Month: January 2013

Freakies News!

I love Freakies! So I’m super excited to let you know there are great things happening with the Freakies. One, Guy Himber has licensed the rights to do a Freakies Playing Card Deck — but he needs our help. Support the Feakies at Kickstart! More freaky news about the Freakies coming soon, so stay tuned.

freakies playing cards

Image via Himber at Flickr.

Sparkling Clean? Not-So-Much

Circa 1960s, this is the paper wrap that went over your drinking glass in a hotel or motel. When I grabbed this from the china hutch at that estate, I thought the original glass was still in it; but it turns out there was some powdery stuff the husband thinks was “some sort of ash from a volcano” — “like from Hawaii or something.” OK. But since I accidentally dumped most of it on my floor in my ignorance to its existence… The vacuum got it.

Drawing The Line At Valentines

It may seem a little early to start with the Valentine’s Day stuff, but we’re seeing a huge jump in traffic to our previous Valentine’s Day posts (older archives too). Heck, WalMart already has Easter candy out! Not that WalMart dictates anything to me; but I feel fine mentioning Valentine’s Day stuff now.

Anyway…

This vintage Valentine is a vintage mechanical Valentine from A-Meri-Card.

On the back, it’s signed “Love, Pursy.”

Found at an estate we are helping manage here in Fargo, the vintage Valentine was found inside a folded half-sheet of paper. The paper was a mimeographed list of guests for a Valentine’s Day party. While this was the only Valentine saved, it’s clear that Pursy was not invited to the party. Another example of drawing the line at party guest lists. Especially sad when the list has the guests arranged in pairs of one boy and one girl — and clearly there is one girl who had no “date”. Poor Pursy. Poor Paula.

You can find more vintage Valentines in our eBay listings. Those looking for vintage Valentine’s to craft with, check out our “crafty” Etsy shop.

Miss Beatnik 1959

Don’t they look like they’re enjoying themselves?  These perky, cheerful ladies were just a few of the candidates vying for Miss Beatnik 1959, in this photo from the LA Times.   The ladies are, from left to right, Michi Monteef, Sammy McCord, Patti McCrory, Shaunna Lea, and Inner Thigh McGee there in the back is Jan Vandaveer.  They won’t smile or acknowledge the camera (except for Jan, but that’s why they made her stand in the back) because they really want you to know how serious being a Beatnik is — so serious, in fact, that this Beatnik contest was disavowed by Lawrence Lipton and his Beatnik colony.  See, this Miss Beatnik contest was sponsored by the Venice Art Committee, started by John Gifford and Tony Landreau, who were seeking publicity for their organization — which means, in Lipton’s words, they were merely “hip squares…taking advantage of the Beatnik movement.”  Real beatniks don’t do publicity stills, see?  Well, unless you’re a Greenwich Village beatnik, because they held their own Miss Beatnik contests in 1959 and 1960, but they were mocking the Miss America contest so that makes it totally Beanik.   The 1960 news article even mentions Miss Chicago Beatnik, Gnomi Gross, who went all the way to Greenwich Village to Beatnik all over those hep cats the way only a Windy City Beatnik could.  Hopefully the four ladies in the Venice Beach Miss Beatnik contest were able to rise above their unBeatnik ways and truly become the disaffected postmodern iconoclasts each one hoped she could always be.