Recent Musings. . .

 A long time ago, I banged my head on some guy’s belt buckle (not in the obvious way!).  His buckle actually left a chevron shape on my forehead for a few minutes, and ever since then I have paid some serious attention to people’s belts.  God knows you don’t want to end up with a disastrous shape on your forehead, should you be as clumsy and spastic as I was. And give people a reason to stare at your belly for reasons other than to ogle your little belly button. Beware tripping fools carrying too many books.

I love pom poms.  Even the words are cute.  When I was a kid, I had to make a pom pom Nativity scene in art class.  I made the Moor, the other wise guys, the animals, etc, even Jesus from much-sweated-over pom poms.  And even though they are now ancient, ratty and discolored, my mom still puts them up at Christmas and we still all laugh.  Something about pom poms that make you smile, feel silly, and oh so happy.  Like seeing the button nose of a dog up close, pom poms are joyous little decorations. I for one can never see enough of them!

“I reached out my hand, and it fell heavily upon something damp and hard.” The Pit & The Pendulum, Edgar Allan Poe

There are a few shapes that lend themselves well to design, and some of my favored ones are pendulums, pods and pits.  They are mysterious in their simplicity, smooth, hard, graceful, and foretell some future event – a flower, a fruit, a divination. The promise of a message in a shape, a simple shape, is magic at its best.

Remember when the most exciting thing in the universe was touching the hand or leg of your lover, before you ever even explored their lips?   The electricity that runs through these appendages could light a galaxy.  When a hand stops its incessant activity and alights on yours, just briefly, it feels like the moon has stopped just for you.  Or when the leg of your beloved is willing, for just this certain slice of time, to stop roaming the earth and let you rest your little hand on it because there’s nowhere safer.  It’s an honor to stop these busy explorers.  Like when a flying thing rests on your shoulder and lets you know how magical a place you are to light upon.

The first film ever made of “Alice in Wonderland” – 1903!

We all love to have animal images around us – instinctively we grab for an animal item and hug it.  We’d all prefer the real thing, but intuit rather quickly that we cannot expect a bear to let us lie on its back or a penguin to want to swim in our soup.  Then there are those like Sea World who think they can convince a killer whale to want to join us at our table and eat with a spoon.  The lesson always eventually comes – animals have their own books of etiquette and we are not invited to dine with them for a very good reason!  They, at least, have the courtesy not to try to make us live in their habitats.  So let’s invite them to ours in the kindest possible way – in ceramic or cloth or metallic versions, so the real ones can keep on doing what they are meant to do - prowl and hiccup through the world.

What better beast to have for your children than a mandrill?  They’re funny and sweet and colorful.  ADOPT ONE and see how great they are.  Their blue ski slope snouts, their button eyes, their redder than red noses…so beautiful. Severely underappreciated, they are shunned for their pink butts and often-justified snarling at people accompanied by a howl of great yellow teeth.  But like all misunderstood geniuses, they are simply suffering poets. Give them a little kiss. And one of your children.

Dressing screens have such stories to tell.  The showgirl flouncing in her skirts to her dressing room only to find an elderly gentleman ogling her.  She tells him to turn his head away while she slips behind a screen.  He cheats and sees her ankles and shoulder, the curve of her neck. He hears her garters unsnap, the slide of her stocking down her leg.  This is about as far as the seduction will go for him.  She is meeting some musician after the show, so tough luck. But yes, thank you, she will accept that little diamond trinket and “see you some other time, you sweet old man…”  All kinds of stories, the upshot generally the same – beautiful busty women tickling the chins of old men and always, always, putting them off. How wonderful the trickery of woman, and the accessories that attend her game.

Today is my birthday.  It is on this day that I most want to live on the moon.  I have a particular desire to get there in a pumpkin ship (see below). In Georges Melies’ “A Trip to the Moon” (see below – click to go to film) the air men land splat into a moon made of whipped cream where strange stars with women’s faces speak down to them on the puffy white ground.  Where else can this kind of surface exist? Where else are these creatures of the air? Nowhere but the moon. I must pack my bags and get going. Today, the earth is not for me.

The incessant drip of March.  Everything is melting, drooping, crying with the weight of winter.  It drives us mad with its incessant drip drip drip on our ACs, our sills, our heads.  But if you can get past your hair-ripping anxiety, they are quite wonderful, these drips. They are winter throwing itself out of the sky, burrowing into the ground to make flowers.  We should give them a break. They are, after all, harbingers of Spring and working very hard to give us something to look forward to!  Dang, I just heard one …

 In my fits of nerves over yesterday’s surgery, I decided to feature all things with stitches or medical references!  I know, I’m a little creepy.  So I won’t be posting for a few days – try to live without my pearls of wisdom!  Chat with you later!

I dream about the sea all the time.  In my dreams I am often floating on my stomach looking down into the crystal blue depths and killer whales are undulating past me, without eating me.  Seals and bears twist under the water and I am always laughing without choking.  I simply float for days and days watching the rubbery creatures go by.  I want a Viking funeral, I want to live in the sea, on the sea, beside the sea.  I have always been in love with Neptune (even though he doesn’t even know I’m alive!) and would fit just so inside a clamshell.  I could go on and on.  I especially like the idea of great sailing ships floating above me, the sail’s flapping and some brandished swords accompanying each one.  I should have discovered America.

 Magic animals in a mad dance. Women in the air (their natural element), long white legs scissoring so quickly you’re sure they can’t walk on the earth. Clumsy loud music spitting out the same garish colors as the juggled balls.  Tiger roars and claw swats at the sound of whips. Dogs jumping through flames.  Who thought this all up?  Some mad genius who knew better than most how to turn the world upside down and invite us to tilt our heads too.

I love the idea of busts.  Actually heads in general. All those great pock-marked stone giants with missing ears or noses or locks of hair.  The idea of a place where all those noses and ears go, a collection in some madman’s cellar fills me with joy and a great desire to find it. Perhaps I’ll start my own. In Egypt at the foot of one of the pyramids I found a wonderful foot-shaped stone and have been on the hunt for naturally occurring body parts ever since.  They are rare, I have found.  Anyway, back to busts.  Today’s busts are not missing parts – they are whole and healthy and quite unabashed about staring.  So cool.

Buddha – we all love him and think by having a Buddha in our homes we will be blissed out, humane, and kind to animals.  The funny thing is, the little man does seem to promote a kind of peace of mind and I for one think it’s the closed eyes that does it.  He’s tripping out behind his lids and what he’s seeing sucks us in. Quite sure he’s on to something, we sit in front of him and try to understand.  Not a bad way to settle the nerves.

Buddha Tortilla!

I realize I am waaay behind the curve on featuring faux bois, but hey! I am often a dork who doesn’t know what’s going on and wanders through things  that strike me regardless of their timeliness in the blog-world.  Anyway, here’s a story: like many, I grew up in a concrete forest, with faux everything which somehow felt more faux-faux than anything else.  I didn’t catch on to the nature thing until I was about 10 when we were living in the Bahamas and things started to bite my feet and make flying silhouettes in the dark night.  It took me forever to learn the names of plants and flowers, and even animals.  This horrified my relatives no end, being somehow more attuned to nature than I was, which is not saying much.  To this day I laugh when people ask me the names of things that are skittering by or blowing in the wind. How the hell would I know?  But ask me the tensile strength of concrete…well, who am I kidding? I wouldn’t know that either.

Why does a woman’s body lend itself so well to a strategically placed feather or ruffle? Because her body is a puzzle box, with secrets and tricks and passwords and little drawers filled with the perfect detail. Even when it’s bare, basking in its own laughter, there is so much more to know.  That’s why burlesque tantalizes.  It’s about the details, the turn of the ankle and the curve of the shoulder, not the slobbering beasts of prey waiting at the stage door. Women of such style and wit go home to their own forests and never let you know when they’re coming back.

The great Sally Rand (above)

The little island that shocked the world…she is truly beautiful, like a fine racehorse always exceeding herself.  When she hopped the pond, she brought with her such delicacies – Shakespeare, the Stones, Carnaby Street fashions, Savile Row snobbery, an entire empire of red, white and blue. Oh, and best of all, the elusive and rarely sighted Cherry Bakewell. My first time in London I felt a punch in my stomach that was so exciting – I was finally THERE!  The place where all things cool originated.  I felt small and insignificant and garishly American, but oh so very happy.  However, I lived on cheese toasts since I couldn’t bear the food. Oh well. One disappointment is not so bad.

It’s hibernation season, and I can’t stop admiring pillows.  A dream of mine is to spend time in a Saharan tent, filled with pillows for every possible use, white camels outside spitting and the sand roaring, while I, snug in my pillows, eat dates.  I would be offered things on pillows, I would be massaged on pillows, I would be bathed on pillows, and best of all, I would greet my guests from pillows.  You know, those weary travelers  who leave their horses outside and come in panting, begging for water and a pillow.  I would have enough of them for all the sandy windburned travelers in the desert!

Flowers are little pieces of the world and its magic.  They deserve their own castles and kingdoms. So here are some to start with…

Who is NOT on the perpetual hunt for the perfect bag?  The one that will hold our frogs, hankies, loose emeralds, lipsticks and old plane tickets?  That perfect one that will have room for a rabbit but not enough for a sweater, the one that will suit our store of safety pins and old string, the one that will stay by our sides without ever wandering off to another table in a swank restaurant.  That saucy but reliable bag that winks at us but not at others and declares its love for our little collections of pebbles and shells and memories.

Smooch smooch! XOXOXOX. I Heart you!

In honor of the Olympics, I’m celebrating torches – i.e., candles and candle holders.  Shining a little light in a dark wilderness is a profound and lovely thing, especially if you’re watching someone else out on the freezing tundra doing it.  So while we warm our hands over a little candle and thank god we never pursued a sport beyond voyeurism, glide on, Olympians! 

Photographic goods are magical.  You can imagine what the person trapped under glass or resin or in fabric was thinking when the photo was taken, like, “Was that a rat that just ran over my foot?” Or, “Will the crops come in?” or even, “Who’s that holding my wife’s hand?”  Risque vintage photos are funny because the people in them are clearly unaware of just how long images can last.  Their naive joy would surely evaporate if they knew they’d end up on a belt buckle on their great-grandson’s jeans as he plays heavy metal guitar. So just remember, whenever someone takes a snap of you, be sure you won’t mind if it ends up in 2050 on some kid’s lunchbox or tucked into an old book found at the Strand.

Garlands = Mt. Everest and those ghostly Tibetan prayer flags.  But now I see garlands are also inside inventions, not always meant to flap.  And not just for hippies to divide rooms in that I-don’t-believe-in-dividing-space kind of way.  They’re pretty little messages to your walls not to despair.

So many pillows, so little time…crucial to our well-being, each one is as unique as our own heads.  I like to imagine the kind of head that would lie on each beautiful pillow I find, and have come up with one for Mick Jagger, one for Poe, one for Thumbelina, one for Henry Darger…the list goes on and on.  It’s a little game I play on days like today. when we’re snowed in and have plenty of magazines, books, and bagels to make our home as wonderful as the Taj Mahal. And so many pillows to rest our little heads.

Recently my nutty Uncle Dave died, and we are left wondering who will harangue the Philadelphia Enquirer now.  He spent a good deal of his adult life writing to them weekly, a crank with a bone to pick.  He’d complain about the streetlight on the corner, the tolls, the potholes, the dust, and lord only knows what else.  He described himself as a writer, and took this work very seriously.  A crusader for comfy living in the city, he collected opinions from all, and composed a carefully worded nut-rant for the editors.  I’m quite sure they knew him by name after decades of slitting open his shaky-handed letters, and yet they didn’t give him an obituary!   After all, he was a most loyal reader.  Anyway, my point is, whether you are a batty old woman who writes letters to dead people and leaves them on their graves, or love letters to your beloved, or letters to cancel some boring event, or even if you are like my uncle Dave, you must write letters to let the world know what you are all about!  Make your little voices heard in their most beautiful format, the letter.

My wonderful, outrageous dame of an aunt, who has been on the great stage of the beyond for 10 years now, used to do an hysterical impression of the Elephant Man when she was drunk.  She captivated cocktail crowds the world over with this act, and just thinking about it cracks me up.  She’d prepare herself like the frustrated Method actor she was by snorting and bowing her head, and then she’d drape her arm in front of her nose (even though the Elephant Man was not really an elephant), and stammer out the famous line – “My head is so heavy because it’s full of dreams…”  This resulted in bursts of applause every time and gut-busting laughter.  So every time I wear a headband, or think about heads at all really, I think of Aunt Ri.  A head like hers deserved the finest ornamentation known to man. Don’t we all deserve a little bit of this cocktail glamour?

How magical a piece of paper can be!  We follow our little dotted lines to our own big red X’s, filled with anticipation.  We suddenly remember that skipping is a valid way to get somewhere and always, the end is only part of the point.  Even if the path leads you to some boring wedding or grandma’s burnt pork chops, it’s the map that prepares you for what you will find – intersections, exits, detours, roundabouts…life, really.

(You really need to blow up these thumbnails to see the full effect of the map-work…) 

This is a story of fear and redemption.  It is about peanuts.  When I was 5 years old Mr. Peanut kidnapped me from the Atlantic City boardwalk as I strolled in the sunlight with my family.  I was wearing a fetching little dress with purple stripes and embroidered violets on the smocking.  He took me into the Woolworth’s photo booth and all I remember is being hugged very tightly and the mesh covering his eyes.  When I was in my 20’s I went back to the boardwalk with a friend and we saw Mr. Peanut, but this time he was a bored kid in hip-hop pants, oversized gloves and a top hat that was dusty with trailing threads.  We had to laugh.  Over the years, he had lost his power, his reputation, and his style. I can once again appreciate the beauty of the peanut, and all the peanut-related practical jokes my friends play on me are just plain funny.  Fortunately, other people do not carry this peanut baggage and are making sublime odes to the peanut, as it frankly deserves.

(The Jesus Peanut!)

(The Unsavory Mr. Peanut)

(Much like the dress I wore on that fateful day…)

Portraiture is a fascinating thing.  On the one hand, it is a memory of someone’s prime, when they looked good in a crown or with a scabbard and before they got the vapours.  On the other hand, it is a strange kind of collusion with the artist to fix a point in time that will only cause a whimsical pang to the subject in years to come, when they are no longer that person, no longer an artist’s inspiration.  So I am most attracted to portraits of people I don’t know. People from history, or people who aren’t people, like owls.  I don’t keep snaps of people I love around the house because no one is ever the same from one minute to the next, and I want to see them in the present, an always moving present.  But that’s just my own way of fixing a loved one’s image in my mind forever, albeit one that requires an admiration for the constant dabbling of time’s paints.

I can’t wait for the birds to come home.  I know they have a very long journey ahead but I don’t care.  I want them here so I can imagine that the whole world will be popping open with flowers and leaves and smells of life.  It will be mating season for the beasties again, and all the earth will feel fed, clothed, and cared for.  We need them for that.  Come home soon, please!  In the meantime, it’s always cute to have a bird-theme going on in your stuff, so chirp away!

I grew up in a concrete world.  I had no more exposure to nature than the hippies in Central Park and pigeons.  I had my cat, true, but I did not have a full panoply of the little creatures that inhabit the everyday worlds of nature-dwelling folk.  My husband is from a farm outside Vienna, and he spent his days picking up baby hedgehogs and watching them ball up in his hands, hunting bats in the barn at night, and watching the wild cats hop on mice.  He has that farm attitude that things die and are born and it’s no big deal. But for me, not living a “natural” life, I think animals should be eternal.  It doesn’t much matter to me if they’re in 2D on a fabric or 3D on a lamp. Poor subtitutes for the real thing, surely, but not bad for learning which animal is which (plus, they can’t bite you)!

We all remember having to go to our grandmother’s closet to get her winter coat for her and it smelled like moth balls.  A disgusting smell, even though when we’re older we respect her for taking care of her clothes while we let them unravel rather than put moth balls in our closets.  Somehow they smell like the dead.  And closets are scary anyway – you never know what goes on in there.  Like my crazy Aunt Ginnie who believed Satan was living in her closet, and who am I to argue? But like many things, smells have gotten better. Therefore closets are less terrifying. So take care of your clothes, and kiss your granny for being so wise.

“This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.”  Rainer Maria Rilke

The 3 Valentine’s sprites below are by Jo Anna Cassady, who can be reached by email (pmresort@bellsouth.net).

Happy Valentine’s Day in advance!

Little dresses.  Every girl owns one, every girl saves one, every woman remembers one.  They are always the ethereal dresses, the ones you can almost see through, the ones that smell like summer and remind you of bees at your ears, humming something you think you understand.  Their delicate natures are the transition between girlhood and womanhood, so inviting and so holy.  Seeing little legs stick out from their skirts, hearing the rustles, watching them flutter in a breeze, some mother in her bitter peach dress pointing a glove at a child… memory in whispering organza.

(This above photo is by Chrissie White, a 15-year old photographer!)

Animals in and of themselves are fascinating, but somehow their heads are more magical than their impressively engineered bodies.  As I have never been much of a scientist, I like to make up my own reasons for everything, and my conclusion about animal heads is that they are so magnificent because they are the structures out of which an animal contemplates the world.  Since they surely see amazing distortions in what we see as humans, then their heads have to be shaped differently.  Their ears have to be on top of their heads so they can pick up signals from miles away. Their eyes are bulging because they are shocked by pretty much everything in our world.  They have tails because they know enough to swat away anything that’s coming up behind them. And they don’t have fingers per se because they don’t want to pick up anything from the ground.  Their ladies-in-waiting manners are a lesson to us savages – be mindful at all costs or you don’t deserve a head.

How can you not love lucite?  You can imagine you’re sitting or sleeping in glass, wearing glass, putting your feet up on glass, all the while not worrying about the sound of crashing to the ground or your ensuing screams.  There is something so “Thin Man” about it, elegant, modern, sophisticated and just a little bit bordello-like.  (I love those stores in Chinatown that sell obscene acrylic tables with huge swans holding them up, beaks pointing at your privates.)  It’s so easy to make it tacky, and just as easy to make it beautiful.  That thin line – it seduces all good designers, doesn’t it?

There are 2 sides to every door.  One side wants you to come in, the other wants you to stay out.  This threshold is like so many other things – life/death, love/hate, hello/goodbye so it represents that fine line across which the opposite occurs.  Very profound if you think about it.  Given that this all happens in an instant, it behooves us to mark it with style and aplomb.  Let’s begin…

While I think people go too far in identifying what’s theirs (such as my father, who labels everything from the spices to his umbrellas), I do think luggage is the one thing that MUST be identifiable.  People do all sorts of stupid things to make their typical black rolling suitcase stand out on the luggage turnstyle – knots of twine, airline paper tags, duct tape, etc.  I once waited for my bags on a flight from Dubrovnik with Siegfried of Siegfried and Roy fame, and, expecting a glittering gauche and fabulous luggage tag on some over-the-top white leather suitcase, I was astonished and more than a little disappointed to find that he too had the same suitcase as the rest of us, and suffered the same “elbowing to yank the wrong suitcase out” frustration.  No tag to mark him.  No tag to show his years of fame and glory, his unqiue tiger-taming talents.  Nothing!  Surely we mortals can do much better than that, on the mini-Vegas stage of our own lives.  Here’s a start…

As Valentine’s Day approaches, I once again revel in stories of people who have gone mad for love.  Nothing is quite so poetic as these madmen and women.  One of my favorites is the painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, who lived in New York for many years.  Across the alley from his tiny apartment was an opera singer, whom he had never seen, only heard.  He fell in love with her, running out each night to leave flowers on her doorstep.  She never knew who he was.  He became such a recluse he made his own paints in a pot on his stove, never cleaning it, so his paintings themselves have a cracked and wounded texture.  He had once married a woman, who, on their wedding day, told him she was renouncing sex as it burdened her spiritual growth.  Then she died (it is said this below painting was for her). And so he grew older, pining away for another woman whom he had no desire to touch.  And then there is Pierrot, the sad clown who never got his hands on Columbine…the list goes on and on.  Ah, love!  It is truly grand.

I always collect links to fabulous jewels, and since they are backing up my database, I had to share them all with you today!  They require no introduction, other than a drumroll and a red carpet!