Hello everyone!!!

I decided to make a special blog post ten special Instagram accounts that I follow. With a lot of people being more and more in self-containment and bunker  mode for a while I thought to present a list of ten accounts that is worth a follow.

In no particular order:

@totallygourment

I found this Instagram account a couple of months ago when I was scrolling through pictures of vegetables.

I enjoy the sense of humor that this feed brings me and perhaps one day I made a face out of an apple and post it. But in the meantime I have this feed to get me constant inspiration.

@craigbartlett

Craig Bartlett Instagram’s feed brings back some fantastic cartoon memories and when I am having a tough day. He is one of my go to feeds to cheer me up!

@scifi_art

For the last decade or so I have been an avid fan of everything retro sci fi art. I believe that it takes a creative mind to depict a point of view of what the future holds. Scifi_art curated the most eye pleasing Instagram account. So if you are a fan of sci fi and art then this is a must follow account! Martin also creates music and the link is below to check it out!

All India Radio Band

@jonny_question

IG account Jonny_question’s feed constantly reminds me of all of the shows that I used to watch and sometime I need to revisit. Jonny always celebrates birthdays and anniversaries of actors, actresses, characters and shows.  What an amazing feed!

@frankopitt

Frank does these super creative Lego scenes. So many of my favorite movies he recreates them in a well captured mise en scene. I am always so excited to see what he makes next!

@poptrashmuseum

@poptrashmuseum (run by Eric) is a wonderful Instagram feed of everything retro of the less prominent but equally awesome milestones in pop culture.

They also have a website with interesting articles that is worth browsing and also a newsletter that I just signed up to. The link to the website is below:

Pop Trash Museum

@hifructosemag

I love art and there are so many brilliant artists featured on this feed. Hi Fructose Magazine has always been a staple in my social media feed for longer than I can remember.

They also run a website that has a store that sells their back mags, subscriptions and more. Link is below:

Hi-Fructose

@thehoodwitch

The Hood Witch instagram account provides me with that extra sense of confidence. If I feel tired or exhausted and need that extra boost I refer to her witch tips for that week or I read her posts to provide me to go that extra mile.

She also runs a website that has a store full of crystals and amazing items. There is also a blog that I often go to for the weekly horoscopes. Her website is below:

The Hoodwitch

@glazy_uk

This account provides me with my daily movie facts. I also how Andrew set up his feed and I continuously check out his feed to learn about things that I didn’t necessarily did not know or to join the conversations under the posts.

Now this is just a current list. Like myself I am always constantly astounded by the creative minds of many people and I might do a future blog post of the next round of ten IG accounts.

Until next time!!!

In a small town called Chihuahua, Mexico there is a wedding dress shop called La Popular that has an interesting story. There is a mannequin that they have been using since 1930. However that is not the the most interesting part of the story.

Their is a urban legend surrounding this particular mannequin. On March 25, 1930 this mannequin appeared wearing the latest wedding dress of the spring and summer collection. However it wasn’t what the mannequin was wearing made people do a double take when they walked past the main story window display. Rather it was the mannequin itself. Locals said that the mannequin really looked like Pascuala Esparza’s (who owned the shop) daughter who passed away during the same time frame as the mannequin started to be used as the main display in the front window.

According to the legend Pascuala’s daughter died from a severe bit from a black widow spider on her wedding day. Pascuala was so overcome by grief of the death of her daughter. That she supposedly had her daughter embalmed and kept her in the store as a mannequin.  People started to talk about how much the mannequin looked like her daughter. Also is that was not weird enough people started to notice the mannequin’s hands and skin looked too life like. She even had real hair and cuticles where the nails are.

Her facial features and every details of the entire mannequin seemed to go more towards the realistic ness of it being more human like then just a display to showcase wedding gowns.

Over the decades of the mannequin being displays there have been various reporting of the mannequin shifting positions at night by herself to her eyes watching you while you look at her.

I personally believe she is just a really detailed mannequin. Whoever made this particular mannequin went above and beyond in creating an extremely life like one. Plus I do not believe that the conditions of the wedding dress store fit the extreme requirements of preserving an human body.

However I think the store take pride of the local legend that surrounds the business. Yes, it probably  does creep out a lot of people that this particular mannequin looks extremely life like. However I feel like it add personal flavor to the town.

Has anyone heard about this or visited the wedding dress shop?

Comment below!

Source:

The Line up

Until Next time!!!

The movie of the day is Splash (1984) and starring Tom Hanks, Daryl Hannah, Eugene Levy and John Candy and directed by Ron Howard.

This is the first romantic movie I ever watched when I was growing up. It is about a man name Allen Bauer who had an interesting childhood experience while being on vacation at Cape Cod. Him and his family go on a boat to tour the area. Allen noticed something weird in the water so he jumps in (even forgetting that he cannot swim!) and upon closer inspection realizes he saw a mermaid.

Flash forward to him being an adult. Allen is in business with this brother who is played by John Candy in a fruit and vegetable business in New York City. One day on a drunken whim after his latest girlfriend dumped him. Allen takes a very expensive taxi ride to Cape Cod and ends up waking up on a beach. Very hung over and noticed a naked lady starring at him.

Both equally confused as to why the other is here. The naked lady (who is played by Daryl Hannah) kisses Allen and jumps into the water where she turns into a mermaid!!! I won’t spill the rest of the movie plot but it is available to watch on many streaming devices.

The first time I watched this movie. I was about ten years old. Mermaids was a popular subject with my friends and anything mermaid related was the hot topic!

Some interesting facts about the movie:

The fountain in the movie is on display at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

Daryl Hannah had a fascination with the book the “Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Anderson and had been swimming mermaid style since she was eight years old.

Daryl Hannah’s fin was super heavy weighing 35 pounds and when the crew would break they would just lift her out with her costume and leave there because it would take her too long to reattach the fin.

Many actors turned down the role of Allen Bauer including Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and John Travolta.

Daryl Hannah is a strict vegetarian and did not want to eat a real lobster during the dinner scene. The crew decided to used the shell of a real lobster but filled it with a white tofu paste for her to use. However she cried after every take because of the fact they real lobster shells were used.

Steve Guttenberg auditioned for the lead role in this movie but obviously did not get it. However Ron Howard did cast him as the lead in his next movie (also a favorite of mine): Cocoon.

When you think of Valentine’s Day  you think of the over kill of love, and hearts.  Every available cartoon character with it’s own show surrounded by hearts :

However they are the older vintage Valentine’s Day cards that have it’s share of the weird, creepy and sometimes horrifying premise to say “I love you. I am not sure if Valentine’s Day cards back in the early 20th century were meant to share you into loving the person who gave you the card. Maybe people were edgier in their feelings  and wants in those days. In any case I decided to share some memorable and scary Valentine’s Day cards. Sometime when I see these vintage Valentine’s Day cards I think that this holiday is a mini Halloween. Which of course I am all for it!!!

Enjoy!:

So I noticed there were a lot of cards that mixed witches, witchcraft and love. I enjoy the mixture of witchcraft and love in one card.

Get a card that shows off your talents of eating fire.

I think this Valentine’s Day card is suppose to encourage you to be a 100% true to your Valentine’s.

This is one of my favorite cards. It has a clown who is either about to punk you out or is aggressive in telling you in the dead of night in the corner of your room while sleeping that you are the only one for them.

If the part heart head and other half human Valentine’s Day card is not weird enough for you. Then let the big creepy eyes follow you while you read your Valentine’s Day Card.

Nothing says I love you like sneaking behind your Valentines and covering their mouth?!?!

There was a lot of food related Valentine’s Day cards. Although a lot them were kind of weird like the pig about to turn himself into bacon in return for your love.

No words….

There was also a lot of cards that promoted self harm or putting yourself in harm’s waya in order to receive love.

When I think of Valentine’s day the first animal pops in my head are those lovable sharks!

Valentine’s Day cards and greetings have advance a lot to current times but I still get  kick going back and seeing these old cards.

Until Next Time!!!

Some people spend this holiday going out to dinner or buying gifts for their love ones. I on the other hand stay in and watch movies. So here are five movies that scream I love you in my own weird and unique way:

Videodrome (1983)- Directed by David Cronenberg and starring James Wood and Debbie Harry. James Woods is a president of a TV station that shows a large amount of X-rated shows  on his channel. He doesn’t see what the big deal is and why people are upset by his choices in his programming until his real life and TV station become one entity.

Click below to buy:

Videodrome

The Prowler (1981) directed by Joseph Zito and starring Vicky Dawson, and Christopher Goutman. This movie has a bit of everything you want in a  horror movie to watch on Valentine’s Day : A unknown crazy killer bent on revenge. A  Dear John Letter, high school dance and numerous flashbacks!

Click to rent is below:

The Prowler

Natural Born Killers (1994)- Directed by Oliver Stone and starring Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis. I remember the first time I saw this movie was when I was 11 years old and on vacation in Guatemala visiting my family. It was the only movie that they will play everything Friday at 2pm and 8pm. This movie is ingrain in my head as a love run a muck. What better reason to watch this movie other than on Valetine’s Day?

Click to buy is below:

Natural Born Killers

The Love Witch (2016)- directed by Anna Biller and starring Samantha Robinson.  Samantha Robinson stars as Elaine who is a witch and is a big believer in love and wants to find her one true love. However in order to find that she decides to casts a bunch of spells and potions to help her quicken her search and it kind of blows up in her face.

Click to buy is below:

The Love Witch

Teorema (1968) directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Terence Stamp and Silvana Mangano. Terence Stamp stars as an angel or a god ( I am still trying to figure out which it was). And stays with a rich family and his main objective is to seduce and destroy their family dynamic. Needless to say mission accomplished! The first time I watched this movie was in an Italian Cinema course. I have never heard of the director Pier Paolo Pasolini before but when I watched this film. I was entranced, confused and  enjoyed this movie a lot. Even though I was confused about the plot. The night of the class when we were supposed to discussed this movie the teacher asked us a question. Was Terence Stamp the angel or a devil in this movie. Never had a seen such a heated debate in a class before! Yelling, and interruptions were a constant in this discussion. Their was even a threat of a chair to be thrown. Needless to say Pasolini became one of my favorite directors after that night!

You can preorder the movie below:

Teorema

Until Next time!

There some houses that I idolized in terms of design and concept. The Haunted Mansion is one example of houses I would LOVE to live in and the other is Jayne Mansfield Pink Palace in Los Angles, California.

Jayne Mansfield bought this house in 1957. It was a 40 bedroom house style in an Mediterranean theme in terms of the construction of the house. The house used to be owned by former teen idol and singer Rudy Vallee:

Jayne Mansfield bought the house from Vallee for $76,000 and it was before she married Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay. Mansfield acquired most of the money for the house from an inheritance of family member.

After she bought it and got married, she decided with the help of her new hubby and set designer Glen Holse she set out in turning her new house into her dream “Pink Palace.”

Her first step towards her dream house was to paint the bland white house on the outside of the house to her favorite color: Pink.

Then slowly but surely Jayne started transforming the inside of the house.

She decide to cover most of the floors in nothing by shag carpeting:

She cover her bathrooms in pink tile and wall to wall pink furs. One of my favorite things about her bathroom were her heart shaped bathtubs also in pink! She had a constant theme of gold hardware, statues of cupids and angels (she was a big believer in Angels)  throughout the house.

The newly married couple had some furniture issues while trying to fill in there new pink home. They spent a lot of their money buying the house that they didn’t have a lot left over for much else. So since they were so they were both so popular. Jayne Mansfield came up with the ploy of going to furniture stores and offering to sit on the furniture in the store so she would be autograph in them for the newspapers. She would also signed autographs there too and as an exchange for the furniture stores would give the couple furniture for free.

Even though she had a lot of fluffy aspects in her house she would do some transitional rooms in different material such as the patio and this hallway with her many many magazine covers.

She even had a heart shaped pool:

Here is a short clip of Mickey Hargitay talking about the house:

Jayne Mansfield wasn’t not able to live very long in her pink palace. She died in a terrible car accident in 1967. The house had several owners such a Mama Cass, and  Ringo Starr. Ringo Starr mentioned that he tried to get rid of the pink color many many times by painting it over white but for some odd reason the pink color was still able to steep though. Many believed that Jayne loved that house so much that her spirit never left.

In 1977 Englebert Humperdinck  bought the house. He kept most of the original furniture and styles that Jayne had in the house. He even kept Jayne’s bed and bed board in her bedroom.   He kept the house until 2002 when it sold for about $8 million dollars.

Unfortunately the owners who bought the house in 2002 decided to tear it down to make room on their own property. I believed it was bought from a neighbor who wanted to expand their house.

Until next time!

Sources: Wikipedia, Youtube and Getty Images

Hello and welcome to the first interview of 2020! This time I interviewed IG account : @leftbankbooksny

Left Bank Books is a bookstore located in New York City and it co-owned by Erik DuRon (who has twenty years experience as a book seller) and Jess Kuronen (who is a graphic designer and artist)

1. What is “Left Bank Books?”

“Left Bank Books is a used, vintage and rare bookshop in Greenwich Village. We specialize in literature, art, and arts-related subjects (i.e., music, film, photography, dance, theater, fashion, architecture, design, children’s books, etc.). Our emphasis tends to be on 20th-century books, though we handle some antiquarian books going as far back as the 17th century, as well as some very contemporary books (though nothing technically “new”). We’re especially interested in books that marry word and image in a distinctive, in many cases pre-digital way – books that are striking and compelling to look at and page through. Every book we buy for inventory needs to justify its place on the shelf, as we’re tiny (about 250 square feet), so we’re constantly asking, what is interesting about this book? Will people want to keep it when we’re all in the grip of de-cluttering our lives, and otherwise doing a lot of our reading on digital platforms? Will they want to give it as a gift to someone special in their lives?

Left Bank started out over 20 years ago under prior ownership, as a neighborhood used bookshop that handled some rarities. As rents increased in New York City and the demographics of Greenwich Village changed with gentrification the shop struggled. It was on the brink of insolvency several times and got rescued by a series of well-meaning landlords and new owners, but each time confronted the same challenges anew, finally shuttering in 2016. Jess and I were working there when that happened, and thought we might be able to do things a little differently. We wanted to retain the old shop’s DNA as a neighborhood shop focusing on used, vintage and rare books, but we wanted to distill it down and reimagine it, almost as a gallery space for books, a place where the mission would be to preserve book culture but in a timely way that doesn’t feel overly reverent and stultifying. A place that’s aesthetically pleasing and fun to shop and spend time discovering in. So that’s what we did, and we re-opened in the spring of 2019.”

2. Have you noticed any book trends in your store this holiday season?

“Two of our most popular books lately have been any edition of Alice In Wonderland (not surprising, as it’s a perennial favorite, and we always try to have some iteration of it) and a title we recently started to stock (and track down every copy of we could find): Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. It’s an art monograph from the 1980s and focuses on people like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Vara, Lee Miller, Frida Kahlo, etc, who were largely active in the 30s and 40s. They all seem to be hot right now, but I especially like the tandem nature of a book like that and Alice, which is surreal in its own right. I think maybe the world is ready to be remade in the image of some very creative, headstrong women.”

3. If I walked into the store and wanted some good winter reads for the upcoming winter season. What three books would you recommend and why?

“Well, three fun and distinctively “New York” books we’ve acquired recently are first editions of Andy Warhol’s Exposures, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems:

Andy Warhol’s Exposures (1979) was the artist’s first photobook, a record of his nights out and beyond, with 360 black-and-white photos of his “rich, powerful, beautiful, or famous” friends, including Bianca and Mick Jagger, Liza Minelli, Jackie Onassis, Lou Reed, Muhammad Ali, Catherine Deneuve, Marisa Berenson, David Hockney, Truman Capote, and everyone else. Warhol’s famously says in it, “I have a Social Disease. I have to go out every night…”

Capote’s celebrated novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” was published in 1958 along with three other stories: “A Diamond Guitar,” “House of Flowers,” and “A Christmas Memory.” Famously played by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 Blake Edwards film scripted by George Axelrod, Capote’s Holly Golightly is less sugar and more spice than her on-screen counterpart, regaling the narrator with shocking stories from her life as a socialite among rich men, fine dining, and the best fashions the big city has to offer. Its publication prompted Norman Mailer to call Capote “the most perfect writer of my generation” for his seductive, evocative prose. 

New York poet O’Hara’s late, great collection of verses, Lunch Poems (1964) chronicled and celebrated everyday life in Cold War-era New York. It was written mostly in Times Square, where the poet went during lunch breaks from his day job as an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and was published three years before the poet’s untimely death at the age of 40. Here’s a quote for flavor: “It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering / if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch / ah lunch! I think I am going crazy / what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up / at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch’s / I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems” (from “The Day Lady Died”). “

4.  Can talk a little about the employees’ favorite books they are reading for the winter?

“I’m reading an Italian novel from the 60s, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani. It was turned into a great movie by the filmmaker Vittorio De Sica, but I’d never read the book. It’s about an aristocratic Jewish family in Ferrara on the eve of the Holocaust, and the relationship between the narrator, a middle-class town Jew, and the beautiful, slightly aloof daughter of the family, Micòl. But really it’s about a whole world that was lost. (And my copy’s a first American edition, with a beautiful dust jacket designed by midcentury German-American graphic designer George Salter.)

Jess is reading Jia Tolentino’s timely essay collection Trick Mirror: Reflections On Self-Delusion, which she describes as her brand.”

5. Do you have any upcoming and exciting news you would like to share in this interview.

“We haven’t done any events in the shop yet, mostly because it’s so small, but also because we’ve been waiting for the right thing. We recently acquired a nice archive of After Dark magazine, which is this very cool performing arts magazine from the 1970s, that has a quasi-queer sensibility. It promoted dance and cabaret culture in a very mainstream way, as well as theater, rock and roll, and film. Like the Warhol book, everyone was in it at one point or another: Grace Jones, Elton John, Baryshnikov, Bette Midler, David Bowie, you name it. We want to maybe do an exhibit of them that will re-introduce the magazine to readers, possibly get a writer or artist who was associated with it in some way to talk about its importance and contribution to the cultural conversation back then. We’re still in the early planning stages and thinking possibly sometime in the spring. We’ll also be exhibiting at the Greenwich Village Book Fair in February. People can sign up to our email list through our website to receive news and catalogs.” 

If you like to know more about them this is there IG account:

@leftbankbooksny

They also have an amazing website and a shop where you can purchase an amazing assortment of books:

Left Bank Books

Thank you guys for the interview!

Until Next time!!