Cans of beans and banners, 1919

8" x 10"

Cambell's Beans

Grocer's scale

Paper is heavy and back is blank

Covo frying oil. 1919 or so.

Black and white and etsy all over



I love this treasury. Hard to explain to non-believer's, I guess, but treasuries are the ritual of the etsy observer: assemble lovely items in a group based on a theme, contact everyone. Like throwing confetti to the skies, sometimes. Sometimes it's better, like filling a pontiac with Christmas presents and driving to Ohio, where fruitcake and peppermints await.

But this time, which is best of all, it made etsy's front page this afternoon, setting off a flurry of graphic, elegant happiness worldwide.

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.

Vintage as a black and white cookie

Glaser's Bake Shop black and white cookies

This week, like nearly all of them, has not gone as planned. The chicks are doing marvelously but the camera makes them panic, so pictures are forthcoming once they are more used to the giant black spectre of a digital SLR in their midst. The chicken coop has arrived, brought on a Ford F350 and a pneumatic hydraulic superflexible trailer, driven by a man wearing an FD hat and sweatshirt and ghillie-toed logger boots. And levi's. It made me think, the sight of those big macho boots (he had big feet) with the frou-frou, snaz-ola touch of the kiltie toe. A functional part of the boot's design with a purpose: to block embers, protect the upper from chafing from laces. But they look fancy, regardless. They do.

The toe in question, called a Kiltie, looks fussy but has a purpose.

Same toes, not the same purpose. Vintage Italian Bruno Magli loafers.

Why do people wear what they wear? Why do they pick what they pick? Which me straight to the revelation of the black and white cookie.

Glaser's Bake Shop. 87th Street, First Avenue, NYC.

The point is, the black and white cookie is a flexible entity that can be savored and considered in many ways (Seinfeld, etc). 27 people might have one and noone will eat it the same way. And, incidentally, it started as a way to use up leftover cake dough — waste not in ye olden days. It is at least 108 years old: Glaser's, a famed old world bakery that happens to be in my sister's neighborhood, has been making them since the opened in 1902. Which makes it bona fide vintage.

Manning the ovens at Glaser's, some years ago.

And that fondant icing, made of simple ingredients, adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Like great outfits. Like a great piece of vintage, that emanates something far more than a piece of cloth with seams. We all know the phrase: a Peggy dress,

A Joan dress.

Means a world. Come to think of it, how many times do we see Joan in a black and white dress? Doesn't suit her. There's nothing really black and white on her surface, though there is,
I think, on the inside. Her curves have their own morality.

All from Simply Vintage treasury by cabinwindows

The thing about black and white cookies, which belong to the honored category of Food That is Vintage, is that they are stark and yet they are delicious. They are geometrically divided, they are round, and yet they have that warm, crumbly potential you can taste before you start eating. Vintage is that way, or can be. In black and white, it can look even more luscious. The forms come out, the lines, the retro, old-school, antique mechanics. You can nearly see the drafter's pencil at work, the giant shears at the tailor's. Cabinwindows is the etsy moniker for a biologist and anthropologist who made the treasury excerpted above. Black and white. She grew up watching biology filmstrips, lives in a haunted cabin, and she gets the black and white cookie of it all.

Dress that cupcake #2

See the first post for the concept, in which I decided that instead of creating an outfit from a room (did Domino do that?) or a room from an outfit, we should really get to the basics here and dress an outfit from the most fundamental food, the cupcake.

cupcake/outfit

cupcake: red velvet cupcake with creamcheese frosting, mingmakescupcakes

outfit: 1970s oxblood gathered vegan handbag (ever since I found out a vegan baker
won the cupcake baker reality show I've been into vegan as a cupcake concept), rustbeltthreads

1960s red velvet babydoll dress (red or not,
this is a remarkable dress!), thrush

chalcedony and silver necklace (luminous, hot, and
beautifully made), polestar

1960s Air Step nerd heels (but the shoes really should go with the dress), lisazain

1960s Copenhagen poncho (another phenomenal piece), veritevintage

Vintage lotto marker bobby pins (imagine how adorable), factorygirlashli

long cuff mittens like Bella's in red (ok, sure, like Bella's, but also like my Auntie Deena's, and she remains my personal 60s icon), ilZdr

Table service for the American Home, 1939

The threshers eating dinner, photo by Wallace Kirkland for Life, n.d. (1930s)

SERVICE

There are three general types of service. Russian, when all food is served in the kitchen and brought to the table after the guests are seated. Each plate may be served or the food may be arranged on platters for each guest to help himself.   Family Type, when the food is all served at the table by the host or hostess or both.  Combination, when the main course is served at the table by the host and all the other courses served in portions from the kitchen.
                                                              — from The American Home Cookbook, 1939.