Gratuitous Holiday Cuteness...

Miss Xmas!

A Christmas Outfit...for reals

About which, more later. In the meantime, read "A Dangerous Lag In the Holiday".

Later. The above is what you get if you use Google Images, searching for "women's Christmas outfits". Actually, what you get is babes in Santa-slut outfits gently flicking a whip, round-faced mommies in Mrs. Claus red flannel nightgowns and ruffly mobcaps, and this one. Dress? Housecoat? Fiercely nuts? You decide. I love the notion of a hard-charging Christmas mom stumping into the family Christmas morning on her big square gift-wrapped feet. Even better, I like to think of her in the kitchen, whipping up her special Holiday Waffle Surprise while dressed as a tree. But this post isn't about beating up people who have delusions of Christmas.

Or maybe it is.

When your own Writer to the Stars was just a young twinkler, she took a job at one of the big DC tony department stores at the start of The Holiday, that is to say, before Hallowe'en. Here I'll segue off into a chunk of one of my short stories, since it sums up what the job entailed:

When you were at your most naive and, you hope, your stupidest, you took a job as Miss Christmas in a DC department store. You weren't the only one. There were swarms of Miss Christmases, a few as young and dumb as you were, a few who were young but hard-eyed, and a few who were young but already exuded a slutty passivity. Being Miss Christmas called for all of you to dress like a package: to hide your torsos in a brightly wrapped box, to wear red tights and high heels, to tie bows and gift cards around your necks and to top your heads with fake fuzzy poinsettias.

By October, the store had launched a flotilla of Miss Christmases throughout the store. Whenever a man appeared (and you were ordered only to wait on men), you were to clop over to him rustling seductively in your box, and announce, "I'm your Miss Christmas! May I help you with your Christmas shopping?" No matter how vile the response, you were supposed to whisk him through one expensive department after another, cajoling him into spending, spending, spending. Each Miss Christmas had to make $200 a day, which meant, in 1964 dollars, a lot of men.

Your own station was by the E Street door, where timed squirts of Elizabeth Arden's Blue Grass spattered over you at three minute intervals. Somehow, reeking like a chorus boy, your box becoming more battered by the week, your poinsettia more frowzy, you managed to live through three exhausting months as Miss Christmas. Out of the gray, anonymous hordes, you still recall helping Avril Harriman, the entire cotton lobby, and a whooping drunken sailor. After work, in The Blue Mirror Bar, drinking whiskey sours, playing Pretty Woman over and over on the jukebox, you sat collapsed in a tufted booth, feeling assailed, dented, much worse for wear.

You gave up your cherished dream of being a high-priced call girl or, for that matter, any other occupation involving high heels.

Excerpt from: What A Job Will Do

Yeah. Retail. It sucked.

A Dangerous Lag In the Holiday...

The Twosome Blanket from Iceland

What with honest toilers getting laid off from their cube farm jobs, the assembly line, or their sore-footed retail labors, I sense a dangerous lull in The Holiday festivities. This quietus used to be taken up with enforced jollity like attending the Team Lunch at Steak and Ale, donating gifts for crack babies, and listening to co-worker carolers howl out some version of Little Drummer Boy. When we weren't getting hammered by Xmas cheer at work, you could find us at home cooking up a mega-casserole for The Division's big noontime spread. And if we weren't layering glop into a glass dish, wrapping crack-baby gifts, or staggering back from a hi-carb meal at El Fenix, we were plotting a bruising mall visit to Christmas shop.

But we're all broke and fired now, aren't we? And if we're not fired, we're broke, and if we're not broke, we're about to be fired. With worry afoot, we can't scamper through the stores the way we once did, grabbing lavish gifts with all the thought of a meth-amped gerbil. The usual buzzy Holiday impetus is stalled-out, and on a national scale too. This current dead time makes me fearful for my fellow citizens who are, no doubt, trolling the Internet on a misguided quest for the cheap and unusual gift. Or, worse, just the stunningly unusual gift (see above).

After many years as an artist, I've learned that most situations don't require a lot of creativity and that there are numerous occasions when creativity is to be strongly eschewed. The Holiday is one. Forget what the hag-mags tell you. Your beloved really doesn't want a hand-scrawled certificate promising 100 Hugs! Nor will she want the Tater Mitts (shown below).

Tater Mitts

The Tater Mitts, which are both cheap and unusual, violate the no creativity dictum that operates in most real-life situations. Somewhere around the Bronze Age, our ancestors learned how to chisel the hide off a potato using a knife and thought, Okay. Got that one knocked. Since then, not too many variations on the chore have been needed. The same, perhaps, goes for Toilet Candy (below).

Toilet Candy

I haven't noticed that either small children or adults need to be snookered into eating candy, so the logic behind this novelty eludes me. I'll give a quick product description. The toilet proper is filled with two flavor choices of lumpy powder--grape or watermelon, or going by color alone, either green or pale blue. Since green gives rise to some unspeakable toilet-associations, I suggest blue which, at least, connotes that perpetual blue toilet cleaner found in some bathrooms.The product also comes with two mini-toilet plungers. To consume, you lick a plunger, stick it in the bowl, lick it off, and repeat. When I first came across this, I wondered who on earth the target consumer might be, but on closer examination, I think I know: people who eat out of toilets.

Tell me I'm wrong.

Twits for The Holiday...

Blythe Danner, American Actress

Quickly, quickly, I need to note that Blythe Danner is not a twit; she's the mother of a twit, though, through no fault of her own. With my worldview of life as chaos, I consider twits to be born, not made. And here I refer to her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, whom I consider a wide spectrum twit and launcher of a deeply offensive self-serving blog called GOOP.com. GOOP has yoga/decorating/vegetarian/fashion/kabbalah advice for those with globs of money and zero self-awareness. I imagine nearly everyone on the planet can live their lives in some manageable fashion without either GOOP or Gwyneth, and will probably do so. I do, however, have the sinking feeling that both GOOP and Gwyneth will have some expensive ideas for The Holiday.

It's impossible for me to imagine Blythe launching anything like GOOP or, for that matter, giving birth to Gwyneth, although by all accounts she loves her dearly.

I went to school with Blythe, when I attended Bard College. She was several years ahead of me and looked only slightly like the picture above. I wish I could find a picture of the way she looked at Bard, but haven't been able to. Her dirty-blonde hair hung well below her butt in a ragged coiling dryish mass and she wore incredibly baggy jeans rolled up on her shins, coupled with a t-shirt and no make-up. Her skin always looked healthy but chapped. By appearances, she was a kick-ass bohemian and a hard-working one at that. For her senior project she appeared in a play, the name of which I never learned, but I do know that a bunch of agents came up from the city to see her. Even then she was enough of a celebrity that whenever she passed by, someone would nudge me in the ribs, and whisper, "That's Blythe Danner."

I was interested in observing Blythe because she was like a lot of the students I ran into at Bard: a busy, very young professional. Her dad, however, was a bank executive, and so, like me, she also belonged to a seeming minority at Bard: kids with parents who worked in offices. Most of the students I bumped into had parents who worked in daytime soap operas, were fortune-tellers, poets, or hard-core communists. If these parents had fights with their kids, it was usually because they felt their children didn't care enough about the proletariat or the Socialist Party.

But my point here is that Blythe labored like a stevedore and deserved every break she got. Her twit-daughter, on the other hand, seems to feel that those who aren't communing daily with their aromatherapist are, well, somehow lacking. In any role I've ever seen Blythe take on, she always displays a kind of intelligent grittiness that I've never, ever seen in Gwyneth. Somehow Blythe got a snootful of reality and her daughter never did.

Of course the times were different then. Hard-nosed realism was more prized; bohemia wasn't a life-style choice, it was something that just took form around certain people. We may be getting back to something akin to those times, a chancy place I call Edge City.

It produced one good actress, at least. And I've noticed something else.

Easy times never make much worth having.

Gifties continued...

Brooch by Bettina Speckner 2001
Photo Etching on Zinc, Set in Fine Gold
with black diamonds

Bettina Speckner's jewelry is the best argument I know for making a ton of money. She's my favorite jeweler for an assortment of reasons, most of them arty, so bear with me here. First, she's an odd kind of deconstructivist, and I love me some ironic deconstructivists wherever I find them. Her pieces show you how they're made, while at the same time, they're a narrative on jewelry in general, explaining how jewelry functions as a keepsake, a reminder, and a collection of precious materials. Here, let me show you another couple of pieces.

Brooch by Bettina Speckner 2005
Photo Etching on Zinc, Set in Fine Gold


Brooch by Bettina Speckner 2003
Photo Etching on Zinc, Set in Silver
with Gray Pearls

There's also a kind of gloomy memorial nuttiness about her work. They remind me of the Victorian funereal hair jewelry I used to see at my grandfather's house. This was truly creepy stuff in the best creepy death-worshiping Victorian tradition. Head hair was collected from the dearly departed, then macramed into strange intricate knots and chains, then set into rose gold fittings with cut rubies added for contrast. The stuff made me feel crawly just looking at it. But Bettina's work takes the memorial idea and turns it on its head in a couple of ways. Sometimes she uses an "unworthy" subject; see cow above, and elevates it with precious metals and beautifully matched pearls. Sommetimes she goes for broke and takes an antique photo, one of those that's so antique you can't imagine that a human ever lived outside the image (See below), then decks it out with raw diamonds.

Brooch by Bettina Speckner 2003
Ferrotype; Silver; Split Raw Diamonds

She often tosses in some strange bit of offhandedness like the little hats floating below the subject in the brooch pictured above, or the globs of gold scattered on her 2005 brooch.

If you're cudgeling your head, trying to think up an anonymous gift for your Writer to the Stars, head on over to Bettina Speckner. Any one of her pieces would be a prize and I'd wear it every day. Otherwise, I may have to write a book and squander aaaallll the advance money.

Be worth it though.

Gifts that keep on giving...

A Motorcycle Cozy

Other than fudge, the gifts I've made tend to have the sweaty fingerprints of what my mother called, Made By Loving Hands At Home. You already know what I'm talking about. Long endless stretched out scarves, dishtowels embroidered with wavering stitches, lumpy needlepoint wrapped around bricks. Besides coming from a long line of cheapies, I come from a long line of talented needle-women, of which I am not one nor will I ever be. Even as a child, when given my Xmas-gift-to-make, I'd think, Big waste of time. Then I'd sit there splitting embroidery thread, pricking my fingers, getting brownish dots of blood over the linen, feeling sorry for my grandparents, who were the recipients-to-be of whatever tangled mess I conjured.

The woman who made the motorcycle cozie belongs to a new breed. She's an extreme knitter, one of a number of subversive anti-girlie craftspeople. You can see quite a lot of these women's work on the Art For Housewives site at http://housewife.splinder.com. This makes a lot of sense to me. There are plenty of oddball connections between revolution and weaving, since threading a loom is irritating and time consuming. Sitting over a bitterly repetitious task allows plenty of time for brooding and plotting. It's no accident in Tale of Two Cities that Madame DeFarge tirelessly knits, watching the carnage of the revolution tick on. Her clicking needles become a kind of metronome for the gathering violence.

There are some extreme embroiderers too. I think my attitude towards embroidery might have been a bit more, well, open if I'd known I could do something like this:

Cotton Square By Andrea Dezsö
from the Exhibition "Pricked"

Or this:

Cotton Square By Andrea Dezsö
from the Exhibition "Pricked"

Or if I could knit something like this: (from the show "Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting"...)

David Cole's "The Money Dress"
is made from 879 U.S. $1 bills cut
into 1/8" stripes and woven together.

or...

How about those for Christmas gifties?

Yeah, me too.