Did I mention my obsessive brainstorming for new research zines; have I said that I was working on a zine for pineapples? Well, beyond finding recipes for wine and vinegar, I have also found that pineapple plants, their leaves specifically, are used to make cloth. In the Phillipines, where most Piña cloth is currently made, it has been used to make the traditional Barong tagalog as well as embroidered kerchiefs and shawls (Wikipedia). The Piña cloth produced in the Phillipines is made via a time consuming manual process. It is often woven with silk to give it a nicer drape. Whether with silk or without, it is an oddly translucent and beautiful cloth.
Pineapple snakes
Holidays in the Movies: Christmas in July
We don’t celebrate Christmas in July because we have an all encompassing love of Christmas and we just have to have it more than once a year. Our mini holiday is more because we need a little imagined cooler weather; would never turn down the opportunity for another present and some some mulled cider; and could use a reminder that the yuletide feeling of love and hope for humanity doesn’t need to only happen once a year. However, while we spend weeks immersing ourselves in media for Christmas, Christmas in July gets a couple days at most. We make a selection of absolute favorites, White Christmas, and select a smattering of other features. This year that list includes:
- Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July (1979) – I have probably talked about Rankin and Bass before. Theirs are the holiday specials of my childhood, along with Charlie Brown. And, the title says it: Christmas in July.
- Silent Night Bloody Night (1972) – I now believe that all mansions were once used as asylums or clinics of some kind.
- White Christmas (1954) – This may be my favorite Christmas movie of all time, so of course, we watch it in July.
- A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) – Yes, Charlie Brown again.
Check out the other Holidays in the Movies posts.
What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking
Until ten years ago, Abby Fisher was known as the first African American woman to publish a cookbook in the United States. The details now known about her life give only the faintest sketch of a woman who worked her way from enslaved cook on the east coast to business owner and author on the west. Much of what we do know was unearthed by Karen Hess, southern cooking historian, who studied Abby Fisher and encouraged the reprinting of her book after a rare copy of Fisher’s book came up for auction (“What Mrs. Fisher Knows About…,” 2021). Because I am a lover of old cookbooks and have been on a hunt for all the fruitcake recipes, and of course Mrs. Fisher had one, I was elated to find Mrs. Fisher’s book online courtesy Michigan State University: https://n2t.net/ark:/85335/m5tt11. I have selected the recipes that look especially interesting to me in order share them here, but do go and check out the whole book!
Abby Fisher was born Abby Clifton to Andrew James, a white farmer of French decent, and Abbie Clifton, an African American, in South Carolina (“Abby Fisher,” 2021). During her research Hess could not find direct evidence that Abby Fisher was born into enslavement, but many have made that assumption based on Fisher’s date and location of birth (Rae, n.d.). An ad for her cookbook in the The San Francisco call from 1897 seems to support this assumption by indicating Abby Fisher was “raised in the family of the late Newton St. John of Mobile, Alabama (“An Excellent Cookery-Book,” 1897). Newton St. John was a prominent merchant and banker in Mobile prior to and after the Civil War. So, it must have been in the St. John kitchen where Abby Fisher first became a cook. Before the beginning of the Civil War, in the 1850s, Fisher met and married Alexander C. Fisher in Mobile (Rae, n.d.). After the Civil War, in 1877, the couple moved to San Francisco (“The African American Women of the Wild West,” n.d.). The 1880 census shows them on Second Street with four of their eleven eventual children. They are both listed as mixed race; Abby was working as a cook while her husband was a pickle and preserves manufacturer (“Abby Fisher,” 2021; “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About…,” 2021).
Continue reading What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern CookingThe Velveteen Lounge Kitsch-en
We gave up traditional cable a little while ago and currently have only a slim selection of streaming channels, most of them very specialized. For the most part a lot of our non-movie watching is on YouTube, and this I love so much I had to share:
Holidays in Movies: 4th of July
I play the same record on every patriotic holiday: Timbuk 3’s Edge of Allegiance, because it starts with National Holiday. If we entertain guests, then perhaps I’ll bust out the Sousa, but Sousa takes a level of picnic commitment that is hard to rustle up in the heat of a Florida summer. Of course, like with many other holidays at my house, we get in the mood and stay in the mood with some carefully chosen movies.
Halloween and Christmas are extensive enough to warrant their own zines, but you can check out my previous posts on Thanksgiving, New Year, and Easter if you want more of this holiday moodiness, or check out all the other Holidays in the Movies posts.
4th of July
- Music Man (1962): honestly, before checking the date on this, I had forgotten their was a 2003 version. I think I’m going to forget it again, because I love the 1963 film so much, no interlopers could infiltrate this relationship.
- This is America Charlie Brown (1988-89): have I said this before: Charlie Brown means the holidays, any holiday, every holiday.
- I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997): This even has a parade it is so 4th of July. There are flags and pageants and fishermen and floats and everything patriotic.
- Silver Bullet (1985): Yes, it is a werewolf movie; yes, it happens on the 4th of July.
- Martha’s Summer Favorites (2006): Martha Stewart specials on DVD are featured in our house every Halloween season, they help us prep for Thanksgiving and celebrate for Christmas. So, of course, they’re going to help us prep for the 4th of July too. This set could be watched at the start of summer except for an extended sequence on celebrating America, so here it is.
- Jaws (1975): How could we miss it?
On a Horse
Holidays in the Movies: Summer Solstice
Summer tends to feel terribly devoid of holidays, but there are some important dates to celebrate. The summer solstice is the longest day of the year. Like sun lovers who celebrate the winter solstice as a lengthening of days from then on out, I welcome the summer solstice as a herald of shorter days to come. The sun in Florida is blinding and relentless, so the thought of it receding just a bit is a comfort by this time of year. At the same time the hottest and brightest days of summer are still to come. These are the movies we are watching to get in the mood and learn to love summer again:
- Race for Your Life Charlie Brown (1977) – I’ve said it before, Charlie Brown is every holiday
- Summer School (1987) – for everyone who no longer has summer breaks with no commitment, the feeling of being cooped up in class when you want to be out on vacation is real and familiar
- Lost Boys (1987) – except for the fashion, this feels as though it is as hot and blinding as summers where we are
- The Burbs (1989) – there is nothing that says summer so much as sitting around the house and indulging in conspiracy theories and paranoia
- Sleepaway Camp (1983) – camp isn’t a break from school, its just more of the cliques, awkwardness, and bullying of school without the distraction of class work
- Friday the 13th part VII: the new blood (1988) – as described by Richard, “Carrie vs. Jason,” but really, any Friday the 13th movie is appropriate as summer celebration watching
- Hausu (1977) – A summer trip to the country complete with watermelon
- Hiruko the Goblin (1991) – incredibly strange Japanese horror film with great summer vibes and plenty of school drama
- One Crazy Summer (1986) – a silly slapstick comedy with some clever jokes, but not one we watch every year
- Summer of Fear (1978) – also known as Stranger in Our House, this TV movie is full of witches and occult intrigue
- Cheerleader Camp (1988) – more proof that all summer camps set in the woods are plagued by knife wielding killers
Don’t forget to check out all the other Holidays in the Movies posts.
*Holidays in the Movies posts will be treated like living posts and updated routinely. Last updated 6/28/2022
This one with that one
Making books
My Grandmother kept her recipes in a recipe binder fitted out with envelopes for the various categories. She had never used the blank pages for each section, instead relying on the envelopes to hold all her scraps of paper. She had recipes written on old envelopes, on drug advertisement notepads, clipped out of newspapers and magazines, and sent to her in letters by friends. I was lucky enough to get a hold of this binder and had the fabulous idea to scan them all and make a kind of recipe zine for easy navigability. I’m not sure why I thought that a bulging binder would fit easily into a zine sized book. Even squishing as many recipes as I could onto each half sheet page, I ended up with 333 pages.
This isn’t the first time I played around with sewing sections of papers together to make a fat book, but it is the first where the pages were already printed up. I shoot from the hip when it comes to book making. I’ve read some articles, handled a lot of books, but I haven’t studied technique, so I made a lot of mistakes. But, the final product is exactly what I wanted: an easy to flip through, organized, collection of my Grandmother’s recipe clipping collection.
Scanning the recipes also gave the the opportunity to tweak the coloration on some of the oldest handwritten notes so they were just the tiniest bit easier to read. I already know the recipes I want to try out first based on the splatters, finger prints, and wear alone. And, though I included the recipes in this book, I will be avoiding all the molded jello salads. I just can’t.
Un-Authorized Recipes of Doomed Moviethon zine
This past year has felt frustratingly un-productive, but I did finish a thing. Though I have been dragging my feet on taking pictures and getting it listed in my Etsy shop, I am happy to say that I completed the ‘Un-Authorized Recipes of Doomed Moviethon’ zine!
So, if you ever wanted to follow along with Richard Schmidt’s excellent book, eating and drinking what he did (because I fed him), then here are the recipes you need to recreate those insane moments. I also slipped in some movie inspired comic strips.
China Mary: woman of many faces, women with no names
I returned to tales of the ‘wild west’ and pioneers of the frontier looking for women who may have been cut out of the history books because of their sex, culture, and race. There are no shortage of stories romanticizing the time period, the seeming lawlessness, and the rugged criminal turned hero. They distract us from the many atrocities that were committed as east coast colonists pushed westward, warring with native peoples and decimating the land in order to claim for their own everything between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The harsh and turbulent conditions meant that people had to contend with so much more than we can imagine, sometimes rising in fame because of their business savvy, their integrity, and their resolve. China Mary was just such a person.
Except that she was multiple people. During the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the following legislation that prohibited immigration of Chinese people to the United States, racist actions towards Chinese people in the United States ranged from massacre to seemingly polite acts of diminution (“Chinese Exclusion Act,” 2021). Prior to and despite the prohibitions on immigration from China, many people living in China headed for the U.S. to escape facing violence from civil was between 1840s and 1860s, unemployment, famine and overpopulation of coastal cities. Chinese men often immigrated to the U.S. without their wives and some families in China decided to sell their daughters into prostitution oversees to both avoid starvation and provide the girls with the opportunities a new country may provide (Waggener, 2021). While looking up more information on the woman in Tombstone known as China Mary I came across a couple more, in Wyoming and Alaska, and discovered that Chinese people were often called China Mary or China John to save white people the trouble of learning their real names. I cannot adequately express how much this bothers me. To deny someone their name is ultimately demeaning and terribly cruel; it is an erasure. There are probably thousands of China Marys and China Johns completely lost to history by design. Today I’m going to explore the lives of Sing Choy, Ah Yuen, and Mary Bong, likely not their real names.
Qui Fah or Mary Bong 1880-1958
The woman who would become known as China Mary or Mary Bong in Sitka Alaska was born in Shiqi (Shek Kee 石岐) in Zhongshan 中山 county (“Mary Bong or China Mary,” 2019). From her own reporting to a newspaperman in 1935, she ran away from home at the age of 13 and headed for the United States. Aware of the immigration restrictions facing her, she arrived Canada and stayed in Vancouver until she made friends with Gee Bong, a Sitka resident on a business trip. Her reasons for marrying at the age of 15 were practical, as she recounted to the newspaperman: “I learned that if I were married to a man who had his immigration papers I could get into the U.S. as his wife. I liked my new Chinese friend from Alaska so I married him” (DeArmond, 1994). She helped her husband with his Bakery and Restaurant, where she was dubbed China Mary.
Continue reading China Mary: woman of many faces, women with no namesWitch secrets
Mid century oddities
I inherited a weird little curio from my Grandmother. I don’t remember ever seeing it in her house, though it could’ve been hidden amongst her enormous collection of salt and pepper shakers. Any time I look at it, even now that it has lived in my house for so long, I am overwhelmed with questions. My grandmother’s house had porcelain figures of children being held up by the giant hand of Jesus, it had kitchen prayers and little plaques with owls made from shells that said ‘world’s best grandmother.’ This figure of a small person with bee wings and a halo, playing flute seems weirdly incongruous. Is it meant to be an angel? And why does the cow have a halo too?
Perhaps, I thought, it was just a product of its time that made sense to whomever brought it to my grandmother’s house. But then, I wanted to find similarly odd figurines of the mid century. I often surf around eBay looking at anything tagged as ‘mid century,’ so this time, I dedicated my search to finding these figurines. Far from the popular brutalist style of the time and equally far from the ‘modern’ ideal that most comes to mind, these figures are weird, fantastical, and kitschy. This is what I found:
Continue reading Mid century odditiesDivination witch
