Leonia, 1970s

It wasn't just about Mom and the rhododendrons and the tree.

I had a thing for yellow because we didn't, as a family, wear yellow a lot. Peasant blouse from missfarfalla

We had Dodges. So I thought the coolest cars were Buicks and Fords. Buick station wagon in a color my mother could have tolerated. She had the right idea on that one, I think. That cars should try to blend in with the trees a little more.

Everyone had crazy bedding. It's a wonder we got any sleep. Flower power bedding, raggletaggle

frye boots, what all the cool girls wore, what I dreamed of wearing when I got older and my legs got a little longer.

Everything was patterned. Everything was printed to look like something else. Patchwork patten sewing box, thevintagepepper

There were super bells, elephant bells, fancy bells. Unbelievably amazing jeans, lovefashionmusic

But mostly the clothes seemed strangely unwearable and overcoordinated. Stiff vests over thick dresses, clingy skirts sticking to tights. (via here)

I was more into the free spirit version. Like this fringed vest, another cool girl friday night at the ice cream parlor staple

And then there were girls I knew were just cool. Whatever they did. Skinny and nightgowned and phone calls from cool people and doing cool things and wearing hear in cool braided ways and cool. (via him)

Tickings

1930s tickings advertisement, dewitt co.

ticking market bag lined in broadcloth by bayousalvage

1930s farmhouse pillow with double cover, luncheonettevintage

1930s farmhouse feather pillow, luncheonettevintage

ticking and buckwheat hull neck support pillow by octavi

vintage ticking bolster by enhabiten

microwaveable ticking pillow by the blackstrap

antique indigo striped ticking, theprimitivehome

Obsessed with the color of smoke and the color of blood.

My dog got injured last week. It was Martin Luther King Day. Not going to go into the hows and whys. And he's fine, and I'm fine, and we're all fine, all 11 of us not counting the chickens, which would make 22 of us, not counting the pigeons, which would make 154 or so of us, depending on what babies have hatched and are now swaddled under the down of pigeon parents.

So maybe it's the color of pigeons, or the average color of pigeons, and the color of blood. My dog, Slam, the black one, got a rip in his leg that was a bona fide rip. No more details for the squeamish out there, and I guess for me, because I keep seeing that sight: the red state within the black fur, really. It was shaped like the state of ohio. I did not take a picture. But I am living with a whole slideshow, can't erase it. And thus, somehow, am obsessed on a kind of neuronical level with the colors red and black and gray and silver and red. And dark red.

In the book right now, there are mechanations on the main gal's part of clean up the cabin. The bathroom towels are to be cleaned, only the wolf steals them while she's got her back turned. The wolf being the house wolf, whose name is Hamish, after the ham sandwiches he preferred, at first, to anything else. Ham is a kind of pinkish reddish color and this wolf is an ashy to fog color of grey and silver. And the towels, I have written, are salmon pink. I can't get away from it. To get my mind off things and into things I make treasuries, like all the other happy obsessives on etsy (we're a happy, obsessive, global slumber party, aren't we). And lately they are all red and grey. For samplings, keep going.

Not a candlestand

Vintage sometimes presents enough of a hint of its original purpose to contradict assumptions; to steer you away from easy conclusions. Or, simply, I am ignorant. So it was with this, and so it was with me.

I found it while going through a box of castoffs at a thrift shop. It's part of the whole vintage discovery process; first, the shop; then, its threshold: hazy with the dust of old videocassettes evaporating into the stale air; sometimes a radio warbling from overhead; sleepy clerks; that strange gray overcast under the dim charity bulbs. Then, the mining begins. For some reason, I was in a box mood. There was a box, by the LPs that were in their own box. When 27, I would have dug into that LP box as if I were the first to discover Pet Sounds on vinyl. That was so then.

This box was marked Misc. Misc. in vintage can mean a lot of things, but it mostly means mystery. Promise. Miscstery. Promisce. In this box, at first, were just discards: cards of discount earring studs, a cloth purse with a rotten corner, a pleather purse riddled with adhesive gunk, a sneaker (a sneaker with another s on the end is a useless object), rubber-banded jumbles of old pharmeceutical logo pens, unloved paperbacks with ragged ears, a cutoff Fame style sweat shirt and some pinned-together sweat socks that smelled of foot powder. Then, for some reason, I thought of my father, who often tucks fragile things like Leica lenses into his socks. And so I — fondled — the socks. Quietly. Discreetly. There is a fine line between vintage treasure hunter and hoarder of things like singular sneakers, I fear, and sometimes I wonder how easy it is to cross it. But sure enough, tucked into one of the socks was this.

The find.

After the find, there is often the — feign. After you find what may be something amazing, you call upon the karmic treasure gods by not really focusing on it — as if somehow, by calling attention to it, you'll magically alter its price, or its something. So instead you avoid investigation. You gloss. You feign disinterest, lest someone notice you.

You deposit your object in the cart, or the basket, or the bag, as casually as you can, projecting disinterest, and you keep moving. I assumed I had just found a candlestick holder and satisfied enough, header for a fake leopardskin hat that turned out to be late 1990s awful. Hours later, got home. That's where you get to check the take. Do the take check.

I spread it all across the kitchen table (a yard sale find, 1950s chrome legs, flecked green and white formica top with a leaf pattern, heart be still). Put away the sweaters, the skirt, the dress, the coat, the cooking with cheese book. And I took a closer look at this candlestick.

Blue speck on the scenic reprint: what's that? It looked like ink. A blot of ink. Scene reprint: it turned out to be Holland Pier, Rockaway Beach. But when? Gilding, cobalt glaze. Old. Man in hat and suspenders. Men don't stand around in hats and suspenders since a long time ago. There was a Boardwalk Empire on a Sunday afternoon look to it. I googled. Found these:

Entrance to Holland Pier, Rockaway Beach, postcard from 1912

Holland Ave. Pier, Rockaway Beach, postcard sent in 1918

Holland Dock Pier, Rockaway Beach, postcard sent in 1908

The first was clearly The Scene on the candlestick thing. The second seemed a bit newer, but was really taken, originally, from slightly further along the pier. The third had a white instead of a green fence. Still, more proof. I could almost hear the gulls, smell the salt, the water, hear the quiet that must have been then.

So it was old, this candlestick thing with the ink spot on the scene. And it was a souvenir from Rockaway Beach, back when Rockaway Beach was a real resort. And it has a horseshoe, a kind of lucky horseshoe, and I knew from some old file folder in the back left of my brain that back in the 19-oughts, resorts often sold souvenirs with things like lucky horseshoes on them. And they tended to serve 19-ought type of functions. And also back in those days, there were oil lamps and gas lights. Not too many candles. Someone trips on the edge of her nightgown, the candle lands on the lace curtains, and whoosh goes the pier. So this had to be something else.

It says Germany on the back. I stared at it for a few minutes. The dogs were sleeping, so I could think. I stuck a very standard sized candle in the hole of the well-type part. Candles, amazingly, according to a friend of mine who could be called a wax historian, have not changed that much. Already the idea of it holding a candle was a dimming possibility. And the candle didn't fit. And that blotch in the bowl.

Spot of ink. Horseshoe shape. I googled around and found this.

Souvenir inkwell from early 20th century.

There's the search, the find, the feign, the take, the long think. And then the stumble, the google, the google some more, and finally, the i.d. Germany, it turned out, owned the market for blue porcelain souvenir inkwells with scenes on them. Imagine a guy in shirtsleeves held up with garters, penning his order for 100 porcelain horsehoe inkwells printed with the postcard enclosed, sincerely, Messr. Somebody whose brother posed for the picture in hat and suspenders.

Danke. And you can find the find here.

Out of line

Catalog cover: Carin Riley, Belinda (2010), Out of Line. Slag Gallery, NYC

Writing the catalog essay for the spring drawings show at Slag Gallery in NYC was a blast. These are anything but prosaic works on paper and the artists are tremendous. I grabbed the bit and ran with it.  An excerpt, or read the whole essay.

Before we are taught to perceive a line in terms of letters and words, we respond to line as pure line: scrambles, curves, loops, straights. Each shape has a different hum, a different vibration, character. Molly Stevens’s giant ink drawings on paper (Ink Mountain, 2009) have that primal quality, have palpable personas. In an elemental motion, the line surges from the bottom to the top, hovers up there, then plunges down to the baseline. Tall as humans, a pair of lines double each other, one awkwardly spooning the other. These are giants entreating, murmuring, humming. Stevens draws them with a brush attached to a stick in one continuous motion from beginning to end, placing herself at a distance from the page, a distance that allows for accidents, for change. There are countless attempts, but only occasionally does it resonate. There’s one in a heap of them in which the lines make the right sound.

.

Vintage weekend afterburn

Timber wolves by Frederick Remington, vintagesuburbia

 There was a lot going on this weekend that had nothing to do with vintage. It was supposed to be that way. There was grocery shopping. There was writing. The landscape in my novel suddenly had to change. Or so I thought it should. I wanted to turn the bowl-shaped valley that the wolves live in into a hollow, or a clove, something that seemed more jagged and less tyrolean. That set off all sorts of revision-hell alarm bells. Consistency rebricked across all those pages could be the death knell, so after toying with it, I temporarily gave up.

1960s rat pack tuxedo, fabgabs

There was work. I interviewed a haberdasher for an upcoming article. I love interviewing haberdashers. He said, "Men no longer want a big silhouette. They want that slender, throwback, lean and mean fit." He said, "Black is the new black."

Colette in a suit, being brilliant back then

And I had to finish editing a kind of magnificent, far-reaching text by someone who is clearly, and I say this with no irony, brilliant. And clearly, in a slightly wild-haired way that somehow reminds me of Colette, of his own mind. And I had to query him, in English, through a few intermediaries, and hope the answers would somehow sieve out of German and back into English in a way that I could then blend them, a la Smitten Kitchen, deftly back into the batter, so to speak. And it worked, in the end, into a smooth, kind of peppery mix.

1970s-1980s pumps, and not the ones that smell that I talk about below. These ones don't smell at all. The ones that smell I wouldn't photograph. Somehow it might show up in the image, like a yellowish haze. These pumps are an unscented size 7.

As I write this I am sitting with a pair of old pumps on my lap that smell like stinky old shoes. I have been inhaling shoe stink somewhat unconsciously, until the last few moments, when it got — profound.

Just 5 of the pulp stack, a small fraction of the lurid cache. Coming soon to the luncheonette.

And just to the left of the laptop, towering behind the screen in a kind of tawdry jumble of type and color, is a stack of pulp mysteries and crime novels from the 1950s with names like Night at the Mocking Widow and Dardenelles Derelict. I'm going to sell them in the luncheonette for a friend. We had a blast going through the titles, the covers, the luridness of it all. And next to them is a stack of vintage cookbooks I am obsessed with, which have instructions like, place in a quick oven and bake, and be sure to save the drippings in a can for later: a thrifty kitchen is a practical kitchen!

Not from the back of a cookbook, no. You're right.

The point is that a weekend that was supposed to be very much not about vintage became a weekend in which vintage held me in thrall, in all its enigmatic impossibility, its time warp, its fragility, its other-time-ness. It called to me as I worked, cooked, ran. It created conundrums and commotion. It busted a little hole through the real-time sky.

At a barn sale one town over, I found an old 1950s lace cocktail gown, strapless, with peach-colored lace so delicate it threatens to fall apart at a lady's exhale, and dove grey trim around the bodice that has an unsettlingly mottled look over one side. It is, of course, tiny, and yet the chest is made for someone on the Jane Russell side. And on Beulah it does nothing, just hangs there limp like it's about to play bass at a Hole show in 1996. 

This is a beautiful dress, but it's beautiful more like bleached out Edward Gorey than like the hell-cat curvaliciousness of a thriving retro frock. In other words, it looks anemic. It makes Beulah look like a Greek statue in drag.

I have to figure out what to feed it to bring back its bloom. How to treat it. How to write about it. How to photograph it so it doesn't look like a dress stuck on doll parts, because on Beulah it looks, just, sad. So this is perhaps the crossroads dress that will finally make me forsake Beulah, in all her flea-bitten rickety wonder, for a more sleek, vanilla-linen-covered dress form that doesn't maw apart at the ribs or crack open at one rear hip panel. A Wolf? A Baumann? Would that I were so lucky.

Beulah was built about a hundred years ago and does not entirely resemble so much as confound the contours of a woman's body. She is probably more like the Victorian, bustled, chest-forward, corseted ideal of a body. With a hole in its skin and that smell, like pie. Better, I suppose, than the shoes, which I'm about to de-scent using my secret recipe, gleaned from an old cookbook, actually, written for clueless young brides.

Happy Sunday.

Department of Since You Asked: A-okay with Jo-o-Kay

The Grits n Ham suede jacket — came through the doors at the luncheonette, made a brief stint on etsy, and wound up in Utah, beloved at last.

Amazing, and amazingly weird at the same time!! It is so retro, but in such GREAT shape!! Was it yours? Thanks for everything ... Do you know anything about it?
—Feedback from the woman who bought the 1970s Grits n Ham suede jacket, from the luncheonette.

My answer: It wasn't mine, though it would have been if it and I had crossed paths in the past.  Especially if I'd come across it in college, when I was a double major, one of those majors being History, which serves pretty well when it comes to researching a jacket like this.

Nearly everything that comes through the luncheonette gets a pretty thorough working over: I start with the label, go through trademarkia, patent archives,  old ads (often found on *bay), legal records.

Letter written from Ardmore Air Force Base, 1943. The writer says, I have been to Ardmore once and I don't think a hell of a lot of it.

From a site on Oklahoma history, I found out that Jo-o-Kay is a trademarked name that isn't in the trademark archives. But it stands for John and Kay (Katherine) Simpler, of Ardmore, Oklahoma. Actually they weren't technically of Ardmore, they were of somewhere else, but they moved to Ardmore in the 1950s, after the owner of the Western Supply Company encouraged them to. Western Supply made leather goods, specifically the hand-tooled kind, and the owner's family and the Simplers would have cookouts every Saturday night once things got going. The suede and leather coat business started, probably, as a discussion over hamburgers on a buggy night. Imagine everyone, filling up on good Okie beef and looking towards fall. Everyone needs a good jacket, after all.

Main Street in Ardmore, 1958.

 John and Katherine wanted to call it Jo-Kay. But Jockey, already making underwear, paid for them to add an extra o into the name. As if someone might confuse a two-tone, snap-close cowhide leather jacket with a snazzy cowboy yoke for a pair of Y-fronts. At any rate that's what the Simplers did, though locals always called it Jo-Kay.

A later 1970s label (which, upon second thought, makes me wonder if the Grits n Ham jacket was actually from the 1960s)

And here's an excerpt straight from "The Year of the Campus Cowboy" in a 1964 Sports Illustrated:

Rough-out leather jackets, cut, stitched and snapped like a wrangler's denim model, are hotly popular in the West and are now turning up in the East as well. One firm, Jo-O-Kay of Ardmore, Okla., has sold 100,000 of them this year in 42 different models. They are made of brushed cowhide, lined in warm Orion fleece. Mike Irving and Justine Purdy wear rough-outs over snug-fitting cowboy shirts in Ivy League stripes.

Can't find the photo, but here's the caption: 

This page, above: Both jackets are by Jo-O-Kay; the man's, in Aztec gold color, is $30, the lady's $29. Both are at Granby's Trading Post; Miller's; Western Ranchmen Outfitters.

 Western Ranchmen outfitters is still in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Members of the Simpler family are still in Ardmore, having cookouts. At some point, the Tandy Company bought Corral Sportswear, which carried — or oversaw some aspect of (and this is where the research gets spotty) Jo-o-Kay. At some point Jo-O-Kay began making coats and jackets for Corral. And someone named Simpler — and it might have been John Simpler himself — was interviewed during a National Labor Relations Board Hearing on whether or not the Ardmore plant had conspired against AFL-CIO members who wanted to organize. That was in 1966-1967, when Corral Sportswear's Ardmore Oklahoma plant — at least this is how it's described in the NLRB transcripts — was found guilty of conspiring against union members by the National Labor Relations Board. The union had petitioned to hold an election at the plant, and among the winners were union members then contested, said the NLRB, by management. Managment being a Mr. Simpler. The plant had 96 employees, but there were only 76 voters:

76 voters-- 1 janitor, 1 patternmaker, 11 cutters, 3 set-up department employees, 3 finishing department employees, 2 shipping department employees, 6 linegirls, and 49 employees performing other work. All voted, as earlier indicated, with 5 challenges made. The Company challenged Pat Wilson, a set-up department employee, as a supervisor; the Union challenged Velma Trent, a finishing department employee, as a supervisor; the Union challenged Myrtha Heartsill and Gladys Roberts,⁶ linegirls, as supervisors; and the Union challenged Ruth Wills, the patternmaker.

The details of the case are a bit sad: you can imagine the group of employees hoping to do some good, imagine Mr. Simpler hoping to stave off changes that might lose him money, imagine the Union lawyers interviewing him, cross-examining him, when all he wants to do is go home and have a good steak. And it gives you a glimpse into how coats like this were made, by patternmakers, and cutters, and finishers, and linegirls, and a tiny shipping department, and by women with names like Myrtha Heartsill and Velma Trent.

And that's what I found out about the Grits n Ham jacket.

Dept of instastories redux

etsy treasury number something-ty. click here for the real thing with links.

Sometimes an etsy treasury has a story on the tip of its tongue. Sorry for the metaphor.  If I find it, I will reveal here in all its geegaw humphage. Sure, humphage is not a word, but it has a lusty fallover and phhhhhh sound.

Sellers I trolled to pick this one — rollinghillsvintage,    swoonshop,    wiltsiebridgecs,    kbjhandmade,  knotoriginal,   annesaccumulations,    newdominionblues,    nakisha,    mousetrapvintage,    treehouse28,   savagesalvage,    bucktoothedbunny,    ohmyampersand,    elizabethwrenvintage,    simplylodge,    snootieseconds.

Life with dogs

I have a goal of 4 pages a day in order to finish the novel by the end of October. Okay, say mid November. The year begins today and ends on Thanksgiving, in my mind. Lately I've met the goal by hammering out 4 pages of triplespaced-narrow-margined-throw-in-another-line-break text. Text with stretch marks. But since I'm crashing headlong into my birthday I'm determined to meet the daily quota.

So this morning I was trying to write a scene in which the wolf, the old male patriarchal geriatric wolf, is trying to deal with the endless presence of the woman, the young, curly-haired, not-entirely-close-to-nature woman who has nevertheless cast her lot in with a bunch of close-to-nature types. I'm giving a lot away here, kind of, so sorry. But the scene has not been going well. It has run aground a number of times. The wolf and the woman really don't have a way to communicate. This is not a mystical rocky mountain high fantasy I'm writing here, it's a skewed tale that presumes very little. That's what I seem to do. But the scene has no been going well.

And this morning what bashed the fragile wisp that is fiction writing's delicate eggshell head into the distracto wall was one of our dogs. Canis germanus fangus biggus distractus. Specifically, the male patriarchal dog. The father of litters that includes amazing working dogs who have successfully done all sorts of Rin Tin Tin-like things.

Papa is a big hero dog in own right and has accomplished many titles and numbers and certificates and honors, and has giant saucer eyes that would, if they could, speak volumes.

This morning as he lay on the kitchen floor he decided volumes had to be spoken.  He tried, over and over again, to get my attention — dramatically jumping to his feet and whining if I did so much as shift in my chair.  When the writing is not happening I tend to shift a lot. So there was a lot of canine activity happening as well. We fed on each other in that strange reciprocal feedback loop called getting nothing done because we're getting nothing done. Eventually his whine successfully pitched his needs in my direction, right into my brain, at peak velocity, where it ran around, chasing my words into the dark corners to huddle and wait.

This is entirely natural. It is as natural as the way I abuse metaphors daily. He is a working dog. He has ideas and drive. I am a working writer. I have ideas and drive. What was driving me this morning, and not fast enough, was the idea of a wolf trying to deal with a human. The wolf, in this story, came first in the cabin they live in. How does this wolf assert its territory? He pisses on things. He was taking aim at her down coat (specifically L.L. Bean ripstop navy blue nylon, a leftover from her early college days) when the whining turned to barking. It turned out, of course, that Papa needed to go out and take a piss. So who, I wonder, looks the dumbest here?

I have yet to get back to that scene. The time is now. arrivedoggi.

Etsy wolf item of the day


wolf switchplate (antiquarium)


and the view that works like a metaphor, more so.