture, featured swirled loops of gold braiding just like on a real officer's jacket. Matthew looked very, very cute. Closeup, he had on a little under-eyeliner, some pink lipgloss, a white stripe across his face, and I even cut a braid off my Cleopatra wig (I didn't ever get enough of the costume done to run with it!) and pinned it into his hair for a convincing rattail (see the professional photo at the top of this post).

On Sunday, we carved pumpkins at Matthew's mom Deb's house and ate ridiculously good jalapeno cornbread muffins (made by Deb) and turkey chili (made by her adorable Polish ESL student, Ula, who, with her equally adorable husband Conrad, came to carve pumpkins as well). Here's our pumpkins!

The art deco one on the left is mine, and the cutie, happy one on the right is Matthew's.

If something good comes up tonight, we may try and don we now our gay apparel again, but I'm pretty happy with the Halloween festivities we did manage to squeeze in this year!

Are you going or have you gone as anything this year? What's your favorite Halloween related activity? Have a best costume ever for this year or years past? Do tell!

Have a Happy Halloween, and I'll see you guys tomorrow!

Hiram Walker Imperial Whiskey (1955)

Good morning!

Would you look....would you just look...at the advertising gentlemen I dug up today. In 1955, Hiram Walker whiskey ran a series of promotional ads for their "Imperial" brand featuring manly men, doing manly things. In the mold of Hemingway, drinking, carousing, and wrestling bison/kingfish/legionnaires in a bare knuckles fight to the death are activities that go hand and hand in the Eisenhower era. So why not think about how "manly" a belt of this premium blended whiskey would make you feel through these fifties' visual aids? I get whiskey thirsty just thinking about the African savannah....

Before you get too invested in the whimsical Wes Anderson-y color palette and kitsch quality of the illustrations herein, let me first tell you that every one of these ad-men are REAL people. How would you like to be a big game hunter and have your "agent" (do they have agents?) call you up with an offer for a year's worth of whiskey (and in hi-ball days, we're talkin a LOT of whiskey) for a single promotional appearance in Life magazine? I'd say yes in a Kwazulu heartbeat. Russell Aitken (above) did, and he even got a little inset of his tête à tête with a Cape buffalo in the wilds of Africa. Besides being an artist whose "Surrealist sculpture.... is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art", his New York Times obituary also reveals that he was the #1 skeet shooter in the country in 1949, "shot socially with...[The Women playwright] Clare Booth Luce", and is credited with having shot and killed the largest water buffalo on record (jeepers!). LOOK AT ALL THE THINGS I JUST LEARNED BECAUSE OF THIS WHISKEY AD. Also, nice hat, mister. But let's not stop there... 

                

This innocuous looking beard-o is Sacha Siemel. The disembodied jaguar head snarling over his left shoulder in the shadow of a spear is to represent the more than 300 jaguars he apparently stalked and killed during the course of his career as a big game hunter. In 1914, having emigrated to South America from Latvia, he was taught by a native Brazilian how to become a "Tigero", or a hunter who hunts jaguars with only a spear. You can read all about his primitive yet effective bow-and-arrow-and-or-seven-foot-long-spear technique, as well as his subsequent film appearances with legendary big game hunter Frank Buck at this website.

I know you know who Louis L'amour is, and if not, he's the undisputed "king" of the Western paperback. Did you know he looked a little like a more handsome, black Irish Van Heflin? I didn't! I love that the text here lists his interests this way: "His hobby? Writing. His business? Adventure." Can I put that on my next job application?

Mainly I included Chuck Meyer, big game fisherman (is that a term? What do you call "adventure fisherman"?), because of his AWESOME PATCH. "Mako Shark Spinning Light Tackle Record" refers to the incident you can in the inset, in which he landed a 261 lb Mako Shark using a 12 pound test line. I'm not sure what that means, but I am sure that I want a patch like that, so I need to start reading up on fishing, I guess. Read an article he wrote for a 1956 issue of The Rotarian on landing a 100 lb Marlin here. Need more encouragement? How about this illustration from the aforementioned article?

Yeah, I thought so.

Last but not least, another fish guy with awesome patches is Alfred Glaskell, Jr. According to his NYT obit, "In 1953, he set the world record for the largest marlin ever caught on a hand-held rod and reel. At 1,560 pounds, this record remains today, and the worlds largest game fish resides on view at the Smithsonian Institution.":

If you think the fish looks big in the illustration, look at the actual picture of it with Glaskell. It's like a dinosaur! How can such a thing live in the twentieth century outside of my nightmares?

Anyway, hope you weren't too sicked out by all the game hunting and instead now have a hankering for high seas adventure and whiskey!

Seen any crazy vintage advertising lately? Read of any Hemingway-esque exploits of the midcentury? Do tell!

See you guys tomorrow.

Out of The Game (Rufus Wainwright, 2012)

Good morning!

What a weekend! We had people over for dinner on Friday, hit the flea market on Saturday and went to a Halloween party that night...Sunday I worked on my education paper (while, naturally, at work) and carved pumpkins at Matthew's ma's house. This morning, I left my house for work around 7:15, thinking, "How am I even perambulating at this point?" My head is still spinning a little from all the activity, which I'll have to report as soon as I have time to photo-document my finds and mine Bab's iPhone for candid snaps I've already forgotten we'd taken.... in the meantime, let me tell you that the one constant throughout all the hub-bub this weekend was this:

Rufus Wainwright's Out of the Game is his seventh studio album since his self-titled debut in 1998, but I hadn't remembered much of his output since 2002's Poses, including the anthemic-to-my-college-years "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk". There was a whole-kit-and-caboodle cover of Judy Garland's 1961 live album Judy at Carnegie, an album dedicated to the Lulu character of Wedekind and Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box, and a double-album-released-as-two-albums called Want One and Want Two...which all sound GREAT in theory, but ended up a lot of interesting ideas more than things you wanted to listen to in your car. The Judy thing actually irked me so badly I'd mostly given up on RW, stamping my feet in my well known "how dare he!" tradition of what I do when musicians take liberties with pre-existing properties I love (I can get in a froth over practically nothing, but the Judy album really was pretty terrible).  Still, look at this face and superior, dandy-ish clothing choice...I couldn't stay mad for long:

I was reading an article somewhere last week that mentioned Mark Ronson as a producer on this album, famous for helming production on records for Adele and Amy Winehouse, and I went..."All right, let's give it ONE more go". Wasn't I shocked to find myself completely crazy over the record? I mean, you're talking to a girl who never, never likes new releases, always finds out something was great way after the parade has ended...this album came out this year and I'm telling you, it is this GOOD. Strangely sensitive and hummable at the same time, there's just not a bad song on it (except maybe "Rashida", but only because of the cloying subject matter). Particularly stand out tracks on first listen were:

•  "I'm Out of the Game"
• Because of Lyrics Like: "Just hanging around/Wearin' somethin' for God knows where..."
• And Unexpected Touches Like: The verses change really quickly from one tempo to the next with an infectious "Look at you, look at you, look at you, look at you, suckers! Does your mama know what you're doin'?" right smack in the first thirty seconds of the song, and the man's voice just soars. I HAVE BEEN SINGING THIS ALL WEEKEND.
• "Montauk"
• Because of Lyrics Like: "One day you will come to Montauk/And see your dad wearing a kimono/And see your other dad pruning roses/Hope you wont turn around and go..."
• And Unexpected Touches Like: How very eerie and hopeful the repetitiveness of the song's melody and lyric structure is! And the last, turn-around verse about his mother, who passed away in 2010, "living in the sea". Ugh! I love this.

Best part? Unlike in 1998, when you would have ventured $15 bucks out at Media Play to give a new release a shot, the entire album is available streaming on Spotify. I plan on downloading it from iTunes eventually, but not before I've worn out my Spotify feed with listening to it over and over again at work.

Things you may/may not know about Rufus Wainwright:

His crazy-awesome famous-people lineage: His father is Loudon Wainwright III (a seventies' folk-ish singer songwriter who I'm personally obsessed with) and his mother is Kate McGarrigle of the McGarrigle sisters (who wrote Linda Ronstadt's hit "Heart Like a Wheel" and had several other Franco-Canadian influenced hits of their own). His grandfather was Loudon Wainwright Jr, a staff writer for Life magazine in the sixties'. His sisters, Martha Wainwright and Lucy Roche Wainwright, are also musicians. He started playing piano at age 6 and was performing with the family by age 13. 

All the crazy-awesome famous people he's friends with: Elton John called him "the greatest songwriter on the planet" (which I'm sure didn't win him any brownie points with Bernie Taupin)-- he has a child with Leonard Cohen's daughter, Lorca (named Viva Katherine, was there ever a better name than Viva Katherine Cohen Wainwright?). Guests at his August 2012 wedding to longtime companion Bjorn Weisbrodt (Viva's self described "deputy dad"), included Sean Lennon, Alan Cumming, and Julianne Moore. Sean Lennon looked like this (and his twenty-five year old girlfriend look liked that...dang, girl!):

Wherever these two are going, I want to go, too!

I have to get goin' on this dumb paper again...but I'm telling you, do yourself a favor and listen to this golddurn album. Everytime I think I've isolated the one or two songs I like the best on it, another one becomes my new favorite. It's just delicious.

Have you had any songs or album catch you by surprise lately? Any go-to music in the car that you can't get over? Share! I need to diversify after three days of solid Wainwright! :)

Have a great Monday, I'll see ya tomorrow!

Photo Friday: It Pays to Be Frugal, Florida Edition

 Good morning!

You may have noticed if you've been following Photo Friday with any regularity that Doris and Ray took a lo-o-o-o-ot of vacations with friends and family throughout the years. Today's find is another trip with Doris's sister Ruth and her husband Robert, this time down to Florida in 1968. And it wouldn't be a set of vacation snaps without a picture of the group packing the car!

Looking over these pictures reminds me that a) I don't document near enough of any special travels Bab and I have taken-- we're usually so busy running around and trying to see all we can see that I totally forget to photograph any of it! and b) the pictures I take need to be more editorial, like these! You've got a natural progression from "Oh, RUTH, REALLY, we can't take ALL these suitcases!" to the ladies of the party getting into the car with their massive thermos-es (plural? how?). See Ruth's natty little pink suit and her extra long cigarette.

That picture takes us to one more of Doris and Ruth getting into the car, and Bob enjoying the fruit of their labors as he sips Thermos coffee from the cap of one of those. Something about Bob's head, sunglasses, and expression, always makes him look like early Eastwood to me.

The group crosses the Florida state line! The red older model sedan has pulled over to take a picture, but not our group! I think dashboard pictures from this era are so exciting. Notice the lack of those over-the-whole-highway-signs! When did we start having those?

 Some worse-for-wear looking ducks and a great, modular hotel. Don't sixties' buildings like this look like something Soviet Russia would put on the moon? I love how distinct and "apart" buildings with balconies like this look from the rest of the landscape. And each room its own private balcony!

Two interesting things about the next two pictures: one, Doris and Ray have bought matching kimono-esque robes, and are super excited about them; two, look at the little makeshift buffet the sisters have set up in their hotel room! Was there no cha-cha-y hotel bar and restaurant at this place? Between that and the thermoses, Doris and Ray and Co. are going very thrifty with this vacation. It looks like they're having cold cuts and pretty good time on the right there. Check out the crazy wall light fixture and mark me down for two, thanks.

I told you they were crazy about their robes! Doris goes all Revlon model in this one:

Return of the striped one-piece Doris favored for most of the sixties'...how cute is her sister Ruth's bandeau bikini top? I like how Bob's like "Nah, I'll be keeping my shirt on, I think." Notice in the far background of the picture on the left, you can see the indoor pool on the beach-front hotel. I like to have choice! You can either brave the saltwater and whatever lives in it for real ocean swimming, or enjoy chlorinated freshwater in a heated, indoor setting. Either way though, you're going to have sand.

There must be another fifty of these little envelopes, all from about 1967- 1980, each with between fifteen and twenty little snaps in a packet of a particular trip. I'll keep going through them and let you know what I find!

Any big plans for the weekend? I just remembered the Flea Market is today, Saturday, and Sunday. I guess that means I know what I'm doing tomorrow morning, now!

Have a great weekend, I'll see you guys on Monday!

Popular Mechanics Does Halloween (Vintage Costume and Party Ideas, 1927-1934)

Good morning!

If you're a mechanically minded young Halloween enthusiast, let me tell you, for the research I did in Google Books today, Popular Mechanics of the twenties and thirties' has GOT YOU COVERED. Can you imagine all these little ragamuffin kids running around their neighborhood alleys, picking up scrap wood and other materials to build their FREAKING AWESOME ROBOTIC COSTUME for Halloween? This might actually top the Halloween parade stuff I mentioned on Tuesday...it's just out of control:

To quote the text: "Making a robot requires a lot of work, but it is worth the effort to create a real sensation at a party, and assuredly, this mechanical man will be the talk of the community." AMEN! I've seen basic cardboard robot people wandering around parties, and been greatly impressed-- think about how much greater of an impression an incredibly detailed and articulated robot would have made! I love his little knee flaps. How could you even suggest going as a sack of potatoes (see the circular inset) or a "tent" (I have no idea why someone would want to go as a tent for Halloween, but there you are) when you'd have to walk in the company of a robot, complete with debonair cigarette holder in mouth? So Ronald Colman. So.

These two are from the same article, and I think they're pretty great! The Roman costume pretty much just requires a little handiwork and great legs...ditto to the clock costume.

These two I was less impressed with....while colored flashlight bulbs hidden in your glasses would look kind of neat, wouldn't they also reflect back into your eyes? The baby costume, comprised primarily of painted cheesecloth stretched across your face, seems way too much like a robbery get-up or a nightmare to be appealing. Onward!

Once you've got your costume figured out, you're going to want to think about what you want to do for entertainment at your Halloween festivities.Look at the little illustrations from this article on different "tricks" you can play on your guests. Also, look at the ghoul in the ghost fortunes panel! What is going on?! He is TOO scary. That same trick requires you to use a "dilute solution of sulphuric acid" which sounds like nothing so much as a bad idea, but you use that to write the fortunes out (they're invisible) and then heat from a jerry rigged curling iron (now known as a "witches' wand") makes the fortune appear at the right moment. It may sound like an episode of Maury entitled "Pranks Gone Horribly Wrong" waiting to happen, but you need to man up! This is the thirties! Child safety doesn't exist yet!

 I put this in here just because I love how innocuous the glove monkey looks when he's supposed to be an object of fear and terror. He's just a little hand puppet! I do like the idea of using luminous paint to one's great advantage, however...there's got to be a use for that this year that I'm not thinking of yet....

Last but not least, a box you put on your party guests' heads that distorts their vision and makes them fumble around the house looking for their way (I usually just use vodka towards this purpose, but you get the idea), and a TRULY WEIRD Halloween costume made of piano wire and pearls and black magic itself:

Have you figured out your costume yet? I did a "dry run" of mine the other day to make sure I really had it together as much as I thought I did...it ought to be good, I think! Have you gone to any elaborate measures before to pull off a truly stunning Halloween costume or trick? Share!

Hope you're still enjoying the holiday focus I've put into this week...tomorrow's Photo Friday! I wonder if I can find any vintage Doris and Ray trick or treat snaps before then. We'll have to see. 

Have a great Thursday and I'll see you tomorrow!

Dennison's Bogie Book (Vintage Halloween Decorations, 1920)

Good morning!

Continuing on the theme of "Halloweens Past", have I got a treat for you guys today! You might be sick of the color orange by the time we're through with today's post, but if you like doohickey little decorations as much as I do, gird yourself against the pumpkin color palette because these are THE. CUTEST. THINGS.

Behold!

1920's Dennison's Bogie Book includes decorations for fall festivals and Thanksgiving, but believe me when I say that they pale in comparison with the crazy, crazy Halloween trimmings offered up for design and purchase in this booklet. Dennison paper goods are still in business under the umbrella of Avery-Dennison, but in 1920 as a separate entity, they were showing you how to do some SERIOUS Halloweening! The copy in the front of the book assures us that "all of the decorations shown are easy to copy and in almost every case stock goods are used". Meaning, in the year of our Lord 2012, you, too, can create these cutie crafts of yesteryear with just your own bold ambition and some simple craft supplies. You might need to make copies of some of the "seals" here (like the cat's face, the pumpkins, etc), but once you do, you can make most of these things from paper goods around the house.

First, make sure you take notice of the horrible leaf man tally card figure in the above illustration; then, let's look at some even neater stuff:

See the stompin' pumpkin man of figure 2! How about the wholly terrifying cat-favor of figure 5? In the case of #5, I vaguely remember from elementary school classroom parties these kind of party favors, where the body was kind of like a cardboard tube and inside was candy, but how special is the presentation of said candy in the favor? I say skip the photo montage at my wedding- if you could put an equal amount of time hand crafting little animals with candy inside, I would be a much happier gal. Keep stompin, pumpkin man! Keep stompin!

The girl in the inset at right has a great crepe paper crown of witches and black cats, but what I'm really loving is the bat with the fringe on her apron. It's so crazy how costumes in the twenties' were way more about doing something Halloween themed (say a dress with pumpkins and bats and witches as decoration), than "being" something (like a pumpkin, a bat, or a witch). I'm also interested in non-ironic "theme" costumes people used to wear around the same era...where a girl would dress as "liberty" or "freedom" in a red white a blue gown with a torch and all.

Figures 4 and 5 are my favorite in this assemblage. Four is "a favor for a man" made of principally crepe paper, wire, a pumpkin picture, and a pack of cigarettes (which you could also substitute for candy...think about a time in which cigarettes were so cheap that you could give away packs of them as party favors!). #5 is a "devil serving cup". I think I want to try attaching little pictures or whatever to cups at a party...think about how much more likely people would be to keep up with their drinks if their particular glass was the one with Paul McCartney or Tony Danza on it! And then you could work it into a party game somehow or maybe as a lottery ("Whoever has Tony Danza has just won this mix cd!"). Food for thought.

#5 in this one looks vaguely lascivious. I'm sayin'.

The book also has decoration ideas for whole rooms and for different kinds of events (school party, home party, civic organization party, church party, etc). How cute is that girl's dress?

LOOK. AT. THE. PUMPKIN. MEN. I am so in love I could die.

What are your Halloween plans this year? Have you put out any kooky decorations? Do you have any vintage Halloween goods lurking around the house? Tell!

Hope you aren't O.D.'d on Halloween colors...I'll see you in a less monochromatic tone tomorrow!

PS: SEE THE WHOLE BOGLE BOOK ONLINE HERE. You know you want to!

Halloween on Parade (1950-1955)

Good morning!

As I was looking for Halloween stuff to share with you today (it's coming, it's coming, it's coming!), I was surprised by the tone a lot of the midcentury magazines I habitually read took towards little Halloweeners and their bent towards mischief. Every other article is like "HOW CAN WE STOP THE MAYHEM?!" Though I like to think of most high school hijinks of the fifties' as involving gum that turns your teeth black or a bucket of water that gets you when you unsuspectingly open a door, I remember my grandaddy (who would have been a young miscreant sometime in the early 30's) telling me about a time he and some of his neighborhood pals hog-greased the trolley car tracks from town so that the next to last stop, in Inglewood, didn't stop at the last stop, but kept careening down the line without pause, to the great delight of said miscreant and pals. So I guess, maybe, Halloween prankers of days gone by went hard or went home, truly taking the "trick" part of trick or treat to heart!

Here are some of the things I took note of in The Rotarian, Popular Mechanics, and Life from the Halloween seasons between 1950 and 1955:

1) Shop Window Soap Decorations:
In a 1951 issue of the Rotarian, the accompanying copy to these illustrations is "Halloween without Havoc". Apparently, the local middle and high school kids were all rounded up to soap-paint the windows on purpose, as part of a fundraising competition, rather than under cover of night and deep secrecy, as I guess they were used to doing on actual Halloween. This is a good example of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!". The pink guy in the first picture is also a good example of "my date to the Fall Festival, plus I love him in all his ghoulishness":

Some of these are also from Life, but I forgot to mark which was which (I am an ace reporter at reporting, I am). Here, local school teachers give the proto-StayPuft man (who for some reason lives in a cobweb) his due scores. I like the collegiate look of the teacher at right.

The good kids from the local Boys and Girls Club even clean up afterward! Again, this is major progress over previous years in which I'm sure Floyd the Barber lookalikes were outside angrily brandishing scrub brushes to remove soap graffiti of a much less inspired sort from their storefront windows. Bravo, Rotarians! What an idear!

2) Halloween Parades:

I think I was aware of the tradition of having parades at Halloween, but I don't think I've ever attended or participated in one. If it had been anything like these, I think I would have remembered! Below, three brontosauri with (two with "come hither" eyes and lipstick!!!!) precede a pair of dice and follow a couple of clowns on their procession march. How freakin cute are these dinos? Where I'm not partial to wearing a costume myself that obscures my face (so vain), I would love to see these guys out on the town, with the dice, especially!

The October 1954 Popular Mechanics spread on Halloween parades featured two, knock-your-socks-off floats built by junior mechanical engineers....this, ladies and gentlemen, is a rocket piloted by a robot that shoots popcorn balls out of its ray gun turrets. WOULD YOU BELIEVE!

The rocketeer, in close up:

Marking a close second, Hazel the Witch, with flapping arms and sidekick bats:

3) Halloween Costumes:

This little guy was in a Hawaiian Punch ad from the fifties', and I couldn't get over the combination of skeleton costume and Hawaiian accouterments. YES!

A schoolgirl in Life magazine shows us how to make an awesome, pinata-like head out of papier-mâché. My main concerns out of this are that people would spend all night treating you like you have a pinata for a head. However! How cool would it be to make one of these of the Jack in the Box head and just wear it with a suit? ANSWER: VERY COOL. Also, dig the little girl's hair and glasses...so perfect.

Last but not least, lots of "what the heck are you?!" real life Halloween costumes from the fifties:

The one kid's mustache (left, above)!

Note to fifties' mom of the kid in front...putting your boy in your bra and panties and lipstick, to be worn in  public as a costume, is not thinking on your feet because you forgot to get him a dime store mask before they were all out-- I'm pretty sure it's a minor case of child abuse. I like the solemn look of "Well, this is happening" on his face. Father time (behind the wagon, white wig) is a pretty good idea.

Look at the tiny devil in front! Why are little little children always the scariest in masks?!

Well, hope you got a kick out of some of the midcentury madness. Have you decided on your costume yet? Any memories of parades/ soaped windows/ horrible last minute homemade costumes you'd like to share? Spill!

That's all for today...see you guys tomorrow!