Not only is this an excellent salad/party condiments serving piece but it serves just as well as a conversation piece as its composition is a complete mystery. I haven’t been able to come to a 100% consensus on whether it’s made of plastic or glass since I bought it for a hefty $9 at a thrift shop a few weeks ago. It sits out on my dining room table and it’s become almost a ritual for guests to tap their fingers against it and register a vote. It looks like glass and it sounds like glass and it certainly is as heavy as glass but every now and then a tap will deliver a dull thud, the signature sound of plastic. Actually, most votes are that it’s a bizarre combination of glass and plastic, one or the other covering the other one so you have the beauty of glass but practicality of plastic. I know this makes no sense but this appears to be the way of the world.
I think the only way to know for sure is to drop it, a fate I hope does not befall this beautiful bowl. Did I mention that it’s quite chunky? 16″ across and 10″ high.
When I went to measure it just now it clanked against the top of the metal shelf I pulled it out from. It sounded like glass and I was expecting it to shatter but it came out chip free and once again sounded like hollow plastic when I tapped it again.
The marks on the bottom of the bowl tell me nothing. Though that smudge looks pretty plasticy but then again, the base could be plastic and the rest of it glass.
I’m just happy to own this pretty bowl. I don’t intend to eat it or use it for anything other than what it was intended for - to be beautiful and make whatever is inside of it look even lovelier. And as a Kitsch lover I can make a case for whatever material it’s made of and love it just the same.
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Yesterday, me and Mark Blackwell, who I work with, drove back to LA from up north in Sonoma where I was working with Pomplamoose. As I had raced through the last 48 hours to drive up there with a van full of props so we could shoot our “Shbaby” video, unloaded everything, danced and carried on like a lunatic for the video for much of the time, wrapped, re-wrapped and repaired instruments I had made out of foamcore, many of which weren’t happy taking the trip, singing and finishing tracks for another song, “R U Thinking”, finalizing our “Jungle Animal” video, racing back and forth to the hotel where someone who weighed at least 400 pounds was very fidgety in the room above me both nights… as all this was crammed into a less than 48 hour period I was drop dead T-I-R-E-D when it was time to head back yesterday morning.
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In the 1960’s and 70’s when string paintings were at the peak of their popularity more string owls lived on wallpapered and wood paneled walls inside houses than real ones lived outside. I never took the craft up. The strings in the crowded areas reminded me of tiny spider legs. The nails were tiny and unless you hit them dead on the black velvet would twist around the shaft and pucker everywhere. Then the string, or in this case yarn, had to be pulled completely taunt or you’d have a sagging bird. All those crisscrossing strings gave me Vertigo, especially when it got to places like around the eyes where there were so many of them it was like a spider convention at The Sheraton. This was way too precise of a task for a free-form, spontaneous artist such as myself. I felt the same way about Spirographs.
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I can’t remember any game more popular than Cootie when I was growing up. But forget about the game itself, I loved playing with the little plastic body parts. I’m quite positive that the full-on-plastic-soaked-saturation of the pink Cootie legs is where my love of that particular color came from.
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Featuring 425 “new” recipes plus a special “When-Company-Comes” section, this cookbook, published in 1958 by General Mills, was designed expressly for “brides, business girls, career wives and mothers of married children”. Divided into sections like Regional Meals USA, Pennywise Dinners and What Every Good Cook Knows, as is often the case with vintage cookbooks the quintessentially Atomic 50’s graphics and fonts are even better than the recipes themselves.
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This vintage cleaning product can may be a little worse for wear but so am I as I hobble around my house shining it back up to its usual state after a couple hundred people trounced through here yesterday in celebration of John Lloyd Young’s debut exhibition featuring his very first works of Kitsch Pop art. I love that cleaning products in aerosol cans were so new when this came out in the 1950s that it was made of silicones (more than 1!) and was referred to as the “push-button cleaner”.
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If ever there were a garden for 2010 with no water required, no gardening bills to pay and always picture perfect plumage on well-sculpted almost-topiary-but-without-the-cute-animals tree/bushes this would be it.
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The Snack Master, a 1-1/2″ long aluminum tube with a wooden plunger, is the vintage quintessential kitsch kitchen accessory that cuts holes in food, making teeny round, bite-size appetizers. Which means that you can turn a slice of American cheese into a slice of Swiss cheese with one simple plunge not to mention whipping up little toothpick skewers of bologna, liverwurst and other festive lunch meats to impress your friends!
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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.
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I’m not sure what flavor of liquid came in this bottle but the Sweetie logo featuring an early ’50s extra-pert secretarial type sucking on a straw that looks more like a striped cigarette would have had me buying this drink no matter what it tasted like. Beautifully designed with the concentric circles on the pyro-glazed logo echoing the raised flanges of glass above it, the aesthetic effects of this squat little 8″ Sweetie bottle would make anything taste good.
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