One of my favorite genres of Kitsch is when objects are produced to take advantage of a massive trend in pop culture but actually have nothing at all to do with that trend. My next favorite genre of Kitsch is when the products themselves are impractical for the use they were created to serve. This “Disco Beat” earring holder qualifies on both fronts! The bouncy, clean cut 1950′s American Bandstand bobby-soxers would have never gotten into the 1970′s disco-beated Studio 54 and the zillion holes provided to dangle earrings from makes for too crowded of a surface to effectively hang more than a couple sets of earrings without them hanging over each other and coalescing into a tangled mess. All of which makes for one hell of the fantastic Kitsch product!
I had my ears pierced when I was 16 but the pain was so excruciating I couldn’t get the image of a shaft of metal poking through flesh out of my head, reliving the experience every time I poked a cheap little gold wire through either hole. So I gave up after a few years and nothing has violated that area since. I did however have a great collection of vintage earrings, none of which fit on the Disco Beat unless I had at least a half an hour to spend trying to disengage the earrings from the holes and each other.
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Categories:
Accessories,
Consumer Alert!,
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Disco,
Forgot to Categorize,
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Products
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This “giant”(all 4 1/2″ of it!) can of tooth powder was all the rage in the 1940′s and 50′s when the jingle, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!” flooded tv and radio waves. Pepsodent was famous for its powerful whitening ingredients, “I.M.P.” and Irium, but in 1994, then-FCC chairman Reed Hundt claimed that there was actually no Irium in the product at all. Despite this, the popular jingle and mere promise of whiter teeth made Pepsodent a huge success and the first product that used “radio as a medium for gathering listeners for the purpose of advertising to them”.
Categories:
Consumer Alert!,
Health & Beauty,
Jerrie Thill,
Kitsch,
Products
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Swear to God, this week Coldstone introduced some of the cold stuff that turns into pudding and never melts. Only available through July 28th, this joint venture with the King of Kitsch foodstuffs, JELL-O, has the texture of pudding but is cold like ice cream and stuffed into cones or cups. Jello Pudding Ice Cream, as this test monkey is known, comes in Chocolate-y Goodness™ with peanut butter, caramel and fudge and Butterscotch Velvet™ with Butterfingers, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and caramel. I’ll miss the drips but look forward to even more chemicals lighting my system up. I’ll have some red balls Orbitz to wash that down with, please!
For recipes using the new chemical treat go here. Really.
Categories:
Consumer Alert!,
Creativity,
Food,
Kitsch,
Kitsch O' The Day
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Winning the Grammy in 1986
Yesterday I wrote an open email to a widely read music industry newsletter re the longstanding mistreatment of songwriters in the entertainment industry, veering off into the music industry ignoring the Internet until it had almost swallowed them up. Today, Mark Cuban posted this on his Facebook page which led to it spreading virally. I’ve had so many people email me and send me Facebook messages today I decided to post what I wrote myself:
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willisville
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Nothing better for a Sunday chew-down than a can o’ ham, glistening pink deliciousness especially when printed on tin or whatever metal this is that allowed the contents to completely disintegrate inside. As you can see from the photo below, the sardine-like key on the back is still intact but upon shaking nary a shred of meatstuff can be heard. I found this in a junkyard at least 25 years ago (the ham was already gone) and almost everyone who’s walked through my kitchen since gives it a good shake thinking the ham might magically appear.
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Kitsch,
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OK. I reallllly should be writing a detailed blog about the party I threw last Thurs. night here at Willis Wonderland to launch the new Bubbles & Cheesecake video, “Editing Is Cool”, and to debut my first official painting collaboration with Bubbles the artist, the Print Painting series, featuring canvas prints of five of Bubbles’ most popular images that I hand embellished with paint and vintage found objects. That sounds pretty ho hum, a party to promote something, but anyone who knows me knows I’m a hostess with mucho mostess and stiff is at the north pole of oppositeness of what went on here.
In order to do this party justice I need to go through 14 hours of video footage and this is not a job to do when you’ve slept for 21 hours total the previous week and your brain mass is still dripping through a strainer trying to get back to any semblance of normal. So I’m slogging through all of it as fast as I can but know if I drive myself nuts to finish in the timely fashion bloggers are wont to do I won’t enjoy any of it. So please know that the merriment of the “Launching Allee” party is forthcoming – you can look at a few photos from it in the meantime – and instead this blog is about how I took my own advise as offered in my brand new shiny video, “Editing Is Cool”, and got through the party without killing someone.
Categories:
Art,
Bubbles the artist,
Consumer Alert!,
Creative process,
Interactivity,
Music,
Party,
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Technology,
video
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