Coat Love

I love this coat.

If I owned this vintage coat I would move someplace very chilly so I could wear it everyday.

Coat via OldRags on Tumbler.

Folded

Evening dress by Charles James, 1950 United States (NYC), MFA Boston

I saw this glorious gown on Tumbler this morning. It made me think of all the designers out there in the last few years with their folding and poofing of evening gowns and how in the end none of them could manipulate fabric the way Charles James could.

Lists

So there are lists that people want you to make.

Normally I won't, but I will do two for you.

The first is what's the most played songs on your iPod. Well I don't have an iPod, but I do have a iTouch and these are the top 20:

1 Songbird (Fleetwood Mac)
2 Hymn to Love (Cyndi Lauper)
3 One and Only (Adele)
4 You Belong to Me (Jason Wade)
5 The Cave (Mumford & Sons)
6 Carved in Stone (The Subdudes)
7 Love of My Life (Queen)
8 Bad Romance (Gaga)
9 Mr. Blue Sky (ELO)
10 The Way You Look Tonight (Sinatra)
11 Not Ready to Make Nice (Dixie Chicks)
12 Me and Mr. Jones (Amy Winehouse)
13 You Know I’m No Good (Amy Winehouse)
14 When I Fall In Love (Nat King Cole)
15 Don’t Stop Me Now (Queen)
16 Rainy Night in Soho (Pouges)
17 Viva Gloria (Greenday)
18 Sigh No More (Mumford and Sons)
19 Elenore (Turtles)
20 The Irish Rover (Pogues)

The other list is inspired by Pajiba's yearly Top 10 Celebrates we want to shag in which we post our top 5 freebies list. Here is mine.

1. Benedict Cumberbatch

2. Idris Elba

3. Alexander Skarsgard

4. Timothy Olyphant

5. Robert Downey Jr.

I guess this was just an excuse to post picture of pretty manly men.

Blast From The Past

Vintage Playboy Bunny Manual has been scanned and added to the intertubes.

It's a bit of a hoot.

And yeah, sexist.

Via Jezebel.

Cocktails and Culture

North Star Vintage just sent out a Tweet:

An exhibit about two of my favorite things - vintage and cocktails!

I agree. What a fabulous combination for an exhibit:

As you enter Cocktail Culture, an intoxicating exhibit of apparel, accoutrement and ephemera at the Rhode Island School of Design's Museum of Art, it's hard not to think of Billy Strayhorn's lyrics in his jazz standard "Lush Life":....

The exhibit feels like an elegant and witty party that can be followed over six decades, from 1920 to 1980. You can almost hear the chatter. Think of it this way, say Kate Irvin and Laurie Brewer, both curators with the museum's Costumes and Textile Department. Cocktails — the word might be from the docked tail of a certain kind of show horse — are about mixing. Which, during Prohibition, was necessary to cover up the awful taste of bathtub gin......

Cocktail Culture: Ritual and Invention in American Fashion, 1920–1980 will be on display at the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, R.I., until July 31.

How can this not be wonderful?

Wish it was a travelling exhibit....

As always my favorite scenes mixing wonderful vintage and liquor come from The Thin Man movies:

My Wild Jungle Cat

Opinions Are Like Assholes

because every fucker has one.

The most cringe worthy quote from this review of Bridesmaids?

This one:

About the only things all the bridesmaids have in common is that they talk like truck drivers and have low moral tones.

I like the old fashioned idea of looking up to women. They are our mothers and the mothers of our children. In almost every society they are placed on a pedestal. The idea here is to take away from women this respect they are due as mothers, and to view them as just no different from some bum in a bar. No need for a man to treat them special, like a lady, because that idea is passé.

I would respond but then I would be painted as "no lady" with low morals who talks like a truck driver & does not deserve to be treated special by all the manly men in my life.

So yeah, I'll be a good little woman who keeps her mouth shut so I can be put on a pedestal because I am a fucking mother.

Sheesh....

How Much Do I love Stephen Fry?

So much:

On Language

(So, to the pedants I say)

But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet.

Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava.

Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble.

So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen.

Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity.

Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.

Words to live by....

And Still Alive...

Really this year has just sucked in so many ways and I've just been unable to work though it for the past few months.

But that does not mean that there are not things to blog about.

Benedict Cumberbatch is adorkable and lovely with either his natural ginger with the epic sideburns or the dark locks of Sherlock Holmes.

I wish I lived in the UK so I could be a proper crazy old lady stalker.

He's in a small independent film, Third Star, that has a limited release in the US and will be in a couple of other "larger" films later in the year and of course Sherlock: Season 2 is filming right now in Wales.

Also Mrs. Obama makes me all kinds of happy:

And while I thought Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows part one was BORING and had NOT ENOUGH SNAPE, I am looking forward to the end and will probably join some friends at the midnight showing next month.

AND I hear that Crazy Sarah Palin has made a movie about...herself!

Still Alive

I'm here.

Just have not been feeling chatty.

A blue funk indeed.

Here, look at this great picture my brilliant teenager took the other day.

People Die, That's What they Do

12/25/95
Julie,
Have a wonderful Christmas and always remember me at my best -
surrounded by beauty with my nose planted in the bible. :-)
(yes, seriously he wrote out a smiley face....remember when people used to do that?)

Jesus, look how skinny I am.

People have died.
That's what people do!
That's what Moriarty screamed at Sherlock.
And he's right.

Is there a word for the feeling you get when you Google the name of an old friend because you were too lazy to look for it and wanted to give him a call because you thought "man it has been awhile" only to find out said friend had passed away?
Because that just happened to me. My friend Frank Miranti has been dead since 2009 and I had no idea.
How much do I suck?
I need something cool and hip that describes the drowning sadness I feel at the loss of one of the most extraordinary people I've ever know known most of my life. Not just my adult life, but all my teen years and the whole time I've been a wife and mother. He was THE ONE who became the friend who refused to let me just drift away like I have a habit of doing with people.

I still dream about him, he was the hottest guy I ever kissed (we never dated which was a good thing...even though he did tell me, years later, that the one time I met his dad he told Frank he should marry me or that I was a "Keeper" or something like that....).

Hot, right?

But I lost touch with him in the last few years because I suck as a friend.
What is the name of the feeling you have when realize that you really SHOULD have called him back in April 2009 when he made his yearly birthday call to you.
But you, being the lazy bitch that you are just let it go and figured you would talk to him at Christmas instead. And then when Christmas came and he didn't call you just filed it away in your head until today when you think "you know Frank didn't call me at all last year, I'll see if he is on Facebook (which he would never have been) or Twitter (what a ridiculous idea) and get in touch and apologize for being such a shitty friend...again" but instead you find out that he didn't call because he was dead.
I guess fucking shitty is a good word to cover how I feel right now. Yeah and I'm pretty pissed off at myself too.

I used to think about driving up to see him (it's not that far away from here) but that never happened and I thought there would be time later to be more then the "over the phone" friends we had become.

Frank took me to see The Wall stoned and kissed me in his car after (I was 17) and broke my silly teenage heart. He was there when I graduated from high school, when I came back from Arizona and when I got married, he wrote me tons of letters when he went away to college (I still have them) and made sure I was sure and happy when I got married and ignored how uneducated I was about the world at times and really thought I could be more then I was and he always had advice about my sad pathetic gardens and worried about my spiritual life more then I did over the years.
He was brilliant and funny and so fucking generous and kind and was a better friend then I ever could possibly deserve.

I know...still cute for a middle aged guy.

So better late then never...I loved Frank and I think I'll go get drunk now and take to my bed for a few days in his honor and then start getting the gardens ready for spring.

So here is his obituary that even mentions his old car that he had when I first met him in the early 80's.
http://www.columbiamissourian.com/obits/obit/1369/

And a lovely post from a friend about Frank and his lemon tree and his life.
http://marciemcguire2.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/lemon-tree-very-pretty/

And since Sustainable Farms and Communities, Inc in Columbia Mo. seemed to be an organization important to him you can always donate in his name:
http://farmersmarketpavilion.org/donate/


(Frank would have also looked over this post and marked my grammatical/spelling errors....now all I have is spell check.)

Saturday Baking

I baked my own hamburger buns yesterday.
Delish.
I guess making buns (really they are good for all types of sandwiches) needs to be added to the weekly baking list.
Got the recipe here.
I cut the sugar to just 2 mostly because the hubby would have bitched about them being too sweet.
I made 10, but I think next time I will divide the dough into 12.

My Betsy Johnson....

Well, maybe vintage, not sure.
I've had this great Betsy Johnson neck scarf for a few years and I get to wear it once or twice a year. Today was one of those days.
So I wore it on the walk up the drive (SHUT UP!) to get the mail.

Brilliant Idea

There are a good number of networking sites that allow you to point others to interesting finds, but I don't think any are specifically focused on vintage until now.
Vintage Find It is "is the first independent social bookmarking site specifically for vintage. Shopping for vintage finds can be overwhelming. There are so many sites to look at. Here, you will find the best vintage on the web. Whether you love vintage clothing, home decor, art, you name it. Found by you. Curated by you. Show us your favorite vintage finds."

The site is the brainchild of Sandra at Debutante Clothing.

Brilliant!

http://vintagefindit.com/

The 1920's amazing silk embroidered coat at the top is in the possession of Ang at Dorothea's Vintage, but you can have it for $1200.

My God...Dior

From Tom and Lorenzo:
John Galliano once again goes back to the archives of the House of Dior for his inspirations, offering beautiful, whimsical, feminine looks that remind you of classic Dior without replicating it outright.

Calling Nora Charles

Via a link from Mary at Vintage Kitsch & Collectibles.

Winter in the City 1940's....

Downtown Little Rock in the 40's.....or is it?
Click to see the full photograph.



Nice bit of luck makes for a fun composition.

How to Respond

On Little Green Footballs some mook posted this about the shooting today:

I believe that people are ultimately responsible for their own actions. If it turns out he is a lefty wacko who thinks she did not go far enough provide health care or some other lefty cause who will you blame then?

In response a most awesome regular poster responded:

People are ultimately responsible for their own actions. However, if it turns out that the shooter was motivated by violent rhetoric from left-wing figures, I will hold THEM accountable for what they said.

See, this is the thing. If the Baader-Meinhof Gang, or the Weathermen, or WTF, come back from the crypt and start spewing hate and blowing shit up, I will not be backing them, because, you see, I am an American liberal, and they are freakazoid assholes, and will be even if I find one or two basic ideas we agree on. If their rhetoric starts to be parroted by Democrats in Washington, I will not vote for those people, and will actively campaign for non-crazy Democrats.

And I certainly won't be caught dead on LGF pretending that the Weathermen are 'really a mix' of extreme right-wing and left-wing ideas, I will just be condemning their asses as radical terrorists. I don't like radical terrorists.

This isn't so hard. No conservative is diminished by the actions of radical wingnuts. It's a fucking radical wingnut! But pretending that there is no problem, that the rhetoric isn't out there, that it isn't bad, and that we don't have a problem, is just plain dumb.

And all I can say is THIS!

Dear Sarah.

Dear Sarah step up, be an adult and please take a bit of personal responsibility for your part in how crazy things have gotten. It does not matter why. What matters is that what you said could have resulted in a shooting. As a public figure you have a responsibility for the tone of the conversations. In an effort to tone down the rhetoric you might want to apologize for the targets and vow to never use gun/violent language when it comes to political rivals.
Or make maps.
Maps seem to get you in trouble.
There should be no place in our society for that type of talk.

and I'll begin by apologizing for anything I might have said in the past.
Now it is your turn Sarah.

And a Happy New Year (with the Thin Man)...

Happy New Year....

Enjoy some epic drinking with the Charleses.