Vespa!

In case you haven't figured it out, me and B like big animals: elephants, giraffes, tigers, lions, zebras etc.  So a lot of our interior decorating involves these big animals.  It's like we want live in a zoo! 

Here's a vintage poster we picked up on eBay for that obvious reason, but for some other reasons too.  One thing that B always asks when I look at potentially obtaining art is, "where will you put it?"  Well, with this one and Babar-like elephant, that's also obvious, not that we're planning ahead or anything.  It's got great color and it pops.  Plus, I like Vespas.  I don't own one, but maybe one day I'll be that oddball teacher that shows up to work on an old Vespa and my sports coat with the elbow patches. 

The poster was produced by the Piaggio & C scooter company in 1959 and designed by Ditta Giuseppe Lang, S.P.A, which is a graphic arts studio in Genova, Italy.  I wish I could tell you more about it, but I can't read any of the Italian on any of the sites I googled.  If you can help, let me know!

So I collect oil cans now...

It started with the Wizard of Oz.  No, actually it started with Gregory Maguire's Wicked.  I really liked that book.  I read it in graduate school when I was living out in the sticks in the panhandle of Florida for my PhD research.  I was drawn to the fact that the story flipped a classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, on its head and gave it realism.  It took the antagonist, the wicked witch, and made her the likable antiheroine.  It then inspired me to pick up the soundtrack to Wicked, the Broadway show, which was based on the book, starring the voice, Idina Menzel (she got a Tony for this) and the chipper, Kristin Chenoweth.  Then I read the sequels and I even went out a purchased the 100th anniversary edition of  L. Frank Baum's original.  Since I have been intrigued by all things Oz.

I'm a collector, but I've for the most part stayed away from Oz related things.  Trying to collect everything that interests you is a bad idea for two reasons: 1) you end up with a house full of junk and 2) it's costly.  It's best to stick to particulars.  I've had my collecting phases.  When I was a kid it was rocks and small bottles, then in high school it was baseball cards, then in grad school it was comic books, then after it was back to baseball cards and autographs.  I've retained most of this stuff, but it's time I give some of it up.  I'm getting married, looking to buy a home, so I need some money.  I may keep my favorites and sell the rest.  Even if the money doesn't go towards the wedding and home, at least I can use some of it support my newer collecting habits, with out spending the money I should save for the grown up stuff.  Once a collector, always a collector.

I'm now collecting art, old stuff or old stuff that now qualifies as art and records.  I got into this stuff last fall.  Every Monday night, I was on my couch preparing for class and I would have the History channel on.  It was American Pickers, American Restoration and Pawn Stars that got me fascinated by the story behind things.  My new fascination with the old things has resulted in me dragging Bethany to antique stores, flea markets, and estate sales.  Most of the time, I never buy anything.  Either nothing appeals to me or I don't know what things are worth, so I don't take the financial risks.

Last May, at the Red Bank community yard sale, I did buy something and it cost me a whopping 25 cents.  It was the oil can below.  Some people call them oilers.  I think they should be called oiling cans so that they don't get confused with cans of oil.  What inspired me to shell out all that money?  Two things: 1) The Wizard of Oz.  It reminded me of the tin man and his constant need for oil and 2) an oil can my friend Mark bought at a clay festival we went to in Texas.  His oil can was made of clay, but it looked so freakin' real!  The craftsmanship of it was ridiculous.  I've always been jealous of that oil can.

So here's what I know about my 25 cent oil can.  It was manufactured in Pittsburgh by GEM manufacturing company.  I know that because it has GEM MFG CO stamped on it and that's pretty much all I can tell you about it!  haha.  I tried finding info about it, but there really isn't any.  There are several oil cans like mine online and several of the ads say they're old (the 70s), but there's no other details I could find.

A few months later, I bought another oil can.  This time it cost me a dollar.  Two makes a collection, right?  This one (below) is a tiny version of the first one I bought.  It's an oil can that was used to grease up a sewing machine.  Singer sewing machine company made oil cans like this, but my little oil can doesn't say Singer Sewing Company on it.  It doesn't say anything at all, so I guess it's some generic version and there really isn't any other information I can get about it. 

Two weeks ago I bought my third oil can at an antique show in Ocean grove.  The woman had several for sale, but I was strong and only bought one.  I paid 5 bucks for this one.  She wanted seven.  Either way, who knows if I got a deal.

Here's what I know about this one.  It was manufactured by the Plews company in Minneapolis.  It has PLEWS GEM written on it.  There's that name again, GEM.  I was able to find info about Plews.  The Plews company was founded in 1927 by R.G. Plews.  At first the company focused on oil cans for the railroad industry, but when cars and trucks became more popular for transportation, the company switched to manufacturing stuff for cars.  In the 1970's, the company merged with the Edelmann Company, which was an automotive company that started by making power steering hoses.  This detail would lead me to believe that the can I bought is pre-1970s because it doesn't have Edelmann on it, which appears on their more current products.  I bought it because of the funky goose neck it has and the paint on it made me think it might be military related.  No confirmation of that yet. 

That's my collection so far.  Feel free to contribute to it!  I've done a bunch of reading about oil cans and the history of them.  I've learned and seen pictures about the different varieties.  Oil cans are subset of collectibles called Petroliana, which incudes items related gas stations and oil companies.   I'll update you on any additions.

Some new art.

I'm a cat guy.  You can thank my cat Marty McFly for that.  He's a stud.  I like other cats too: tigers, lions, ocelots etc. I've got more into tigers recently because of the stuff I've read recently while researching some things about saber-toothed cats for a book I'm writing, but may never finish.  I discovered this theory that the sabre-toothed cat possibly went extinct because of people.  And I learned that tigers may go extinct in our lifetime.  This is saddest thing ever.  Why are they in trouble?  Stupid people obviously.  We have hunted them for all kinds of stupid reasons, for furs, fertility medicines which don't work and for our own entertainment, namely the circus.

Circuses have been enslaving all kinds of wild animals.  I started reading about that too on one of my internet crawls (which is like a beer crawl, but instead of going from bar to bar, I go from site to site fueled not by alcohol, but my own endless curiosity).  While exploring about the history of circuses I started noticing the old posters that were used to advertise for them.  I loved them.  The color, the pop.  I wanted one and I wanted one with a tiger.  You may ask, but Ped doesn't that glorify the problem?  Wouldn't having a poster celebrate the cruelty that we did and do to tigers?  Perhaps, but I'm looking at it differently.  I pursued an old circus poster as reminder of what we did in the past, that we actually are responsible for our actions and that we need to conserve the natural world and what's left of it. And cause like I said before, I like tigers.

There are lots and lots of reprint posters out there.  I wanted something original.  Well original posters are expensive.  I'm talking more than a hundred bucks.  I've seen some greater than a thousand.   This is because of rarity due to the fact that they were made on the cheap and not to last.  They were made for advertising purposes in which they were just glued to walls where they would sit for a few weeks until someone came along and glued another poster on top.  Think of the advertising you would see on the boards around construction sites in the city.  This is why they are printed on cheap crappy paper, like newsprint, so they do last that long.  Many collectors buy these posters and have them mounted to canvas where they can be treated a little more roughly.

I searched some shops in the city and some estate sales (my Sunday alone-time past-time).  But I couldn't find any that I both liked and could afford.  So where do you go for stuff on the cheap?  Ebay, duh.  After several months of searching, I came across an original poster from 1952 being sold by someone who was selling a circus collection of a collector who recently passed away.  The poster was cheaper than normal because it was misprinted.  A defect.  I like defects though because they remind me of the process of making the poster.  You don't think about the process when the poster is in good form.  So I bid and won it for pretty cheap.  Since I didn't spend that much on it, I decided to frame it up nice and grown-up like.  I've provided a picture.  It makes me happy.  I think about the process of making it and I think about tigers.  Isn't that the point of art? To make you think?  To make you happy?

my new distraction...

Well baseball is over (well the Phils are over) and I'm barely over it.  It was heartbreaking.  I had such high hopes.  My whole life is all about hope it seems and not so much realization of hopes.  I just keep on hoping.  I'll survive I suppose and before you know it (probably next week), I'll start counting the days until next season.

I have had some of new free time open up in my life, both unfortunately and fortunately, and so I've decided to use my time maturely with self improvement.  It's time for Ped to continue to grow up.  So I've been working out some and exploring the arts.  Specifically, I've gotten into water color painting.  I'm terrible at it.  It probably doesn't help that water color is the harder of the painting styles.  I got inspired when I bought two small water color originals from my favorite website etsy.com from a super nice woman named Rachelle Levingston from SLC, Utah.  Pictures of the ones I bought are below.  I like buying original art.  It makes me feel good.  I get to fill my home with beautiful things while also supporting someone that is doing it for a living.  I also bought a cool hand carved owl thingy made from bark at the cranberry festival in Chatsworth, NJ this weekend.  Maybe at some point I'll post my own art on here, but don't hold your breath.