musings...

[lemonyandbeatrice]

What’s your name, man?

[mccallspatternbehavior-blog]

Interesting costume Peg

I’m a Midinette

A what

A Midinette

I don’t 

MIDINETTE

Ok

[mccallspatternbehavior-blog]

I mean I’m happy to be a bridesmaid

I just

Which one of you is getting married today

[mccallspatternbehavior-blog]

Kelly

There’s literally only one rule to Hat Club

[slatevault-blog]

Cards to get you past the speakeasy’s bouncer during Prohibition: http://slate.me/10wmhCC

[animatedtext]

requested by iamrodrigoov

[absurdlakefront]

Vinegar Valentines.

Beginning in the middle of the 19th century and continuing into the early 20th century many people sent not just traditional valentines to people whom they ostensibly loved, but also insult cards to people for whom they lacked affection to put it mildly.  Most are composed of a caricature drawing and a pithy poem.  Some of these cards are really hateful, and I imagine that was the point, but surely many were given as tongue-in-cheek mementos of twisted friendships.

 I enjoy these artifacts as a countermeasure to the modern hyperbolic consumerist love festival of our contemporary Valentine’s Day.  I’d personally love to get a such cards, and even if genuinely hateful they’re likely less shaming than only receiving a Valentine’s Day card from my mother.

[sarabenincasa-deactivated201807]

My buddy Matt Oswalt wrote a post about this image and I thought I’d add my two cents because this is the fucking Internet and that’s what everybody does, right? I’ve had a few phases of reactions to this image over the past several hours, so I want to write ‘em down and get ‘em out of my brain and focus on other stuff.

I’m no censor. I thought "Piss Christ" was an amazing idea. And after recently writing a knee-jerk reactionary article to a particular piece of art for a major media outlet — and then changing my mind after I wrote it — I figured it was best to sit a little with my opinion on this one. So I sat with it, and I think I’m clear now.

There’s an argument to be made here that art is meant to be provocative and you need to know the context in which art is made in order to truly judge it. But my opinion is just that I think, as an audience member, I’d skip this particular installment of this popular comedy show even though many of the comics on it are fucking excellent (really a stellar lineup from a booking perspective) — also, I’ve heard this show is really fun and well-run. I’d be embarrassed to promote this particular show though. And at the end of the day, if the poster for your show gets more attention than your show, that’s not the best outcome. 

I’ve looked at some of the other posters for this show and the ones I saw are excellent (meaning the other installments of the show.) I love crazy art. 

But to be honest I look at this and I think about that man raping a girl with a knife in that horror movie “Se7en,” and while that is an incredibly effective and terrifying horror movie, the truth is that shit like this actually happens in reality. Like, not just as a horror movie terror scene, or as a provocative image to promote a comedy show. So I see this image, and I say to myself, “Oh man. Seems like this comedy show is not a place where I’d be welcome.” 

Now I know that isn’t true because I have actual friends on the show! And I’ve seen women and queer folks and straight folks and all kinds of folks on lineups for this show in the past. 

But if I were just looking at it online without knowing any of the folks involved, I would react with fear. Like that image to me is a red flag: “HEY LADY, YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN’T SHOW UP HERE. MAYBE YOUR KIND AIN’T WELCOME. AT ANY RATE, HERE IS A THING THAT EVOKES IMAGES OF ONE OF YOUR ACTUAL WORST FEARS IN LIFE SO, YOU KNOW, DO WITH THAT AS YOU WILL.”

I know I’m bringing my own shit and past and fears to this. But that’s what happens with art. It can’t exist in a vacuum. Once you create it, other people react to it. Art lives once in your mind, again when you create it, and again and again and again when other folks react to it. I know this pretty well as a book author (which is why I read very few reviews of my own work, and why I avoid comments on my Internet articles.) 

That said, I hear very good things about this show and I’d definitely consider schlepping to Covina to see it. But context is errrrrathing, and most folks who see this image aren’t going to have a ton of context for it.

Anyway, those are my thoughts from here in Brooklyn. Writing this has made me miss my friends in Los Angeles comedy, which is hilarious when you consider we’re talking about a bloody dick knife. Like that’s what inspires nostalgia in my heart? It’s time for me to go to therapy. But it’s always time for that.

[gydaarber]

Yup. Exactly.

[missingcinema]

Visit Original Link

The Mystery of Lotte Kuddles (Part 2 of 5)

Any discussion of the murder of Vaudevillian Lotte Kuddles has to begin with her early life. She was born Letycja Kedzierski in Brooklyn in 1898, the daughter of Polish immigrants. Young Letycja sang and danced and occasionally won local Greenpoint talent contests, though she was never as successful as her idol and rival, the talented Mae West, who was 5 years older than Letycia, and far more successful.

The origin of Lotte’s stage name remains unknown, but the first use of the name I could find was in 1919 when she made her Broadway debut in the premiere performance of George White’s Scandals as a “George White Girl” (see below pic). Though she was just in the chorus, Lotte had stronger ambitions—her sporadic diary entries include one during this time that states “I’ve got to find a way to see the music director. He’s stuck on Peggy Dolan and won’t give me a minute.”

It seems Lotte got involved with actor Franklyn Ardell while appearing in the Scandals, and a scandal indeed erupted around her. Ardell was famously dismissed from the show for providing alcohol (during the height of prohibition!) to the chorus girls backstage and was dismissed in October of 1922, and it appears Lotte was as well. I suspect there may have been more going on than a bit of drinking—my theory is that White caught Ardell and Lotte in flagrante delicto in Ardell’s dressing room and dismissed them both.  

In 1923 Lotte began to pursue the vaudeville circuit and modeled herself a bit after Anna Held. Lotte’s diary contained the below clipping of Lotte appearing at B.F. Keith’s Bushwick in 1924 (the building is luckily still standing, it’s currently the Brooklyn High School for Law and Technology).

The only extant recording of Lotte that exists (to my knowledge) is a 1923 tune “Just a Girl That Men Forget” (which proved to be sadly prescient, given the remainder of her short life). The record was found in her trunk, which I was able to digitize (the quality is poor due to the age of the record)—you can listen to the clip at the top of this post.  

I will continue the story of Lotte tomorrow, with her move to Hollywood, the parentage of her illegitimate child, and the continuing (and destructive) influence of Franklyn Ardell in her life. 

—Jennifer Eakin

(with Gyda Arber)

[missingcinema]

The Mystery of Lotte Kuddles (Part 1 of 5)

Although Hollywood has a penchant for sensationalizing horrific crimes that occur within its boundaries—Nicole Brown Simpson, the Manson Murders, the Black Dahlia—there are plenty of murders that remain unsolved and forgotten, neither horrific enough, nor featuring high-profile enough players, to attract media attention. One such murder is the sad tale of former Vaudevillian–turned Hollywood hopeful Lotte Kuddles. This newspaper clipping from an October 1932 edition of the Los Angeles Herald-Express is the only mention of her death, which was ruled a suicide by the L.A. County Coroner, though the suspicious circumstances mentioned in the article make it clear to me that foul play was involved. 

I happened upon this story while doing genealogical research, hoping to trace my line back to a Revolutionary War patriot in order to join the DAR. When I received a copy of my grandmother’s birth certificate (required for my application), I was shocked to discover that the mother listed was NOT who we had believed her to be—not Olenka Kedzierski, as we had all been told, but Letycja Kedzierski, Olenka’s sister, a not very successful Vaudeville performer with the stage name Lotte Kuddles. My grandmother is no longer with us, so we were unable to discover if she ever had this information during her lifetime, but my mother was completely unaware of this deception. 

We knew very little about Lotte, but I have been researching her life, and death, for the past few years, and have developed a theory as to her killer. I have been helped along by the recent discovery of Lotte’s trunk in the basement of her apartment building in MacArthur Park, which is undergoing a condo conversion. A kind building worker was able to identify our family from letters sent by Olenka to her sister, and arranged for its return to us. I believe this trunk was packed up after Lotte’s untimely end and has remained in this basement until now. Of particular interest is Lotte’s scrapbrook/diary, which sheds light on the motives and suspects of her killer—which I will reveal to you in my posts over the next few days. 

- Jennifer Eakin 

(with Gyda Arber.)

[johndevore]

White Privilege Checklist

(Check All That Apply)

(Check All That Apply)

__  You frequently smile & wave at law enforcement

__ You might say, with a chuckle, “Hello, Office.”

__ Cops sure do love donuts! LOL!

__ A police officer shoot an unarmed white person in the back and then there’s no trial ha ha ha that’s absurd now let’s go drink kombucha.

__ Maybe you were born into intractable poverty and cringe at the idea you enjoy any privilege but let’s be honest: there’s someone who has it worse off than you and that person is probably brown-skinned.

Read More

[hippoinatutu]

Dealing with Grief like a CHAMP!

[missingcinema]

The Search For OOF, Part 2

[Read Part One] I have fleeting memories (all happy) of the bear costume. It did exist, in real life as well as in the sketch I’ve attached above. My father would put on the bear head and chase Klaus’s gibbon and I around the sunken living room - me, shrieking happily, the gibbon eating all the potpourri in a bear induced panic (zoo life had been difficult and confusing for him) and then throwing up in the swimming pool. It seems Svetlana agreed with the gibbon about the bear costume situation judging by her added notes above. The most exciting (yet upsetting find) are the two crumpled notes written by my mother. I haven’t written much about her yet, but she was not a happy woman. Please note, amidst the to do list and the doodles, the reference to Romania. I have no idea what it means (if it means anything). Back in the 70s the Carpathians were unreachable in the Soviet controlled East. My parents were decadent apolitical hedonists who thought all government was boring, but thought the people on the left wore better outfits (my father published a famous illustrated essay about Radical Anti-Chic vs. Radical Chic. He was so pleased when the death threats began to arrive from the French Maoist contingent!)

My mother suffered greatly from various ailments and had nothing to do with politics. Her journals were all found in Romania, but I haven’t yet been able to decipher them (her habit was to write in a code of her own devising).

She would be furious if she knew the following note was kept and published. I don’t know if she’s dead, so I don’t know if she’s watching me, but I feel that she is. I wish I knew if she even presented my father with an ultimatum. My father was so open and she was so silent and secretive.

Poor, mother. She was a child actress in her native NYC, but hated it. She vowed never to appear on film again once she left my grandparents’ home. Choosing to marry my father must have seemed like madness. But there are rumours that she both wrote and edited Mal’s films from her bedroom. I wish I was older, that I knew this would be important, that I remembered more. Oh, why can’t Klaus’s gibbon speak? Georgia Quinn Paris, 2012

via cavigliascabinet

[missingcinema]

The uncertainties surrounding the brief existence and sudden demise of Studio Oof have colored my life since childhood. My father, the genius director/producer Mal Quinn (one of the bastions of the Irish Austrian film industry) produced two well received short films in the late 1960s, “The Dark, The Dark!” and "creaturecatdogbirdwhoops". The dawn of the 70s were spent trying to get the money together for his first feature while also managing to pay for private care for my mother. My memories are vague: actresses weeping and disrobing in our sunken living room, Klaus d’Alsace’s pet gibbon running amok in my parents’ suite, dozens of whispered, incomprehensible conversations in languages I didn’t (and don’t) understand, cries of “GORP GORP” faintly heard from the shrubbery. What did it all mean? Any kind of definitive answer would be lost to me (and the world) on Wednesday, 8 October, 1972 when my parents, the actors, and the crew boarded a plane in Berlin, intending to fly to their filming location on a private island in the Indian Ocean. Contact was lost as they flew over the Carpathians. Forty years of wondering, silence and the responsibility of looking after Klaus’s gibbon have formed the warp and weft of my life. There have been no answers, only tangled threads. "No answers". At least until last year, when two simultaneous events changed everything. First, a Moldovan man named Dragos Cojocaro found a large number of items that were thought to be on the plane in a box in his garage. The second was me locating a cache of pictures, documents and film fragments buried in the garden. I will attempt to sort through these two boxes and my own disjointed memories and attempt to piece together the exploded fragments of my childhood. Above is what I assume is a costume design, at least a proposed one. No copies of my father’s last screenplay survive, so I can’t be certain of its meaning. It was found in Moldova, but of my parents there is no sign. Below are two crumpled telegrams, proving both that financing for my father’s film had been secured in London, and that his lead actress and muse, Svetlana Von Von was causing problems as usual (I have a vivid, disjointed memory of blood dripping down her heavily made up face, my mother laughing, the gibbon screaming).

I fear there are no answers to the questions that have plagued my life, but perhaps I can find deeper mysteries and unravel the fabric of my parents’ life. Georgia Quinn Hants. October, 2012

via cavigliascabinet

[zinelove-blog]

[trillmeetsworld]

Fuck Helvetia but hell yeah to the rest !

[mymotivationstoloseweight-blog]

(via

TumbleOn)

[gydaarber]

Yes, please.

[gydaarber]

Trailer for the Julia Pastrana show I'm working on!

[gydaarber]

Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

Ooh. Good stuff here.