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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.

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Anyone who knows me knows I love Reality TV.  Of all the contestants on all the nutty dating shows I went especially nuts over Chance and Real, aka Ahmad and Kamal Givens aka The Stallionaires, real-life brothers and finalists 2 and 3 on season one of VH-1’s I Love New York. I liked them so much that I co-wrote and co- produced the theme song,  “Does She Love Me”, to their spin-off VH-1 show, Real Chance of Love, with them and younger brother, Micah.

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As trillions of young girls will tell you, Real is known for his long silky locks.

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So much so that last week he launched his Real Silk line of hair care products at the salon that bears his name in Long Beach.

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After an hour of tooling up and down Lakewood Blvd. trying to make sense of the googlemap directions I finally made it to the salon minutes before the opening was over where I was meeting my fabulous friend and Borat hooker, Luenell.

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Normally I would have been pissed arriving this late anywhere but I was very happy to find this giant bunny building while I was busy being lost.

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These are four of the funniest people I know. And we all have great hair.

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You can too if you pop down the coin for a bottle of this:

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Once again I don the Easter bonnet I made to go to my friend April Winchell’s mother’s house Easter, 1998 where she had a smorgasbord of international foods, the unrecognizable contents of which were festooned with name tags stuck into the dishes on popsicle sticks, an excellent sign if one likes a side of Kitsch with their holidays.

This was the first Easter bonnet I ever wore, modeled with the Sears Easter Bunny in Detroit in 1952.  It was storebought and wasn’t very Eastery. I vowed to have more festive haberdashery after that.

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My current chapeau is made of foamcore, eggs, chicks, peeps, bunnies, roosters, shredded cellophane, bagels and about 10 pounds of hot melt glue. It has held up remarkably well over the years .

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There were recipes for “Eggs In Exciting Ways” from a vintage cookbook under the brim.

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I’m wearing the hat now and having a very Happy Easter.  I hope you are too.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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Now back to the showroom Thursday night:

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Thank you, Margaret and Phyllis, for the never-ending inspiration, talent and fun!

Main Photo: Katy Winn

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Passover means Seder, Seder means matzoh and matzoh means crumbs. But fear not, the Matzah Sweeper is here, a convenient crumb caddy made from plastic that could not have cost the manufacturer much gelt because it’s so clunky to use.  After having decimated at least half a box of matzoh trying to get my favorite unleavened bread topping, peanut butter and jelly, spread evenly across it there were enough crumbs to make it look like my kitchen table was covered with snow.  But despite the fact that it says “press here”…

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after five minutes of trying to pry it open pressing everywhere imaginable I gave up trying to crack the Matzah Sweeper open to dump the crumbs. I finally used it, full of crumbs,  as a  percussion shaker on a song I was working on yesterday. The trade-off worked out nicely.

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One of my favorite things from a Kitsch perspective about matzoh is that there’s no clear correct spelling of the name. Sometimes it’s matzo, sometimes it’s matzoh and for the Rite Lite company of Brooklyn, New York it’s apparently ‘matzah’.

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And now, an extra Passover bonus! Please enjoy The Temptations circa 1968 singing a Fiddler on the Roof medley. The visual quality of this clip is beyond chaluscious (sp? Yiddish for ‘atrocious’) but to hear this score sung this way will add a little pinch o’ soul to the matzo brei and gefilte fish and ensure you stay in the groove this Passover season.

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Manischewitz is the premier manufacturer of kosher foods. I can’t tell you how many boxes of their matzo or those squared off bottles of wine sat upon seder tables of my youth but one Manischewitz product I never saw before is this special edition single released in 1958. I never even knew there were Jewish cowboys let alone that Harold Stern was one of them.

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Stern regales us with almost 9 minutes of chatter about being a Jewish cowboy and the joys of Manischewitz.

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Many famous songwriters have been Jewish, among them the very founders  of Pop music like George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Oscar Hammerstein, but who knew about “Avram”?!

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This record is fascinating for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was put out by a big legitimate company yet it’s just a demo, not an officially recorded record.

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I personally usually love demos, what the songwriter records as their idea of the song, better than the actual records made of them. But back in the day, very few people who couldn’t afford to go the full record route copped to the fact that what they were putting out was the demo. Here they didn’t even spring for a back label.

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Who knew that Centerville, Texas was such a hotbed of religious passion?

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I always liked Peanut butter and jelly on my matzo.  Perhaps I’ll crack open a box and spread a little of that on now, fill my Swinger Glass with  grape wine and lie back and enjoy all the fruits of Manischewitz and The Jewish Cowboy’s labor.

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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:

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2) They’re apparently called “Beer Friend”…

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… though the name “Beer Friend” appears nowhere on the box:

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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”.

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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.

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Although one of these little fish was a victim of the 1994 LA earthquake and lost the tip of her fin this happy couple are still among my favorite salt-and-pepper shakers in my collection of 1000 or so vintage ones. Though any ceramic animal, fish, vegetable or otherwise that has eyelashes immediately leaps it to a higher ranking in the army of Kitsch over here.

The only drag about these stone cold 1950’s/ Made in Japan amphibians is that the holes drilled for the S&P to come through are so huge that once you flip the fish over the entire Morton Salt mine blankets the food like an avalanche. Over the years I’ve learned how to bend my wrist just so in order to release the desired amount but they still terrorize dinner guests if I haven’t remembered to swap them out for a pair with more delicate holeage.

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