Salt and pepper shakers have always provided an excellent opportunity to spice up any meal. As a firm believer in making meals as entertaining as possible, cat chefs Salty & Peppy, typical of the genre since the 1950s, can always be counted on to achieve that goal. Six inches high with screw-on chef caps they’ve seasoned everything around here including the fried egg I just burnt myself for breakfast.
This is one of the most popular things in my house. It sits on a bar as you walk from my dining room into the kitchen and has been pumped full of M&Ms since the day I bought it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for 35 cents. My house is pretty much a health food lover’s nightmare anyway but even the strictest vegetarian can’t resist scooping out a handful as they pass by.
This almost foot long honey weighs a ton, almost like it’s made out of cement. Loaded with M&M’s – I top it off every morning so it rises out of the glaze like The Big Rock Candy Mountain – it’s weathered every earthquake since I’ve had it. Everything else around it crashes to the floor yet the faithful candy dish doesn’t shift an inch. So even during the scariest moments there’s always something happy to eat.
From 1989 through 1991 I art directed and hand built the set and props for “Just Say Julie”, MTV’s first ever clip show starring (Uptown) Julie Brown. Julie was one of my best friends and we had a ball, especially as it was so early in MTV’s scripted show evolution that no one from the network paid much attention to what we were doing so we just went nuts. We shot 10 shows in three days each of the three years. The art direction budget was insanely small, something like $500. It made no sense financially to do it so my deal was that I could keep everything once the shoot was over. This is when my collection of Kitsch went into serious overdrive. I still have just about everything but none of it so close to my heart as the 14 foot long astroturf couch with sandtrap ashtray and golf club feet that sat in the middle of Julie’s living room.
Many illustrious guests sat on the couch.
Even Elvis showed up one day.
Yesterday, Julie and I both showed up at Street.
We talked about how much freedom we had doing “Just Say Julie” versus what usually goes on in Hollywood where you’re stripped senseless of any brain material once you sign a contract and are beholden to create by committee. But with the (thank God) rise of the Internet, power has been turned back over to the artist if they have the brains and balls to use it, a topic I’ve been obsessed with for almost 20 years.
We did a lot of eating while we talked. We had Moroccan Spiced Winter Squash with popcorn,
Tatsutage Fried Chicken,
Mini Kobe Beef Chili Dogs…
… and Spinach Varenyky, which I forgot to photograph until I finished.
Julie was more diet conscious than I and only ate the insides.
Julie and I have a longstanding history with food. In 1989, she won the Best Food award at my Night of the Living Négligée all girl pajama party with her spectacular “Cabbage In Rollers” appetizer featuring cocktail weenies stuck into a cabbage face with a jar of barbecue sauce sunk into the head.
I know the beautiful cabbage head is hard to see in the photo. You can see it a little better in this one where I’m demonstrating that the rollers are actually edible as Cyndi Lauper turns away in disgust.
Always a reliable party guest for showing up with festive pot luck food, Julie brought some delicious mouthwash to my Smock It To Me (Art Can Taste Bad In Any medium) party in 1991.
All in all, I don’t think Julie or I have lost much of our spunk or drive over the years. I look forward to decades more of friendship, food AND fantastic couches!
I never drank coffee before I was 21 and almost fainted in a doctor’s office after he gave me a shot and a big cup of coffee to keep me from going down all the way. Slowly but surely over the next few months I built up a taste to it and by the time I started living in recording studios in the late 70’s when I got my big break with Earth Wind & Fire I was up to 20+ cups a day as social breaks at the coffee machine and playing Pong was the only time I ever saw sunshine.
I never actually used this cup to drink out of, mainly because it was too heavy to pick up full and take a delicate sip from and the coffee was too cold by the time the weight was manageable. So it’s spent three decades as a candy dish, pen holder and even made it on to MTV from 1989-91 as part of “Just Say Julie”, the first music video clip show ever, when it hung in Uptown Julie Brown’s set that I art-directed.
I used to work around the clock. Now I’m at a more human 12 – 16 hours a day. But oftentimes the nights still seem like a bottomless cup.
Ten years old and Italian, this diver plunger is only about half the size of a normal one but performs his duties ably. Although I’m not about to plunge it into a toilet because of its diminutive size, it rests under the bathroom sink where my cat, Niblet, loves to drink water and waits patiently for hours until I dole out a few drips. As cute as that is, her fur eventually clogs the pipes and it’s then I reach for the diver, always perfectly poised to make the plunge. He delivers every time!
Anyone who knows me knows that getting me to eat celery or anything else green is no small feat. I’ve always thought that I’m prone to Kitsch because my brain has been tweaked by decades of glorious junk food ingestion. But I’ve been trying to make an effort to at least dunk my toes into the waters on the other side and pulling the stringy-green-stuff-that’s-much-better-for-me-than-a-Twinkie out of something that looks like this is the first step toward reformation.
This anthropomorphic celery is 7″ high and only holds about four healthy stalks. Which is about as much as I can take. I fill it up every morning in hopes of it stopping me from scooping up a handful of M&Ms like everyone else who walks through my dining room does and so far it’s working. I always respond better to things when they are aesthetically pleasing.
I found this guy on eBay. At that time he had an asparagus brother. I was outbid at the last second on that one. I HATE when vintage sets are broken up so wasn’t happy with the seller or the stealth bomber who didn’t have enough sense to go for both of them. But Mr. Celery is very happy here with all his other ceramic friends and I thank him for keeping me very healthy (and mature).
This has sat over my refrigerator for at least 15 years after being rescued from a no longer existent unbelievably insane junk store nestled deep in the Adirondack Mountains in Old Forge, New York where I used to make a pilgrimage every summer with a group of friends. I wasn’t into swimming, fishing, hiking, canoeing or any of the other outdoor things that most people who go to the Adirondacks do. There were no roads going to the house we stayed at but I faithfully schlepped a couple miles via canoe across the lake a few times per trip to pilfer through the literally thousands of items that cluttered the shelves at the joint, Antiques & Articles, and would spend whole days poring over every single shelf, drawer or box in the place. The shopkeeper, about 100 years old, wasn’t sure exactly where this clock came from but he thought it was from some American Legion Hall in the vicinity.
I don’t really know what American Legion is all about but I love all the artifacts they turn out – salt ‘n pepper shakers, combs, shirts, paperweights, string paintings, pie plates, you name it, if it could have a name and a logo stamped, painted or stitched on, there was an American Legion version of it.
This baby is a hefty 20″ x 14″ x 4″ and tic tocs like the day it became a Legionnaire.
I could sprinkle grated cheese on ice cream I love the foodstuff so much. Especially when it’s shaken out of this happy little chef.
Made in the 1950’s, the height of bringing fun into the kitchen, or in this case, kitschen, via fancifully designed accessories, this chef has done at least 30 years of shaking over here.
Margaret Keane is the High Priestess of Pop Art, painting those huge waif eyed paintings that stared out at everyone throughout the 60’s and 70’s and are still copied and emulated to this day.
Last Thursday night I got to see not only so many of the original historic paintings but new works by Keane as well who hasn’t lost a gnat’s hair of technique.
This happened inside one of the greatest places in LA, the Phyllis Morris Showroom. Although Phyllis herself, creator of the original poodle lamp and unquestionably one of the greatest designers who ever lived at the high and artful end of Kitsch, isn’t still with us her creations very much are. Being in the actual presence of Keane and surrounded by both women’s work which not only dominated the eras they came from but still impact Pop Culture today was about as uplifting and exciting an art moment as this Pop artist could have. (I guess I’d have to throw in the time I walked past LA Eyeworks and through the window saw Andy Warhol staring at a motorized piece of art of mine for over five minutes. Him calling me a genius when I walked in was a watershed moment.)
There’s a movie in the works about Margaret Keane with Kate Hudson signed on to play Margaret. Her story is fantastic. Her husband, Walter, was a crafty businessmen and convinced his wife to basically paint and shut up. It was his name that was on all of her paintings and it was he who made multiple appearances on Johnny Carson, did all the interviews and got all the glory. Margaret is still very soft-spoken but came to her senses in an infamous 1965 court case during their divorce when she rightfully and finally claimed that the paintings that made Keane a household word were actually hers. When her husband called her a liar the judge set two easels up and asked them both to paint. Margaret got up and knocked out one of her famous big sad eyed paintings while Walter complained of a sore shoulder and sat there like a lump. Feminism was at its height and Margaret instantly became an Olympian sized champ.
I only own some Keane prints from back in the day. I would have loved to have bought one of her paintings last Thursday but as opposed to the few dollars they cost in the 60’s they now average between $75,000 and $225,000.
As far as Phyllis goes, I hope to go back to the showroom to shoot a video with Jamie Adler, Phyllis’ daughter who runs it now and is a fantastic designer in her own right. Her mom set the bar for merging Art and Kitsch, magnificently over-the-top Baroque creations that remained totally tasteful and full of importance and humor. Throughout the four decades she was designing, Phyllis’ oversized beds, chairs, wall units and accessories filled the homes of folks unafraid to embrace their own uniqueness and style like Liberace and Elvis Presley. Here’s Phyllis and her dyed pink poodles in 1953 with some of the first poodle lamps that rolled off the assembly line:
Now back to the showroom Thursday night:
Thank you, Margaret and Phyllis, for the never-ending inspiration, talent and fun!
Main Photo: Katy Winn
I first got into throwing parties, my favorite thing to do among everything I do, by inviting friends over on Sunday afternoons to watch Bad movies. I was long aware that environment totally influences anything that happens inside of it and the bad films allowed me to ratchet up my collection of Kitsch to enhance viewer experience. Grabbing candy out of a plain white bowl was just that, grabbing candy out of a plain white bowl, but sticking your hand into something like these incredibly cheap sawed-in-half plastic beer bottles acted like Mind Control pulling my guests further into the inane madness of classics like “Monster from the Surf”, “The Lonely Lady”, “Attack of the Mushroom People”, “Black Shampoo”, “Plan Nine from Outer Space”, “Puma Man” and other Academy-Award-worthy nominees for Worst Film Ever in my never-ending collection of cinematic clunkers.
There are several things that set these ‘novelty nut dishes’ apart as outstanding artifacts of Kitsch. 1) They’re so incredibly cheaply made that they crack as soon as you breathe on them:
2) They’re apparently called “Beer Friend”…
… though the name “Beer Friend” appears nowhere on the box:
3) The realllllly cheap, mushy, squishy cardboard box with its 4) tag line, “Perfect for candy, too”, with a misplaced comma not to mention the aforementioned 2) absolutely no mention of “Beer Friend” despite it being embossed in big letters on the back of the “bottles”.
If you’re not doing anything when you read this grab some nuts and a cold beer (neither of which are particular favorites of mine) and watch one of the above mentioned movies. Your day will improve immensely.
