More things I didn't buy: Game of Thrones edition

I bought a ton of stuff this past weekend at one major blowout of a sale (books!), but now that school has started and I'm back in the blogging saddle, I need to catch up on some old, dusty posts first. Like, don't you want to know all the stuff I haven't been buying? Starting with this totally awesome lantern sconce, which reminds me of Game of Thrones, probably because I really, really miss Game of Thrones, though it wouldn't be out of place in any medieval-style restaurant or B-movie. I appreciated it, but I didn't want it. There is a difference.

I seriously wanted to buy this giant medallion/sun dial wall plaque thingie (is it Mayan? Incan? cursed in some way?) because I have seen similar ones proudly displayed over fireplaces (as this one was) in many of my vintage Sunset Books. It's clearly the only place you can hang one of these things. But in my house that would mean relocating the family-room flat-screen and I don't think that's a negotiation I would win.

It amused me to see someone's old cache of Playboys squirreled away in a closet at an estate sale. I'm guessing this is where the original owner kept them and the estate-sale company didn't have the stomach to display them more prominently. All my early encounters with Playboy were in the closets of friends' parents or brothers (I think that sounds worse than it was), so this came as no big surprise. Sadly, these issues were all from the ’80s and I draw the line at the 1970s when buying nudie mags (and $3 each? Oh, honey please).

More things I didn't buy, starting with the Un-bra

I did not buy the Un-bra because I have a strict no-undergarment-buying policy when shopping estate sales. One must set limits.

I did not buy this defaced (or faced?) mannequin head, but I did appreciate the effort.

I did not buy a stack of back issues of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact magazine, though I did mourn the passing of another loyal print subscriber. I assumed this digest, which has been published since the 1930s, couldn't possibly still exist but, lo, it does! You can even get it on your Kindle. This first line of description of the latest issue is making me regret my decision to pass up this trove: "By pure coincidence, our March issue offers a denser than average population of nonhuman intelligences, and quite a collection they are."

I did not buy any $80 hub caps. I didn't even buy the cheaper hub caps.

More things I didn't buy: old Playboys and rocks

I did not buy any of these hundreds of vintage Playboy magazines, all from the 1960s and ’70s, because I was overwhelmed. Seriously, I'd pick up one issue and the one underneath was even better. I did not know what to do, so I did nothing. Much to Lindsay's chagrin.

I did not buy this unopened pack of oven-liners because I'm not really sure if we have a need for over-liners. I couldn't resist the packaging, though—the foxy hausfrau in ruffles slaving over a hot stove. Classic.

I did not buy these rocks or shells because I try to limit my rock-buying to sales I've dragged my children to. They always make me buy rocks.

Tina Brown did not invent cheesy Newsweek covers

More things I didn't buy

I did not buy a pile of ’80s Vogues, despite the nostalgic pull (this is totally when I started subscribing!), because they were lying on someone's gross bathroom floor, next to the toilet, possibly since the ’80s. Also, they were $4 each, which is just about the stupidest price for anything that I've been quoted in a while. I mean, seriously, do you think you're selling your old magazines on the hipster-clogged sidewalks of NYC? Cuz I'm pretty sure you're selling them in a dismal San Antonio tract house that smells like pee.

I did not buy this stack of Texas Observers, even though I know it's supposed to be a great publication and Molly Ivins was so awesome and I'm embarrassed to say I've never read it and wouldn't this have been a great place to start?

I didn't buy this midcentury piano with its glorious Danish modern legs and to-die-for matching piano stool despite the fact that my daughter plays piano and really appears to enjoy it no thanks to any Tiger Mom tactics on my part. I just can't commit to a piece of furniture this large, especially when we already have two organs and several keyboards.

I did not buy this Dawn doll and Dawn accessories in their original boxes even though I loved Dawn waay more than Barbie because they wanted like $50. Always annoyed when people know the value of things.

Bananas for budgies

I think I first learned about this Forgotten Bookmarks guy in Country Living magazine. Yes, I am a dinosaur who often gets her information from these things called magazines. Anyway, seems he's fellow dino, though a few key differences lie between us: He appears to sell his books for an honest living whereas I allow mine to pile up around me till I'm forced to devote a weekend to dividing them into neat new stacks, some of which are marked "to sell" and others "to give away," at which point they begin to gather fresh new dust, and remain unsold and ungiven, and are eventually engulfed by new piles, undivided, unorganized, un-neatened until I start the whole process all over again. No, this guy has an actual store and he also has a clear and simple idea behind his blog: sharing the cool and often poignant or odd things he finds inside old books. So it's no surprise he also landed a book deal. This blog wishes it were so straightforward. Like the name—thingummery—what does that even mean?

Oh, whatever, I don't know. I do know that I too collect the bonus oddities I find sandwiched between the pages of old books and periodicals. I also wonder how they ended up there and I feel badly about separating them. Like my favorite, the stripper card in the sewing book, which I wrote about here. And here we have another example, though it's not quite as titillating.

I bought this copy of Bananas magazine at one of those filthy, moldy, willies-giving sales that always have the best stuff and it's almost all too damaged to buy. HATE that. But I certainly couldn't resist a copy of Bananas with Willie Ames on the cover. Eight is Enough said, am I right? I'm such a prehistoric creature that I used to buy this ’70s-’80s pop culture magazine, the poor relation of Dynamite, at the Scholastic Bookmobile. As I was thumbing through the issue and trying not to get cooties (seriously, it looks like it spent the last decades languishing on someone's bathroom floor), this Polaroid portrait of a parakeet fell into my lap. As the owner of a pair of caged birds (zebra finches), I sympathize with the photographer, who probably just wanted a snap of his/her pet but ran up against a hard truth: Caged birds don't make good subjects. The pictures are all cage and very little bird.

Anyhoo, parakeets kind of give me a bad feeling because I had one as a kid. My parents gave him to me for my birthday, though I don't recall ever asking for or wanting bird. I'm thinking they were just trying to make me stop pining for a pony. I remember going to the pet store and peering into this big glass tank set into the wall and it was just a blur of blue and green wings. I kept trying to point to the one I wanted and I'm pretty sure the pet store guy just gave me the first one he could catch. Maybe I held that against the bird because I named him Sinbad, after my favorite movie, and never paid him much attention after that. I thought he was kind of gross. I never let him out of his cage and I didn't make more than a half-hearted effort to teach him to talk. Eventually he moved into my brother's room and my brother totally loved him and let him fly around his room and sit on his shoulder and eat of his hand but he never learned how to talk, just uttered the two syllables of his name in a garbled bird language, and I was always blamed for that. When he died and was buried in a velvet box at the foot of the yard beneath the lilac bushes that are no longer there, was I even invited to the funeral?

Oops, I seem to have gone off on another tangent. See what I mean? Not concise, not clear, this blog will never have its very own book deal.

The fun city girls

You know, I used to be a fun city girl, whistling for taxis, dancing on bars, throwing my hat triumphantly in the air in the middle of busy intersections. But just judging this book by its cover—and how can you do otherwise?—I might as well have been the pitiful hausfrau I am now compared to these chicks:

Stephanie had been the Mayor's wife, until she cut out to start the most fanatical of all Women's Lib groups—B.I.T.C.H.
Sabrina had been his mistress, until certain ground rules of politics made him ditch her.
Michele's latest heart-throb was a black militant who taught her that all was fair in love and class war.
Irene had an overwhelming passion to be "in" where the red-hot action was.
When this quartet of crazy ladies ganged up on one poor man, there was going to be a bang heard 'round the world!
*This novel is rated "R"—for riotous, ribald and deliciously readable every scandalous page of the way.

I made a valiant effort to read this book, but the staccato prose and groovy slang defeated me. What I took away from a quick skim is that the titular Fun City Girls are reminiscent of Mary McCarthy's The Group or of the book-publishing chippies in Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. Full of old-is-new fashion references (Cacharel, Sonia Rykiel) and amylnitrate-fueled sex this book is. "Deliciously readable" it is not:

They were Man and Woman, stripped naked of phony cultural restrictions and creepy inhibitions. They were free. Adam and Eve in the primeval state.

Set in the magazine industry in the early 70s, The Fun City Girls is dedicated to erstwhile NYC mayor John Lindsay, and rated a blurb from longtime New York magazine food critic Gael Green ("Delcious!" she pithily, allegedly proclaimed.) Since "the poor man" these fun city girls gang up on happens to be the mayor of New York, I'm trying to imagine a similarly tawdry roman a clef inspired by Bloomberg and I'm coming up empty...(how about you?). This book has left few traces on the internets that I could find—a flickr set here, a $5 copy on ebay there—so I don't think it made a big splash back in the day. Too bad. I really wanted it to be better, especially given the magazine angle that's so dear to my heart. Striving freelancer Irene wants to transform Modern Woman from "a manual of sewing hints and casserole recipes...into an exciting, informed magazine for today's exciting, informed modern woman."

!!!The editor of Modern Woman. The youngest editor of a major magazine in the United States. Maybe the world. No more the uncertainties of free-lance assignments. No more tedious rewrites. No more fights about having her more controversial articles printed by chicken editors. She'd be the editor! She'd have the power! She could finally do what she always wanted: change the world!!!

Aww, once upon a time a magazine editor wasn't just a romantic-comedy excuse for Jennifer Garner or Kate Hudson to wear Manolos and bark orders—it held the promise of changing the world. And well, before I get too jaded about that notion, let's consider Gloria Steinem and all the radical womyn behind the founding of Ms. magazine, the subject of an entertaining oral history in New York magazine. Ms. was launched in 1971, the year before The Fun City Girls was published—taken in that context, I should probably cut it a little more slack.