For Adepts of the Higher Beauty Culture

If you've ever seen the 1955 movie My Sister Eileen you know the scene where Ruth Sherwood (Betty Garrett) undergoes a lengthy bedtime ritual in which she applies an entire jar of cold creme to her face, ties a hankerchief over her head (for the prevention of double chins), and adheres small squares to her forehead and cheeks. I had given this scene the same disparaging laugh I had given Ruth's "toning" efforts, preventing the "spread" of her hips by doing the bump against the wall of a nearby closet. Girls, what are you waiting for? Flatter asses and stomaches for everyone! Of course, it's a comedy and her measures are supposed to be a send up of 1950s beauty culture, but you can imagine my surprise when I noticed "Wrinkies" and "Frownies" for sale in the Vermont Country Store catalog. These things are real? And, what's more, still made?

Apparently, they "work" by training one's facial muscles to relax and for $19.95 you can have 144 nights of facial relaxation leading, no doubt, to a new and improved you. Throwing back the covers, you'll fight your way into a girdle and a lovely grey New Look suit a la Kim Novak in Vertigo to go to work in your Best of Everything office, sleeping your way to a position of power, a career woman in the big city. But don't come running to me when your roommate laughs at your freakish ways and exposes your gullibility to all your friends.

Christian Dior's New Look at Design Museum

Vertigo 1959 Hitchcock film

The Best of Everything - a 1958 novel by Rona Jaffe adapted to film by Jean Negulesco in 1959.

Lulu's Vintage Blog and Store

A perfect marriage of obsessive compulsiveness, consumer culture, and technology, Lulu's Vintage Blog and Store is your one stop guide to what's fabulous in retro fashion and culture. Two sites in one, Lulu's store has vintage clothing and accessories for men and women as well as sewing books, patterns, and fabric. Her blog highlights the wonderful junk being sold out there in the wide, wide suburban shopping center that is the internet: 1960s style coats at Nordstrom's, 1920s bridal and evening wear on ebay, you can always trust her very excellent taste to lead you in the right direction.

Of course, personally, I am most tempted by the amazing and extensive collection of crochet booklets she's selling at her store...I have so many, but maybe just one more.

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

While looking for stuff of interest on Sophie Tucker I found the most amazing thing: The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at UC Santa Barbara. They have MP3s/bit-wavs available of old cylinder recordings of music, humor, speeches, dialect songs (warning: they're offensive), hymns, and many other things I haven't even looked at yet. If you like music from the teens and twenties this is a great site for lesser known recordings that may not have made it to CD. There's also information on the history of cylinder recordings, their project specifically, as well as "cylinder radio" which plays recordings from their collection.

I highly recommend glancing at their links page which has a list of web-accessible early recording collections at other libraries and universities.

A few sites of interest:
History of the Edison Cylinder Phonograph
Ethnographic Wax Cylinders at the British Library Sound Archive
Library of Congress American Memory Project