Learn More About The Orange Show

Watch this to learn more about Houston's delightfully unique "Orange Show."

The Orange Show

 McKissack created this environment right in suburbia.
Modest homes surround the Orange Show.

If you're in Houston, you need to visit the amazing and astonishing "Orange Show" environment created by the late Jefferson Davis McKissack. Now managed by a foundation and staffed by dedicated volunteers, The Orange Show is a star attraction in East Houston.

 Eye candy abounds at The fabulous Orange Show.

I have been to the site several times--it is a wonderful place to take visitors, truly a gem.  This Sunday, I took my daughter and her girlfriend, after they decided that the Delta Con Gaming Event wasn't worth the $20 entry fee.  We had driven down from The Woodlands to the University of Houston campus, which is only blocks from Munger Street, where the Orange show is located.

 A perfect spot for a fashion shoot!

We braved record-breaking heat to take a quick walk-through.  My daughter wants to go back for more photos when it's cooler.

Jeff McKissack, a mail carrier in Houston, Texas, transformed a small suburban lot near his wood frame house into The Orange Show in honor of his favorite fruit. Between 1956 and 1980, when he died, McKissack used common building materials and recycled junk such as bricks, tiles, fenc
ing, and farm implements to transform his home into an architectural maze of walkways, balconies, arenas and exhibits decorated with mosaics and brightly painted iron figures.—From Wikipedia

 I have one of these metal bucking broncos.
Originally they were ornaments for screen doors or fences.

These are my most recent photos from the Orange Show, but you can visit my Flickr page to view photos that date back to 2006.

I hope you enjoyed this virtual visit to this veritable oasis of art!

The Migration of the Plastic Bag

Seen on BoingBoing.  Watch this and take care that you don't contribute to this un-natural migration.

Feelin' Groovy

Yes, she's feelin' groovy.

My birthday was yesterday, and now I'm 51.  Since I was the oldest of two girls, I didn't get the full "Baby Boom" experience, although I qualify as a boomer.  I don't recall when JFK was shot, I didn't know what Woodstock was or who The Beatles were until the early 1970s.  However, I remember that groovy, groovy style, especially as it appeared in book illustrations and on stationary.

 The poems are worse than mediocre, but the illustrations are trippy.

Today's finds include a few bits from my personal collection.  Several of the images come from Hallmark gift books, which were very, very popular in the 1970s.  Hallmark capitalized on the trend toward psychedelic grooviness by utilizing "hip" illustrators.  I found most of these little gems at my local Friends of the Library, in the 10-cent book bins.  Fred Klemushim illustrated the "Tell You That I Love You" Hallmark book, which was published in 1973.  The poems were copyrighted in 1942.  Go figure.

John Overmeyer lent his illustration talents to this upbeat, "give peace a chance" themed tome, published by Hallmark in 1971.

And what could be more groovy than a minstrel playing a flute on the cover of this happening 1970s school textbook, "Making Music Your Own."  I absolutely love this cover.  You can see the back cover on my Flickr page.

Greeting card illustrated by Jane Gilbert.

What time machine to the '70s would omit big-eyed kitties?  Although these aren't the famous Keane sad-eyed strays, the hypnotic, staring eyes of these pop-art Siamese kittens perched in a punch bowl makes men who stare at goats look like amateurs.

Click to see the bigger size to truly appreciate the shagginess.

Don't forget the fashionable carpet of the 1970s!  It's simply shag-alicious--and by Armstrong in 20 "flavors."  This ad was scanned from the July1976 "Reader's Digest".

 Jonathan knew he was different than the other seagulls.

Of course it wasn't all about shag carpets, Watergate and Leisure Suits in the '70s.  We had our best sellers, too.  This is a direct scan of my very own paperback copy of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull."  I read it several times, not a challenge since it's a short book--"a story," as the cover text assures us.

Playing card from the 1970s.  It just seems to say it all, doesn't it?

So have a nice day.  Smile.

File Cabinet Archeology

My husband is out of town for three weeks, so I'm doing some file-purge work.  I am the pack-rat in the family.  I'm not to the point that I need to audition for that reality show about hoarders, but I have a tendency to save all sorts of things--as a mixed-media artist, I can find a use for just about anything.

 My "office" circa late 2009.

I don't have an official studio, so I store my paperwork, books and much of my art stuff in my "office."  Consequently, my office, as you can see above, is a landscape of bins and piles, framed by bookshelves.  I have a filing cabinet in another  that I have used to corral the overflow, but the contents are mostly mundane--school newsletters, recipes from Family Circle that I will never use, tourist brochures, old schoolwork by the kids, college application work for my son, church projects that failed to launch.  You get the idea.  All that has gone into the recycle bin, and I've freed up almost an entire drawer on a four-drawer cabinet, and I have one more drawer on that cabinet to sort.

Sorting my files has been like a visit to a thrift shop--little surprises pop up among the junk, and I have found some things I had forgotten I had.

Doodle from the bottom of a church council agenda.

Among the keepers I've come across during my sorting are doodles (I used to be a pretty fast sketch-cartoonist) and some vintage stuff--you know, stuff from the 1980s, like the KLOS Radio logo above.

 

Sketch of my dog, "Cross," circa 2005

 I have found a few things that bring back memories, like this business card from our favorite pre-kids restaurant in Redondo Beach, CA:

I have always been a writer, and I've earned my living with it, so I have research stuff from different companies I've worked for (not in this file cabinet), copies of brochures and newsletters I've penned (for pay and as a volunteer for  non-profit work), not to mention the drafts for three completed novels, bunches of poems and all sorts of notes, short stories, and character sketches.  That's all stashed in two other file cabinets, which are not on the agenda for this set of purges.

My high school graduation gift from my parents was this Smith Corona electric typewriter.

The image is cropped from the instruction booklet, which I found in my filing cabinet!

My goal is to clean up the floor of my office and get rid of old magazines, art supplies/junk that I don't intend to use, and to take an inventory of my incomplete projects and decide which I plan to finish.  We're also working on getting an upstairs "game room" ready to house my daughter's sewing machine.  We're going to be selling some stuff we no longer use--an electronic drum set and an electronic keyboard.  Once this post is up, I plan to set out some boxes for Purple Heart pick up tomorrow morning.  I have two big boxes of books to take to the Friends of the Library.

Remember Dr. Finklestein from Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas"?

This image is from a plastic bag I had used to hold ticket stubs.

I want my husband to see a noticeable difference in the house when he returns on August 21st.  So this is my way of getting some accountability!

Things on my Scanner

The Tinsel Trading Card and the applique were scanned separately and combined digitally. 

But I could have achieved a similar (but blurry) effect by hand.  

 Ephemera is my addiction.  And my scanner is my favorite gadget after my camera.  This is a post about things I have scanned.

We had dinner at this famous deli.  The pickles were crunchy.  The huge Reubens were delicious.  This is a cleaned up scan of the souvenir napkin I tucked in my messenger bag.  Now, instead of leaving the napkin stuck inside a tour booklet, I can post it on the Interwebs!

We went to Liberty Island and saw Lady Liberty for ourselves.  She was as magnificent as I expected.  In the gift shop, we bought Silly Bandz.  Silly tourists!

Here is the more conventional bit of travel ephemra--the ticket for our ferry ride to see Miss Liberty.

My daughter bought clothes at this trendy NY chain located on Broadway in the SoHo district.  I bought the fluffiest flower pins/hair decorations ever, one in shabby pink, one in purple (for my sister) and one in earthy browns.  I also bought a cutey-cute pink scarf trimmed with pink pom-poms.  I'm not normally a girl who goes for cotton-candy pink, but I do adore pom-poms.

I'm glad the Metro folks are serious about safety.  This is the back of the card we used to pay for our subway rides.  In the 1980s, I was a managing editor for a trade journal called "METRO Magazine," which focused on the transit industry in the U.S.  I wrote about the NY Subway system (and its buses and trains) on a regular basis.  This was the first time I'd ever seen the system I wrote about for so many years!

This is a scan of a "Walks in New York City" card from a deck published by the good folks at Chronicle Books.  A friend loaned me the deck before our trip.  I took some of the cards with us, but we didn't use them due to competitive agendas.  However, this card, which includes two stars (double points if you find them) added digitally by me, show the area where we stayed.

I call this little feline "Lucky Lucky".  She is a little Japanese kitty cropped from a hang tag on a little trinket picked up in Chinatown.  I love the simplicity of this drawing.

If you are looking for great Chinese food--I recommend this eatery.  The shrimp with almonds is divine.

What sort of ephemera do you save?  What do you do with it?  Leave me a comment and let me know!

More from Manhattan

 

 Artwork made from scanned ephemera.

This was my first trip to New York City, and quite frankly, in spite of the crowds and the occasional long, long walk, I found myself captivated by the city's offerings from start to finish.

 Lady Liberty from the ferry at dusk.

First off, the city was a lot cleaner than I expected. I've lived in the thick or along the suburban fringes of several big cities--Los Angeles, Honolulu, New Orleans and Houston--but I just assumed that New York would be filthy. Certainly we were tramping along the tried-and-true tourist routes, but we did make a foray into the Brownstone blocks of SoHo on foot. The sense of pride the residents have in their city was evident in the tidy gardens, the cheerful posters taped up in front stoop windows, and the trash bins around business and high traffic areas. We saw a lot of graffiti, primarily on buildings near the roof-top lines, and on phone booth shells and newspaper boxes.  I know life is a lot grittier and dirtier in many neighborhoods, but what amazed me was how, in spite of all the people, the city remains clean.

Graffiti on a train car, Newark, NJ, train station.

Second, it was great to be in a city that celebrates the written word--bookshops, magazine stalls, posters, signage, even slogans on tee-shirts and Jumbotrons all blazed with literary fervor, both glorious and mundane.  It was great to sink back with a meaty paper--The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post.  It was exhilarating to wander through three-story bookstores--whether it was the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble or the giant Japanese-language bookstore, Kinokuniya, which was stuffed full of manga, language and travel books and anything else connected with Japan, Asia, or the Pacific Rim.  The typefaces and fonts on the signs transcended the blandness of our local malls here in Houston, while the blazing LEDs flashed spangled slogans and scrolling headlines.  The word, it seems, permeates New York, whether in English, Arabic, Chinese or Thai, or Farsi.

Chandelier inside Grand Central Station, NYC.

Third, it was exciting to plunge into the wonderful whirl of cultural collisions.  Clumps of older Jewish ladies chatting in strong Bronx brogues about the best place to get your hair colored as they paused outside a nail salon,  sharply dressed businessmen conversing into their Bluetooths (Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Hindi).  The Syrian, Iranian and Lebanese street vendors displaying racks of halal prepared meats--chicken, beef, and lamb.  The bellhop manager at our hotel was Danish, and the desk clerk was Philipina.  Markets had shelves stocked with Tex-Mex, Asian, British and American foods.  Delis served breadstuffs from around the world--croissants, scones, bagels, and baklava.  Fruit vendors had papayas, apples, mangoes and more.  You could eat and shop your way around the globe without venturing more than a few city blocks.

Fire escape details in Tribeca.

Fourth, New York City's architectural history is so rich and complex that there was no way I could capture it with my camera, and I don't have the vocabulary to describe it with accuracy. Buildings were bedecked with carved details, exquisitely decorated facades, wrought iron embellishments and treatments created with brick or stone.  Glass-covered skyscrapers gleamed like sabers, and reflected the cloud shapes against blue glass.  Trees cloaked in summer greenery draped over park fences of weathered wrought iron.  Sculptures, reliefs, carved doors, capped cornices, gargoyles and the fascinating symmetry of the fire escapes created a stunning tableau.  Even the scaffolding erected across the face of buildings undergoing repairs had a sturdy sense of purpose.  So much different than the calm sameness of the suburb where I live.  So jam-packed with history and lives.

Near Times Square.

Yes, I think I want to go back to New York City.