Reminder: interregnum week is always light on content.
As is our Family Tradition, we went to the Arrow Awards at the Walker, in the Caligari wing:
Remember that grand shot of the main staircase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York we saw last week? Here's today's answer:
The Arrow Awards, believe it or not, a compilation of television commercials. But not just any commercials. No, they’re adverts. That’s right! British ads! So they must be clever and classy, right?
The usual mix. A bit less of the Pastoral Garden of England as you might think; no small-village scenes. Some high-concept stuff that made me tired, like the Burberry ad. As with last year, it features people flying around. This time they are being picked up and hurled about by some tentacular ET.
The worst were the Gucci ads. When I think “Gucci” I think “classic style brand that has become degraded by louts who think a logo bestows class, and whose definition of ‘class’ is ostentatious display of luxury items.”
This one can just go stuff itself in every available possible way. From the notes on YouTube:
“I’ve always been charmed by cinema. For its power to tell stories that can probe human adventure and its drift,” begin Alessandro Michele’s notes on the new Exquisite Gucci campaign, which draws inspiration from a series of iconic films by the late, celebrated sculptor of genres, Stanley Kubrick.”
Inspiration, you say.
I went to Hunt & Gather to see if I could pick up something interesting for Natalie, and no, I did not find anything. I mean, I did, but I’m not going to saddle her with something that might be right or might be half-right, and oblige her to carry it back and hang on to it. Better she come with me and find her own things. But that’s for after Christmas.
Some new things, or rather new old things, the provenance of which I can only guess. Lots of these.
It’s like they uncovered a buried chemistry school from the 1920s.
The National Musical String Company is a defunct music string factory located in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The company was to make the first harmonicas in America, and became the world's largest producer of steel strings. The property is being redeveloped by Pioli Properties as a mixed-use site with the primary National Music String building renovated for commercial retail uses on the first level, and 38 residential apartment units on the second and third floors.
And here it is:
Oh dear
I REMEMBER THESE
I swear I had a set of these. Or just one. Those fancy recessed locks - we thought we were jet-set moderns. Scuff-resistant! Unwieldy as a box of chimps.
They have sheets and sheets of Life Savers wrapping paper for flavors that no longer exist:
You can get all your Stik-o-Pep info here, where the history and graphics are exhaustingly detailed. And hats off to that chap for his efforts. Speaking of hats:
This bothers me.
It implies sentience.
Also, note how the Straw Boater calls back a certain era, but which? Gilded Age? Twenties? It’s the pre-war past, when things were better and peppermint sticks were better, somehow.
Last one: a bit of old grace, waiting for someone to take her home.
I wonder where she came from, and who gazed upon her. Or whether she was based on someone who’s been long in the box.
More tomorrow, because you know I had to go back to the enormous pile of unsold and unsorted slides.
Now two ways to chip in!
That'll do - see you around! Nervine information awaits. And thanks for the patronage.
