Grace Hartigan, Abstract Expressionist and one time New York painter has died at the age of 86, reports The Baltimore Sun. Hartigan was a confidante of the poet Frank O’Hara who had posed for her and written poems to her. She said that although he was homosexual, their emotional intimacy was more intense than any she had with a heterosexual man. O’Hara’s biographer, Brad Gooch, believed the lines “Grace/ to be born and live as variously as possible,” which are engraved on O’Hara’s tombstone, were written for Hartigan. The artist credited O’Hara with influencing her on the use of popular culture. O’Hara’s poetry could jump from Picasso and Lana Turner. She told The New York Times: “Frank broke down the barriers between so-called high and low art.” She took to Abstract Expressionism in the late 40’s but not long afterward began spiking it with images of ads and department store mannequins and street life, early evidence of what she calls her “desire to get the balance of abstraction and imagery, like the porridge, just right — not too hot, not too cold.”

Poet stirs up religious storms over new book

01 - Here In My Heart - Al Martino

The first ever recorded UK Number One Single starts as these things probably should: with a swell of strings. “Here in my heart I just yearn for you, only,” sings Martino, and you believe him, in that way you always believe singers like him, singers for whom the only reason you don’t sing something louder is because you physically can’t.  His song is like a wave, echoing that swell from the beginning, and there’s a moment at the 2 minute mark when it sounds like he, and the orchestra, are going to burst, when they play and sing louder, stronger. And how does it end? With him repeating the most repeated line of the song again, with more gusto, and the Orchestra playing the final notes of the film soundtrack that they’ve condensed into their three minute timeslot. 

I almost wish that this song was more symbolic of what was to come, that I could sum up the Beatles and the Queen and the Spice Girls that will follow over the next fifty years through it, but I can’t; and somehow that’s more appropriate, really. It works best that it’s nearly fluff, that it sounds like hundreds of soundtracks to Golden Age Musicals, that it sounds like the music played over the logo of a Film corporation, that it sounds like the closing performance at a show for Royalty. It’s fluff, but the most brilliant kind, the kind that stays there without you even noticing it.

Greg Nanamura is an antique collector

here are the things i liked in his collection

Pair of Sconces Coral colored enamel
Aluminum & brass
Italy, 1940s refinished

———-

Coat Rack & Umbrella Stand

Chrome & ebonized wood
Buenos Aires, Argentina 1950s

————–

Chandelier

Lightolier
Silver plate and lucite
American, 1950s

————-

Karl Gustav Hansen Danish (1914-unknown)

Pair of candelabras
Sterling silver
Made by Hans Hansen
Denmark, 1955
Marked: Hans Hansen Sterling
Denmark 494 ANNO 1955

————-

peace

This is my second film by Kenji Mizoguchi, and to even try to compare it to my first would be incredibly unfair.  ”Ugetsu” was such a surreal, haunting, sublime, and beautiful experience that, even despite some overacting (traditional of that era’s Japanese cinema) and other minor flaws i’d just about call it a perfect film-watching experience.  ”Sansho the Bailiff” is not.  The overacting that I was able to overlook in “Ugetsu” is even more visibly in full force in “Sansho” and cannot be overlooked (a case in point was when the protagonist Zushio literally crawls on all fours to gain an audience with an important minister while screaming and pleading - I had to lower the volume so my eardrums wouldn’t explode), and combine that overacting with some plot points that are beyond histrionic, and much of “Sansho the Bailiff” is melodrama defined.  I’ve never been a fan of melodrama (and that’s putting it lightly), and it’s melodrama that practically defines “Sansho”…and yet I bought into it.  Credit Mizoguchi’s impeccable craft as a director (right up there with the transcendent ”Ugetsu”), or the simple fact that you’d have to be a heartless/curmudgeonly Nazi to not sympathize with the plight of a mother and her two children being separated by slavers, but “Sansho” makes exaggerated melodrama work to create an imperfect, but undeniably powerful, experience.

A basic plot description won’t win any subtlety awards: a kindly governor is sent into exile for defying an unjust order, and his wife and two young children must flee into the wilderness.  One morning, the mother is duped into losing the kids - brother and sister are sold as slaves to the cruel Sansho the Bailiff, and mother becomes a prostitute, growing more and more dejected and obsessed with seeing her kids again by the day.  

And the histrionic touches don’t end there: you get the father telling the son Zushio “without mercy, man is not a human being,” and later a priest lamenting to a fugitive Zushio that man is filled with greed and corruption.  It’s stuff like this that I absolutely hate, when a film’s moralistic themes and moral quandaries are shoved down my throat via motivational quotables, and I almost got sick to my stomach as soon as “Sansho” had this from the get-go (at the expense of proper pacing at the beginning - I really had no idea what was going on at the outset ).  But then just take in what happens to these characters as we go along, and the sheer sense of agony that presides over everything, and I dare you not to be repulsed by Sansho’s treatment of his slaves, or pitying of the pathetic state of that mother once she’s separated from her children, or moved by Anju’s sacrifice allowing her brother to make his escape.  And really, it all comes down to Mizoguchi’s direction.  I definitely cringed more than once as select slaves received Sansho’s signature punishment of forehead-branding (once by Zushio himself, who’s grown into Sansho’s most trusted lackey…in a movie with a few too many plot omissions, which is surprising considering it’s two hours long, I would’ve liked to see the relationship between the cruel Sansho and this boy he’s molded over ten years expanded upon)…and yet we never see the branding itself.  The camera just keeps rolling, watching the reactions of the people around the poor sap getting branded - their shocked and dismayed reaction, and the shrill screams from below, is more stomach-churning than an image of the branding itself.  We see Zushio and Anju’s mother, pathetic in her obsessive weeping for her children as she crawls on a cliff overlooking the sea, singing that song that’ll resonate throughout the entire film and eventually spur her children into action - the acting is beyond over-the-top, but the camera simply regards her and subtly follows her, letting this poor woman air out her deep grief.  It’s heartbreaking.  Or there’s the cold but active efficiency inside Sansho’s manor, or Zushio and Anju’s rushed and on-the-spot plot to get him out of there, and perhaps the most tragic and moving of all, an intimate meeting between estranged parent and child on an abandoned beach.  Each of these scenes are in completely different contexts and represent either chaos or desperation or tragedy or reconciliation, but each is still regarded with the same eye of the signature Mizoguchi camera: as few cuts as possible, and relatively stationary, following the vital action very subtly.  The director is letting the characters and their actions do all the talking: the camera, like the audience, is just there to soak it in.

OK, so “Sansho”’s atmosphere and set design don’t evoke the same otherworldly experience as “Ugetsu,” but why should the two even be compared in the first place, just ‘cuz they have the same man at the helm?  ”Sansho” deals with very different material, but Mizoguchi’s artistry still shines.  If melodramatic plot elements and performances are more prominent here than in “Ugetsu” (there I go comparing them again ), that’s all the more reason to feel the burden of this family’s lamentable situation even further.  Wonderfully minimalistic direction and cinematography, along with exaggerated performances that would otherwise be uncalled for, basically cancel each other out.  Articulating the emotional weight of “Sansho the Bailiff” are a hobbled mother’s weeping, a young man and woman’s quiet desperation to escape their lot in life while putting up with it (maybe a bit too willingly in the case of Zushio), and the song that bonds them together over a great distance.

8.5/10

Out of necessity, my maternal grandmother, Catalina, had never been a housewife. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1916, the second of 12 children (additional siblings had died at very young ages or were stillborn), she was raised in a traditional Spanish household. Her ancestors were from Spain, some possibly from the Canary Islands. From a young age, she helped my great grandmother, Clara, with household chores and the care of her younger siblings. My great grandfather, Segundo, laid down the rules: girls didn’t wear pants, his daughters couldn’t date unchaperoned. My grandmother’s education ended around the eighth grade. Because Puerto Rico was under US rule by then, she had learned English.

I have often considered my grandmother’s upbringing in light of the woman I knew growing up: a divorced single parent living in her own apartment in Harlem in Manhattan.

Riverside Drive, north of 135th St., not far from my grandmother's apartment

Sugar cane workers resting, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1941 Dec. Delano, Jack,, 1914-, photographer., The Library of Congress

A few years later, my grandfather kept his promise. He brought her to the states, hoping to fulfill his dreams of being a batboy for the Yankees. He never did, though he remained a loyal Yankees fan until he died. “Los jankees,” he’d say in his accented English. Instead, he worked in the Waldorf Hotel’s kitchens—years later, I found silverware in her drawer stamped with the hotel’s insignia—and taught himself bookkeeping.

Sometime early on, my grandmother grew tired of his drinking and suspected he was having an affair. They separated, and my mother stayed with her. Periodically, my grandmother sent my mother back to Puerto Rico to live with her parents in Ponce for months at a time because of her job. She needed to support herself and my mother. My grandfather stayed in the picture, visiting regularly and providing money for child support.

In the 1950’s, my grandmother worked long hours stooped over a sewing machine at the Eve Stillman lingerie factory in the Garment District. She’d arrive at work in stylish dresses or suits, felt wool hats, long gloves and high heels and change to a housecoat, just as the other women did. Despite Manhattan’s cold winters with its bracing winds sweeping up from the Hudson River, she never once wore pants. In that way, she obeyed her father, who had never known temperatures below 50 degrees, no doubt.

Grandma kept a Thermos of coffee or tea by her side. She took coffee, smoking and lunch breaks, per the ladies’ garment worker union rules. In the large room surrounded by rows of industrial sewing machines and cutting table, she hand-embroidered flowers and other designs on fine cotton or silk nightgowns, camisoles and other undergarments. She sewed delicate lace and transformed thin scraps of fabric into tiny bows and straps amidst the fabric dust, hissing irons and whirring sewing machines.

Vintage Eve Stillman Cotton Camisole and Pants

My grandmother took pride in her work. Sewing was more than a means to earn a living. She made clothes for herself and my mother. She bought yards and yards of heavy fabric, which she stitched into pleated drapes and sofa pillows. For her, sewing not only saved money, it was a hobby. She looked down upon store-bought clothing. Grandma believed homemade clothing was of better quality and proved to the world that you weren’t lazy. With a careful eye, she matched seams, sewed even stitches, tailored a dart here or there, took pains to make hem stitches invisible on the right side of the fabric. In stores, she’d examine seams and sneer in Spanish, “machine made.”

For a while, two of my grandmother’s sisters also moved from Puerto Rico to live New York. Mostly, though, my grandmother had no family around her, except her ex-husband. She enrolled my mother in boarding school—St. John’s Villa Academy elementary school—a ferry’s ride from Manhattan. She knew that my mother would be safe under the watchful eyes of the nuns. My mother, though, was not one to hold her tongue. After the first week in school, my mother was moved to the next grade. “She told us she already knew how to read and knew everything,” a nun told my grandmother upon arrival on Friday to pick her up.

When my grandmother told me these stories, half in Spanish, half in English, her hands were always occupied: making arroz con pollo or other Puerto Rican dish, knitting a sweater, crocheting a blanket, stitching on buttons, and always, a cigarette perched on her lips. The wispy smoke would drift upwards into her hazel eyes. I was riveted and asked her to tell me these stories again and again. Her life had become my own, some of the patterns repeated in mine. Perhaps these tales would help me adjust to my own circumstances.

I admit this: I also loved hearing about the stories she told about my mother when she was a little girl. I was amazed that my mother talked back at the nuns. She rebelled, answered the nun with sarcastic retorts, failed classes. We’d gone to the same boarding school. And yet. I emerged complaisant and quiet and fearful. She had driven the nuns crazy doing what seemed to me outrageous acts: reading novels hidden within her textbooks during class, chewing gum, getting demerits, sitting in detention. I had endured punishments as well, though never for any behavior remotely close to hers. I didn’t dare.

My mother and I did share one thing about boarding school: We both hated it.

elegant striped mink cape from the 1950s, simple A-line design with deep armholes allowing complete mobility, small collar, full brown satin crepe lining all original and in perfect condition, no labels, fits small sizes up to about 6, very good condition, $350

marcjoseph@marcjoseph.com

www.marcjoseph.com

Vintage in Style has got a range of lush patent leather handbags ranging from about $50-200. Perfect to dress up any gorgeous vintage goddess outfit.

This email has done the rounds before, but I think it is spot on… so much so that I’m blogging it for those who haven’t seen it before. “Well done” to whoever first put it together - It’s a good ‘un!

TO ALL MY FRIENDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s…

First, we survived being born to mothers who lived in houses made of asbestos. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can

Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds, KFC, Subway or Nandos.

Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn’t open on the weekends, somehow we didn’t starve to death!

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Toffees, Gobstoppers, Bubble Gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because……

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY, No video/DVD films, No mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms…..

…..WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
Lawsuits from these accidents.

Only girls had pierced ears!

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time…

We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays,

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!

Mum didn’t have to go to work to help dad make ends meet!

RUGBY and CRICKET had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law!

Our parents didn’t invent stupid names for their kids like ‘Kiora’ and ‘Blade’ and ‘Ridge’ and ‘Vanilla’

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO
DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And YOU are one of them!
CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.

In 1958, ABC lobbed an eight-year nightmare of emasculation onto the airwaves, cloaking it under an innocuous title: The Donna Reed Show.  Less blatantly Freudian than the same year’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, this domestic situation comedy nevertheless postulated its housewife protagonist as a superwoman capable of rendering the male of the species all but obsolete.  The surname of Reed’s emblematic TV family was Stone - same as the stuff they build prisons out of.

The eponymous star kept her own first name as the all-purpose wife/mother.  Two kids (teenaged Mary and younger son Jeff) and work-at-home pediatrician dad Alex made up the rest of The Donna Reed Show’s prototypically nuclear clan, huddled together in a cramped-looking suburban two-story. 

The standard rap on The Donna Reed Show is that it presents Reed as an impossibly idealized image of domesticity.  But in digging through the first ten or so episodes, I was struck by how far Donna’s superpowers extended beyond the regimen of mending clothes and packing lunches. 

The debut outing, “Weekend Trip,” has Donna scheming to clear the family schedule so they can enjoy a brief vacation together.  And I mean scheming: think Lady Macbeth.  Donna manipulates Alex’s colleagues and friends into covering his patients or dropping their demands on his time.  She even usurps his professional status, figuring out a psychological motive behind a boy’s illness that eludes Dr. Stone.  Alex still manages to wreck things at the last minute, by forgetting to deliver an important phone message - Carl Betz’s “oh, fuck” reaction shot is the biggest laugh in the episode - but Donna has this problem solved in seconds, and doesn’t even deign to issue the expected scolding.  From the outset the message is clear: Hubby might be the breadwinner, but his stethoscope is as limp as his … well, you know. 

With each new episode, Donna seems to annex another sector of masculine territory.  She teaches Jeff how to box (episode two, “Pardon My Gloves”).  She takes a group of boys on a camping trip (episode three, “The Hike”).  Finally the question of Donna’s incontrovertible superiority comes to the fore in the fourth segment, “Male Ego,” which really chucks poor Alex under the bus: Mary delivers an overblown speech extolling her mother’s virtues, and dad comes off as a whinging ingrate when he bristles at being undervalued.  By the time the infamous twin beds turn up in the spousal bedroom during in the final scene of “Male Ego,” you can’t help but muse that it’s Donna who decides if and when they get pushed together, and Alex who’s on the bottom during the activity that ensues.

The punchlines to these gags undercut a full-on feminist reading.  Hopeless at tent construction and other outdoor skills, Donna hires a caterer to provide the hunter’s stew.  But the overwhelming impression is of a family unit in which husband and even kids are superfluous appendages. 

It’s possible to assess much of the popular American entertainment of the fifties as a post-war retrenchment of traditional gender roles.  This is especially relevant in television, where the major works of the first generation of dramatists (Rod Serling, Reginald Rose, Stirling Silliphant) often retreated into all-male worlds, or unfolded as one-sided and rather hysterical monologues on female sexuality and independence.  (Silliphant’s early Route 66 segment “A Lance of Straw,” available on DVD, gives this type of anxiety a rigorous workout.)  In that context, The Donna Reed Show seems less about female empowerment (or its opposite) than male fear.

*

I have, of course, offered a somewhat radical counter-reading here.  But I think the worthwhile comedy shows of the fifties sustain these kinds of sidelong interpretations, and even encourage them.  Programs like The Donna Reed Show or Father Knows Best are thought of as reinforcing social norms - the Eisenhower ideal of the nuclear family, pounded into your head until you want to impale yourself on a white picket fence.  But humor derives from the defiance of expectations, so it follows that only the most banal (and now forgotten) early sitcoms could have failed to challenge, in some way, the institutions that they depicted. 

For instance.  I’ve always thought of Leave It to Beaver not as a wholesome family show but as an exercise in witty insult humor.  You have June’s cheery putdowns of Ward’s stuffiness; his slow-on-the-uptake double takes; Lumpy Rutherford and his father Fred, sharply etched caricatures of mediocrity; and of course Eddie Haskell, a human diarrhea of sarcasm that splatters all over every totem of ethics or decorum.  And watch Wally Cleaver closely.  Tony Dow’s “aw, shucks” delivery, and the long penumbra of Ken Osmond’s more verbal Eddie, conceal a steady, passive-aggressive stream of unanswered rebukes to every correction offered by his parents, and a devastatingly accurate assessment of “the little creep”’s (Beaver’s) shortcomings.  It’s the prototype for a later, raunchier classic of spoofed suburban malaise, Married with Children, and I’m very much convinced that Beaver’s original audience was in on the joke.

Apart from a few clips, I’ve never seen The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, but I’m fascinated by Tim Lucas’s considerations of the surrealism and technical innovation in that series - qualities which would seem to refute, or at least sidestep, the common perceptions of the Nelsons’ fourteen-season opus as a simple-minded exercise in domestic harmony.  Lucas’s work strikes me as a useful example of how to look at media that might seem dated or irrelevant today: through contemporary eyes, but with a close and open-minded examination of the texts. 

Fifties sitcoms seem particularly vulnerable to brutalization at the hands of ideologues.  Nostalgists respond to them with misty-eyed diatribes exalting the narrow-minded, conformist “family values” of the fifties.  In this limited view, The Donna Reed Show becomes a club to wield against today’s more permissive popular culture or even (by devaluing that which the Stones’ world excludes) against the sort of social progress that has made possible the election of a black president.  Where’s that African-American version of the Stone family?  Oh, right - they were busy getting block-busted out of the suburbs over on East Side/West Side.

At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve run into academics who see fifties sitcoms as objects of condescension or ridicule.  When I was in film school, the old cliche of June Cleaver wearing pearls while doing housework came up as an example of how out of touch shows like Leave It to Beaver were with the reality of their own era.  When I pointed out that June wore pearls because the cameraman sought to conceal Barbara Billingsley’s unattractive neck - and cited a source, Jeff Kisseloff’s The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920-1961 - no one was particularly interested.  But to me, such clues are critical in trying to gauge the gap between reality and representation.

*

I’ve drifted pretty far away from The Donna Reed Show, which I had not sampled until its first season appeared on DVD (in an attractive, well-produced set from Arts Alliance).  Is the show any good?  It’s certainly competent: there are a few laughs in every episode, and more wit and intelligence than I expected. 

I wish I knew more about the production history of the series.  The producer was Tony Owen - Reed’s husband - and the associate producer, William Roberts, who is also credited with creating the characters, was apparently the same screenwriter who co-wrote The Magnificent Seven.  Roberts penned the funniest episode I’ve seen so far (”Change Partners and Dance”), but The Donna Reed Show doesn’t appear to be the work of a single distinctive voice.  Instead, it’s a professional, anonymous effort assembled by a large pool of busy freelance comedy writers.  The scripts are inconsistent, not only in quality but in sophistication.  “Pardon My Gloves” includes a Hitchcock joke and a subplot about a mangled local theatre production of A Doll’s House that’s only funny if you know a little bit about Ibsen.  But in the same episode, Jeff comes home with a black eye (and then another one), and each time his family seems concerned primarily with whether or not he succeeded in beating the other boy even more savagely.

The direction, mostly by Oscar Rudolph, is routine, although the timing and energy of the cast is pretty lively.  Someone made the clever decision to write all of Jeff Stone’s lines at an adult level, and Paul Petersen’s delivery of these precocious throwaways is often hilarious (much more so than Danny Bonaduce’s obnoxious take on a similar character in The Partridge Family).  Petersen and Shelly Fabares have a fast-paced, natural chemistry, and - as in Leave It to Beaver - their banter is more insult-based than one might expect.  (Sample lines from the episode “Change Partners and Dance.”  Mary: “What a revolting little freak . . . He makes me sick.  I think if I had my way I’d drown all boys at birth.”  Jeff: “A formula guaranteed to get rid of ten pounds of ugly fat . . . Cut off your head!”)  

Even Carl Betz, a total stiff in his dramatic turn as Judd For the Defense (for which he won an Emmy), proves a nimble straight man.

Oddly, the weakest member of the ensemble is Donna Reed herself.  Reed is monotonous, even cloying, in her unflappability; her perma-smile has a robotic quality, like an android grandma from The Twilight Zone.  Much more than the material, it’s the star’s unwillingness to bestow any hint of human frailty upon Donna Stone that gives The Donna Reed Show its Stepford reputation.  Donna Stone is the antithesis of the warm (and, not insignificantly, ethnic) mama figure of Molly Goldberg. 

It’s easy to imagine a child burying his or her face in Mrs. Goldberg’s ample bosom for comfort, but in a similar scene on The Donna Reed Show, I’d be scrutinizing Reed’s face for subtext: will this embrace muss my hair or wrinkle my apron?  She’s the kind of parent whose perfection most kids would compare themselves against and come up lacking.  How could Jeff and Mary hope to reach their twenties without becoming seething, rebellious head cases?  Now that’s one made-for-TV reunion movie I would have liked to see.

by Robyn Juola  (yes, me zelda)

MSW   LCSW

2008

Something made a sudden dawning in my mind this morning. It came on suddenly as I had a clarity about the parallels between individual social and psychological development and that of our American society.

For example, the 1950s: A time of childhood. When President Kennedy was assassinated no one believed it was a conspiracy. Never! No one could have wanted to harm him except a deluded sick individual. There was no sense of the suspicion that wracks so much of all of our political discourse today. The 1950s when roles were clearly defined as in the play of children. Mother’s were in the kitchen and fathers were at work. Everyone thought alike, loved their country, and there were no real boogy men except the communists. The naivete of that time is staggering to me, and I lived through it! Those who came after simply can have no understanding of how narrow the way of being was at that time.
Then President Kennedy was shot and the dawning of our adolescence began. Two months after President Kennedy was shot The Beatles came to the United States. I cannot help but think two things about this: that it was all destiny and perfect timing; and that if President Kennedy had not been assassinated that somehow this country and the world may not have been ready for The Beatles. Their entry upon the world stage was truly a destined part of the development of this nation. The beginnings were the innocent adolescence of crushes and record buying. Of dreaming of meeting “the ones”. This time went on and grew into something else…the turbulence of adolescence. Psychelic Beatles and psychedelic drugs. Woodstock. Peace, love, and rock and roll. Oh yes, and the sexual revolution.

In the span of a few short years we went from an idealized childhood into a crazy topsy turvy world that had in large part changed by the introduction of the birth control pill. Suddenly biology was not destiny. But this was a crazy trying on roles time. Women were thought to be more similar to men than thought. Women were assumed to want to sleep with everyone if only they were “liberated” enough to realize this. And thus women suffered under the interpretation by men of what it meant to be a free woman.

Eventually, we began to move……and move…..and move.  And the culmination is the election of the first black president of the United States. We have moved into adulthood. We have reached the mountain top of our cultural evolution. We stunned ourselves and we stunned the world as we accomplished this smashing blow to all stereotypes about ourselves with one giant move. Stunning in its rapidity, its power, and its significance.

We are now into our adulthood. An early adulthood, but adulthood none the less. A time for coming into our own individuality (read diversity) and the full power of a nation whose ideals the world has long admired. The Statue OF Liberty, Ellis Island, we made it. And we are, for one shining moment, a beautiful sight to behold.

We made it.

I am tormented by the gorgeous pair of mary janes Christina wears on her Candyman video! Look at the perfect shape! The sexy heel, cute buckle, the ingenious positioning of the strap. That delicate sexy curve of the heel and the back of the shoe! Pure perfection.

What torments me is that I can’t find them from anywhere! I expect them to be Louboutins as that’s all she ever wears, but all the Louboutin mary janes I can find are a totally different shape.

And how incredibly cute are her socks with the little bows? If anyone can tell me where I can buy the shoes or the socks please let me know!

I will not rest until I can prance around in that combination!

In 1955, a trio of Marshalltown brothers began work in Cedar Rapids on a shopping mall.

Matthew, Martin and Maurice Bucksbaum sold their interest in their grocery store business (SunMart stores) to Nash Finch and began a new career building malls, the first of which was Town & Country in Cedar Rapids.

The Bucksbaums soon were building more malls and taking over management of other malls and properties as General Management Corp.

In 1971, General Growth Properties was formed with stock traded over-the-counter and properties managed nationwide.

The photo at left was taken on May 21, 1956, as the mall opened with 28 stores and free parking for customers.

Les plus jolis manteaux d’hiver

The prettiest winter coats

Et mon préféré:

And this one is my favourite:

Officiel de la Mode -  années1950

Psychedelia was a combination of Art Nouveau sensibilities and a modern, if sometimes perverse colour palette. This style has now become so closely associated with the decade that when we see design work that may at one point have been influenced by the Art Nouveau movement, we only see psychedelia.

This new generation of designers were able to produce a genuine new decorative style that belonged solely to the 1960s.

This is the story of how in 1958 two men, Robert Dvorak and William A. Higinbotham, designed and built the first video game, Tennis For Two. They were working for the Brookhaven National Laboratory and while reading the instructions for a computer in the lab which explained how it could simulate the trajectory of a bullet, missile or a bouncing ball, Dr. Higinbotham thought of creating the precursor to what we know today as video game technology.

Read the complete article on The New York Times.

Newport, RI, 2007

It appears it used to be red.