Allee Willis Blog » 2010 November

14Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – My Seriously Kitschy Birthday Gifts

14Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – My Seriously Kitschy Birthday Gifts

I wasn’t going to do anything for my birthday this year. Too overworked and no extra coinage to throw around. But word leaked out and spread and all of a sudden these people, most of whom I’ve spent every birthday and momentous occasion with for umpteen years, showed up at my house:

Bottom row (L-R): Diva Zappa, Lisa Loeb, me, Prudence Fenton and Michael Patrick King.
Middle row (L-R): Jane Wagner, Lesley Ann Warren, Bob Garrett, Lily Tomlin, Pamela Des Barres, Karen Levitas, Gai Gherardi, Gail Zappa, Nancye Ferguson, Stan Zimmerman and Jim Burns. Top row (L-R): Ben Bove, RuPaul, Tom Trujillo, Roey Herschovitz, Jimmy Quill, Charles Phoenix, Sonny Ruscha Bjornson, Mark Blackwell and Jack Nesbit.

Though all of my friends may not practice kitsch like the religion I do, their lives and occupations are consumed with pop culture and they all bring unique individual style and vision to everything they do. None of us are color-in-the-lines people. Which means that when it comes to birthday presents, it’s fantasyland overload as their sensibilities collide with mine in harmonious gift wrapped chaos! For example, here I am with perennially great gift givers Nancye Ferguson and Jim Burns:

Jim is looking very happy because the video game he stars in, Call Of Duty Black Ops, was released the day before and set the opening day record for ANY type of entertainment,Is he is grossing $320,000,000 by the time he reached my house. Maybe that’s why they got me 14 gifts. Though Nancye and Jim are always reliable for a smorgasbord of age-inappropriate-unless-you-happen-to-be-me offerings like this magnificent 1950’s mother of pearl poodle pocket mirror/pill box:

… and this convenient land line phone ear piece for my iPhone:

They also gave me this wonderfully famous Enid Collins owl box purse…

…and this fantastic 50’s fold up wallet with plastic coin holder inside like the Good Humor ice cream man used to wear on his belt to give people change:

They also threw in this 1960’s Wilma Flintstone bathing cap.

Here I am with Pamela Des Barres, the world’s most famous groupie, and Diva and Gail Zappa, who came straight to my place from the airport after being honored at a Frank Zappa festival in London.

Pamela is a fabulous writer and also travels a lot for her work. Which is lucky for me and the rest of her friends as she hits thrift shops wherever she goes and picks up stuff for us all year round. She makes these finds for pennies and stacks them up so she can arrive like Santa Claus on any given occasion. These “On The Wagon’ coaster and snack trays she gave me are just about my favorite bar accessory ever!

I love when snacks are referred to as ‘Tid Bits’, especially when what is normally a single word is broken up into two separate words as stamped into the belly of the wagon.

This nightshirt could be the heaviest gift of the evening. It’s hard to see all the 1960’s pop culture graphics and slogans in this photo and I’m not sure who the characters on it are but there were more than a few vintage clotheshorses at the party, certainly including myself, and we all agree that Pamela’s $2 purchase would easily go for $500 in the right store.

Then there’s this early 60’s Make-Up Mask that you pull over your bouffant to protect the Max Factor from rubbing off your face when you pull your angora sweater over it:

Pamela graciously modeled it for us throughout the evening.

Her excellent gift giving instincts have definitely rubbed off on the other Des Barres in attendance, Michael, who reliably gives me fantastic African swag.

At one point there was a girl’s conference in the bedroom. Here I am with (L-R) Lily Tomlin,Prudence Fenton, and Jane Wagner:

Prudence not only cooked an incredible dinner for everyone but made the excellent “Crackerature” portrait of me that’s between our heads in the photo above.

Lily and Jane gave me the most ridiculous-in-the-best-kitsch-sense-of-the-word-ridiculous gift of the night:

He’s only about 3″ high, his little arms are made out of bobby pins and his body is some kind of overcooked Sculpy or baking soda concoction. The card that accompanied him was just as kitschy.

The Diller is Phyllis Diller, which adds a few pounds on the kitsch scale for this gift. The note Jane and Lily wrote me make the cheese wheel even weightier:

Joining Lily and I here is Stan Zimmerman. We all grew up in Detroit.

Stan added a little class to my gifts with this 1950’s signed Sasha Brastoff ashtray.

Here’s Lily and I with RuPaul. Both of them have added greatly to the kitsch cache of my alter-ego, Bubbles the artist, as they are the #1 and #2 collectors of her art, each owning over 20 pieces.

Michael Patrick King, seen here with Pamela Des Barres’ lovely feet, brought me some of my most Americanized presents.

He brought my gifts back from Dubai when he was there filming Sex and the City II. First, this green shopping bag featuring a carefree Michelle Obama:

And then this brain-numbing Muslim Barbie shoulder bag:

I got one more bag, actually a Kitsch Emergency Kit, from Karen Levitas.

It’s nice when your friends give you a healthy snack of sardines to enjoy while you read cheesy poetry from the 70’s:

Here I am with Mark Blackwell, who’s also a November 10th birthday baby, and Sonny Ruscha Bjornson, Lisa Loeb and Roey Hershkovitz:

Lisa and Roey gave me some quality reading material:

Maybe I will learn to make beautiful cakes like this one on page 110:

But when it comes to baking, there’s only one Supreme Master and I’m pictured with him here:

Just a few days before my party Charles Phoenix was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal with his signature “Cherpumple” cake, one of which he baked for me.

A Cherpumple is three Sara Lee cherry, pumpkin and apple pies stuffed inside three Betty Crocker cakes and frosted as one happy stack of sugary ecstasy:

Here’s my friend, Lesley Ann Warren, indulging in some. Perennially skinny and always eating healthy, she hit the Cherpumple as an extreme gesture of kitsch on my birthday.

Lesley was my first friend when I moved to Hollywood in 1976. She was also the first person ever to sing one of my songs on TV when she did the third song I ever wrote, “Childstar”, on Johnny Carson.

Some people went back for seconds of Cherpumple. Each plate weighs 2 lbs.

Gai Gherardi and Rhonda Saboff shared their Cherpumple:

They gave me an excellent pair of glasses from LA Eyeworks, which Gai co-owns and where I’ve bought all of my eye coverings for the last three decades.

When RuPaul arrived he brought me another birthday cake.

It was delicious but everyone had already gorged on too much Cherpumple.

Which means that everyone went home in sugar shock, the condition they’ve had much practice existing in as they’ve all been over to my house a trillion times before.

I didn’t have far to go as my bed was only feet away from the remains of the Cherpumple. I went to sleep with my crown on and had sugar sweet dreams anticipating a very good year to come indeed!

More party photos can be seen here.

10Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Happy Birthday To Me Special Effects Ultimate Volcano Cake!

10Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Happy Birthday To Me Special Effects Ultimate Volcano Cake!

volcano-cake1

Yes, my birthday’s today and were I’m not so lazy and overworked that would mean it’s time for me to make one of my signature spewing fire and lava volcano birthday cakes. Ranging from a foot to four feet wide and anywhere up to 25 pounds and two feet tall, these overdosing towers of junk have accompanied me rounding the bend to another year ever since I first saw a commercial for The Special Effects Cookbook in 1992.

The real recipe calls for a nicely constructed “lifelike” looking volcano, but I’m an artist and into Kitsch so it should be no surprise that my cakes are hulking, unrecognizable lifeforms wayyyyy out of the realm of what the cookbook author had in mind.

My version is made of up to 10 layers of anything I want – vanilla, chocolate and cherry cake, chocolate chip cookies, brownies, Rice Krispy treats and any other foodstuffs appropriate for celebration, surrounded by Jell-O or whipped cream and accented with Snickers, mini marshmallows, sprinkles, multicolored frosting and flaming sugar cubes-soaked-in-almond-extract torches, all of from which spews lava made from eggs, water and dry ice. In the 17 years of cooking/sculpting/drilling these things, even the most vegan amongst us ends up with their fingers plugged into this heart attack mound of sugar stuff. The cake is big enough that guests can easily locate a germ-free area in which to do their excavation. Here’s my Birthday ’94 Volcano before it blew:

And here’s the first Volcano cake I ever made in 1993:

See it erupting!:

Here’s me making a second 1993 lava spewing dragon cake in case my first volcano was too small to feed all my guests. A drill is one of my most necessary kitchen utensils.

Here’s my Volcano Birthday cake, 1997. Rather than stack four cakes on top of each other and risk an avalanche, or whatever it would be called if a volcano tipped over, I erected a mountain range.

Top view:

I won’t be baking any Volcanos this year because my friend, Charles Phoenix, is baking me one of his signature Cherpumples, three pies stuffed into three cake and presented as one. A most happy birthday to me!!

09Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Has Anyone Seen My Bike Van

09Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Has Anyone Seen My Bike Van

I’ve certainly piled a couch or two on the top of my van through the years after a successful flea market run but I’m in the pee wee league compared to this bike enthusiast spotted parked in an industrial area in the east San Fernando Valley. This is one incredible strap on job…

The bikes even trail down the back of the van like a mullet.

It’s almost impossible for me to believe that the ropes that wrap around the van are enough to hold the bikes in place. Upon closer inspection you can see some big chains too but this assemblage is still a mastery of physics.

I can’t even get it together to properly hook up a bike rack on the back of my van. We’re looking at a master here.

08Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Kitschlicious Riverside, CA.

08Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Kitschlicious Riverside, CA.

Last weekend I drove to Riverside to see a performance of The Color Purple, the musical I co-wrote. I tend to pick and choose the performances of the show I see based on how good the thrifts shops and vintage architecture is in the cities it’s playing in.

Riverside is only a little over an hour east of LA and has at least two blocks of nothing but thrift shops so that being a target city was pretty obvious. Besides, it gave me a chance to go to one of my favorite barbecue joints on the planet:

It’s always a good sign when your favorite joint is pushing your show as hard as the deep-fried turkeys and hams.

I discovered Gram’s Mission Bar-B-Que Palace, at the time in its original location two blocks west of where it is now, the first time I ever went to Riverside in the late 1980’s. Paul Rubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman, and I took my van for a weekend thrift shop extravaganza. We stayed overnight at the famous Mission Inn, an architecturally historic hotel where Ronald and Nancy Reagan spent their honeymoon, and then, starting in Riverside, we hit every significant thrift shop between there and LA. My bed at The Mission Inn was directly under an astronomically huge stained-glass window of Jesus Christ. I woke up about 8 am. with Jesus’s light raining down on my body, which now itself looked like a stained glass Jesus. This felt somewhat blasphemous as a Jew so I ran to a open window across the room to get some air and there, rising like a miracle before me directly across the street, was a big ass barbecue smoker with plumes of rib greased smoke billowing out of it. I can’t even tell you how fast we bolted down there.

The only thing better than the ribs, fried chicken, catfish, meatloaf, yams, greens, mac ‘n cheese and cobbler we inhaled was the bridge table next to us that was covered with an extra long shag fake fur chessboard and foot tall handcarved chess pieces. I know I have a rib grease stained photo of it somewhere but all I can put my hands on right now is a photo of the cover of the menu.

All categories of chewables featured on the cover are excellent at Gram’s. By now, after all these years of coming here, I think I’ve only missed one thing on the menu:

Back to this trip, I left Gram’s stuffed like the pig that used to be attached to the ear and hit the thrifts. This spectacular 1950’s pushbutton ashtray was one of my more significant finds, especially as it was only $16 and I already own the matching desk fan and calendar.

Here’s Riverside on the ashtray:

For $1 I also got this incredible 1950’s beer and parfait glass.

Fish were a very popular design motif in the 1950’s.

Thank God, a few other things from the 1950’s abound in Riverside like these incredible vintage neon signs:

This sign isn’t neon but beautiful and 50’s nonetheless:

The matching restaurant is even better:

Thank God it was dark by the time I got back to the theater…

… because I parked just across the street and changed in the back of my van. I like having a van because not only does it accommodate any size of thrift shop purchase but it’s a portable dressing room as well. This would not have been the case had I been driving this vehicle that whizzed past me on my way back to the theater:

All in all, my day was fantastic. The show, the food, the sights, the thrift finds, all fantastic. So what’s not to love about a day trip to Riverside? Especially when everything but a Pigs Ear awaits me.

07Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Mr. Peanut Bank And Friends

07Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Mr. Peanut Bank And Friends

Although I’m not a massive fan of actual peanuts, I’ve always loved classic 1950’s plastic Mr. Peanut memorabilia. I love how the plastic glows with depth from the richness of the classic 50’s colors he came in, in this case perfect baby blue.

I also love the sound of coins dropping into Mr. Peanut’s all too small empty plastic gut.

The only other Mr. Peanut memorabilia I collect is also made of plastic. I have this cup in pink, yellow, red and the bank mate, baby blue.

I also have Mr. Peanut salt and pepper shakers. I love them for their diminutive stature compared to the bank and cup, but they stay too close to traditional peanut color and I like things that break more out-of-the-box.

I love Mr. Peanut’s stance. He’s so casual.

I especially like his little thin legs and rolled down socks.

And he always looks so self-assured.

For all these reasons I like having Mr. Peanut and his multiple selves around my kitschen.

04Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Crazy California Cars I’ve Seen this Week

04Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Crazy California Cars I’ve Seen this Week

That’s my 1955 Studebaker Commander. There’s nothing crazy about it; it’s just beautiful and an expression of part of who I am. I love people who still drive around in classic cars. But who I love even more are folks who play with their cars, decorating them full tilt as they see fit. It may not mean much to the rest of us that these people are expressing themselves to the world but as long as they’re not slamming into other cars or hurling obscenities out of the window, it makes the landscape more exciting and for that I’m ever thankful. Because of its forgiving climate, Southern California is Mecca for these cars. Here’s just a sample of what has crossed my eyeballs in the last week alone.

THE ROCK CAR, resting quietly in Burbank:

Definitely a homemade job. The top lump is pretty neat:

The bottom’s a little more chaotic:

My guess is that the whole car will eventually be covered to add a little weight as it schleps this around all day:

Here’s THE ZEBRA MONKEY CAR, spotted whipping down the streets of Riverside:

Zebra seems to be a common car motif, though it’s usually confined to the fake fur lining the dash or covering the seats. Less common are stuffed monkeys hanging on your car:

A nice attractive rear end provides the animals a nice home:

THE TIGER CAR, spotted racing down the 101:

THE FLAME FORD, parked in Burbank:

THE OBAMA BLING ESCALADE, with a totally jeweled ensignia and license plate cover. I had to hang a right just as I spotted it so I never saw if the sides or front were embellished as well.

THE CHEVY TRUCK WHOSE PARKING BRAKE DOESN’T WORK:

THE ‘VORK FROM HOME’ TRUCK:

I’m not sure what kind of pest control work someone can do from home and I’m not sure I would let anyone who allowed ‘work’ to turn into ‘vork’ and hasn’t washed their truck in a year teach me anything.

I definitely spotted a few others but my camera wasn’t close enough to snap them as they whipped by. I did, however, have my camera when I tried some eyelashes out on my own little souped-up Beetle:

03Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Politics and the National Rooster Crowing Contest Trophy

03Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Politics and the National Rooster Crowing Contest Trophy

When it comes to an award for crowing the loudest, that should go to politicians. If I get enraged by the money that movie stars make imagine how insane I go seeing the money that’s dumped into political ads on TV that tell us almost nothing about the actual goals of who made them. I don’t want to hear anyone crowing when they throw hundreds of millions of dollars away on campaigns. Do some real good and give that money to saving school systems or cities from going bankrupt. Neither Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina, the loudest crowers of all in the election yesterday, deserve any prize, which is exactly what they got for dumping all that cash down the drain. I don’t like to hear the other politicians crowing either, and I really don’t want to see any ads about ballot measures which, despite their cheesy production value, cost a fortune to shoot and are never clear about what the measure is really about.

At least with this rooster I have the option of winding him up to crow so I only hear him when I want to hear him…

…unlike all the politicians who drive me nuts constantly jabbering their text clouds of hyped-up nothingness on the airwaves. So despite the fact that almost every candidate who ran or makers of almost every measure that made it on the ballot are well deserving of this tin National Rooster Crowing Contest souvenir, I’m keeping it here. Because I feel like a winner today now that all those stupid ads are off the air.

02Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Democratic License Plate Bling

02Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Democratic License Plate Bling

I’ve seen political enthusiasm expressed on cars before but it’s usually more in the way of stickers. This jewel encrusted license plate cover and insignia demand far more of a commitment to their candidate on behalf of the driver. Upon closer inspection however, it appears that this is a company car and the real commitment is to selling more bling.

I wish the taillights were jeweled as well.

Get out and VOTE today!

01Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day –1950’s Handpainted Conga Drum

01Nov 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day –1950’s Handpainted Conga Drum

I love drums and I love crafts so what’s not to love about this handpainted stunner of a conga drum? Made in the 1950’s and covered with Ricky Ricardo inspired hands poking out of frilly cuffs and playing Cha Cha keyboards, I’ve slapped this skin with my hands so many times I can’t tell you. A lot of times I strike it with mallets. It’s got a nice fat djembe sound and when I use soft mallets on it that I wrap in sweat socks it doubles as a tympani.

The conga lives in a kind of corner of my recording studio where it’s constantly knocked over. The spills seem to work for it. Despite hundreds of tumbles, not a spec of paint has ever chipped off and the tone just gets richer and richer.

If you really want to go the whole way Ricky Ricardo when you play it, the conga has a shoulder strap.

I’ve tried to wear the conga while I play it but it constantly feels like the strap is going to break when you beat it. If it came with a shoulder harness instead like my vintage marching drums it would be way more practical to play in the wearable position.

So playing this conga is strictly a sitting thing.

But more than anything, it’s a pretty thing: