1. Things that I am officially too old for:

    January 12, 2012 by ms. xandra

    Bear in mind that I am not technically actually old.  However, I still feel that I am too old for the following:

    1.  Greyound buses;

    2.  Shared rooms in hostel-like accommodation (this is actually something that I declared myself Too Old For at the age of 22, an ambitious declaration to make at the age that might be really considered prime hostel-dwelling age);

    3.  White zinfandel, or really any rose, unless it is the kind of rose I make myself by pouring the end of a bottle of red and the end of a bottle of white into the same glass (A LADY IS NEVER TOO OLD TO INVENT HER OWN WINE);

    4.  Getting a bottle of Bailey’s from my grandparents for Christmas every year because of that one Christmas at their house when I was 15 and drank a lot of Bailey’s because I hadn’t really drunk before and it tasted like milkshakes, a seemingly innocuous event that returns to haunt me in the form of a giant bottle of Bailey’s every Christmas;

    5.  Any kind of musical event that involves being outside in the burning sun (or, more likely pouring rain) with a bunch of people who are/are dressed like hippies;

    6.  Camping, much to the disappointment of my Gentleman Caller, who often alludes to willingly spending the night in the great outdoors as though it is actually a fun past time;

    6.  Skirts that fall above the knee, which have the effect of making me look like an overgrown five-year-old.

     

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  2. Holiday Miracle!

    December 30, 2011 by ms. xandra

    WHO DOESN’T like a good holiday miracle?  That is what I ask of you.  Well, fellow holiday miracle fans, I have happened upon the holiday miracle to end all holiday miracles.  Look at what I have done to a pile of once-unassuming and humble oranges:

    I have transformed them into cherry and frangelico-striped oranges.  VOILA, HOLIDAY MIRACLE.

    I could keep my methods a secret and I could claim my magical act of orange transformation was achieved through the powers of alchemy, but instead I will err on the side of honesty and admit that I learned it from a book.  Specificially, I learned it from Jellies and the Moulds, by Peter Brears, which I purchased at the British LIbrary bookshop and which has proven to be the single most important book purchase that I have made since I upgraded to a new copy of Harriet the Spy.  Brears is a food historian, so this is not just a recipe book, but is really a social history of jellies in the UK, from the middle ages (MEDIEVAL JELLIES!  My eyes have been opened to a new and slightly revolting world) to the 20th century.  I have learned so many things from this book:  disgusting things about boiling calfs feet until they became gelatin; fascinating things about flummeries, which are soft gelatins made by boiling gultinous stuff like wheat and rice down and extracting the goo; the use of gelatin as a food for sick people, which was useless as it has basically no nutritional value; and about the manufacture of moulds, which grew more and more elaborate and fussy through the 19th Century.

    The stripey oranges are called Oranges a la Bellevue, and the recipe dates from the British Regency period, although, according to Brears, it enjoyed popularity well into the Victorian era.  I don’t know a whole lot about the Regency period, but from what I’ve seen (ie: fancy jelly recipes and the Brighton Pavilion) I have to say that I really appreciate the spirit of utter idiotic frivolity that characterizes the Regency-era approaches to both decorative arts and cuisine.

    Anyhow!  Here is how I made my Oranges a la Bellevue.  The original recipe calls for the jellies to be orange and almond-flavored, but I opted for cherries and booze because I can’t leave well enough alone.  The results were delicious!  One warning:  I am impatient and tried to rush the setting period for the jelly layers by popping them in the freezer.  This resulted in some expansion and contraction of the layers, so they weren’t as perfect as they could have been, and they shrank a bit once they’d thawed.  If and when I do this again, I will put on my patience pants and just wait for things to set at refrigerator temperature so that the oranges are prettier.  Also, I used regular gelatin, but I think this recipe would be an excellent candidate for using agar agar to do a veggie-friendly version.  Agar agar sets a bit firmer and crunchier than gelatin, which I think would work well for slicing and presentation here.

    On with the oranges!  Click an image to enlarge and to show recipe steps.

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  3. Paris is for dead people.

    December 17, 2011 by ms. xandra

    I went to Paris a few weeks ago to visit my fabulous friend Jill!  And we visited at least one burial site every day that I was there.  This began by accident, with trips to Pere Lachaise and Monmartre cemeteries, but then we just decided to EMBRACE the deathliness.  I like travelling with themes in mind.  That way, if say, you only have three days and during which you couldn’t possibly see everything there is to see in Paris, you can at least see most of the bones there are to see in Paris, and still feel like you’ve accomplished something substantive.

    In addition to dead people tourism, we also went DANCING! and it was GREAT! because unlike other places in the world (ahem, Los Angeles) it was so much less of a scene and so much more about just DANCING!  And also you can get a bottle of wine for, like, three euros, which is cheaper than a god damn shitty cappuccino in Londontown.  This makes dancing even greater.  Not uncoincidentally, I sustained a larger number of very minor but still inconvenient flesh wounds (got thumb stuck in door jamb, fell off curb and banged up knee, etc.) during my three days in the city of light than I normally do in, like, a year; and I also managed to ruin about one pair of stockings for each day that I was in Paris.  Life is not easy when you are a fashionable young lady in a city where the wine is cheaper than the water!

    ANYHOW, here are some pictures of cemeteries, etc.


     

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  4. London is for Wandering

    December 5, 2011 by ms. xandra

    I’m not in London anymore.  This is sad!  I like London.  London, I like to think, likes me.  But I will be back again, I’m sure!  Right now, though, I’m in Ireland, with Aaron, who came over to join me for a pre-Christmas holiday, and we are in Galway, and it is cold and windy.  But we are also the only tourists here, so, you know, you win some, you lose some, when you travel off-season.

    One thing I will miss about London, though, is the way it enabled me to wander.  And wander and wander and wander.

    I like wandering both purposefully and aimlessly; with a goal in mind mind or simply to while away an afternoon. Is purposeful wandering an oxymoron?  I don’t think so – sometimes I will deliberately set out with the goal of wandering to a specific place.  I like wandering by myself, because then I can truly go wherever I want and and not feel like I have to worry over whether or not someone else is having a nice time. But I also like wandering with other people, because sometimes you need to witness the world with someone else there, so that you can laugh, ensemble, at the ridiculous and delightful things are in the world, which, I think, one is more attuned to whilst wandering.

    Los Angeles, I love you, but you are not always the most-wandering conducive. Sometimes you are! You are good when it comes to EPIC JOURNEYS, like walking to the beach from downtown, or walking home from school, which I haven’t done but which I keep meaning to do. Or, on a less epic level, walking through the residential streets between Santa Monica and Melrose, winding my way through mid-century low-rise land to the Fairfax trading post on a Sunday afternoon. But, Los Angeles, you are hot and sunny and sometimes you make me too tired for wandering. Also, you are a grid. A giant grid. Without tiny little sidestreets that might lead god knows where, I find my path can feel a bit prescribed . And while this makes not getting lost easier, sometimes I want to be a little lost, you know?

    So, I’m sorry Los Angeles, but London is superceding you right now. It could be because I only have a week and a half left here, and I am feeling pre-emptively nostalgic, but what can I say? In London, it is CLOUDY! And on days when it is sunny, it doesn’t actually get hot! Cool weather is good wandering weather, it’s a fact.*  Also, there are streets in London on top of streets, streets so small they are just called paths, streets that appear and go nowhere, streets that go around in circles, streets that can be frustrating, but can also be fascinating.  And there are parks full of paths that mimic those streets; parks where you feel like you’ve stepped out of the city into the countryside, even if its only for a few moments.  The parks are full of ponds and trees and dogs that look like people dressed up in dog costumes (I have noticed that most animals in England look like tiny people dressed in animal costumes.  I’m not sure why this is).  And most of London’s museums are free, yay socialism, which means that even when the weather is TRULY terrible, there is wandering to be done.

    And so, in London, I did lots of wandering, and here are some pictures of my wanderings over the past few weeks:

    *And, on a slightly tangential note, I’ve also decided since I’ve been over here that fall is my most flattering season because I can layer warm sweaters and tailored coats and look put together, whereas in Los Angeles, I’m always a bit afraid that I’m a hot, sweaty mess who is showing too much skin.

     

     

     

     

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  5. Here is a post that I started writing a week and half ago and then forgot about and then remembered!

    November 13, 2011 by ms. xandra

    London’s public transit is forever ruining LA’s public transit for me.  This is largely the fault of LA’s public transit system, which is terrible.  I say this as a Great Defender of LA’s public transit.  I am forever extolling its virtues to non-transit riders and forever making excuses about how it isn’t that bad, but, alas, now that I am in a city where transit is actually good, the shortcomings of the LA Metro have been thrown into harsh relief.

    It’s an interesting difference in culture:  here, it seems like just about everyone rides the tube, whereas in LA, well, a colleague who shall remain nameless once said to me “the bus here just seems like it’s for the underprivileged.”  This is a very stupid and problematic statement that I shall not begin to unpack here, but I think it really gets at the difference in attitude towards transit that pervades the two cities.  Riding transit is a major part of my life, and a big part of the culture shared by myself and many of the people I know.  It is also a major part of the lives of anyone in LA who cannot or chooses not to have a car.  Lots and lots of people ride the bus, but the bus-riding population in LA is really seen as a marginal group. Here, in London, I think it’s taken for granted that just about everyone will ride transit.  There are many things that I think are good about a transit-oriented commuter culture, but one big one is that I think it’s healthy for people to actually just be in public spaces around other people.  Around lots of other people.  Around lots of different other people.  I am tired of rampant individualism, and I think that actually being around other people in the world can give people a sense of perspective and of place in larger social communities and structures. Maybe this is naive and idealistic.  Probably it is.  Oh well, whatever.

    There are more practical, tangible things that I like about a city where transit is part of the culture.  I like that I never worry about feeling lost because pretty much anywhere you are you can walk until you hit either an Underground station or a bus stop where you can catch a bus that will take you to an Underground station.  I like that once I’m in the Underground, I never feel lost because using it is pretty intuitive (even though the lines all have names that don’t actually make logical sense, because they are all vestigial traces of when the London Underground was a bunch of independently-operating rail companies).  I like that on the weekend, when I went to a concert and I was worried about walking back to the tube in the dark afterwards, it turned out that I didn’t have to worry because all of the hundreds of people who were at the concert also took the tube there and so we all walked back to the station together and it felt totally safe.  I like that I don’t have to plan at least an hour’s travel time on either side of an event.  I am going to so many more things here in London than I do in LA, just because it’s actually easy to get places.  I’m always telling people that I love LA, but that it makes me tired.  The user-unfriendliness of public transit in the city is a big part of why that is.  (Having said all of this, obviously things are not perfect here – tube lines are sometimes frighteningly overcrowded, and everything useful always gets shut down on the weekend for maintenance.  Like this weekend, when they shut down the part that was going where I needed to go but I fail at informational-diagram-reading-comprehensions skills, so I didn’t discover this until I tried to switch trains and found my platform barricaded.)

    Anyhow, something I have been frequently going to on public transit since I’ve been here are late-night museum openings!  They have these in LA, too, but I have NEVER been to one because there is no good way to get, say, from West Hollywood to the Natural History Museum without taking at least two buses, probably three.  But ANYHOW.  And also, here, most (but not all) museums are free.  Because, socialism, right?

    I’ve been to the Victoria and Albert late openings twice, because I love it there.  It is very unlike, say, the British Museum, which is always very very busy, and always feels kind of…plundery.  Something about the informational pamphlet they give you when you go in to see the Parthenon friezes, for instance, just seems a little too defensive in explaining why these priceless Greek treasures are really better off in England.  And while I know the V&A has just as much of a plundery, imperialist history (hello, Queen Victoria!), since it’s a museum of design rather than, say, art or history, it is so much wider in scope and so much less intent on selling a particular History of Civilization than the British Museum. AND the current special exhibit is on postmodernism and includes such delights as costumes that belonged to Grace Jones and Klaus Nomi.

    And this is where the post that I started writing a week and a half ago and then forgot about and then remembered was abandoned! What was I going to say next?  I was probably going to say something about how I also have been to a late night opening at the Churchill War Rooms where I proceeded to get quietly drunk and then wandered around pretending I was a member of Churchill’s stenography pool while listening to an Andrews Sisters cover band.  Or maybe I was going to say something about how I went to a late nigh opening at the Tate Britain, where the theme was APOCALYPSE! where I proceeded to get quietly drunk, and watched some apocalyptic performance art until they started passing out haz-mat suits for the audience members to wear, whereupon I decided it was time to go look at some good, old-fashioned John Singer Sargeants, because generally I prefer to be on the “observing” end of performance art involving haz-mat suits, rather than on the “participating” end.

    So basically, the takeaway of this post is that good public transit is really handy for the particular subset of people who enjoy going to museums at night for the purpose of getting quietly drunk in presence of art and/or history.

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  6. True fact:

    October 30, 2011 by ms. xandra

    I will totally cry at every P.J. Harvey concert that I have the opportunity to attend.

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  7. Thrilling report from madwoman in attic

    October 28, 2011 by ms. xandra

    Inquiring minds have inquired as to the status of my accommodations:  their status is totally great.

    Last year when I came to London, I stayed in a closet-sized London School of Economics dorm room.  It was…fine.  It was fine.  The shared bathrooms were fine.  The lack of internet was fine.  The tour groups of Italian teenagers who I was sharing the bathrooms with were fine.  The lack of kitchen facilities was fine.  The tiny beds were fine.  It was all fine.  But it wasn’t good.   (The free breakfast, though, that was pretty good.)

    If I were to really level with you, I would admit that I think I actually started to go crazy in my little tiny room after a while.  The trip was really fun and productive, but there were a lot of…long dark nights of the soul, mostly dissertation-related, that I think were probably exacerbated by living in a closet.

    Now I am staying in a nice, big studio apartment in the attic of a nice old Georgian townhouse, and I have a kitchen and my own bathroom and it’s not even outrageously expensive (with the exchange rate, it’s probably costing me around what my rent is in LA, which probably is outrageously expensive, but in my LA-tainted mind, it’s totally reasonable).  It is good.  It is really really good.

    Here is the view of the city on a sunny day that I can see from the window at the back of my apartment:

    and here is my temporary Room of One’s Own.  I love:  The high ceilings, the big windows (these were taken at night, so you can’t see how bright it gets in here), and the tiny, miniature oven.

    I was feeling all cranky yesterday because, well, because I hate dealing with people who are just plain mean-spirited and awful, and I had to deal with a mean-spirited awful person, and I was mad about it because it was related to a thing that I was hoping would just stay in LA and not bother me here.  I am not good at dealing with these kinds of things because I end up internalizing a lot of anger, and I’m uncomfortable communicating that anger because, I always second guess my own feelings and can never admit that they are valid.  And I also have a lot of anxiety about how people will react to me when I say what I think.  So that is to say, I end up spending a lot of time drafting fantasy angry emails that I never send.  So I was doing this yesterday, in my head, and then I realized that I was

    a) sitting having a coffee at Ray’s Jazz Cafe, which is located in Foyle’s bookstore, which is a lovely place,

    b) about to go see an off-West End show,

    c) in fucking London, doing whatever the fuck I wanted,

    and that maybe being angry was a waste of my energy.

    And then I saw a play, and it was good and made me glad.  And then I got home and discovered thatRaffi made a song out of Jack Layton’s letter to Canada, and even though I am typically averse to sentiment or even admitting that I have feelings (see above), it made me cry.  And I was like, you’re right, Jack, what am I even doing.  Sitting around feeling impotently angry is always a silly idea.

    Also, I think I am giving myself a repetitive strain injury from sitting in the library too much, so I guess that means that tomorrow I have to shopping on the Portobello Road instead.  TOO BAD FOR YOU, library.

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  8. Things I learned from Girl Annual, 1963

    October 20, 2011 by ms. xandra

    Can you imagine my delight when, at the South Bank Book Market, I discovered a copy of the 1963 Girl Annual?  I had promised myself not to buy any books while abroad (they are heavy!) but I promptly dispensed with that solemn vow within less than a week of arriving in London. (because you can ship them home!  That’s what the Royal Mail is for, right?)

    Anyhow.  I am so excited about my copy of the Girl Annual, that, were it possible, I would join the cover girl and stand on the top of a ski slope and grin until I was red in the face.

     

    There is SO MUCH to learn from Girl Annual!  There is something for everyone!  Just look at the table of contents!  There is ballet, there are adventures, there are romantic castles!  You can learn about stenciled cushion covers, romantic castles, and fencing!  And somebody named Monsieur Potato!  (Spoiler:  sadly, Monsieur Potato is not a story about Mr. Potato-Head’s adventures in Paris, but is, instead, about Louis XVI thinking potatoes are a good idea.)

     

     

    But let’s see what else we can learn from Girl Annual, shall we?

     

     

    Eilly Bowers, Pioneer Millionaress!  Pioneers and millionaresses, these are categories that I assume to be mutually exclusive, based on my elementary school history classes and childhood love of Laura Ingalls Wilder, both of which taught me that pioneering was shitty because you were always living in rudimentary houses made of sticks or eating salt meat or dying of dysentery and/or consumption.  But now I have learned, from Girl Annual, that one can live the dream of a Little House on the Prairie, while also enjoying modern conveniences such as millions of dollars!

     

     

    I read this story, and it is less about masks than it is about hairpieces.  Basically the story is:  Sandra is shy.  She goes to the masquerade and acts like her True Self that She Has Hidden All of These Years because she is in disguise so nobody knows that it is her!  BUT THEN it turns out that she forgot to put on her wig, and everyone knew it was her all along because of her curly hair, and they ALL LIKED HER ANYHOW.  What can we learn from Sandra’s story?  We can learn that I need another glass of wine before I read more Girl Annual.

     

    Instruments of the world!  For the Girl who wants to be an ethnomusicologist.  My favorite is the horn player.  The caption reads “European playing a French Horn.”  I hope they mean European in the euphemistic sense, as in “his predilection for bowties and good grooming seems awfully…European.”

     

     

    Clearly this story needs a subtitle, and that subtitle needs to be “A TALE OF TERROR by Stephen King.”

     

    And speaking of Tales of Terror!  Do you know what more publications need today?  They need drippy horror movie font.  I love drippy horror movie font.  Back when I used to sing in a church choir in undergrad, the church ladies were having a tube sock drive for the homeless.  And the poster for this event was done in drippy horror movie font.  ”TUBE SOCK DRIVE:  A TALE OF TERROR.”  Anyhow, good font, well done, Girl Annual.

     

    YES!  I am very excited to learn about America’s first SPACE GIRL!  I want to be America’s first space girl!  Hey, Girl Annual, tell us what it takes to become America’s first space girl!

    How to become a Space Girl:  Get frozen in carbonite.

     

    And speaking of ethnomusicologists!

    This picture needs a new caption.  Here, I have thought of one:  Peggy Seeger has giant monster hands.  Her husband, Ewan MacColl, is from Williamsburg and plays in some band you’ve never heard of.

     

    And no girl-oriented publication would be complete without a teen hearthrob!  Like…Burt Lancaster.  Who would have been a young, virile 50-year-old in 1963.  Nothing creepy here.  Moving along.

     

    But, really, no girl-oriented publication would be complete without an important lesson about fashion that makes us feel inadequate!  Thanks, Girl Annual, for showing me that all girls, fat and thin, can all feel vaguely ashamed of our bodies TOGETHER!

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  9. Unfortunately, blue suede shoes are impractical in this weather.

    October 11, 2011 by ms. xandra

    Hello, I’ve moved to London and I’m living in an attic.

    “Moved” is perhaps to strong a word, I suppose, since I’m only here for two months.  And “attic” really doesn’t encompass how perfectly lovely my attic is.  It’s huge and has high ceilings and large windows and french doors that open out onto the roof and has a little kitchen with a miniature oven and has a better desk than the one I have at home, and it’s centrally located and the rent is good.  I’m renting it from an artist, and the entire house (which is a gorgeous Georgian townhouse) is decorated with her lovely work.  She lives here with her husband, who is very elderly, and was also, incidentally, was a fairly well-known anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, and a publishing entrpreneur and athlete, and who, at age 89, had a pulse rate of 52, which is 20 points below the national average, or so his wikipedia page tells me.  Also, according to this article, he may have basically invented the concept of having your bills withdrawn directly from your bank account for you?  (And what have we all done with our lives lately?)

    Really, all of this just confirms for me that Wikipedia is like a social network for people who are too busy doing things that are actually important to bother joining a social network.

    What else, what else!  Oh, I know.  Today I visited three different cellular phone shops.  Before I left the US, I very carefully got my phone unlocked and made sure that it would work with a UK sim card.On my adventures today, two separate phone-shilling idiots put a sim card into it, decided that it didn’t work, and tried to sell me a new phone.  So, in the third shop, I didn’t even mention that I have a phone, and just bought a sim card, stuck it in my phone myself, and after three minutes of fiddling with the settings HEY PRESTO it works.  Aaron and I like to make fun of each other for telling very boring stories that nonetheless have epic three-act setup/conflict/conclusion story arcs.  This is exactly one of those stories. What shall we do with our boring boring stories?  Let’s put them on the internet!  Act 1: I made sure my phone would work.  Act 2:  Two idiots tell me my phone doesn’t work.  Act 3:  I buy a sim card, phone works.

    Oh, what else?  My flight was pleasantly uneventful, other than I actually didn’t sleep because it was a poorly timed overnight flight that left late afternoon instead of actually at night.  HOWEVER!  One of the wonderful things the universe likes to make happen for me is that in-flight entertainment systems very often have film and television choices that are VERY specifically skewed to my VERY specific interests.  Once, on a flight to Toronto, for instance, I got to watch a documentary about Doris Day and an extremely delightful Rosalind Russell comedy from 1953, in which Russell plays a wealthy socialite whose father enlists her in the Women’s Army Corps to teach her a lesson.   These are very much things that only I would watch.  The last time I flew Air Canada, there was a documentary about dinosaurs, but it was not just any documentary about dinosaurs:  it was called BONE WARS! and it was about the two founding fathers of American paleontology, Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope, who absolutely despised each other and basically made a giant mess out of dinosaur taxonomy purely through ham-fisted attempts to one-up each other.  They would do things like have their assistants smash up any fossils they found in the field that they couldn’t immediately carry home so that the other guy wouldn’t find them.  I am also very fond of this photograph, which appeared in the film:

    Marsh is in the middle with the beard.  Those fellows all around him?  In their adventuring hats?  They are all GRAD STUDENTS who actually paid to fund the expedition for which they then provided the labor.  Ah, yes, the illustrious history of grad students paying people for the privilege of doing thankless work, its roots, they might be right here.  At least these guys had the sense to wear funny hats and carry guns.

    ANYHOW, I digress.  The very-specifically-skewed-to-my-interests entertainment that Air New Zealand had for me on my flight to London was SEASON FIVE OF THE X-FILES (ie:  The BEST season of the X-Files).  This meant that as my plane descended at Heathrow, I was watching the most important moment in all of television history:  Mulder and Scully slow-dancing to Cher’s recording of Walking in Memphis.  AUSPICIOUS, I tell you!

     

    *The classic three-act boring story that started it all is Aaron’s Ye Tale of Ye Meetinge, and it goes like this:  Act 1: Aaron’s boss shows up and says, “We’re meeting today, right?”  Act 2:  Aaron is confused because he thought there was no meeting today. Act 3:  A meeting occurs; it is fine.

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  10. Things you can learn from Lady Robin Hood

    September 8, 2011 by ms. xandra

    Aaron and I went to Vegas a couple of weekends ago.  Most people, I have heard, go to Vegas for gambling.  Personally, I am less interested in such things, and more interested in shiny lights, showgirls, and tightrope-walking cats, all of which Vegas has in abundance because it is a magical place.  Other things that Las Vegas has that are relevant to my interests include:  restaurants that offer unlimited free wine (relevant quotation from our waitress:  ”the red is a Burgundy, the white is a Chablis, and if you mix them together, you get a rosé!”); diners with purple and pink velour booths, Tiffany lamps with flamingos on them, mirrored ceilings, and giant fake cherry trees; an entire museum about atomic bombs; all of that great fake crap (Eiffel Towers, New York Cities, etc.); and the Pinball Hall of Fame.

    Oh, the Pinball Hall of Fame!  More museums need to be like the Pinball Hall of Fame.  It is in a warehouse space in a strip-mall, and it is free to get in, and it is filled chock-a-block with restored pinball machines dating from the 1940s to now, you can play all of them, and they donate all the profits to charity.  I may or may not have used up all of Aaron’s parking meter quarters.  What was really amazing about all those old pinball machines was their art, which is fantastic and elaborate.  I’m also very interested in how femininity is represented in the art on those old pinball machines – lots of the ones from the 1940s and 1950s, in particular, featured images of women, and while most were predictably pin-uppy, a few seemed to feature ordinary girls, which makes me wonder if some of the machines may have been marketed to a young, female audience.  Basically, I would like a pinball historian to write me an interesting quasi-academic article about pinball machine art, because I think it would make for fascinating social history.

    I am not going to write that article.  Instead, I am going to tell you about how the ladies on pinball machines can teach us SO MANY THINGS about FASHION!  These are all pictures that I took of the backglass and playing field of some of the more fabulous pinball machines.  Titles of the pinball games link to their respective entries in the fantastic Internet Pinball Machine Database.

    Centigrade 37:

    Magenta tights.  I think that is the message that this is sending us:  if you are a Lady Mad Scientist, you need some magenta tights.  What is Lady Mad Scientist up to?  Is she cloning herself a Lady Supersoldier?  Reanimating a Lady Zombie? Is she putting a fellow Lady Mad Scientist into cryogenic deep freeze?  A mystery!  Frankly, it does not matter what she is doing, if she is doing it in magenta tights, she is doing it in fine style.

    Starjet:

    This is all about hair.  It when you ride your Starjet to your Starvaction spot (I am going to assume for our purposes that this gang is headed for Starlas Vegas), it is very important that your hair be perfectly coiffed.  Also, who doesn’t love pointy, pointy collars?

    But wait, there’s more!

      You really ought to make sure that the shape of your hair lines up exactly with the shape of your space helmet.  This is very important.  Like, you know how you don’t want to layer shirts with collars that don’t line up nicely?  It’s like that.

    Domino:

    The Domino artwork raises many important questions:  where can I get dominoes the size of my head?  Why does red-shirted fellow have such poor posture?  What song are the couple in the corner serenading us with?  (My money is on Toto’s “Africa.”)  And most pertinently: why am I not wearing an op-art polka dot mini dress right now?  It is perfect for every domino-playing occasion.  And I have so many of those in my life.

    Spin-a-Card:

    Stripey tent dress on the left?  Fabulous.  Fitted sun-burst print sweater on the right?  Darling.  Blue wig?  Transcendent.  This, ladies, is how you should be dressing when you harness the powers of witchcraft to make playing cards grow to 10 times their normal size and then levitate.

    Bowling Queen:

    Again with the hair, right?  I love the pincurls on the redhead and the blonde, and the beehive on the waitress.  Also, what a lovely patriotic bowling shirt.  That girl isn’t just bowling for the title of Bowling Queen.  She is bowling for freedom.  Or whatever.

    Lady Robin Hood:

    Oh, Lady Robin Hood, you impress me so much.  There are no words.  But I do have words for the way ingeniously pair the green chapeau with yellow feather and a red outfit.  Those words are: to die for.

    And just look at your band of Merry Women!  They are also fabulous.  And they have taught me a very important lesson.  You see, I had always wondered why I had never managed to make it as a Infamous Lady Outlaw, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, running an Outlaw empire based out of a complicated network of treehouses that run through Sherwood Forest:  it is because I never thought to pair hot pants, a bustier, and pumps with a bow and arrow.  WHAT WAS I THINKING.  Perhaps it is not too late.  I will head to Ye Olde Americayne Apparelle on the morrow, because I’m pretty sure they will have that entire outfit in stock.

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