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Tema, Johnny Weir's Japanese Chin

Having covered etsy on theweekings, 

and toured all its haunted do-goodnessisms and come up rather haunted myself,

I turned to its obvious counterpart: chickens. That's where the Olivebridge Pastoral came from: there's a family album growing on these Buff Orpingtons. And since the essay on life with chickens was published in theweeklings, Lucille the broody hen went broody again, and we now have 6 more chicks. This is all beyond human control, unless we want to try to "break" her of her broodiness by putting her in a wire crate with her belly exposed to the cold air. But with Lucille, that won't work: she is a dedicated broody hen. So she gets to have her brood. Photos will follow. For now, here's a generic yellow chick:

Having covered etsy, having covered chickens, the obvious next subject is possibly the remarkably heartfelt, insanely athletic, flamboyantly gorgeous endless double adjective of Johnny Weir's instagram. But there's a novel about to wolves to finish, and it howls whenever I leave it alone.

Piper wakes up after dinner.

Filmed in the worst light imaginable with a crappy iphone. Just click play.

Piper is the small one. The bigger one with the black ear is her cousin, Pixel. The one with the brown ear that looks calm isn't really calm at all. She's Pixel's sister. Name's Widget.

New pup

Her name is Piper. She is 8 weeks old. She's a Llewellin Setter.

She has a very strong personality. She will not sleep in her crate. She will not hang out in her crate. She wants to be where the action is.

But since she's a puppy, she stays awake with everyone as long as she can and then she can't stay awake anymore. And falls asleep. But only on laps. No crates.

On a lap she'll sleep for hours. And hours.  And hours. Just no crates. Absolutely not.

stuart and diane's place

stuart likes to have some new shirts on hand for special occasions

 

diane saves everything, like a length of old linen lace and a lone plate

wooden hangers from the 1920s hang in their closet, unburdened

diane still has her mother's childhood sunday dress

on the second floor landing, an old pint milk jar sits on a chenille rug

diane commandeered stuart's old toolbox for her own collection

at night they both dream of oregon, a trip to the coast they'd like to take.

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.

This is not an occasional thing.

Years ago I used to make sure to write celebratory writings on the occasion of a celebration of an occasion. In other words, back in the days when my head was clearer, before the fuzz began to lay along the meridians and frollocks of the brain and the world didn't quite seem so muddy. On the occasion of the new year, for instance, I'd write something resolutionary. Though even then, back when I had short hair, sometimes very short, and big eyes, sometimes very big, and sported a generally slightly bored look, I wasn't bored. I was consternated: our new year is not necessarily their new year and their new year is not those other people's new year and so is it really the demarcation of anything?

That was probably a sign of early onset. Meanwhile, the helliday tide of family joy and angst (— someone make me up a word mixing those two and I'll send you some pie. Joyangste? Pronounced the french way? Gives a dressiness to it. Jangst? Sounds Freudian. Jongst? Isn't that the name of a famous skier who wrapped himself around a tree in Gstaad? — ) has come and gone, and with it my marathon baking session that nearly melted our kitchen wall to death. Which was a very great thing. The net result of 4 cheesecakes, 7 batches of peanut butter cookies, 4 batches of chocolate chip, a killer batch of twice-baked shortbread, a whole herd of jelly kiss cookies and lots of satellite batches ungapatchka'd together from leftover sturm und drang is an accelerated Kitchen Renovation Plan.

Apparently, and this is switching into confessional blaggage over here so forgive me or skip, I have been, um, yelling for a couple of years about the kitchen. I have no recollection of yelling. Maybe a goddamit the fiftieth-whazztheyeffith time my knife fell between the crack between the dingy 9th-hand tiny stove and the loose scrap of faux formica counter (color: burned marshmallow, from years of someone who apparently liked to flambé her toast), and I therefore had to fish it out using the handle of the swiffer, teasing a mound of old yam shavings and dog hair and vintage mysterianisms into the middle of the kitchen floor where, somewhere in their greasy midst, was the knife.

Maybe, sure, just a little, little curse when the linoleum backsplash absorbed the boiling over tomato-based sweet and sour chicken soup instead of deflected it. Maybe a tiny little noise when the cardboard box of teabags plummeted from the cabinet over the sink into the soaking soup pot, endowing some very fancy Japanese tea with an unwanted iridescent lavender-eucalyptus cast. Just a little squeak.

Worth mentioning, however, that the stove has tantrums. What come are strange spikes in temperature from the oven: bake at 325º can become char at 600º if you're not there to monitor, to cajole, to turn, to readjust. That may have had something to do with the melted wall. And since a marathon baking session is also like pulling triple shifts as a museum guard in the Picasso galleries when the psychotics had their field trip, I may have been a bit distracted from the whole wall thing. Which I did. And was. I was a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, and I did once chase a deranged man through the catacombs between the fake walls during the blockbuster Picasso show.

It's a good thing the wall finally melted. Melting walls speak so much louder than quietly unyelling cooks. But FYI in the spirit of the luncheonette we are not buying the veneer farm or the New New New this or the Shaker farmhouse look or the up-the-value-of-the-house thing. We are not going to spend thousands. I am hoping to keep the atomic-modern metal base cabinet underneath the 1940s sink, and the 1940s sink, and the 1950s'cabin pantry closet, though all are a little — scabby. But the horizontal beadboard trimmed with scraps, the warbled strips of wood paneling, the linoleum backmelt,  the 1970s vinyl faux stone floor tiles that shifted during the Big Melt (the ones around the stove sort of  skated around), are gone yesterday. There is retrofunctional and vintage workable and then there is junkyard dysfunctional. Stay tuned.

Luncheonette x Sartorialist

1980s bittersweet boots in the warmth of the studio, luncheonettevintage

same boots photographed freezing outside on the feet of this adorable girl, thesartorialist

Nearly 4 weeks old.

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.

New writing, old church

Today is another delicious writer's marathon, the COTA readings at the Walloon Church in New Paltz. Twenty minute meals of poets and fiction writers and writers of other ilks, boom boom boom, part of a whole art-filled day: dance, installations, sculpture, music. I'm reading at 1:40, one of the eager jets taking off from this literary runway.  Planning on reading Galletas, just because I hardly ever do, and it does that 20 minute thing with room to spare — possibly for a scene from the new book. Always look forward, someone once told me. And keep it neat.

What really gets me going is reading in this old church, on this very very old street, I mean back to the 1680s kind of street. Old French Huguenot and Dutch gravestones tilt and hunker and shrug at each other in the graveyard right outside. New Paltz was founded by the French Huguenots, and Huguenot Street has some kind of honor as the oldest continuously settled neighborhood in the country. That's hundreds and hundreds of years of tricycles, bread, money, old cabbage leaves, cars and horses and worn down boots, winters, falls, rain, heat.

Graveyard, Walloon Church, New Paltz

Ulster county has lots of traces of old Dutch around. The buffet at Eng's Chinese Restaurant in Kingston is called the Smorgasbord, and everyone, including three year old tow headed boys, knows how to say it. The Pine Hill Bakery has Dutch shoes decorating the corners, and one nailed to a tree, higher up than anyone could reach. The old French culture, les Walloons, the protestants — is right here too, but often overlooked. But New Paltz is named for a village in Germany that sheltered the Huguenots. It's not Dutch. The name DuBois, not the Blanche kind but the Louis kind — traces right back to one of the first French families. New Rochelle, down south a good ways, is Huguenot. Staten Island's south shore. History is a 9,000 layer cake, baked during endless arguments, conflicts, migrations — so often about the divine. Divine providence as persecution, as run away and settle, as make a deal with the Esopus and build a hut, build another. Hate to ship to water to shore and logs to stones to arts festivals. My mother hated organized religion, bless her atheist modernist soul. But without it, we wouldn't necessarily be here.

Preparation for a chicken

1906 postcard, obscurio.

We have joined the zietgeist though we never intended to, and are heading for the receiving end of 25 or 26 or 27 Buff Orpington chicks sometime between September 18th and 23rd.

1908 postcard, laurasvintagegarden.

The factual/numeric aspects of this plan are a bit shaky to me, but I didn't make the arrangements. As a certain breed of Virgo I am fighting the compulsion to see the plan as indefinite as mist. But that was another life.

1939 encyclopedia page, vintagehomerecycled.

In this life, the person who arranged the chicken thing is anything but misty, so there is no question: we are getting them. And it was his job, as a little boy, to take care of all the chickens on his grandparents' farm. So, zeitgeist or not, this isn't a nouveau chickens situation — for him. You could say that by virtue of my union with someone who has squat respect for the zeitgeist, I have in fact joined the zeitgeist.

1970 back to the land followers, westvirginaculture.

There is much preparing: coop, chicken area, fence, whether or not we can let the birds range all over the yard. Our pigeons do — they mill around while the dogs are out, since the dogs were proofed off pigeons long ago. If we can convince the dogs that chickens are just big pigeons things should be fine.

1961 Pasadena school photo, totalvintage.

One of us is mulling over the right coop and bedding and feed.

1934, chicken house in Cairo, caravancollection.

One of us is looking for the right egg baskets and chicken-ish things. Not to mention gingham chicken-and-egg-gathering dresses.

1940s gingham dress, allencompany.

1920s-30s gingham dress, adelaidehomesewn.

1950s handmade dress, clevernettle.

And obsessing over how to use all the eggs. 

egg basket, rollinghillsvintage.