The title of this post is somewhat misleading as although I really did go to the largest exhibition of Marilyn Monroe’s personal artifacts ever I assumed it wasn’t cool to take photos inside the Hollywood Museum where it took place so I only took my camera out to snap a few personal photos of my own.  As I was driving home I was kicking myself that I didn’t break the rules and at least sneak a shot of Marilyn’s gigantic 1961 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine with her gloves and purse still lying on the back seat and the cap owned by the chauffeur, who owns the car to this day, still on the dash.  There were checks written by Marilyn, personal notes, clothes, scripts, magazine covers including huge original photos of her Playboy spread – she graced the cover of the first Playboy ever – and anything else you could have ever hoped to see of Marilyn’s. The star, of course, was not here to celebrate with us having left the planet over 40 years ago but look who was wearing a gown that Marilyn wore to entertain the troops in Korea in 1951:

Our hostess for the evening was the lovely Ester Golderg:

The rest of my crew was (L-R) Chadmichael Morisette, Mito Aviles, (me, Marilyn), LaToya London, American Idol alumni and Nettie in my musical, The Color Purple, and Tiffany Daniels, Squeak in TCP.

The Hollywood Museum is in the old Max Factor building on Hollywood and Highland.

Max Factor was THE preeminent makeup artist and manufacturer during the Golden Age of Hollywood. There are still rooms in the building filled with the possessions and makeup of the stars who inhabited them like Joan Crawford, Judy Garland and Lucille Ball.

Well…Ok…I snuck one shot of Lucille Ball’s dressing table…

Ok, maybe two.  This is Cary grant’s Rolls-Royce:

Some of the rooms are still named for the color of hair a star had with the corresponding makeup:

All in all we had a great evening and saw a lifetime of Marilyn but I’m soooo late for a meeting and need to get out of here so I need to end now or I won’t have time to put on makeup.

This late 60’s Soul Grabber sign for Budweiser malt liquor is one of my favorite possessions. Everything about it screams late Afro 60’s, one of my favorite periods in Soul. In my personal life there’s one supreme SOUL GRABBER and her name is Patti LaBelle. She was the first singer to start regularly doing my songs, starting with “Little Girls” in 1978 and continuing throughout the years with others like “Come What May” and “Stir It Up”, which won me a Grammy when it was on the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack. When I first met her Patti also introduced me to Herbie Hancock and between the two of them that led to Earth, Wind & Fire.  So when it comes to grabbing souls Patti got a hold of mine, shook it loose and got it soaring.

Last night I went to a surprise birthday party thrown for Patti. As surprise parties go, as parties in general go, this was a killer, a real SOUL GRABBER. Here I am with Patti and her mom:

And here with Anita Pointer (of The Pointer Sisters, also responsible for me getting that Grammy with “Neutron Dance”), Luenell (hooker extraordinaire in Borat and fantastic comedienne/friend), Bunny Hull (who wrote “New Attitude” for Patti), Constance Tillotson (inseparable from Luenell – we call ourselves Twinkie, Ding Dong and Hostess Snowball):

And here I am with Loretta Devine, original Dream Girl…:

… and Siedah Garrett, singer extraordinaire who also wrote  “Man in the Mirror”:

And for the second day in a row here I am with RuPaul who I just saw at my party:

Don’t worry, I  haven’t forgotten about the Soul Grabber…

Here I am with Charlo Crossley (one of my oldest friends, a former Bette Midler Harlette and also a Church Lady on Broadway in my musical, The Color Purple) and Rudy Calvo, who’s always with Patti whenever I see her:

The great Kym Whitley:

And the so great Brian Dickens, Fantasia’s manager. I co-wrote and just co-produced “I’m Here”, Celie’s big song in The Color Purple, with a live 40 piece orchestra and Fantasia, who starred as Celie.  It comes out July 13.

I still haven’t forgotten about the Soul Grabber…

Here I am DEEP in conversation with the birthday girl:

And with Cheryl Dickerson and Freda Payne (”Band Of Gold”, “Bring the Boys Home” and party regular here at Willis Wonderland.)

And here I am with Norwood, songwriter and owner of my favorite front lawn in LA…

… the one with all the statues of David in front of it:

That house grabs my soul and everyone else’s who spots it and does an abrupt turn off of 3rd Street to park in front and take photos.

So happy birthday Patti LaBelle and may your soul continue to be grabbed so that you may regularly grab all of ours!

Photos: Prudence Fenton and Allee Willis

Newberrys, before and after dropping the J.J., was an American five and dime store, my favorite genre of store growing up later supplanted in my affections by 99 and 98 cent stores, thrift shops and any other place I could find a wide and often nonsensical variety of goods for bargain prices. These foot long metal rulers encouraging shoppers that “For a Full Measure of Value The Year-Round Shop Newberrys” featured calendars from September 1957 through December 1959, peak years for the chain whose beckoning portals invited shoppers to drop their cash on lots of cheap and oftentimes fantastically cheesy finds inside.

Although green on green was a popular color combo in the late 50’s it would have been even better if the rulers featured the store’s original gold serif signature logo on bright red that used to spread across the entire width of the top of the stores.

The logo changed over the years, dropping the serifs and going to a more modern script font but very little changed inside and it became one of the more excellent trips down memory lane before all the stores disappeared, gobbled up by time as chain monsters like Wal-Mart, K-Mart. stomped through the land.

This 1928 Newberrys on Hollywood Blvd. in LA is now the Hollywood Magic Shop.

Thank God I still have two full measures of Newberrys..

With 3D all the rage today many people forget that the first ubiquitous mass consumer experience with the technology was with View-Masters.  Introduced in 1962, one could view seven 3D images as they spun around on a paper disc creating lifelike reality inside the mouse hole of two eyepieces. The earliest View-Masters featured popular tourist attractions like this one of Miami Beach, where I first started buying these.

When I was young my parents drove to Miami Beach from Detroit twice a year.

We stayed at the Carlyle Hotel.

I bought every Viewmaster reel of Miami Beach I could find because the Deco architecture drove me so batty. When I had my first hit record I immediately bought a house that reminded me of Miami Beach.

A frequent visitor to my house is Charles Phoenix, one of my best friends and Kitschmaster General of vintage slide shows and books featuring insanely on-the-nose location and human examples of living wheels of brie.  The last time he came over, Charles gave me a lesson in how to bake one of his signature Cherpumples, a cake with three pies stuffed inside of it.  As soon as I get done editing the footage we shot I will post our instructional film.

Something like the Cherpumple with M&Ms bubbling out of the pepto -bismolian-pink frosting and utensils at rest would make an excellent 3D photo if only we had the right camera.

Yesterday, I went downtown with Prudence Fenton, Nancye Ferguson and Jim Burns and saw Charles’ first ever all 3D retro slide show.

We learned a lot about how 3-D photography and View-Masters came into being.

We saw a lot of families in the 50’s learning how to not only use their View-Masters but make their own 3D reels.

Of course, you won’t be able to see anything clearly because you don’t have your 3-D glasses on. As opposed to this slide from Charles’ show featuring an attractive threesome with a very clear view of the LA freeway when it was built in 1960 standing less than 10 feet away next to oncoming traffic.

I hope to have a clear view of the week ahead of me although it could go either way. I could feel like an outsider…

… or I could choose to see the world in super enhanced, bigger than life 3D.

Thank you, Charles for an excellent afternoon and thank you View-Master for putting 3-D in the palm of our hands.

As Kitschmeister General I love, love, love the San Fernando Valley, just inches from the center of Hollywood and pumped full of Kitsch like a buffet line at Trader Vics. This is the first in a series of short films I’m making glorifying the Kitsch monuments that abound around me for bigisgood.tv. Part 1 features everything from Roman architecture and giant submarine sandwiches to clowns, frog families, volcanoes, giant fish, horses, shoe cars and very happy houses.

For the full glorious and kitschyfied tour:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRxzFdByMQs

And check out bigisgood.tv.

I have three of these insanely beautiful vintage portholes off of a 1952 Chris-Craft boat. I found them in three separate eBay auctions a few years apart.

I love all portholes but especially these with the chrome fins across the glass.

My studio is a classic Streamline Moderne boat looking structure built as the MGM party house in 1937 and although there were no portholes when I moved in it was screaming, no BEGGING, for me to pop a few in.

As much as I love these they’re not my favorite porthole around here. That honor is reserved for my $11 used-to-be-a-flimsy-brass-mirror porthole that I sunk into the floor and now serves as my laundry chute.

My laundry chute porthole was featured in the Los Angeles Times twice last year alone. When I get completely frustrated writing, painting, making films, curating AWMoK.com and everything else I fill my time with I always think I could go into the business of selling porthole laundry chutes.

Studio photo: Maryanne Bilham

There it is this morning, right there on the homepage of the LA Times – the Sound Of Soul celebration at Willis Wonderland, the  physical extension of The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch, to honor all things Soul – historic audiotapes and my collection of whacked out Kitschified Soul artifacts: http://www.latimes.com/theguide/events-and-festivals/lat-et-soundofsoul-pg,0,2371356.photogallery Movin’ on up!

There’s a block of Lankershim in North Hollywood, CA that’s littered – I use that word lovingly – with square brick buildings adorned with Greek and Roman plaster columns, gods and godesses split in half and glued against the buildings in attempts to make them look like ancient Greek and Roman temples. I love this kind of architecture, especially when most of the time they’re trying to make strip joints look classy and exotic. That’s the case here.

It’s next to another edifice of similar antiquity:

I love North Hollywood!

I’m very attached to my home state of Michigan and collect anything from the 1940s to 1970s that honors it. I particularly love when architecture is involved as in those decades Michigan exemplified the Atomic Age with its number one industry, automobiles, and much of the architecture in the state was inspired by the cash cow’s huge tail fins and modern color palettes.

The Harris Motor Inn in Kalamazoo couldn’t quite decide if it was traditional (lots of brick) or modern, though the excellent slate, floor to ceiling glass windows and suspended light fixtures suggest the latter influence was greater.

I love when anything proclaims itself “the best”. In the case of the Harris it’s “Michigan’s Best for Food and Rest”. If this place is still standing I just might make it there one day to sample the food by Zeman, who was heavy enough to get his/their initial in a larger font size than the Harris itself.

Rising like several healthy squirts of whipped cream on an otherwise dull sundae, the Sanctuary spa/resort/fantasy masterpiece of plaster workmanship on Palm Dr. in Desert Hot Springs, California almost caused me to have a car wreck when I first drove past it. Absolutely incongruous with anything else in the area, it still gets my vote as hot spot in town.

Despite the fact that the plaster is slathered on so thick that the mashed potato/sour cream/whipped cream exterior already shows cracks, I’ve long known that this ‘heaped on’ technique is an excellent way to cover up otherwise dowdy exteriors. Cottage cheese or fan brushed plaster or concrete do not count here. That’s merely for people who have no taste. The cascading and mounding effect seen here at The Sanctuary is, rather, a fully realized artistic vision that scales to the peak of Mt. Kitschrest and never comes down for a landing.

I found these comments online: “… staff , restaurant, rooms and pool area is perfect” … “Rollaway bed mattress ($10 extra charge) was so old and uncomfortable” … “Everywhere we went the staff took time to wish us a good day” … “What a dirty, stinkin, filthy dive!” … “Best $70.00 ever spent…”… “on the first day we have no shampoo and when we ask the answer was “we are not received yet from supplier ” ( who cares-i pay for room ).”