No Such Luck

As promised, here is the first of several wonderful ads purchased at this weekend's postcard show. I didn't fully appreciate how awesome this particular one was until I got it home, as you're about to see.

This is an ad from the Ladies' Home Journal in 1919--the heyday of entertaining magazine advertising, to my way of thinking. It's advertising a now forgotten brand of soap called "Olivilo" (pron. Olive-eyelow.)


The first mystery to me is why one would market a soap with the word "vile" in the name--I do realize it's trying to evoke the nourishing properties of olive oil, and I can overlook the gimmick that the name's a palindrome, but why put that long I sound in there? It gives me a sense of ick before I've even unwrapped the bar. Also, it's packaged in a black wrapper, which doesn't exactly cry out "SPARKLING CLEAN" to me. Those are basic facets of the product itself, though, so I accept that the pitchmen in Olivilo's marketing department may have been stuck with these problems for some time before devising this particular ad.

The first great thing here is the threat implicit in the image. "Do you believe in Luck?" it asks, in enormously loopy handwriting font, the word "in" squiggling precariously upright. "Do you feel lucky, punk? Do ya? Then try our #%@*& soap!"

Next comes the promise: Fate cannot harm you, if you use this soap. Apparently, Olivilo is the detergent version of a mafia bag man. Among other things, it will protect you from the unlucky influence of the rather bitchy looking black cat who is staring balefully out of the ad with eyes like creepy green footballs. OK, that seems worth a 10¢ cake of soap to me... And hey, at no extra charge you get a sidebar explaining that black cats are unlucky! Except when they aren't.




Thanks, Olivilo, for that fleeting educational moment.

However, the single most spectacular thing in this ad, the thing I didn't even notice until I got it home, was this teeny tiny plug for one of Wrisley's other products--Wrisley's Eau de Toilette. What could be nicer than pleasantly scented floral water, right?



GAHHHHH WHAT THE FUCKING HELL???? THE IMPRISONED SOULS OF FLOWERS??!?!! Holy farking Jesus, who thought THAT would be a pleasant image for potential buyers?? **shudder** It makes me want to buy a bottle just so I can give it a decent burial in my backyard. I can only conclude that Olivilo is truly the soap of the damned.

Join us next time when I deconstruct a Jell-O ad from 1921...

Yes, Yes, I Know.

It's been forever since I blogged. The whole canal thing had me pretty beat, frankly, and then I decended into the hell that is bathroom renovation, and I kept thinking "I should blog about this!" and then failing to do so, because it wasn't done yet. And then it was done, and I was sick of the whole thing. I'll get back to it, the topic is rich with satire--but look! I'll make it up to you right now with this gem from the Postcard and Ephemera Show I went to today with Haywain McTarry.

As most of you know, I love old advertising ephemera, and I have a fondness for particular types of postcards as well. So I was thumbing through the cards at one of the bigger dealers at the show when Haywain said, "Come here, you have to see this card!" I looked, and saw the following unremarkable picture of HRH Queen Elizabeth II and her corgis:


Then, at Haywain's behest, I turned it over.


Of course I bought it. How could I NOT buy it? I also bought some singularly hilarious soap ads from the 1920's, which will be used to decorate the newly remodeled bathroom which I haven't posted about yet. Sadly, they're too big for my scanner bed... but maybe I can use the one at work. Because you deserve to see them in all their ridiculous glory...

We Interrupt This Blog...

...to bring you a special bulletin, which will matter not one bit to any of you who don't live in Indianapolis. But most of you know I live on a 170+ year old canal, and that much of the joy in my life consists of walking out my front door each morning and seeing wood ducks, turtles, muskrats, etc. and so on... not to mention feeling as if I'm living in a small rustic town rather than in a city of 800,000 people, thanks to the wall of vegetation on the opposite bank. Last week, the water company which owns the canal (it's a working canal, it supplies 60% of the city's water) unveiled a plan to strip all the vegetation and several feet of dirt from both banks and replace them with a combination of mesh and riprap stone, turning this

into this:

The plan achieves the goal of preventing muskrats from denning in the bank, which does cause subsidence, and keeps geese from sliding down into the water and taking soil with them when they do it. But it will also destroy the look and feel of the canal, will drive off nearly all the bird life outside of mallards (which can live anywhere) and will completely prevent successful nesting for the 5 species of turtles which make their homes here. It's nuts. At the meeting I went to on August 24, only one of the water company representatives seemed at all interested in citizens' concerns; the main people on the project were anxious to tell us what they were planning and what a great solution it would be, but when asked questions such as "How will turtles get out to nest?" and "Will the water company repair property damage done by heavy equipment once the project is completed?" and "How will the company maintain this solution to prevent it from becoming a weed-choked eyesore," they just shrugged and told us they'd look into it. Gee, thanks. Think you might have "looked into" all this shit before settling on a plan and presenting it to the people whose property abuts your canal?

Anyway, if you live in Indianapolis, and you walk the canal's towpath and appreciate the wildlife it supports, please consider writing a letter to IDEM, or to Veolia Water, or to the local paper, and put your two cents in. Since the Star broke an article on this on Monday, the local DNR has apparently been flooded with emails requesting a re-examination of the project, so it's possible we might actually be able to be heard and this project could be delayed until another solution is found. My letter was in the Star on Wednesday.

Hey, check out THIS rack!

Tomato season is upon us, in the sense that a ton of bricks is "upon" you shortly after it falls. I went out to the garden after a week or two's absence expecting to find a dozen or so tomatoes worth the taking, and instead I found this:


I think this was a good 15-20 lbs of tomatoes. I'm hustling to make sauce with them before the few remaining fruitflies in my kitchen manage to colonize the fruit rack again. I made some excellent sauce the other night--secret ingredients are tomato skins (you peel the tomatoes, yes, but then put the skins in the pot while the whole thing is cooking down,) and parmesean rind, and ground bison. Really. Amazing sauce.

It was, in fact, the Year of the Tomato this year at the Indiana State Fair, and thus one of my favorite fruit/vegetables spent two weeks in the much-deserved spotlight. Every time the fair has a theme like this, there's a certain amount of art in the HFA building devoted to singing the praises of the selected farm product. This year was no exception; however, I have to say that this year I encountered one of the most disturbing artworks I've seen in all my many fairs. Check this out:


It's a gourd painted to look like a tomato--this in itself is fine, gourd painting is an established art form and I've got no problem with that. But check out the scene across the front. It's a classroom for tomatoes! The juvenile tomatoes have come to school to learn about how to become a highly productive member of tomato society--and joy! It's CAREER DAY!! And what youngster doesn't aspire to being successfully...er... chopped up, canned, and eaten? Errk. This closeup I found particularly disturbing:


It's almost like that little tomato and his friend the green chili have entered into some sort of unholy suicide pact. ***shudder*** Even a tomato lover like myself has to draw the line someplace... and I think this is it.

Say Buddy, That's an Ugly Mug You Got There

Well, the summer's drawing to a close; my birthday always feels a bit like the beginning of the end, though this being Indiana there's plenty of hot weather still in store. As it happens, August also brings with it the end of the 8 week wheel-thrown ceramics class I signed up for with my friend, J the Curator. Yesterday we went in to glaze our last bisque pieces and pick up the stuff that got fired the week before. I have to say I've learned several important things during this class.

1. Wheel throwing is fucking HARD! Jesus, just centering the clay on the freakin' wheel took me 20 minutes some days, and then I'd spend another 30 minutes ruining a piece, adding more and more water until eventually the poor thing just kind of oozed off the wheel and sat there in the catch basin, shapelessly glowering at me while I sluiced off the wheel and started over with a new ball of clay. That was the first 5 weeks of the class, more or less--wedge clay, wrestle with clay, turn clay into unusable mush, rinse, repeat. Then, suddenly, I almost sort of got the hang of it sometime around week 6 and produced a series of nearly serviceable bowls. Which brings me to point #2:

2. Bowls are way easier than cylinders, which is what she started us on and what nearly reduced me to tears. This isn't to say I shouldn't still learn to throw a decent cylinder--and I plan to! Really!--but for this class, bowls were my oeuvre. Though I did enter a plate phase right at the end, I have to say that bowls are The Shiznit. (The mug up top was slab built, and I kind of love it even though it looks like one of the Dark Gods threw up on it.)

3. Glazes are awesome. Our teacher mentioned that for many ceramicists, glazing is the least favorite part because it's so unpredictable--in addition to the random nature of glazes anyway, they also can look completely different depending on what you put over them, how hot the kiln is, and what's sitting next to them when the kiln's fired up. I can see how if I were trying to produce a body of work that all looked more or less the same, it would be a frustrating phase. But since really, most of my pieces were nothing to write home about in a structural sense, I felt like glazing was the Big Adventure part of the whole process! Let's try THIS one on top of THIS one, with a quick dip of the rim in THIS stuff! And as I'm very color-driven to begin with, I have to say that I am utterly taken with the part when you go and find your finished stuff in the kiln room and go "This amazingly blue thing is mine???? WHOAAAAAAH."

So I've got 5 pieces back, and 9 more in the kiln this week for a total of 14. I can't wait to see the finished products. CAN'T. WAIT. OMG.

Oi, It's Me Birfday!

And a splendid one it was, despite a weather-driven change of plans in mid-stream this eve. I've never enjoyed a 39th birthday more. Though it started with cat-induced bloodletting and some frantic searching for work-appropriate attire, it improved throughout the day and ended with a free slice of key lime pie and some fantastic pizza, as well as a number of unexpected gifts!

I'm thinking of spending my 40th birthday in St. Louis at the City Museum. Who's with me?

I got a bone bruise, it was AWESOME!

So last week, I went to St. Louis for a museum conference. I presented a paper--my first time doing so in this field, and I only did it once back in my medievalist days, so the experience was fairly exciting. (The bit where it wasn't done until the night before was particularly exciting, as was the bit where I wondered if my laptop was going to work with the projection equipment on hand. Yes, I did a powerpoint. Shut up.)

Anyway, so I got that out of the way Thursday morning, and this left me free to enjoy the rest of the conference without stress. Which I did, it was a great time and I met a lot of lovely people in the Visitor's Studies biz. However, the thing I'd been looking forward to mostest of all in going to St. Louis was a visit to the CITY MUSEUM. I had heard all kinds of amazing and wonderful things about this place. And I was NOT disappointed!

First of all, if you are one of those folk who think that museums are Places With Stuff in Cases with Labels Telling You What the Stuff is and Why You Should Care, then the City Museum will just bother the shit out of you. "That's not a museum!" you'll say. "There's no learning going on there, it's just a playground! And a dangerous one at that!" Ohhhh contrarey, my snobbish friend! Picture, if you will, a giant shoe factory near downtown St. Louis. Now picture a visionary--whose name is "Bob", I think--scavenging pieces of architecture and hunks of junk, works of art and random objects from demolition sites around the city, and beginning to weld them together into a weirdly surrealist microcosm of St. Louis itself. The first floor of City Museum consists of a cave system, with endless passages branching off each other, mostly in pitch darkness--I could only find my way by feel in places, and some passages were too small for me to fit through or too high for me to reach--with stairs and twists and turns and a crystal cave filled with fantastical sculptures of monsters at its center. Finally you find your way out, and you're standing next to a massive fiberglass whale; you can walk into its mouth and out its tail and onto a platform which leads to a hollow log which you can crawl through to reach a treehouse. The second floor is filled with wild and wonderful bits of architectural salvage, cobbled together like a nightmare landscape, with a bizarre art installation about corndogs and a one-ring circus in a room to the side. I watched a performance by 3 trapeze artists and an acrobat there around 10:30 at night, they were fantastic. The third floor is a snack bar/souvenir shop/vintage clothing store. And outside....

Outside is Monstrocity, an amazing construction of salvage and rebar which is completely climbable (for anyone who doesn't have issues with heights.) Note the airplanes. Note the fact that people are climbing along giant coils of industrial cooling equipment to get to airplanes which are suspended 4 stories up. Note that there are no safety nets to catch your glasses, your camera, or your child when you drop them. (Kidding--while it seems almost appallingly unsafe for children, whose fingers and feet could easily get wedged or caught any number of places in this museum--there's no real danger of falling from a height, and frankly I saw a tremendous amount of very positive parent/child interaction here, BECAUSE it seems so unsafe. Parents were actually paying ATTENTION to what their kids were doing, imagine that! This is a rare thing in our museum, which is so disgustingly safe that parents often just turn their kids loose, plant themselves on a bench, and tune out until little Johnny's done breaking stuff and is ready to go.) But this isn't the end of it--there's also the rooftop, where for an extra $5 you can climb into an old schoolbus which hangs out over the street, 12 stories up; you can ride a ferris wheel, slide down a giant slide, cross a pool on stepping stones and get sprayed with jets of water, and have a nice cold beer while watching the sun set over St. Louis.

So why IS it a museum and not just a playground? Because the whole point of the museum is teaching kids (and adults) about exploration. Every corner of City Museum hides something new and unexpected. Every choice you make about where to go, what to do, and how to get where you're going can have unintended consequences. Visitors learn not to be afraid, to explore, to be careful but be adventurous, and they'll be rewarded with an amazing experience. This is, quite frankly, exactly the sort of thing St. Louis itself is all about, with its "Gateway to the West" identity; the strangely conceptual museum at the base of the Arch is all about Lewis and Clark and Boldly Going Forth Into the Unknown. But what were Lewis and Clark doing? The same thing kids are doing at City Museum. Boldly going. Taking risks. Finding out what's down the passage or around the curve, sometimes completely without parental guidance. The City Museum IS the City of St. Louis, both in structure and in spirit.

And yeah, I hurt myself almost immediately. Whacked my anklebone while climbing over a low wall in the cave system. It was blindingly painful... as it was again 4 hours later when I whacked the same bone in the same spot while sliding underneath the whale. My own damn fault. And I had an AMAZING time.

(Flickr photoset is here.)