Man's best friend: his psychedelic cat

Cat beats waif.

So I told you about how I accidentally gave this collectible Igor Pantuhoff waif painting to my younger daughter, who glommed on to it when she was around three years old. In the three years that have elapsed since she insisted it be hung on her wall, I've noticed that there's a decent market for these slightly sullen ’60s chicks and I've been plotting to get it back. But what could possibly be captivating enough to make her give up "wedding girl," as she's apparently been named, because she "looks like a pretty flower girl at a wedding"?

Waif for sale...

It turns out cats trump waifs; kittens defeat sex kittens. (In a perfect world they do, anyway.) I bought this trippy Cheshire cat–style needlepoint at the same sale where I scored the great Babe Rainbow, unsure if I would keep it or sell it. When I'm not sure about something, I tend to foolishly leave it on the dining room table where my magpie can find it and commence nagging me. It's no surprise she would covet this "Man's Best Friend" picture; she's already got a nice collection of vintage needlepoints going on and she's a cat person to the core. She's still not over the death of our sainted kitty Ace, who died well over a year ago. (And truth be told, neither am I—I still regard most cats as Not Ace, which isn't a healthy place to begin an adoption process. Just ask my dog Cupcake, a.k.a. Not Lola.) The kid recently penned an(other) autobiography, which started out the usual way (name, age, hair and eye color) but then immediately segued into "I have two dogs, two birds, five fish and one dead cat." Aww jeez, right?

Well, the pet head count remains unchanged but at least she's got that awesome psychedelic cat on her wall now, hanging where Igor's waif used to be. She did drive a hard bargain though: To sweeten the deal, I had to throw in another vintage needlepoint depicting the Tree of Life. Meanwhile, the "wedding girl" is back languishing in my closet (not on the dining room table!), awaiting her fate.

Oink.

I got this vintage Piggly Wiggly sewing kit in one of those Ziploc grab bags that tend to cover the bathroom counters at your more sanitary, more organized estate sales (at the other kind of estate sale—one of which I plan to hit up today—you definitely want to avoid the bathroom). I love the idea of marketing your brand via tiny sewing kits; I don't think that's a strategy many businesses employ these days. I'm afraid advertising sewing kits qualify as yet another type of ephemera that's disappearing from our digitized lives. Sniff.

I didn't think the Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain actually still existed, but turns out it does. Piggly Wiggly, which opened in Memphis in 1916, claims to be the first ever self-service grocery store. I don't really get why that's so great—I would love to just hand my shopping list over to a clerk and let him collect everything and pack it up for me while I thumb through Instagram and Facebook and whatever e-book I'm reading on my iPhone. Am I crazy? Better still, I wish I could order my groceries online and have them delivered to my house like I did in NYC (ah, FreshDirect, how I miss you!). I don't know if this makes me a typical hausfrau or not, but I don't like going to the supermarket. It is the biggest bore. I don't linger, I don't sample, I don't chitchat—I fly through the aisles, sticking to my list like glue, ignoring all specials and coupon offers designed to make me buy crap I never needed in the first place. In the old-style grocery store, I wouldn't have to deal with any of that aggravation—so thanks a lot, Piggly Wiggly!

But the one thing I will say in Piggly-Wiggly's favor—apart from the fact that the logo is undeniably cute—is that it would be fun to say "I'm going to the Piggly-Wiggly" instead of just "I'm going to the store," or as we say here in San Antonio, "I'm going to HEB" because basically all the other supermarket chains were run out of town.

On that note, I'm off to the store for the Friday provisions—steak, ice cream, frozen pizza and a six-pack of wine. Happy weekend!

Is there an appliqué for that?

I know you all know this already but I am not very crafty. Nevertheless I'm powerless—powerless I tell you!—whenever I'm confronted with a couple of adorable appliqués like these. Especially vintage Japanese ones, a whole category of appliqué that I wasn't even aware existed. (Is appliqué even the right term for these items?) Luckily, they only cost a quarter.

Anyway, on that note, happy weekend! Lots of excellent books, including the promised vintage kid books, over at the etsy shoppe, and more to come if I get my act together.

The most beautiful ashtray ever

Did everybody catch the piece in yesterday's Daily Mail about the legendary Oregon Wonder Horses, a.k.a. the Real-Life My Little Ponies? Really, you didn't? Well, check it out here. These were 19th-century horses, probably Analusians, that were exhibited in circuses and side shows and horse shows. They had really long manes, like ten feet long, and they are just totally awesome fantasy horses. They're like Pegasus meets My Little Pony meets The Last Unicorn meets those carousel horses in Mary Poppins that come to life. After the most famous of the Wonder Horses, Prince Imperial, died in 1888, his owners had him stuffed and continued to display him at various venues where taxidermied Wonder Horses might draw a crowd. According to the article, he's still on display at some historical society in Ohio. Don't you love learning these random bits of American history from a British newspaper?

Anyway, reading about the Wonder Horses reminded me that I haven't shared this fabulous find: the Most Beautiful Ashtray in the World (in my opinion, you don't have to agree), designed by the great Sasha Brastoff. Close readers of this blog will recall my newfound obsession with the midcentury potter/sculptor/Carmen Miranda impersonator; I wrote about it here. I've been keeping my eye out at the estate sales ever since, resisting the siren song of ebay, where I could easily find the goods to turn my house into a Sasha Brastoff Ashtray Museum. But I won't, cuz as you know, it's all about the hunting and the finding and the keeping. The challenge to owning the most beautiful ashtray in the world in a nonsmoking household is trying to keep it free of loose change, collar stays, paper clips and small stones collected by small children. This is not a receptacle, people! It is a work of art. Behold.

Object lesson: the disappointing parakeet-training record

Let this be a lesson to all estate salers and thrifers: When buying a record, always look inside the sleeve to determine (a) if the record is there; (b) if it's in decent condition; and (c) if it actually matches the sleeve. I was obviously so excited when I found this Hartz Mountain Parakeet Training Record that I thrust my $2 at the salesperson without performing any of the usual checks. Which is why I'm now listening to a scratchy rendition of Mel Blanc doing "Woody Woodpecker and the Truth Tonic" instead of hearing a flock of precocious parakeets chattering amongst themselves.

ARGH!

I suppose it was worth buying just for this frame-worthy cover. I love the tagline on the top of the record sleeve: "Let your parakeet teach himself to talk!" Like, why should you have to teach the bum? Put down the cuttle bone for two seconds, you lazy bastard, and wrap your beak around a few rudimentary vocabulary words!

Rosetta Stone for Budgies—what a fine idea. If only I'd had a copy when I got my childhood pet parakeet Sinbad. Perhaps he wouldn't have remained a mute. Well, I digress. I've told the sad story of my dumbstruck bird here. I'm probably better off with my zebra finches, Flute and Midge—a pair of misanthropes who have zero desire to chat with you or even look at your face. Wonder if they would enjoy listening to Mel Blanc do Woody Woodpecker...

More things I didn't buy: George Bush edition

I didn't buy this cute owl needlepoint because it came too close on the heels of the Mother of All Owl Sales, where I didn't buy nearly as many owls as I probably should have. I'm owled out. No, I don't mean that. I love owls!

I didn't buy this fine example of amateur art: Portrait of the Young Rodent in his habitat. Is it a neutra? A groundhog? A prairie dog? Whatever he is, he's really swell. Why didn't I buy him?

I did not buy this George and Laura Bush calendar cuz, duh, it's from 2007!

Owl be seeing you

I mentioned that I went to an off-the-hook estate sale a couple weeks ago—a total shrine to one woman's owl obsession. I'm disappointed that I didn't take more pictures; I was a little overwhelmed. For starters, I had the whole fam with me. They are very distracting. And when we arrived there was a crime unit truck parked out front and police tape across the door—it seems the home had been robbed the night before. That also threw me off my game. What owl treasure did the burglars make off with? The only thing I know they took was a special kind of collapsible wastebasket that the estate sale staff had brought with them. They were very broken up about it. Apparently, these collapsible wastebaskets are very handy.

So, right. This place: stuffed with owls, including stuffed owls, one of which my five-year-old made me buy for her, despite my rule against buying used stuffed animals. Most of my estate-sale rules crumble if that buys me a little more time to buy stuff.

The place was small, and sad, and stuck in time. This is what the wallpaper looked like:

I bought a bunch of craft materials and vintage books and ephemera that had nothing to do with owls. The only owl paraphernalia I purchased, apart from the aforementioned stuffed owl, was a very excellent owl planter. Somehow, I was not tempted by the walls decked with owl decoupaged plaques, nor by the owl-covered tables crammed into every room.

I also did not consider this deeply dusty and ancient owl pinata even for a minute. I'm pretty sure this guy is the Wise potato chip owl, right?

But I did buy a sack full of these little feathered owls, the kind with wires affixed to their feet so you can place them on wreaths or odd pieces of driftwood for owl-centric centerpieces. That could happen. As of now they're still in the bag.

I'm off to the hurricane-lashed homeland tomorrow, for a week of holiday carousing and possibly thrifting capped by the kids' first time seeing the Rockettes. Should be awesome. Dispatches may be sporadic, or nonexistent, but you can always find me on instagram and now etsy.

Field Trip: The World's Largest Dog Museum

Lately we've been finding ourselves on the road from San Antonio to Dallas. This is not an exciting four-hour trip by anyone's definition. The best way to describe it would be...flat. If there are scenic routes and cultural detours along the way, we aren't familiar with them, nor have we wanted to take the extra time to seek them out. We're in a hurry to get from Point A to Point B and back again, which has thus far meant a stop at the Flying J or some other mega-truck stop (the kind with showers and laundromats) and then another stop at one of those bare-bones truck stops (the kind that's just a cluster of picnic tables, vending machines and bathrooms alongside the freeway). I'm a big fan of roadside attractions, weird museums, funny stores, flea markets, old-school diners so it pains me to be making this road trip—with our kids—and not trying to get something out of it. So this past weekend we resolved to do better than stopping at an HEB in Waco and calling it a day.

Early on Sunday morning, despite suffering the effects of drinking way too goddang much Champagne and letting the kids stay up till midnight just cuz it was daylight savings so how bad could it be, we resolved to hit a few points of interest that we'd noted along I-35. First stop was going to be a shimmering silver monolithic dome called the Starship Pegasus in Italy, TX, but it was closed (it's for sale, though, if you're interested). Next stop was The World's Largest Dog Museum. Hey, we like dogs. And this one was affiliated with an antiques mall, the excellently named Antiquibles. Turned out the museum occupied the back corner of this massive warehouse.

I get pretty excited when confronted with something that reminds me of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I knew my kids weren't going to give me more than ten minutes of browse time before they started clamoring to leave. And that would be after they cashed in on their bribes (you can get anything you want for $2 or less! Now leave Mommy alone!).

I was pleased to see the Green Party had made in-roads in these parts; this is definitely not the sort of sentiment you expect to encounter out in the open just north of Waco...

I was also pleased to encounter a new (to me) genre of literature...

But, really, I should know by now not to get excited about antique malls in Texas, even if they are massive and have a great name and a dog museum housed in the back. I hardly ever find anything I want. The inventory tends to be all overpriced Western collectibles and Texana (stuff I used to purchase ironically when I lived in NYC) and oak furniture and prints and dolls. Blah. I bought two vintage children's books and a totally gratuitous stuffed bear for the 5-year-old ($1.95—she cashed in on the bribe while the older one didn't want to look, she just wanted to LEAVE).

I hit the Dog Museum on my way out; the rest of the family had thoroughly explored the exhibit during those fleeting moments I was shopping. I think the term museum is used loosely here; it is most definitely a massive collection (over 7,000 they say, and I believe them) of dog tchotchkes of every stripe. Some showcases were loosely organized by breed (poodles and greyhounds were very well represented); others were devoted to canine pop cultural icons (Nipper, Pluto, Lassie et al.). I don't think anyone is spending a lot of time with a feather duster in there. Apparently the owners started the collection back in the late ’60s and it just blossomed, the way collections do, into something much bigger than that. As their sign proudly proclaims, the museum was the subject of a segment on An American Moment, a short-lived late-90s TV series hosted by Charles Karault and James Earl Jones. Would that all of our collections could achieve that kind of recognition! I'm thinking particularly of an estate sale I went to a couple of weeks ago, at the home of a woman who obsessively collected and crafted owls. Her grim little tract house was certainly The World's Largest Owl Museum, or at least the largest one I've ever seen. Will post the pics soon.

Benji forever

Back in the day, I was first in line when a new Benji movie came to our neighborhood cinema. I was probably the scrappy little mutt's biggest fan. That Benji was so funny! Remember the scene in the first movie when he gobbles up the crook's SnackPack? And the bad guy is like, what...? Butterscotch SnackPacks were my favorite. Mmmm. SnackPacks.

(Okay. I just googled SnackPacks to see if they're still available. They are still available, but apparently they're "nutritious" now and no longer served in a catfood-type can so they're not the SnackPacks of Proustian memory and therefore not worth revisiting.)

Anyway, when I spied a 5-DVD set of Benji movies in the $5 bin at Target, naturally I snapped it up. My kids love dogs, ergo, they will love Benji. So much better than that total bummer Marley & Me, which I so would not let my kids watch. Or the one with Richard Gere where the dog meets him at the train station every day till one day he...doesn't. And don't even talk to me about Old Yeller, a movie for masochists if ever there was one. Benji never dies!

But silly me did not consider the fact that Benji was made in the ’70s, a grittier time, for sure. Benji isn't exactly Serpico but there is a kidnapping plot and random acts of violence, like when Benji's girlfriend, a Maltese named Tiffany, gets kicked into unconsciousness by the criminals whose shenanigans are the motor of this plot. My kids haven't cried so much since The Beast was pursued by a pitchfork-wielding mob. Now Benji collects dust in the DVD closet, right next to Beauty and the Beast. I doubt we'll ever get to For the Love of Benji, probably my personal favorite, or that we'll read this 1975 paperback novelization. (Fun fact: these are the same kids who are mad at me because I won't let them watch or read The Hunger Games.)

If you're a Benji fan, check out this video. It's a trailer that features on-the-street interviews with "real" people who've ostensibly just seen the film. Too funny.

Finnish Fridays: And this little piggy went weeweewee

I've never associated pigs with Finland—except in the form of sauna sausage (mmm...sauna sausage)—so I'm not sure how we're ending up with a porcine theme here on Finnish Fridays, but let's go with it.

This little piggy was some sort of giveaway from the bank Postipannki, and it's so wee it couldn't hold more than a dollar or so in pennies—not sure what its capacity would've been for Finn markka, or Euro for that matter. You can't open this bank because apparently only the bank staff had the key. I guess this was fun for kids? Seems like you'd be making a lot of trips to the bank. Anyway, according to wikepdia, Postipannki closed/merged in 1997 so this pig serves no purpose, except as a repository for money you don't plan to use. But it is pleasant to look at, don't you agree?

Finnish Fridays: Some bunny loves you!

When people learn that I'm 51% Finnish, they often ask if I speak the language. It's a crazy question. Who speaks Finnish, apart from the five million or so multilingual Finns? Finnish is one of the hardest, most obscure languages you can learn; it's in the Fenno-Ugric group and thus counts Estonian, Hungarian and a handful of minor languages spoken in Russia as its nearest cousins. Don't think, however, that the idea of learning Finnish never crossed my mind; I attended one of the few (I'm assuming) universities that offer Finnish and I'm sure I dog-eared that page in the course catalog. But, you know, it was just a whole bunch of credits and a whole bunch of work and most inconveniently held what seemed like all day on FRIDAY, when I purposely confined my classes to Monday through Thursday, so to my everlasting shame as a 51% Finn, I stuck with Latin, a language spoken by even fewer people.

But! I know a couple of important words. Kiitos is thank you. Hei is Hi. Spider is hamahakki (mentally put umlauts over all those a's because I don't know how). And bunny, as in this adorable fellow that I bought at a flea market in Helsinki: pupujussi.

Finnish Fridays: Dog cards

So this is one of the items I had with which to entertain myself on the flight from Helsinki to JFK (with a significant stopover in Amsterdam). It was 1976, I was 7 years old, and the DC-10 felt like the QE2 compared to the DC-8 we'd flown over on. I did not know, and still do not know, what this card game was all about; I just liked dogs (still do) and made up my own games. That is, when I wasn't watching the in-flight movie (Paper Moon, starring Ryan and Tatum O'Neal) or reading my new Asterix comic books or my brother's Tintins. If memory serves, the journey was 14 hours long and I was terribly well-behaved. There was no air rage. The stewardesses—they were still called stewardesses then—kept the vodka flowing.

Ah, what a difference 36 years makes. Right now, I'm packing for a three-hour 6am flight to Minneapolis, which will be followed by a five-hour drive to the deepest, darkest, albino-deer-fullest woods and muskiest lakes of Wisconsin. Lindsay is busily downloading new kid-friendly apps to his iPad (a.k.a. "Paddy") as well as movies (the Rex Harrison Dr. Doolittle). I've already packed a dozen DVDs to play on my laptop, and downloaded several audiobooks to my older daughter's iPod. The DS is charged. The kids have packed their matching, monogrammed Pottery Barn Kids wheelie backpacks with books, sketchpads, coloring books, pastels, watercolors, markers, snacks, water bottles, stuffies and cuddle-cuddle-up-its-blankets-that-are-puppets.

Do kids really need all this stuff to endure a domestic flight? Probably not, though flying really does suck incredibly compared to the ’70s. I'm not going to wring my hands over it. With Kindle, iphone, pack of gum and bag of almonds, I'm flying about as light as I did 36 years ago, to the closest thing to Finland the US of A has. Funny, no?

I doubt I'll be blogging next week, though you might find me on instagram. I've sussed out at least one flea market in deepest, darkest Wisconsin. Fingers crossed.

What big eyes you have

I found this litho while crawling on my hands and knees through the supply closet of a deceased art teacher. I did not shell out a dollar for it because I'm a fan of the creepy-campy 1960s school of saucer-eyed sad art, popularized by Margaret Keane, and a bunch of mono-named artists like Igor and Gig. I bought it because this "Pity Puppy," named Potato Chip, greatly resembles my own Pity Puppy, named Cupcake. I mean, am I right? Cupcake may not have saucer eyes but that sad-sack demeanor is unmistakable.



I don't know anything about the artist Gig, to whom this puppy portrait is attributed. With the exception of Margaret and Walter Keane, who started the whole genre, these purveyors of mopey creatures—precursors to the Littlest Pet Shop critters, for sure—seem to be a shadowy lot. The story of the Keanes is pretty fascinating, though. Apparently when they were married back in the ’50s, Margaret allegedly did all of the painting while Walter got all the credit (he compared himself to Rembrandt and El Greco). After an acrimonious divorce, Margaret eventually sued him in the mid-’80s, challenging him to a paint-off in court. She produced a waif for the jury in less than an hour, while Walter claimed to have a shoulder injury. The jury awarded her some $4 million. And according to The Hollywood Reporter, Tim Burton is making "Big Eyes," a movie about the Keanes starting Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Reynolds. What—no Johnny Depp??

How now?

This is exactly the sort of thing I try to avoid when I go to sales—knickknacks, tchotchkes, bric-a-brac—pick your favorite synonym for dust-catching figurines that clutter all surfaces until you have to start branching out and covering your walls with special knickknack shelves and glass showcases. It's a slippery slope. But at one particularly great sale, when I was already laden down with books and board games and kitschy message centers because it was the kind of sale where they don't trust you to bring in your own shopping bag and you don't trust them to watch your pile in the "reserved" section, I kept circling back to this $1 cow.

I think she—oh god, I'm anthropomorphizing a knickknack!—reminds of Ferdinand, titular character of one of my favorite children's books of all time. But Ferdinand was a bull—a benign bull—and this is clearly a cow, but Ferdinand did have a mother, a very awesome mother, described in a classic backhandedly complimentary way by Munro Leaf: "His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was just a cow, she let him just sit there and be happy." Just a cow? Come on.