(Euro) Stars on 45!

Today, in honor of my sainted spouse's birthday, we will forego Finnish Fridays and instead highlight one of Lindsay's favorite estate-sale finds—a near-pristine collection of mostly Spanish pop 45s dating from the late 1960s. He was rightly pleased with himself when he scored this eye candy for cheap at a great sale in a real armpit of a neighborhood. (Yes, I still remember this sale even though it was some seven years ago... I think I still smell this sale... Maybe I'm just smelling the records.) He was convinced that all of these 45s were highly collectible; some of them might be, I dunno. They've been sitting in a closet unlistened to and unresearched till I recently decided to dust them off and give them a listen. I can't say that I've made my way through the whole collection (nor did I photograph all of them). Some are kinda catchy and completely insane, the way you would expect a Eurovision runner-up to be. There's some smooth cocktail jazz suitable for Mad Men. There's some manic marching band music and some maudlin vocals suitable for Saturday Night Live parody. And that's the good stuff. I don't think any of the records live up to their fabulous sleeve art. Feast your eyes on these covers, folks! This was some San Antonio hepcat's lovingly curated collection—I don't see how we could ever break it up.

Danny & Donna, "El Vals de las Mariposas," "Dreams Like Mine" (Columbia records)

Los Stop, "Mi Carta," "Villancicos Del Siglo XX" (Belter)

The Vampires, "Something You Got," "Hold On" (Sesion)

Lulu, "Boom-bang-a-bang," "March!" Eurovision 1969 (EMI)

Villancicos por Nene y coro Infantil, "Santa Claus Viene a la Ciudad" (Columbia)

Jean Jacques, "Mama," Eurovision ’69 (discAZ)

Los 3 Sudamericanos, "Una Vida Nueva," "La Chevecha" (Belter)

Michel Delpech, L'isola di Wight (Barclay)

Demis Roussos, "We Shall Dance," "Lord of the Flies" (Philips)

Karina, "La Fiesta," "Las Flechad del amor" (Hispa Vox)

Happiness is... a Mighty Men & Monster Maker

Just a little something-something from one of our favorite categories here at Thingummery HQ: what the husband scored. "Scored" meaning different things to different people, obviously.

This Mighty Men & Monster Maker, made by Tomy in 1979, would certainly be considered a score by any of the 229 followers of the Mighty Men & Monster Maker facebook page, if it were mint in box. Unfortunately, this is far from mint—it only has 6 of the original 18 plates, and all but two are torsos. Sorry, did that not make sense? Check out this action-packed video explaining how to use the Mighty Men & Monster Maker for further clarification, but basically this is like doing grave rubbings, with mix-and-match plates depicting the heads, torsos and legs of various Mighty Men and Monsters.

Still, who would presume to put a price on the joy Lindsay experienced upon laying eyes on the Mighty Men & Monster Maker and its $1 pricetag at a supercrusty estate sale? Not I.

Super-unnecessary-8

Who buys Super-8 reels (is that even the right term?) when they don't have a Super-8? We do! Or more precisely, Lindsay does. He just couldn't do the sensible thing and back away slowly from the laundry basket filled with Super-8s for just 25¢ apiece at our recent "city-wide garage sale." Instead, he reasoned, the kids could watch Heckle and Jeckle unspool through a microscope until we eventually purchase a Super-8 cuz how have we managed so long without one? Come to think of it, why don't we have an 8-track player and what happened to that reel-to-reel we bought at the Best Rummage Sale in NJ so many years ago?

Well, the kids did watch Heckle and Jeckle under a microscope and it was good times for a good ten minutes, at least.

And I was sorry to learn after the fact that Ms. Vintage Kids Books My Kid Loves has a Super-8 and I could have totally squared her son's birthday so much more cheaply than on amazon had I only known!

Better than Atari

Right, so this thing.

Lindsay "scored" this Roberts Rally IV proto-Atari game console at a crazy ’70s sale—my friend Burgin, who hit it on the first day, breathlessly, rightly described it as "It's like your ’70s childhood exploded in this one house—you've got to go!" How could we not go?

Lindsay gets a little glazed when surrounded by the totems of his childhood, so he was in heaven, despite the children whining and pulling on his clothes and asking for things. (Where was I? In the room with all the books of course.) Unfortunately, he made a classic estate-sale error: He saw something he liked: a working Atari, with games. He picked it up, examined it, then put it back down, undecided. Never put anything down! If you see something and kinda like it, hold it close till you've made up your mind. Officious estate sale workers might try to pry it from your hands—they'll offer to relieve you of your burden, to write up your ticket—but you just wave them away till you're sure. When Lindsay finally decided to get the Atari, he went back to the room and saw another guy with it tucked under his arm. ARGH.

It's a terrible, empty feeling. Naturally he had to fill that void by buying something else, and the something else—the Roberts Rally IV pong game thingie—is still covered with dust and sitting in the garage. Apparently there's a small problem with the battery pack (there isn't one) but he's confident that he can make it work by crossing some wires, you know, when he gets around to it. And when he gets around to it, the kids will lay down their wii microphones long enough to play the four games built in to the system: hockey, tennis, squash and squash practice. Woo-hoo, squash practice!

I buy therefore I am

I was an English major in college. I like to read stories. And write about reading stories and sometimes write my own stories. Lindsay was a philosophy major. When we met, he was at the tail end of his senior year and I had one more to go. He was forever mumbling about some paper he was writing on the Marquis de Sade and something about Adorno and that funny math guy Leibniz and Rorty Rorty Rorty, the subject of his senior thesis. Who was this Rorty character and how could he be important if he was still alive? I was so self-involved with my D.H. Lawrence and my Chaucer that I never even bothered trying to understand what he was doing, just wishing that he'd hurry up and finish it so we could go sit on a roof and drink Carling Black Label and smoke cigarettes.

As we've moved from apartment to apartment to house in NYC, and then to Texas, we've carted most of our college books along with us. I know a lot of former college students get rid of their college books but we are in harmony on this point so neither calls the other out on it: "Why do we still have the Penguin Classic Boethius and the Norton Critical everything?" he never asks me. "Why do we have Quine's Word and Object and Heidegger's Basic Writings?" I never ask him. We are in silent agreement. When we are in our 80s and finally go back to get those doctorates we always meant to get, we'll have our dog-eared volumes strewn with barely decipherable marginalia at the ready.

We are not the only ones who cherish this dream. We went to an estate sale a while back that felt like a college bookstore going-out-of-business sale that happened to be held in a suburban tract house with a manicured square of lawn and a windmill out front. This guy had saved everything excellent, including lots of my beloved Modern Library books and vintage Signet paperbacks, and, surprise, surprise—Richard Rorty's Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Lindsay snapped it up and tucked it under his arm. "Wait," I said. "You have that book." This I knew because I am the packer and unpacker of books. "No, I don't!" he said. "You're probably just mixing it up with Contingency Irony and Solidarity." I must've raised an eyebrow. "So what if I do have it? I'll send this copy to Jon" (a fellow philosophy major who went on to philosophy grad school and may well have his own copy of Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, though I think he was anti-Rorty, not that I know what that means). I looked at him like he was crazy and he went defensive: "I just want it, alright?"

Okay, I let it go. It's not rational. I hesitate to use such a loaded term in this context, especially as an irrational former English major, but it's not. The book is not rare or out-of-print. It's not expensive, or leather-bound or autographed. It's a book he already has, but it represents a past life, a familiar face unexpectedly bobbing up in a crowd. It's a nice feeling, right? And crikey, for just 25¢ what's the harm?

Marvelous

I scored these mint-conditon 1976 and 1977 Marvel comics calendars at a great sale in a great neighborhood. I remember there were flash-flood warnings that day but I braved the deluge because the sale was in a long, low brick ranch that I'd driven by millions of times—I had to see what treasure was lying behind its midcentury facade! My fortitude was rewarded: One room had nothing but boxes of pulpy paperbacks and comics, humor books of the ’60s and Mad magazines. That was one hour of glorious sifting. Sigh. Anyway, I knew at a glance that Lindsay must've had these calendars when he was a kid—10 or 11 years old and, I understand, an even bigger comic book geek than he is now. Whoever owned these calendar originally was a similar geek—they are perfect, not a mark on them, not a tear. No one crossed out the days or noted birthdays, god forbid. They were only a quarter apiece so naturally I bought them and when I presented them to Lindsay that evening (I couldn't wait till his birthday), he was, as expected, quite verklempt. He floated down memory lane for a spell, stroking the pristine pages, ogling the amazing artwork and eventually put the calendars on the side table at his end of the couch. Which is where they have remained ever since, in the pile of guitar magazines and cooking magazines.

See, that's the conundrum. What do you do with a calendar once the year is over? Recycle it. Or, if you love it, tear it apart and frame the art? And mar the perfect integrity of the calendar? How could you even think of it, right?? He would never countenance that. We could sell these calendars to some other comic book geek for around 50 bucks a pop and let that guy slip it into an archival box or showcase and pull it out for fondling whenever the mood strikes. Right. That's sooo gonna happen.

My partner in shopping

Today marks 23 years (12 of them legal) of bliss with my sometimes better, sometimes worser half. He left this little illustration on my desk a couple years ago—not sure why, he must've been in some kind of trouble, and what better way to make overtures of peace than to dash off an idealized portrait of us looking so jolly at an estate sale? With me brandishing...a head of broccoli? It's a pretty rare occasion that he looks so sunny at a sale, usually because he's wrangling the kids when he's not dramatically sighing about the massive quantities of books I'm buying. Whatever! Left to his own devices, like when I make him hit a sale in the vicinity of his downtown office, he's been known to get waaay carried away with the spending. Other times, he's struck gold, like when he scored a Paul Klee litho in some Kerville barn for $17 and it's supposedly worth thousands. I don't deny his eye—if only he could work on his attitude! But in his honor, this week I will highlight a few of Lindsay's finds/follies, as well as stuff I've bought for him at sales.