I hope it's not troubling anyone that lately this blog has been more bookish than thingish; that's just where my head's at during these waning, hideous days of summer. I know in other parts of the world early August is prime-time hazy crazy dazey what-memories-are-made-of, but here in San Antonio you just want to wither and die. So I like to stay hunkered in my cave as much as possible and sort books.
Architectural Digest Celebrity Homes is a great big honkin' coffee table book published in 1977. I'm not a huge fan of the magazine—too glossy, too remote—though I admit I haven't really read it since the renowned EIC Paige Rense "retired" a few years back. When Conde Nast shuttered two of my favorite shelter mags, Domino and House & Garden, they sent AD in its place and mostly it collected dust. This book, however, is different. I love it because it's a 1970s time capsule; the selection of celebrities is just the right mix of right on and WTF. Gayelord Hauser? Who he? Sybil Connolly? Huh? But then: Woody Allen, Pauline Trigere, Robert Redford, Joni Mitchell, Bob Newhart, Diana Vreeland, Sonny & Cher... The list goes on (and on—I also have the second volume, which I'll feature at some point).
For the most part, the interiors in this book are not my particular cup of tea—too much toile, too many French antiques, heavy fabrics, you know—rich people stuff (though Joan Crawford's pad was pretty cool). But imagining Woody holding court at his farm table or Truman Capote descending the spiral staircase into his Hamptons library? You gotta love it. I've got a copy for sale at the etsy shoppe, but you can be sure I wouldn't be selling it if I didn't already have one in my library.
I have not abandoned this blog as I have abandoned certain others; I've merely been sucked into the whirling eddy that is summer vacation. I'm not sure who planned out this summer, but whoever did certainly didn't give much careful consideration to my needs—for instance, my need to go to estate sales every Friday, to buy things to keep, to buy things to sell, to buy things for seemingly inexplicable reasons to be examined here, on this neglected blog. To research the value of things bought, to photograph them endlessly, to list them on etsy. Or to clean and then carefully arrange them in my teeny antiques mall stall, where they can be ignored by the kind of foot traffic that doesn't know from MCM to midcentury-atomic-eames-era-retro-danish mod-60s-70s-kitsch-whatever. Right now this summer is panning out to be just like the school year except that the kids aren't in school. I entertain them all day and then shuttle them to various one-hour-long extracurriculars, idle in parking lots and waiting rooms with other idling parents. What nonsense! Who's in charge here?
But today I can thank Carl Hiassen for deciding to write compelling novels for the young; right now, having played tennis, gone swimming and consumed tubs of Orange Leaf, my girls are working their way through his audiobooks, some of which are at least eight CDs long. Hurray! So I have been uploading a ton of photos for the blog as well as listing like a mofo at my etsy shoppe. Expect a flurry of postings and listings this week. As for the next two, I'm off to the homeland, where the flag flies forever half-mast for James Gandolfini, so it remains to be seen if I'll be able to keep it up (if nothing else my right thumb should be very busy instagramming).
In the meantime, today I have Mad Men on the mind, having actually watched the season finale last night with the rest of the devotees of Sunday-nite prestige programming (previously it was shunted to Monday viewing in favor of Game of Thrones... now True Blood has been relegated to Monday nites).
I found the episode quite satisfactory, and look forward to the final season (isn't it supposed to be final—it should be), mostly so I can continue to enjoy the great work the production and costume designers are doing, as that midcentury style evolves deeper into the ’70s. Do we think Banana Republic is going to embrace the Raggedy Ann polyester plaid pantsuit look and come out with another Mad Men line of chic office-friendly attire for youngish ladies? Har.
Coincidentally, I was seeing a lot of these Kodak slide Carousels on the estate-sale circuit these past few months. It's impossible to look at one without thinking of that tour-de-force Don Draper pitch scene that closed the first season, right?
Still, that's not quite enough to get me to buy one, as much as I love obsolete technology, just... no. I've got limits, though sometimes I forget what they are.
You know, there was a time when HBO was known as Home Box and it didn't feature lavishly expensive, highly addictive Sunday night soap operas for wine drinkers of a certain age, like me. Once upon a time, Home Box was an endearingly scrappy cable channel, primarily airing endless repeats of bad Goldie Hawn movies and Death Race 2000, with some quasi-original programming in between. I'm thinking Video Jukebox and Not Necessarily the News. The former was the 30-minute-long precursor to MTV; the latter was a TV-news parody comedy series loosely based on Britain's Not the 9 o'clock News, but funnier because it was about our news, and because it featured Rich Hall's "sniglets." Which my autocorrect keeps trying to spell as "singlets." If Rich Hall were still crafting sniglets, he'd probably come up with a good one for that.
I grabbed this book when I saw it at a recent estate sale though I must confess I've only flipped through it briefly (so hard to find just the right time to sit down and seriously peruse Sniglets!). But when I found this clip from Not Necessarily the News on YouTube, I'm not gonna lie—I was laffing out loud. It might be fair to say my humor has not evolved at all since the ’80s.
So this is the big score I was referring to last week. A big score that I didn't realize was a big score until I got over the initial sticker shock and consulted my trusty iPhone for some background on Ms. Babe Rainbow (seriously, how did people shop without their iPhones back in the day? I can't remember and I think it was only a few years ago...).
What I learned is that Babe Rainbow is a limited-edition screenprint on tin (there were 10,000), created in 1968 by Peter Blake, "the godfather of British pop art" best known for designing the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover. On the back is a museum-label-type potted history of the piece and Blake, who says Babe is one of a series of fictitious wrestlers he painted:
She is twety-three years old and has broken her nose in the ring. She was born in New Cross, London and wrestles mainly in Europe and the USA as there have only been a few contests between lady wrestlers in London. She is the daughter of the notorious Doktor K Tortur.
According to the description, Babe was commissioned by Dodo Designs and is the "first painting ever to be commissioned for reproduction as a picture on tin." Impressive stats that meant nothing to me in my previous existence, the one in which I was blissfully ignorant of Babe Rainbow and her potential value (like, how many of those 10,000 tin screenprints do we think have survived?). Suddenly acquainted with these facts, I had to decide: to go to the ATM or to let her go?
Normally I write checks to estate-sale companies for amounts ranging from $15 to $30. I don't get into the triple digits except when furniture is involved and I've pretty much stopped buying furniture as our house has come to resemble a kind of showroom for weird, mismatched chairs. Since it was the first day of the sale, I decided to return the next day when the prices dropped and see if she was still there—then I could hem and haw some more, but I would have the kids with me and they would seriously cut into my hem-haw time. This is a wait that's usually fraught with anxiety. What if someone buys her for full price? Because according to what I'm seeing online, they've seriously underpriced it. But then, who would buy this besides me? But then again, who was the person who owned it in the first place? This is just the kind of surprise I like to find behind the door of a faceless suburban tract home. But maybe it wasn't so surprising—maybe there are tons of houses in San Antonio occupied by Pop Art-collecting baby boomers and I'm just not going to the right houses!?
Normally, I would've gotten Lindsay to weigh in on a purchase like this, but he was in Mexico and apparently too busy to look at the photos I'd texted him till long after I left the sale. His (tardy) response was emphatic: BUY HER.
Not a huge surprise that he would be partial to the portrait of wrestler who looks like Suzy Quatro.
So, I went back the next morning, and there she still sat on a sofa, ignored by all shoppers. Should I have waited one more day for the price to drop by another 25%? The kids wouldn't let me: We want Babe! We want Babe Rainbow! they caterwauled, reminding me why I try never to shop with children: They are so irrational!
Just like their father. As soon as he saw Babe in person, he put the kibosh on my flipping her for a tidy profit. Not that I don't love her—though she lends a man-cave vibe to the place that doesn't seem entirely appropriate—it just seemed so reasonable for me to sell her. That's what a real picker would do! Oh well, at least I don't have to cough up a few more C-notes to frame her.
I know it's not right to bitch, but it does bum me out when an estate sale service does a good job executing its fiduciary responsibility to get the best price for its clients. Toikka birds are the work of Oiva Toikka, glass designer extraordinaire for the Finnish design company Iitalla, and they aren't free. They're also as scarce as peacocks in South Texas (actually my neighbor has peacocks so I don't know why I said that—as scarce as kiwi birds?), and I hardly ever find any Finnish design objects...
The original brochure!
...let alone Finnish design objects with the original paperwork! You might be thinking, doesn't she have enough Finnish design objects? But you know the answer to that. Anyway, I passed. Too rich for my blood, especially after I paid money I don't have on such a great score at the same sale! Which I'll share soon.
Bowie forever stamps
I didn't buy these limited-edition David Bowie Scary Monsters stamps, which apparently came from some obscure import 12-inch, because they were $20. That might have been a mistake. I don't know the market for David Bowie stamps; I just know I wasn't sure what I would do with them. Frame them? Bah.
An unnecessary object
If you're ever on the estate sale trail you know indoor barometers were once mighty popular items. Makes me wonder how we've been managing without them. Anyway, I usually see them in a nautical theme, not this supercute German Black Forest cuckoo style, but $20? I don't pay $20 for just anything.
This Animal House poster is super-rad and I have no idea why I didn't buy it. Even if it'd ended up hanging in the garage, it would've been a worthy investment at $15. Poo.
I did not buy any of these 8-tracks; in fact, I never buy 8-tracks. Much as I love me some obsolete technology, certain media-delivery systems are too clunky and cumbersome and ugly to be revived (don't get all cocky, VHS and CDs, cuz I'm looking at you, too).
Do you ever wonder what will happen to all your precious refrigerator magnets when you die? Assuming your kids don't want them—and I'm going to assume that—they will be organized into Zip-locs and offered for cheap at your estate sale. No one will buy them and they will end up in a landfill. Consider this next time you're tempted to buy a souvenir magnet at some truck stop on your next road trip (says the person who recently discovered a Zip-loc full of grimy refrigerator magnets from her refrigerator in Brooklyn, which she hasn't seen in eight years).
Despite his being totally on the money with the Hister/Hitler prediction, I did not buy this copy of The Prophecies of Nostradamus... Wait a minute, I totally did! The eyes of Nostradamus compelled me to do so!
Just taking a moment to appreciate Steve Keene, the New York artist who's been dashing off $5 paintings assembly-line-style since the early ’90s. I have several, most of them purchased at the WFMU Record Fair, but this Mary Poppins piece is my favorite, probably because it's a representation of one of my all-time fave movie musicals. The painting has been hanging over the fish tank in my elder daughter's room for years now, and the LP has been in heavy rotation on her Fisher-Price record player for just as long. She and I spent so much time listening to that record when I was pregnant with the younger daughter, that her name was inspired by certain lyrics. (No, she's not Mary or Bert, but a word that's used once as a noun and once as verb in two different songs. And no, it's not "Sister Suffragette," but I can't even tell you how much I enjoyed listening to my 3-year-old sing "We're clearly soldiers in petticoats / And dauntless crusaders for women's votes / Though we adore men individually / We agree that as a group they're rather stupid..." Oh, how I hope she goes to Barnard!)
Anyway. Steve Keene is still churning out his most excellent stuff; you can buy a grab bag lot of six for $30, which is something that I've been meaning to do for a while and I keep not doing it even though it would be a great (not to mention cheap) way to handle the Christmas list. So if any of you are on my list, that's what you're getting and don't steal my idea. If you're not, go to his website and get yourself some art.
I bought this lenticular Gallagher button/pin at that amazing little flea market I went to in Wisconsin last summer. Going to flea markets or thrift stores in a new-to-me part of the world is perhaps my most favoritest thing to do while traveling (that and horseback riding—that's the best way to get the feel for a strange landscape, especially if you get to experience it on the back of an odd multi-gaited breed of horse or pony). But since having kids, I don't travel to as many exciting places as I used to and as I've mentioned many times in this blog, their bitching about being forced to go to flea markets and thrift stores, even when they end up with the most scores, tends to dampen one's enthusiasm.
So I wasn't really prepared to do any serious shopping when I went to this Wisconsin flea market, which turned out to be so great and so cheap that had it been in San Antonio, I would've stuffed my SUV to the rafters without having to make a second trip to the nearest ATM. But I was in Boulder Junction, not San Antonio, so I had to limit myself to what I could squeeze into my always-overpacked luggage, filling the outside-pockets of my carry-ons. Stuff like this lenticular Gallagher button. If for some reason you're not acquainted with the comedian's work, he's the one who basically smashed watermelons on stage with his patented "Sledge-o-matic." He may or may not have inspired Letterman's famous dropping-stuff-off-a-building bit. He may have, but Letterman was funnier.
Most people would've passed this souvenir on by, but I was lucky enough to view Gallagher's act firsthand at Caesar's Palace in Atlantic City when I was about 16 years old, so it had some of that sentimental appeal. Though I don't remember if I even thought his show was good. It was probably okay, but I'd seen so many legendary comics in that venue by that point—Bill Cosby, David Brenner, Joan Rivers, a young unknown Jim Carrey—that his gimmicky act probably suffered by comparison. Still, it fit in my luggage, so here it is—not quite a score, not quite a souvenir, but I had to buy something.
It doesn't seem likely that I've coined this term, but...furniture porn? Does it already exist? Your idea of furniture porn may be somewhat different, but this photo sums it up for me: a downy-cheeked 22-year-old Mick Jagger posing languidly, somewhat petulantly, in his basement flat in Bryanston Mews. Somewhere beyond the frame lies his girlfriend of that moment, the model Chrissie Shrimpton (petulant and languid, too, one likes to imagine), but within the frame? A a beautiful walnut George Nelson for Herman Miller shelving unit (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what it is—I don't consider myself an expert in the things I can't afford). Mick looks like a Herman Miller salesman/spokesmodel, and this could be the world's most awesome print ad. It would also be a fabulous poster, framed and hanging in my office. If there were a way to make that happen, I would.
My brother-in-law gave me this coffee table book, The Rolling Stones: In the Beginning (Firefly Books, 2006), a few Christmases ago, because he knows, like most people who know me know, that no matter my love for chick singer-songwriters, the Stones will always be my Desert Island band, and that they remain in heavy rotation on the soundtrack to my life, despite the fact that I've been listening to them since 1982 (when I first laid eyes on stringy weird rooster-struttin Mick in his cheesy workout togs in the "Start Me Up" video). They just never get old. Well, okay, they did get pretty goddamned old, but these Stones, in this book, circa spring 1965 to summer 1966, are eternal eye candy, a perfect dream forever. My apologies to the Danish photographer Bent Rej, who took these photos, for not doing his work justice, but I invite everyone to go buy the book on amazon; it is quite reasonably priced.
I have to warn you though—out of more than 300 pages, there are only a handful of photos that belong in the Special Rolling Stones issue of Furniture Porn magazine, which I will found and edit one day. There aren't any of Keith; not surprisingly, you find him onstage, outside or on the floor of a nondescript hotel room. But there are some excellent shots of homebodies Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts as well as a good one of the depressingly haggard Brian Jones. Here he is in his rented house at 14 Elm Park Mews in Chelsea. Apparently every stick of furniture in the place was rented but dig that groovy hi-fi. That was Brian's.
Here's Bill Wyman and son in his London flat (at 8 Kenilworth Court for those who are mapping a future walking tour). Love the sofa. Love the low scale of all the furniture—and the picture of the TV where the TV is supposed to be? Or is that a radio? Not sure.
Charlie was the real surprise. I didn't realize he is half Danish, which would explain his good design sense. These photos of his flat at Ivor Court in Gloucester Place could have come straight from a Terence Conran book. Yum.
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.
I had the pleasure of accidentally stumbling across Clueless on cable a few months ago, something that rarely happens since I almost never deviate from what's on my Tivo. I don't think I'd seen it since it came out back in 1995, but let me just say, it totally holds up. No Jane Austen update/adaptation holds a candle to it (I'm looking at you, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies). Alicia Silverstone? Simply brilliant. Stacey Dash? So gorgeous, why didn't she go anywhere after that? Come to think of it, that was the apex of Alicia's career as well. Brittany Murphy, sigh. R.I.P. Only Paul Rudd has gone on to fame and fortune, though more often as the disaffected friend than adorable love object, which he so totally was as the uptight Mr. Knightley-ish ex-stepbrother Josh.
I don't have so many laudatory things to say about this silly tie-in book, Cher's Guide to...Whatever by H.B. Gilmour ("based on the characters created by Amy Heckerling"). It's so awful I can't even bring myself to quote from it. But unlike the movie, which doesn't seem at all dated (well, maybe the Uptown Julie Brown cameo), the book is a time capsule full of quaint references to the ’90s, including:
The Watchman (as in the hand-held TV), MTV (that it was once relevant), CDs, Christian Slater, Marky Mark, Buns of Steel, Smashing Pumpkins, Coolio, Nine Inch Nails, The Bridges of Madison County, Arsenio Hall, Prozac, The Body Shop, The Nature Company...
Who knows? If the movie had come out when I was in high school as opposed to when I was 27, I might've dug the book too.
Once upon a time, I watched M*A*S*H three times a day; four times on Mondays. It aired at 3pm when I came home from school; it was on from 7 to 8pm after dinner, and on Monday nights a new episode aired on CBS at 8 or 9. It goes without saying that M*A*S*H was my favorite show, and a formative influence on my sense of humor, such as it is/isn't, right up there with various BBC comedy series (Fawlty Towers, Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin) and Howard Stern.
I know from Grape Nehis and stills, Toledo Mudhens and meatball surgery. I know that the M*A*S*H theme song was entitled "Suicide is Painless," because, along with "You Light Up My Life," it was the song I most enjoyed playing on my flute. I made a pilgrimage to see the M*A*S*H set at the Smithsonian. I went to see age-inappropriate movies like The Four Seasons and The Seduction of Joe Tynan just because I was such an Alan Alda fan.
I have definite M*A*S*H opinions, some of which don't jibe with the popular view. BJ over Trapper John. Henry Blake over Colonel Potter. Frank Burns WAY over Charles. Frank Burns was probably my favorite character; "Frank Burns eats worms" my favorite line in the whole series (it still slays me). I slightly preferred Klinger to Radar but could've easily done without both of them. Colonel Flagg was my favorite recurring guest character, but I also liked Dr. Sidney Freedman (and by high school his stock shot up when I discovered he was a photographer once married to Diane Arbus). I was glad that Hawkeye and Hot Lips never got together; I hated that episode when they kinda sorta did. Barf. I liked it when Hawkeye was with that nurse who went on to star in the Polaroid commercials with James Garner. I never saw the original M*A*S*H movie, and yes, I know it's Altman and it's so much better and darker, and I don't care. I hated the series finale, like most people, but maybe that's just because I didn't want it to be over, or because I was over it. I'm not sure which. It was 1983. I was 15, and already deep into Cheers, which had premiered the year prior. And like most TV series of that era (any era?), M*A*S*H didn't exactly get better with age.
I can't really watch M*A*S*H now, though I'll happily sit through back-to-back episodes of The Odd Couple, Hogan's Heroes or Mister Ed. Its earnestness can make me queasy; the laugh track hurts my brain. And I have a hard time refraining from reciting all the dialogue I've memorized, which can be annoying if I'm with someone and sad/weird if I'm watching alone.
Anyway, it stands to reason that I should kick sargent-major ass on these Golden Trivia M*A*S*H cards, which came out in 1984, the year after the series ended. I bought these at an estate sale earlier this summer, when I knew my brother and fellow M*A*S*H couch potato would be visiting. I wasn't as good as I'd expected to be, but over cocktails, we both managed to horrify our respective spouses with our M*A*S*H knowledge. I mean, seriously, who doesn't know Frank Burns's blood type?
There are so many great pictures in this Marie Cosindas: Color Photographs book; my choices are feeling a little random and as usual, my pitiful picture-taking ways do them no great justice. Still, you get the idea. I don't know a lot about this lady. I think she's still living. She's Greek-American, from the Boston area, went to art school and to fashion school in Boston. According to Tom Wolfe's introductory essay (he sat for her once), she walked out on her last fashion job, which involved designing children's slippers with animal faces to match hand puppets, and decided to devote herself to photography. She studied alongside Ansel Adams and Minor White. She worked in black and white because all fine art photographers did; photographers who worked in color were considered commercial or journalistic. Wolfe does a funny riff on the "fine artist's Reverence for the Outmoded":
Artists like to be regarded as visionaries, but I can't think of a group of people who resist change more fiercely and bitterly. Most of the artist's visionary acuity is over his shoulder. As the art historian Alan Gowans has demonstrated, artists did not regard the woodcut, the steel engraving, and the lithograph as "artistic" media until they had been rendered obsolete by the photogravure. The more self-consciously artistic movie directors clung to the black-and-white film for years because Technicolor had superseded it with mass audiences.
That's not how it turned out for color-mad Cosindas. In 1962, Polaroid approached about a dozen photographers, including Cosindas, with an offer: take a large quantity of their new color film, Polacolor, which was going on the market the following year, and just experiment with it. The only one who had any success was Cosindas. Her photographs are dark, lush, rich, painterly—like late Renaissance paintings. Her technique was exacting; her process incredibly time-consuming and apparently pretty tedious for the subject (unless the subject was a flower or pile of objects—will share her awesome still lifes tomorrow).
My copy of her book has an inscription on its inside flap to the original owner: "To Bob Saunders, From Polaroid." (Thinking Bob must've been a local camera store owner or something along those lines; doesn't look like he cracked the book but once.) Which brings me back to Wolfe and the Reverence for the Outmoded: Who loves Polaroids—and the Polaroid effects rendered so easily by the touch of finger to screen via Instagram, Hipstamatic, etc—more than my generation, the retro nostalgists who thrill to images that remind us of our 60s/70s childhoods? Track down this out-of-print book and be reminded of what separates the fine artists from the fine Instagrammers—and imagine a generation hence when the backward-looking fine artists might well be Instagrammers.
So I have my kids to thank for this adorable vinyl LP case, believe it or not. When I saw the $75 price tag, I didn't even want to haggle with the amateur estate saler who'd dreamed up that exorbitant figure. I never pay that much for anything except furniture, and how far down was she going to come if we were starting at $75? All the way to $25 it turned out, after the kids begged me to buy it, and it also turned out the case had been undervalued from the get-go because it contained a veritable time capsule of late ’70s/early ’80s kid music, almost all with nary a scratch or warp. If I were to sell off these records individually I would definitely recoup my investment and then some. But what kind of heel would break up such a fabulous collection, so lovingly curated by some kid who easily could've been me? Perish the thought.
Herewith, a complete list of the contents (I was too lazy to photograph them all):
Christmas in the Stars: The Star Wars Christmas Album (1980)
Richard Scarry's What do people do all day? read by Carol Channing
Pac-Man Christmas Album (1982)
The Dukes of Hazzard (1981)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and other Christmas Favorites (1974)
Sesame Disco! (1979)
Walt Disney's Peter Pan and Alice and Wonderland
Raggedy Ann & Andy: A musical adventure: The original motion picture soundtrack (1977)
Disney's Christmas Favorites
Chipmunk Rock (1982)
John Denver & The Muppets: A Christmas Together (1979)
Annie: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1982)
Cargo, Men at Work (1982)
Sesame Street: Help your child learn about numbers! (1977)
C is for Cookie (1974)
Sesame Street 1: Original Cast Record (1974)
Sesame Street 2: Original Cast Record (1977)
Walt Disney's Treasury of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes
Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, The Caroleer Singers and Orchestra
The Muppet Movie: Original Soundtrack Recording (1979)
Christmas Songs that tickle your funny bone, The Golden Orchestra and singers (1972)
The Chipmunk Song sung by The Grasshoppers
Rocky's Book of Sportsmanship
ET Speaks, official Fan Club record (1982)
Walt Disney's Story of Bambi
I think I'm losing my touch because somehow it took me a whole week to notice that the official trailer for the latest Tim Burton-Johnny Depp collaboration, Dark Shadows, had been released. What the hell? I didn't even know it was in production! In addition to being a fan of the Burton-Depp oeuvre (though I don't believe they will ever, ever top Ed Wood), I'm a bit of a vampire buff. I came to terms with that previously here. I love True Blood, though a little less with each passing season. Every May, I self-loathingly download the latest slapdash volume in the Sookie Stackouse series (hmm...is that available for pre-order yet?). I look forward to seeing the final grotesque installment in the Twilight movie series at one of those theaters where alcohol is served. And Bram Stoker's Dracula is definitely, probably, I think on my list of the top 20 books of all time (I've never actually made such a list so I'm not 100 percent sure how it would shake out).
But I've never seen Dark Shadows—the Goth soap is a little bit before my time though I'm sure I would've watched with my mom if I hadn't been, like, a baby. (Thanks to her, I was an Edge of Night addict all through middle and high school.) Dark Shadows aired five days a week for around five years, so, you know, it's not like playing catch-up with an entire season of Mad Men or Breaking Bad over a single weekend. I don't think I've consumed TV on that scale since watching the first few seasons of Six Feet Under while pacing the narrow confines of my Brooklyn living room, a squalling newborn in my Over-the-Shoulder-Baby-Holder. Anyway, the Dark Shadows DVDs are not surprisingly of poor quality, production values of 1960s soaps not being quite on HBO levels. I could start reading these Dark Shadows novelizations written by Marilyn Ross (pen name for a Canadian writer by the name of Dan Ross)—apparently there are only 32 of them! I scored a nice stack at the church thrift shop in my hometown (no, my mom did not donate them) but I think it's more likely I'll just wait for the movie. The trailer made me guffaw at least three times—that's gotta be a good sign.
For your Friday viewing pleasure, more eye candy from The Sixties: A Decade in Vogue, starting with Terence Stamp (Terence Donovan, 1967), above, circa Far From the Madding Crowd, one of my favorite beautiful/depressing Thomas Hardy adaptations. Happy weekend!
Mick, "whose strange individuality will keep him a star. To women, Jagger looks fascinating, to men, a scare." (David Bailey, 1964)
Why hello, Tom Stoppard... (Snowdon, 1967)
Peter O'Toole (Jerry Bauer, 1963)
Mary Quant and Alexander Plunket-Greene (Brian Duffy, 1962). Sorry this is more about the dress than the dude. I'll post more in the future; can't help myself.
How happy was I to score The Sixties: A Decade in Vogue (edited by Nicholas Drake) at an otherwise underwhelming library sale two weeks ago? As with the Scavullo book, it was pretty impossible to narrow down my choices to scan but it does seem bad form to scan the whole thing... I did my best, starting with cover girl Twiggy, a no-brainer of course. Those eyelashes! Those rings! Maybe I will scan some Vogue dudes tomorrow.
Do you recognize this winsome face? Maggie Smith, the dowager countess to end all dowager countesses. Gorgeous, right? (Bert Stern, 1963)
Shirley Maclaine, who will be joining the Downton Abbey cast for the third season, as Cora's mother and likely nemesis of Dame Maggie. I love this pic but her hands are scaring me a little—kind of like if that Oliver Stone movie with Michael Caine starred murderous jazz hands instead of just a regular old murderous hand. (David Bailey, 1965)
Francoise Hardy, at 18. What can I say? (Jean-Loup Sieff, 1964)
Jeanne Moreau. The perfect cat eye. (David Budnick, 1962)
Jean Shrimpton. Love everything about this picture. Which Stone did she date? (David Bailey, 1962)
