This

Is the greatest thing I have ever seen.

A 1927 travel trailer prototype built by one crazy guy and restored by another one.  Read about it here.  It's...perfect.

Anne Boleyn's Body

Sometimes I write posts for this blog, then become disgusted with them and never post them.  Then I read them a year later and decide to post them because the world really needs to know how I feel about everything, even if it is poorly executed.  That will become a pun if you read on! 

Someone asked me what I could possibly be writing about so often in this thing (sometimes blogging comes up in conversation and because I never have the presence of mind to lie, I cryptically mention this, then refuse to give the address. The last person said, What do you like talk about private girl stuff there?  If by "girl stuff" you mean Anne Boleyn then...yeah).  Get ready!

After their beheadings, Anne Boleyn and her brother George were tossed into some graves under the floor of St. Peter ad Vincula.  I am not really sure about the status of that kind of burial.  It wasn't total dishonor (like having your head left on a bridge for your spiteful ex to sneer at from his window), but a queen in good favor naturally wouldn't have been put there. 

As they do, the church fell into some disrepair in the centuries following Anne's death.  A restoration effort was taken during the 19th century, at which time the graves beneath the floors were opened.  It had always been known that Anne and her...family were in there (not only brother George but cousin Catherine as well), so I am not exactly sure why they were disinterred and can only attribute this to Victorian morbid curiosity.  The opening of the floor led to the realization that a bunch of regular  townspeople had been placed there along with the Boleyns and various other nobles over the years. 

It was at this point that they realized they really didn't know which of the skeletons belonged to Anne, having only a 16th century map and a jumble of corpses to go by.  Since a lot of bodies had been shifted around as they added new ones (apparently they would bash up old coffins and shove bones to the side to get new ones in), it was anyone's guess whether the female skeleton in the general area of Anne's X on the map was really her.  Hm, no sixth fingers or tails in here.  Get out the Victorian forensics!  Victorian forensics: "Eh...thiiis one."  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was just a kid when this happened, so he wasn't around to help.

Couldn't they have looked for trauma to the vertebra?  Not that beheaded skeletons were in short supply at St. Peter's.  Anyway, they picked the most likely female skeleton, slapped a tag on it reading AB 1536 :/ (jk, I don't know what the tag says), put her in a nice box, and back under the floor she went.

It seems like they could settle this situation with a little DNA testing.  Anne's sister Mary had children, and surely some of their descendents are living today.  Then again, would anyone care about this other than myself and Suzannah Lipscomb?  Of course they would!  This is important.

Party

My grandma was always a great fan of holidays and parties and decorated her entire house for Christmas.  Streamers and stockings and lights and cookies, cakes, food and crap everywhere.  This photo of her parents at Christmas on the farm helps to explain that.  I would place this picture around 1918.  Unlike other holidays, the most recognizable elements of American Christmas celebrations have changed very little. 

Crepe paper decor was such a big deal back then.  Not sure, but I think the Dennison's catalogs pretty much invented using it to decorate for parties, or at least made it popular to.  They're good for ideas when you want to decorate your Victorian palace in the most authentic way.

Jane Eyre in Film, 1

I have queued every film adaptation of Jane Eyre that Netflix has, because why wouldn't I?  It may impress you to know that there are eight, all of which I plan to watch.  No, nine if you count the one with Timothy Dalton, which I reluctantly do.

So far, my favorite is the 2006 BBC miniseries.  It's extremely loyal to the book and to the descriptions of the characters.  I cannot say the same for the 1944 Orson Welles/Joan Fontaine film, which takes obnoxious license with the story, but is ultimately still watchable.  It also stars a young Elizabeth Taylor as Jane's only school friend, who dies.  I would say spoiler alert, but this book was published 165 years ago; you're on your own.

The Welles version was done while he was still young and babely, frankly too babely to be a convincing Rochester, but he makes up for this with his gruff, barky demeanor and reluctant smile.  Joan Fontaine was also too pretty to play a believable Jane, but we make do.  Unfortunately, she portrays a totally boring Jane, who simpers around seeming weak instead of interesting and willful.  The film shows a protracted view of Jane's unfortunate childhood, and we see just how terrible Lowood was.  Almost more terrible, in fact, than is described in the book.  This movie is all about how sad Jane is and how lucky she is to be rescued by a strange yelling man, rather than how resilient she is and how she rescues him, as CB had it.

Maybe I'm being too hard on this film because I've seen it done better.  For an era that produced some intolerable period pieces and adaptations, it is not terrible.  Also, Agnes Moorehead plays Jane's bitch aunt, three years after playing the crappy abandoning mother in Citizen Kane.  At this time, she seems to have been typecast as the plain domestic failure who knows she sucks but can't seem to do anything about it.  Thank god she showed everyone what the fuck was up later on Bewitched.

In closing, I just saw this on tumblr.  The tag!  Ah, the internet is for everyone. 

Only this.

Astrology Drama

I picked up a 1972 copy of Linda Goodman's Sun Signs at the Salvation Army recently, and in my boredom* began to peruse the truths of my personality.

According to Linda, I am basically Elizabeth Taylor's character in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but younger.  Linda also thinks I'm blonde, or at least should be blonde, on account of the lion thing.  Be the lion.  Kill the people.  Get the attention.  Ask if you are the prettiest.  These are the things that keep Leos busy on a weekday.

As if that weren't bad enough, I also found out that I have had my rising sign wrong for approximately two decades.  Yes, two decades.  Astrology was around when I was growing up, ok?  My great-grandmother saved my horoscope from the day I was born for me to read later.  I did.  It said, "You are kind of a bitch, but it's not your fault. Also you have long flowing hair."  I wish I still had it.

Calculating your own rising sign before there were websites to do it for you involved flipping through large tomes of dates, and lining up your birth day with your birth time on a huge slanted chart.  The lines from one sign to the next are very fine in some cases, and I guess Liz made a mistake, because I just found out that I am a rising sign of Sagittarius, and not Capricorn.  That's a big deal, guys!  Your rising sign is supposed to be more personal, the "inner you," and as an angry teen, I took solace in Capricorn's weird, antisocial, uncool style.  Capricorn is measured, sensitive and real, not a name-dropping high flying bastard with frosted hair.  Finally!  I thought.  Something that sounds more like me!  Astrology is real!

So just imagine the blow to my self-identity to find out that I am not a lion-goat, but a lion-archer.  Is that cooler?  It sounds cooler.  I am ruled by Jupiter!  Jupiter is the big one that Tori Amos wrote about on Boys for Pele.  Apparently Sagittarians are jovial and merry and always say the wrong thing, too high on life to realize they've insulted people.  Also not me.  I always know, or often or usually know, when I have insulted someone.

I will continue to explore the Sagittarius in the future, but I think Linda and I are over. 

__
* I have a 25 page paper due tomorrow.

Of all the things to like.

This 90s retro explosion is just getting confusing at this point.  It seems like the window of time passage is becoming ever shorter before music and fashions return as retro.  Personally, I feel that we need to reach back much farther than this.  Skip a generation or two.  Like that moment in mid-70s fashion in which some dresses and hairstyles were looking distinctly early century. What could be better than that?  Answer: nothing.

The funny thing about 80s and early 90s fashion nostalgia is that all people looked terrible during these years.  I thought we were all on board with that fact.  I think romantics (or post-80s children) have simply un-remembered all of the wretched details that made the fashion of those eras a total blight upon human history.  Yes, yes, Madonna's jacket in Desperately Seeking Susan was totally cool, but do you remember side ponytails on grown women, or stirrup pants?  There were men in tight stonewashed jeans and net shirts, and they weren't kidding.  I feel that every school/childhood picture of me is ruined by the horrible fashions of the day.  I almost can't even enjoy how awful it is because it is actually too awful.  That's all I'm going to say about that.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot that I enjoy from the era.  Extremely busy floral prints layered all over each other!  Dark matte lipstick!  Janeane Garafolo in Reality Bites!  Floral or glittery Doc Martens!  Bikini Kill on stage in ugly taffeta 80s prom dresses, which seemed like such a genius idea at the time.  When super short babydoll dresses and t-strap shoes seemed boundary-pushing instead of just like some kind of burlesque baby fetish costume.  Fishnets that came in every color.  I'm ok with all of that. 

What I'm trying to say is that I watched a video today and could not tell if it was a current artist or an old ass song from the early 90s.  I had to Wikipedia this person to figure it out.  It is a new song.




Obviously, I have always been more interested in the eras of dead people than I have been in my own.  When I was 12, it was Victorian everything.  Then it was the 1940s.  Then the 20s.  Then the 60s.  Now the 10s and 30s.  My dad, apparently grown weary of all the fun I was having with this, once tried to snip at me about how things only seem nice from a distance, but they actually weren't that great to experience.  To that I said, no shit.  Just because I enjoy the craftsmanship of antique furniture, bygone design styles and Glenn Miller doesn't mean I yearn for a day before civil rights, birth control and indoor toilets.  Get realllllllll

But then I find myself thinking the same thing about this 80s/90s explosion.  Do you guys even understand how unappealing this shit looked in context?  People wore jeans that were tailored more like sweatpants.  Shoulder pads.  Boxy suits.  Blue eyeshadow with abandon.  Perms.  The movie Roadhouse being an authentically cool thing instead of an ironic cable tv cult classic.  Do you understand?  As Roast Beef would say, This is not a thing to like. 

Oh whatever.  Kids can like what they want.  Like I care.

Daria addresses the desert oasis

Finally, as I begin to seriously consider prospects that will take me out of Arizona, I have grown a tentative affinity for Phoenix.  Not for all of Phoenix, but for other-Phoenix - that is, Downtown.  The place where everyone assumes you're a Democrat, where drag queens operate frybread food trucks, and where completely different lives cross paths without much notice from anyone.  I really kind of love the weird juxtaposition of watching homeless people leaving shelters in the morning crossing the paths of shiny young college babes.  The sum of conflict is a wary sideways glance from each.

It's not perfect.  It's not even that great!  But I think I could actually be happy in Phoenix if I moved downtown and stayed there in my baby bubble of museums, galleries, farmer's markets, ancient delis, coffee shops, broken sidewalks and unexpected bits of interest.  It's gentrified, but, you guys - not that much.  I was walking down 5th Street today thinking, "Damn. This shit looks way better at night!"  Little bungalows lean with sagging porches and cracked bricks.  Spraypaint murals aren't exactly architectural improvements.  All the yards are dead, and Depression-era driveways open onto vast chain-linked dirt fields, the missing homes razed decades ago.  It is a kind of dry, blasted out charm. 

There's a lot of Phoenix that I do like, but each is a tiny pocket interspersed throughout hundreds of miles of irredeemable wasteland.  I love my grandma's house, and particular streets.  I love parts of north central, and certain buildings, and certain alleys or spots by the canal where old wind-breaking farm trees still live in the city.  I love sunny cold days when the entire fucking city is glinting in spite of its featureless gloom.  I like knowing where everything is, even if I don't care where it is. 

I've hated Phoenix since I was old enough to realize that other places aren't like this.  Like a reincarnated baby who remembers half of its old life, I felt distinctly screwed by living here.  No weather!  No seasons!  No architecture!  No history!  What are you supposed to do with this place?  It's so antiseptic, so staged, and the more other people love the strip malls stretching to the horizons, the more I hate the city.  And the people! I may have been treated to special breeds of desert rebels (guys in ZZ Top beards who call you madam without irony?  being taught to ride by a failed rodeo star? fine.) growing up, and they still weren't enough to stem the crush of human-shaped crap that populates every inch of this place.

I asked my grandmothers why they moved here.  My Grammy came here to follow my grandma.  They fetishized the warmth after years of Montana winters.  My other grandma came here for a man.  She had to leave Iowa or die, her doctor said, for the dampness that already lived in her lungs.  So she went to Santa Fe, where she went on a blind date which brought her here.  "Never thought of leaving after, eh?"  I jeered, resentfully.  No she never thought of leaving, she said.  One dull summer vacation day, when I was lying half on her coffee table and half on her couch, watching Bob Ross paint a winter scene on an antique circular saw blade, she said, "Change it!  I've seen enough snow drifts to last me a lifetime!"  I thought of the inches of frost that accumulated inside her freezer.  Like that?

I like enjoying the city for what it is, when I can.  Certain bits of research mean more to me because I'm from here, and I know that.  I love historic photos of the big empty valley, with only natural characteristics to identify it.  I visited the Luhrs room at ASU the other day to look for some things and came across a lot of early shots of Phoenix in the teens by Albert Ross, I think.  I took surreptitious, poor phone photos of the few that appealed to something deep and nativeish in me.

 Child swimming in the canal, 1924.  This one really gets me.

Praying Monk. 

Kids playing in the street at 7th st. & Van Buren.  Probably Monroe students.  The street looks so narrow. 

Oh, Jean

I never understood the allure of Jean Harlow.  I couldn't quite make the connection between descriptions of her and the woman I saw onscreen.  Although she's commonly described as the most molten thing to come out of old Hollywood, all I saw was a sad-eyed girl with a sweet face and too-blonde hair.  She seemed out of place.  This was supposed to be the sex banshee who haunted the souls of a million Delano-era men? I had envisioned someone more like Raquel Welch instead of a small voiced and smaller-statured woman whose childlike features and pouting lips had earned her the lifelong nickname of "The Baby".

In movies, she's almost always the put-upon, resentful side dish who gets elbowed out of the way when the Loy type comes sweeping in to win the prize man.  She's the vampy secretary, the blowsy blonde, the tacky poor girl, the one who gets put down as soon as she's picked up.  She's vulnerable, yet resilient. 

I have a feeling that seeing her onscreen is to see her out of context.  I think that her real power, perhaps something akin to those breathless descriptions, was rooted entirely in her interpersonal behavior.  I assume this because I've read a number of items in which men and former lovers like James Stewart or Bill Powell share their recollections of her, which frankly are a bit breathless and awed.  James Stewart called her "all woman," which is something he would say, and then made coy references to her generally braless state and the way this went over in a silk sheath dress.  He later said that he realized that he had never been "really" kissed until they filmed the car scene in Wife vs. Secretary together. Well, it is a memorable scene. 

Paying closer attention to her has caused me to shift my perceptions completely, and not only do I love her, but I think I understand the sex witch characterizations.  She played women honestly and never seemed like a caricature as so many other female characters were at this time.  She always seemed like a real person, and managed to place her sexuality at the forefront in a way that was unashamed, affecting, and yet subtle.  But most importantly, she was a great comedienne with excellent timing and perfect expression.

In her private life, she seems to have been an intelligent and genuine person who was not much impressed with fame or Hollywood, and who didn't much resemble her characters in behavior.  She spoke in a measured and thoughtful way and carried a book with her always.  Myrna Loy called her "a sensitive woman with a great deal of self-respect."  She had a tumultuous few years of stardom, which included multiple marriages including a farcical two month marriage to Paul Bern, who shot himself in their bedroom, leaving a bleak and mysterious suicide note.  His ex-girlfriend killed herself by jumping from a ship the following day.  Jean died five years later at 26 years old from kidney failure, apparently resultant of undiagnosed complications following a childhood bout of scarlet fever. Because she was so young, her illness was underestimated in its first stages so that it was too late when doctors finally figured out that her kidneys were failing.  Hollywood legend credits Clark Gable with leading doctors to the diagnosis after he reported to them a strange odor emanating from Jean's body as she lay in the hospital bed.  Harlow and Gable were self-professed BFFs who had worked together in a string of movies during her short career.  Gable had a lot of blonde trouble in his life, as I may have mentioned in one of my 17 Carole Lombard posts, and later with poor self-destructing MM, still unfairly blamed for his death. 

Here is an interesting article written by Hollywood reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns about the Bern suicide aftermath.  Her writing style is weird - schizophrenically baroque, well written, melodramatic, dark, and speculative.

Photo: Edwin Bower Hesser

Woops, nevermind / write time

Eh?  I'm going to keep writing some stuff here too.  Why, because I am an adult and I do what I want.

I'm very wrapped up in atmosphere and how it affects my mood.  Small things will agitate me and prevent me from doing the thing I have set out to do.  It's all very princess and the pea.  I am constantly having to maintain some kind of ambient environment for myself, otherwise I will just...leave.  So basically that means I dislike using Wordpress as well and don't like that blog.

Also, a very sweet 92 year old woman has contacted me based on a post I wrote there about a school that she attended in the 1920s, and now we are email pals.  She's so sincere and grandmotherly and charming and sweet and signs her emails with, "I hope you have a good day," and just emailed me to tell me to have a happy Thanksgiving.  How can I make my vulgar observations about life there now, when I know she might see it?  She's my new grandma!  That's not really why, I do really dislike using Wordpress too, and I feel like this fussiness is just going to end up with me writing to myself in Gmail drafts.

So now I have three blogs.  One is academic, for my internship and my mentor.  One is, I guess, going to become my "professional" blog in which I comment sans vulgarity about local historic architecture bizzle dizzle.  And this.

I have a hard time identifying the voice in which I am most comfortable writing.  I envy people who are able to dissect parts of their own lives into beautiful prose.  I'm much too private for that, and cryptic references to elements of personal experiences never come off well.  You either talk or you don't.

I haven't been writing much of anything, in spite of having all these blogs and all.  The less I write, the worse I get at it.  Writing frequently never feels like the success it kind of is, however, because for every thousand throwaway ugly lines, there are only a few to keep.  There are things I've been trying to write about for years, my relationship with my mother, my feelings about adulthood, the BBC "Victorian House" series...that I just can't elucidate. 

The only reason I came over to this thing was to document this: one of the greatest, most concise summaries of Truman Capote just came out of Caitlin Moran in a New Yorker interview.  Talking about other writers she admires, she says, "Truman Capote, for the ruthless way he hones and hones pages until there's no grit, no snags - the whole thing just floats off the page, like blossoms floating upwards."

Cait!  So poetic! Such a perfect and delightful way to talk about the constant revision that distills into a concise, refined and very short finished product. 

I had to turn a rough draft in recently for peer editing, and had spent all of my preparation time raking over and over the few paragraphs I had managed to bang out in one sitting.  I turned in seven pages of the expected twenty-five and called it a success when the professor (whom I love, like, love-love) told me it was "beautifully written," and then something about being very wanting in length, but I was still ruminating on the beautiful part.

Truman Capote, for the ruthless way he hones and hones pages until there’s no grit, no snags—the whole thing just floats off the page, like blossom falling upwards.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/interview-with-caitlin-moran.html#ixzz2CSAacCD6

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/interview-with-caitlin-moran.html#ixzz2CSAacCD6

Truman Capote, for the ruthless way he hones and hones pages until there’s no grit, no snags—the whole thing just floats off the page, like blossom falling upwards.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/interview-with-caitlin-moran.html#ixzz2CSAacCD6

Truman Capote, for the ruthless way he hones and hones pages until there’s no grit, no snags—the whole thing just floats off the page, like blossom falling upwards.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/interview-with-caitlin-moran.html#ixzz2CSAacCD6

Truman Capote, for the ruthless way he hones and hones pages until there’s no grit, no snags—the whole thing just floats off the page, like blossom falling upwards.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/interview-with-caitlin-moran.html#ixzz2CSAacCD