Kitsch - Salt and Pepper
I had a friend once who wanted me to buy her all the kitschy Salt and Pepper shakers I could find. She was going to open a restaurant. The restaurant never worked out, and I stopped buying them, but since then I've always noticed them.
Thursday, a trip thrifting south through Rossland and Trail - only to discover that the Rossland and Castlegar Hospital Auxiliaries are closed on Thursday (damn!!!) - and, looking longingly through the window of the Rossland shop, there are treasures inside, I can smell them, see them, it's the best thrift shop for a hundred miles, but not today....
Anyways, in one of the ones that was open I discovered someones Salt and Pepper shaker collection. Dozens of them. In every shade of kitsch imaginable.
Collected below for your enjoyment:
Because nothing says "early divorce" like a pair of wedding themed salt-and-pepper shakers. Notice as well the football and pots-and pans themes in the lower edge of the photo.
Hobos and Roosters, Bowling pins and balls, a pair of relatively ordinary glass salt and pepper shakers.
Made in Japan, Jimmy Hendrix? WTF? I have no clue, but I wouldn't want to eat anything sprinkled with that hair. Probably more in the line of "Grandma likes figurines, let's get her this....", as in the abysmally decorative, not at all practical.
A two-part salt-and-pepper poodle, trying to sniff it's own butt...
What can you say? They suggest to me a more traditional Asian aesthetic...
And then there's this. I checked the bottoms to see if they were Hummels. They weren't. Porcelain German kids sitting - when you lift them you see the joke - on the outhouse. Charming. The bears in the back, unglazed bisque, have a bit of cool to them, they hang on the branches of the tree...
And, finally, chipmunk or other forest wildlife in hat/right front. And in the back a trio of skunks with REAL FUR tails and "amusing" sayings on the pedestal. I don't recall the sayings, they really weren't that amusing.
There were more, lots more. Count yourselves lucky.
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Suspiria
Continuing the horror bent: Suspiria, good, 70's, high 70's style, Art Nouveau, vivid colors and imagery. The version I found, a little uneven on sound, and the overdubbing of the language is rather unconvincing, artificial, seems a little unsynced, but overall - definitely not the best, but you can see how it influenced later movies.
Trivia: I'd always wondered what became of Jessica Harper - the lead from "Phantom of the Paradise" - well, this was her next big thing. She turned down Annie Hall for this.
Curious.
LINK(Warning, Spoilers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspiria
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Where in the world is...?
He's disappeared, Batshit I mean, 1 month of the restaurant open and no sign of him. I start to get a little concerned, make some enquiries, in Riondel I ask at the general store, it turns out he slipped, fell, maybe broke his hip, at the hospital...they cleaned out his house in Riondel, didn't want him living there anymore, wasn't safe for him...
Call the hospital, but his alias, Kootenay name, it's not good enough.
And now to the troublesome task of finding out his real name. Ask about Riondel, no one knows it. Or if they do they're not saying. And here, I should note, is a big breach in Kootenay Etiquette - you use the name people provide you and don't ask any further. Lots of people around here have good reason not to give you their real name - from the draft dodgers, growers, and people with warrants outstanding, to the plain old "it's my party name", you take everyone at their word and don't pry.
But I gotta pry if I'm gonna find him...
Ask about in Nelson, a few carefully directed queries and I have it...
Pretty ordinary, a quick Google turns up thousands of results. (later research would prove that his real name - for the purposes of the interweb, anyways, is no better than his pseudonym).
Back to the search, rumour had it he was staying at his sisters...
Didn't know he had one. But on the first call it's BINGO.
And take him for dinner and catch up...
Found him, grown old overnight, he's been moved by agencies to Nelson, all of the doctors, nurses, chipping in to get him a place, furnishing his new apartment at a home up ... street, he describes it, he's tickled pink, loving all the attention and fuss he's stirred.
But he's of a sudden grown old, his hip, not broken but a pinched nerve, he's lost 14 lbs, the hip was minor, he was another 17 days in the hospital with pneumonia, he's telling the same stories he's told a hundred times, living in town, this will be good, easier to find him, to take him out, there's shows he'd love, the burlesque, drag shows, night-clubs, town will work a lot better for sure, but I can't help but thinking this newly found comfort will be the death of him...
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Fallen down the Kootenay well
He starts back tomorrow, the Winter's been hard on him, the other waiter at the Pub. Already a skinny guy, he's lost easily another 30 pounds over the winter living in his crack-trailer on the East Shore. He looks like a bobble-headed skeleton, Skeletor, he's been surviving on $150 every 2 weeks EI, the last few months, and I know what that's like, no heat, no company, sitting every day in his trailer, in the dark, the punched in walls, the filthy antechamber filled with the previous residents garbage, broken BBQ's, Old Tube TV's, he was for a while capturing mice, keeping them company, letting them go, ....
Every couple of weeks you'd take him for lunch, he needs it, buy him some cigarettes, groceries, would do more but I haven't been doing so well myself. He's grateful just to get out of the trailer. And you talk to him and the isolation, it's taken it's toll, he was never a great thinker but even the little bit of reason he had seems to have disappeared, he's fallen down the Kootenay well...
He's looking forward to getting back to work. I'm hoping he's still sane enough to hold a job...
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