Feliz Día de los Muertos

So yesterday I admitted that I don't get the appeal of Halloween. Bad me.

via Flickr

On November 1st however, Mexico hosts a holiday I could really get behind. It's el Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.

El Día de los Muertos takes the idea of the Roman Catholic All Saints day (which is also today) and merges it with the democratic impulses of All Soul's day (which is tomorrow).

Setting aside a day out of the year to honor my dead loved ones? Sign me up.

HBO remade Mildred Pierce; I'm withholding judgment

One of the greatest films ever made was 1945's tour de force Mildred Pierce. Joan Crawford had been let go by Metro Goldwyn Mayer and this was her first film for Warner Brothers. It netted her the only Oscar of her long and distinguished career.

Mildred Pierce is the ultimate film noir murder mystery. Under Michael Curtiz's direction, the movie's stellar cast wallows in 1940s glamor. The set design, the lighting, the wardrobes and yes the story are a compelling and fascinating watch. Joan Crawford could chew on scenery like none other and her larger than life portrayal of Mildred is matched line by line by Ann Blyth's over the top characterization of Mildred's horrific daughter Veda. Throw in Zachary Scott for beefcake and Eve Arden for comic relief and it's a winner all around.





Mildred Pierce was adapted from James M. Cain's 1941 novel of the same name. In order to get the film made, Warner Brothers altered the story pretty significantly. They downplayed the sexual carryings on and played up the violence. Cain's novel is as much about the Depression and Prohibition as it is about they dynamics of a hard working mother and an ungrateful daughter and neither of those topics get touched upon in the Warner Brothers film.

Over the weekend, I learned that HBO has remade Mildred Pierce as a five-part mini-series that will premiere in the spring of 2011. The cast looks interesting and there was enough material left out of Cain's novel to make a brand new Mildred Pierce. Kate Winslett play Mildred and it will take me a while to get used to seeing her as such I have to admit. Guy Pearce plays the penniless playboy Monty and that's some great casting.





What give me hope for this movie is that it's being directed by Todd Haynes.

Todd Haynes made 2002's Far from Heaven, a movie I say is the best film of the 21st century so far.





With Far from Heaven under his belt, he proved that he can handle a period piece. And how. Wow, that movie is as beautiful to look at as it is devastating to watch.

So I'll be curious to see what Kate Winslett does with the character of Mildred Pierce and even more curious to see what Haynes does with Can's novel. What ever happens, get ready for a 1940s revival to counter the current craze for all things Mid Century Mad Men.

Hilarious

You needn't speak a word of French to understand this video.

A Mad Men mash up

Thanks again to Rufus the Dog from Dog Walk Blog. In all of the accolades being thrown at mad Men these days I think this is the best one I've seen so far. This song is perfect. If you watch the show it will make perfect sense.

This is the check that Don wrote

This is the check that Don wrote in the Mad Men episode when Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce dropped out of the Honda RFP.

Here's Don's building in case you're wondering. 104 Waverly Place is in Greenwich Village, on the corner of McDougal and Waverly, across the street from Washington Square Park.

AMC has a season four scrapbook on their website that's chock full of these sorts of odds and ends that produce paroxysms of glee among Mad Men fans. Check it out. All hail Rufus the Dog from Dog Walk Blog for pointing it out to me.

My first cover

Thanks to Floor Covering Weekly for putting yours truly on the cover of their issue this week. Man, many thanks to the terrific folks behind this. I know who you are.

So this week it's Floor Covering Weekly and mark my words, I'm not stopping until I make the cover of Us Weekly. Hah! Here's the link: Floor Covering Weekly

Amusing British night light

This is the Martyr, designed by The Play Coalition.

It makes me laugh. It fits those enormous British wall sockets perfectly. I wonder if there's a North American version in the works.

Did Madonna ever get this kind of treatment?

Iowa State University at 12pm on the 27th of August:

Having fun with stereotypes

The great Erin Loechner had something on her blog, Design for Mankind, the other day that I thought was hilarious.

She'd picked up a map created by Russian turned British illustrator Yanko Tsvetkov and featured on his blog Alphadesigner. The map Erin ran was one of series Tsvetkov made that illustrate the stereotypes Europeans have of each other and that Americans have of Europeans and I thought they were hilarious. Here are some highlights.

This is Europe according to France:

This is Europe according to Britain.

This is Europe according to Germany

Here's Europe as Italy sees it.

This is Italy as seen by posh Italians.

This is Europe as the US sees it.

And in a turn around provided by a link from one of Erin's readers, Here's the US as Europeans see it. This map came from the Swedish graphic designer Attila Toth and his website Attila.

Thanks for the laugh one and all.

You can't get a man with a gun

With apologies to the great Irving Berlin and his lyrics from Annie Get your Gun.

A man's love is mighty
It'll leave him buy a nightie
For a gal who he thinks is fun.
But they don't by pajamas
For Pistol packin' mamas,
And you can't get a hug
From a mug with a slug,
Oh you can't get a man with a gun.

Berlin Artist Yvonne Lee Schulz is putting Annie Oakley's words to the test with a series of hand-painted, porcelain pistols. While it's true they are tableware accessories, there's a lot going on here and what she has to say about gun violence isn't meant to comfort.

The Porcelain Pistols are replicas of James Bond’s Walther PPK and its contemporary sister, the P99,with friendly permission of Carl Walther Inc.The fragile weapon, hand-painted in the style of classic tableware motifs, liesnext to your coffee and cake, asking to be picked up. Its coolness andcomfortable grip increase the qualms of the user, leaving him in a quandary between the pleasure of luxury and violence.

Just as was the case with the graffiti china and china beer cans I've written about before, the heads up about these pistols came from the great David Nolan and his razor eye.

I love the idea of statement art being disguised as an everyday object and I would kill to see a tablescape blogger get her hands one a couple of these babies. What do you think? Too confrontational or not confrontational enough?

Daily nerd laugh

Thanks to Design Milk for pointing me to Like Cool. Hilarious.

It's another Blog Off tomorrow

Tomorrow's another Blog Off and we're counting on a pretty significant turn out. The theme is Where's Your Slice of Heaven? Here's an excerpt from the website:

Everybody it seems, has a place in mind when the topic of get aways comes up. Where’s your slice of heaven?
After the last Blog Off, we thought it might be fun to lighten up the mood a bit by talking about perfect places. So where’s your heaven? What’s the best and most interesting place you’ve ever been? What’s the place that fills your day dreams, even if it’s somewhere you’ve never been?

What do you look for in a location? Do you go to a secluded beach and read? Do you head for the mountains and ride the trails? Do you take in the sights and sounds of a world capital? Or is it in your very own back yard? What’s the appeal of your perfect place and why aren’t you there now? Or are you? Join in with us and Blog Off!

My slice of heaven is illustrated by a story that happened on this very spot in the spring of 2000. I'm awarding bonus points to anybody who can guess this location. Hint: it's not one of my usual haunts.

Stumped, it's no big deal I'm sure you have a slice of heaven of your own. If you're a blogger, why not write about it? You'll be part of a growing phenomenon as bloggers start to arrange themselves into networks and give new perspectives on the same theme. There's more information and a registration form on the Let's Blog Off website.

On set and out of character: scenes from Mad Men

My great friend David Nolan (who's an occasional contributor around here) sent me some photos yesterday. They appeared in Rolling Stone, no wonder I missed them. Anyhow, they made me laugh and though they'd be a great kick off to a holiday weekend. It's a holiday in the US at any rate. Look for a screechy, pro-labor Labor Day post on Monday. In the meantime, Here's John Hamm checking his iPhone 4 between takes.

And here are Aaron Staton and Rich Sommer, who play Ken Cosgrove and Harry Crane, checking out Aaron's Mac Book.

Christina Hendricks, as Joan, hits her mark.

A creative meeting loses some of its Mad Men panache when you can see the cameras.

For three years running, Sunday nights have been the highlight of my week. So long as Mad Men's in season that is.

How do you light a Modernist bordello?

Now that Fiorentino's figured out how to light a Modernist bordello, the rest of us can relax and move onto more pressing issues. To wit:

What possible use could these things have other than classing up an already classy joint in Reno or Sparks? My only concern would be from having that much acetate so close to a heat source.

Too harsh? Is there any redemption to be had?

Taste sensations from the land of my birth

I love Melody McFarland. Melody's a regular commenter around here and a dear, dear friend of mine. Melody and I grew up in impossibly small towns in rural Pennsylvania though I never met her until around five years ago. When we met she lived in Japan and I lived in Florida. We bonded over our shared roots in the rolling farmland of Lancaster County, PA.

Well as fate would have it, Melody and her husband moved back to Lancaster last year after having spent the previous 20 years of their lives living all over the world. Hearing her tales of culture shock have been amusing but in re-experiencing my home town through her eyes I've come to see that it's really not such a bad place after all. After all, Melody's finding it to be a great place to launch her photography empire.

Lancaster's only 60 miles from Philadelphia but in a lot of ways is separated by time rather than distance. One of the apparent examples of this is the continued existence of mom and pop snack factories. It's an odd  but  remarkable thing to go down a snack aisle anywhere in eastern Pennsylvania and find that small, local brands of things like chips and pretzels outnumber the national brands.

Well in a gesture I'll remember for the rest of my life, Melody raided one of those snack aisles and sent me a box of mom and pop junk food yesterday.

I grew up in a household that had a chip can in it and potato chips were something that we had delivered the same way we had milk delivered. There was nothing unusual about it then but in looking back, it's unusual.

The chips we had delivered every week were Good's Red Label. My parents weren't natives and the Blue Label must have spooked them. I'll explain the difference in a moment.

So in the box of wonders Melody sent yesterday, there was a bag of Good's Red Label and a bag of Good's Blue Label. Blue Label Good's are cooked in lard, Reds are cooked in vegetable shortening. And now you know the difference between the two. As I was saying earlier, Lancaster County, PA is separated by time rather than distance from the rest of the Eastern Seaboard. There's no stigma to cooking with lard there.

Until you've eaten a potato chip that's been cooked in lard you are not allowed to judge. Lard gives them a crunch that's not possible to achieve in any other way. Trust me.

As if to drive home that point ever further, Melody sent me a bag of King's chips. King's are only available in the lard-cooked variety. Second only to my love of Good's was my love of King's. Melody has no idea what she's done for my soul here.

But the best was yet to come. Also in that magical box were two bags of Hammond Pretzels. People outside of Pennsylvania really don't eat pretzels, let alone handmade, hand-baked ones. If Lancaster, PA had an ounce of pretension, Hammond Pretzels would be sold at ten times their price and they'd be called artisanal pretzels. But there is no pretension, so they're just plain old Hammond's.

There are few things as sublime as a real pretzel and I am now in heaven. From the bottom of heart Melody, thank you.

Sunday diversions

I was all fired up to write the definitive blog post about the near criminality of the 400+ Eat, Pray, Love-licensed gee-gaws now being hawked to promote Julia Roberts' latest, simpering attempt at being an actor when she grows up. Then I thought about it some more and realized that I would be adding a pointless endeavor to the publicity machine surrounding a movie I'll never see. So instead I'm going to run through some oddities I've come across recently.

None of them merit a post of their own but together, they're actually related to my niche so I'm going to forge ahead.

If you're the kind of person who just can't get out of the kitchen, the Italian firm Rapsel will help you bring some of that kitchen magic to your bathroom. This would also work for fans of the movie Ratatouille as well.

Oh wait a minute, that last image was a bit of projection on my part. Apologies.

I was on a roll a couple of weeks ago with ideas for switch plates and outlet covers, but these babies from The Spanish company Fede put all of my ideas to shame. How about a little Swarovski?

Speaking of Swarovski, Polish designer Lukasz Jemiol came up with with this crystal-encrusted vacuum cleaner for Electrolux.

I love the pearls.

Finally, from an unknown German manufacturer but sold on the website fitsu, come a set of kitchen brushes.

How thoughtful that it has a gold toof. You know, it's being sold as a kitchen brush but it would be infinitely funnier if it were sold as a grill brush.

And there you have it, a bit of diverting fluff for a Sunday morning. Seriously though, what do you think of those soup pot vanity sinks?

Where in the world is this suburb?

My post about American-style suburbia in Melbourne, Australia yesterday sent me on a wild search across the internet. I was on a quest to find similar developments around the world and I found them in spades. I don't know whether to be happy that for a lot of people in the developing world life's getting better. Or whether I should cry at the sheer waste of it. I decided that it's really not my place to do either but it does make me scratch my head. So since I found some really surprising images from all over, I thought it might be fun to show you guys a bunch of these homes and have people guess where in the world they might be.

All of these homes are less than ten years old and most of them came from Real Estate Worldwide.

The answers are at the bottom of this post.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

1. Accra, Ghana
2. Beijing, China
3. Koprivnica, Croatia
4. Lagos, Nigeria
5. Moscow, Russia
6. Nairobi, Kenya
7. Varna, Bulgaria
8. New Dehli, India
9. Sanok, Poland
10. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
11. Slobozia, Moldova
12. Tallinn, Estonia

How many did you get right? Any? Is this sort of thing surprising? Thanks for playing this game of Where in the World is this Suburb? One final question though: is this sort of development in the developing world a good thing or a bad thing?