I. Luster: a gentle sheen or soft glow, especially that of a partly reflective surface
BELOW: Tea cups with bronze luster (top row, right) & lotus blossom pattern, by Red Wing--1940s;
and (bottom row, left) peach luster-ware by Fire King, 1970s.
AM was off yesterday and my Book's and Toys were in good shape, so I played in Housewares (his area). It's work that needs doing, but I was only doing the fun tasks. I set up an endcap display, for instance, and took photos for Big Boss to post on the store's social media. I like to have the record too.
Different volunteers price housewares, and they'd so under-priced the Fire King set that I thought about repricing it. They overprice other stuff though, so I left it, to balance out--getting a steal is part of the charm of thrifting. And pricing is NOT the fun part of work.
By the end of the day, most things on the end-cap had sold, except the lotus
tea cups. They don't have saucers... but even if they did, vintage
tea cups don't sell. Who drinks 6 ounces of anything anymore?
A customer was admiring them and telling me how she plants little plants in vintage cups, but in this case that would obscure the pattern. One would make a nice receptacle for coins and keys, but don't we already have enough of those?
II. Buster
BELOW: Looking at clowns for the collage board. I'd like to incorporate elements of these:
(L to R) the simple eye lines of Giulietta Masina in La Strada (1954), dir. by Fellini (her husband); Buster Keaton's shallow hat; and touches from Fellini's The Clowns (1970)...
I saw The Clowns when I was little, with my mother, and I'd like to watch it again.
(La Strada is way too sad for me to ever watch again!)
Looking it up, I see it is a faux-documentary. I didn't realize--I thought it was real. Oh--okay--all the clowns are themselves, so that's real--but the movie includes fantastical scenes.
I remember that it was mournful--a tribute to a dying art.
Reviewer Philip French (who reviewed classic DVDs for the Guardian) a called it a documentary/memoir:
"Fellini saw himself as both a clown and a ringmaster and the circus as a metaphor for life itself, and The Clowns, which puzzled and disturbed audiences with its bitterness, ambivalence and obsession with death, is an uncategorisable combination of documentary, memoir and classic clowning, a sort of fantasia about the history and nature of a dying art form."
(Marz would like French's review of Altman's Three Women--one of her favorite films.)
III. Weir and Weird Reactions
Speaking of favorite directors, the Trylon microcinema is showing films by Peter Weir in September, starting with Witness and including The Last Wave, which I'd loved. (I'm sad they're not showing his Year of Living Dangerously.)
[Save for later: Peter Wier, 2010 BAFTA talk on youtube]
The one I'm most eager to see again is Fearless (1993). Jeff Bridges plays a man who survives a plane crash and enters a sort of free-floating, disconnected, almost mystic state where he is weirdly fearless.
I only saw Fearless once, years ago, but I've thought about the character in my psychological reactions to events of the last few years--esp the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath. Like the character in Fearless, my reaction (though much milder) has included an impatience with trivialities. (Kind of a weird problem, since much of life is naturally trivial.)
I'd have been interested to talk to a therapist who knows something
about this "survivor" reaction (instead of that inept therapist who wanted to talk about my
childhood).
Gotta look to artists like Fellini and Weir.
BELOW: Camera operator Paul Babin and director, Peter Weir (right) filming Fearless, 1992. From Babin's article "Shooting Myself: Careening Toward Enlightenment in the Entertainment Industry"
And now I am going to the food shelf two block away (at the Catholic Church)---to get food for my WORKPLACE!
IV. Free Food
Fed up with management's inaction after I'd told them some of our colleagues are without food, I decided that surely I could feed us myself sometimes, cheaply, or for free. Say, wrangle the makings for chili once a week, and make it in a crockpot at work.
Yesterday I made a sort of beef stew out of odds and ends we had in the cupboard and freezer in the breakroom--including, amazingly, an old but unopened bottle of A1 sauce!
––plus some fresh veggies a coworker had brought from her garden.
I don't use/need food shelves myself, (thank you, dead relatives ❤️), but I will start scrounging for free food to cook up and take to work. In fact, the Society that runs the thrift store is one of the PROVIDERS of free food to this food shelf! Drives me crazy that they don’t feed their own sheep.
Here's what: Easy to criticize others, but what am I doing? It's not what we say, it's what we do.
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