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Stop the Presses for these Adrian Dresses (1940s Novelty Glamour at the Met)

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Hi-ya, folks!! When's the last time you saw a dress that made your heart skip a beat? I was minding my own business. prowling through the Met Museum's fashion textile collection (like you do), when I came across this knock-your-eye-out novelty print and about lost it.  Behold: source Where did you come from, you little piece of heaven right here on Earth? Where are you going so I can follow you there? This dress was a gift to the museum from Patricia Pastor, a former designer for Perry Ellis (!!), and Barry Friedman, an art dealer. When I traipsed over to the search bar and typed in their names, the Met yielded up fifty other charitable donations, including around 20 other Adrian designs ! Somebody had an eye for the designer. What did I start doing but googling all the Adrian dresses I could get my hands on. The artist at work Adrian (real name Adrian Greenburg, b. 1903) wasn't unknown to me before I espied the dress of my dreams on the Met website-- he was the preferred c...
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Where Does Love Go (1965) : Charles Boyer Sings!

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Good morning!! Long time no see! How've ya been? I'm peeping back in from the BLAZING, SCORCHED EARTH of Nashville, Tennessee to update you with a celebrity oddity I ran across the other day. Yep, the kind of thing only you and I would enjoy. Confession: I cancelled my Spotify premium subscription the other day in a bid to cut down on some of the superfluous digital services we seem to mindlessly become entwined with (it's so easy to do!). As much as I love commercial-free listening, I figured with all the things out there, there had to be somewhere else I could get my music (legally, semi-legally, whatever) for free. And, in my spendthrift haze, I had completely forgotten that Freegal, a service provided by my local library, totally allows unlimited music streaming from something like 10,000 music labels, including Universal Music Group (which has subsumed SO. MANY. OLD SCHOOL. LABELS). While the user interface is barest of bare bones, hey, it's free! And no commercial...
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Monkey Fur Success (Coat of My Dreams)

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Salutations, friends! How's tricks? Not much new here in this life of Riley except for one startling development of a few weeks ago. Would you believe....COULD YOU believe...that I finally have a monkey fur coat of my very own?? Let's just cut straight to the goods here, there's no time to spare! Just as I'd put my oversized foot down about buying more fur coats (and actually passed up a mink or two under $50...who even AM I any more?), an amazing vintage-buying opportunity popped up out of the blue to pick up this 1940's monkey fur coat. Was the coat in question extraordinarily beautiful? Yes, ma'am. Were the terms of the sale extraordinarily, pinch-me-I'm-dreaming reasonable? Oh hayyyull yes they were. And the seller was super nice/prompt, to boot. You'd better believe I jumped on it quicker than you could say Jack Robinson, and now, I have the Marlene Dietrich jacket of my dreams I first mentioned  here  almost exactly two years ago (how the time doe...
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Calvin Black's Possum Trot Dolls (Outsider Art Americana)

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Good morning!! How are things? Same old, same old here in my camp-- I've been listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen, going to a lot of estate sales, and eating as many tacos as my conscience will allow...but don't worry, things aren't as dire as they were in the last blog post. I'mma survive, people! I'm looking forward to going to the beach in a week and giving new meaning to chillaxing by my egregious example of self same behavior. But enough about me-- how you? I hope 2016 has been treating your well thus far! Hi-ya, friend! What brings me back to my own private corner of the internet? I was watching a trailer for a movie on Amazon Prime called Almost There early last week and had completely forgotten, the next day, the title of said movie. I googled "outsider artist movie" and came across this helpful list of things I really, really needed to know about , which included an entry on a short film called  Possum Trot: The Life and Work of Calvin Black, ...
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