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Fabulous Flash

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Let me begin with some full disclosure – the above ring is not the ring Kim gave me a few years ago. This ring was a door prize at the Met’s Met Family Circle pajama party recently – however it reminds me fondly of a light up ring he gave me a few years back. This one has a nice fancy bat design (I admit that with my single track mind I thought cat at first!) – the earlier one is shown below.

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Kim and I share a passion for things that light up. For my part I have given him several variations on bouncy balls that light in bright colors when they hit the ground. I believe the first came from the store at SF MoMA years ago, when I was on a business trip. The cats have shared Kim’s enjoyment of all of these and ultimately spirited them away. The ring Kim bought me was discovered at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York, in the shop one evening while we were killing time between early German film features at the museum. I loved it and subsequently bought them for many people on my Christmas list that year.

All of these LED light up toys are by their very nature, sadly, ephemeral. Perhaps it is part of their charm as well. This Christmas I found tiny “fairy” lights and decorated a stuffed cat in my office with them as a nod to the holiday season. For those of you who have Amazon Prime and are still scrambling this holiday season, I offer the links below. Maybe a light up toy is exactly what you or the person on your shopping list really needs this year.

Chow Time

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cats eatingPam’s Pictorama Photo Post: As far as I can tell, written at the top is Daly Ranch and what a fine farm it seems to be! I count fifteen cats here – although close inspection might make an argument for a sixteenth. It came from a photo album and there’s nothing written on the back. This looks like a pretty happy gathering of the tribe – although that dish looks a little small to keep this crowd happy. (And are those wanted posters of cats on the back building I wonder?) More interesting than great photography, this photo is very a pleasing idea for me. I mean, who doesn’t want a farm full of cats?

When I was little our cats came running whenever we used the electric can opener (do they even make those any longer?) which is how cat food cans were opened at that time, before the pop top most use today. Later, they also came to my mother calling Chow time! And, in fact, if a cat went missing we were more likely to call that than their name. This gang stampeding at feeding time was the first thing I thought of when I saw this.

Whenever Kim and I talk about striking it rich, or a well-endowed retirement, I usually reply cheerfully, Cat farm in Connecticut. Why Connecticut I’m not entirely sure. Art Spiegelman once described such a place to me in Connecticut – actually a sort of retirement home for cats – and I think it stuck in my mind. Although I see it as something the size of a horse farm, but just lots and lots of delighted kitties – and I spend my days romping with them and dispensing ear and chin rubs.

 

 

Cat of Christmas Past

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Pam’s Pictorama: The Christmas card parade continues with this one from a couple of years ago of Zippy. I paused a moment writing that – was Zippy our or my cat? Unlike Otto who was my very first cat but adored Kim, Zippy never really decided that he was also Kim’s cat. This really wasn’t Kim’s fault – he was always good to Zips. Made sure Otto didn’t beat up on him too much and did everything right – and cats love Kim. Still, despite living in extreme close proximity for many years, Zippy remained devoted only to me – and he adored me.

It started one day 20 odd years ago when I wandered into a store where I liked to ogle antique jewelry, over on First Avenue, down near the 59th Street bridge. On that day, there on the counter, was an adorable black and white tuxedo kitten who, in design, could have been a brother to my cat Otto. He had a bad eye, an infection from being born on and living on the street, which would ultimately wax and wane over the years. When I went over to pet him, he hurled himself into my arms. Well, I don’t really need to say it, I was a goner. Although I went home without him that day, I was back shortly thereafter and Zippy and Otto started a long, contentious relationship.

Shown here, is the one Christmas we celebrated with Zippy alone, as a very elderly cat. Zippy lived to 20, the following spring, and he was a bit tatty, if scrappy at that point – as shown here.

I don’t think I knew it, but I assume I was influenced by this print which I picked up somewhere along the line, and was living in the flat files. I found it while looking for our cards. I am sure I had it – or others like it in mind. Here’s to Zippy!

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Christmas Cards Redux Continues

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Pam’s Pictorama: As an examination of our history in holiday cards continues, inspiration seems to strike us differently each year. While last week I highlighted our self-portraits as a jumping off point, this week I am sharing a few where the cat concept became less about our specific cats, and more about the idea of cats. Starting with a favorite, the parade of black and white and white cats featuring a giant cat balloon. I am pretty sure the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade balloons were the inspiration – with a touch of Aesop Fables cartoons thrown in with that long line of cats.

I have never been to the actual Thanksgiving Day parade, although Kim has a great childhood memory of going at least once*. As past readers know, my father was a cameraman for ABC news for many years. His early years there were focused on local news which meant many a Thanksgiving working – filming the balloons being blown up the night before and the parade day of were frequently part of his annual beat. I gather from him that this meant a lot of standing around in the cold, and often wet, wishing he was home with his family. Therefore, as kids we never went and frankly he could never understand why I would want to either. Nonetheless, when I moved to NYC as an adult seeing the balloons blown up was an annual joy. I went in all weather and braved the crowds and always loved it.

I am not entirely sure the precise inspiration for the sort of steam-pump robot cat, although I do love his catty feet and the jolly hat blowing off his head! I like the string of lights too.  Since I do the first sketches and art direct to some degree, I always like to request lots of Kim Deitch snow and stars in our cards. I am especially fond of the anthropomorphic moon and sun as well.

Lastly, the one I think of as Cat-in-the-Box came out of the purchase of the pamphlet I featured in a recent post, Lucky Black Cat and things like it. Halloween was still on my mind that year and rather than include our kitties, we went with a Halloween meets Christmas theme and produced this little beauty.

Next week Cards of Christmas past continues followed by the big reveal – this year’s card.

*Footnote to Pam’s post. My great Thanksgiving day parade memory was when our family spotted, and met Hoplaong Cassidy waiting with his horse to be in the parade.

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Felix Sells

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Pam’s Pictorama: Today I am breaking my own blog rules to bring you a Felix post on a subject I find interesting, but unlike my usual posts, I (sadly) do not own any of the photos or items shown in this post about the brief history of the Winslow B. Felix Chevrolet dealership in Los Angeles.

Living on the other side of the country, I have never had the pleasure of seeing the neon Felix sign in person. As a collector of Felix images I have been aware of it for many years and wouldn’t mind making a pilgrimage one of these days. However, it is the early images of this advertising relationship that really provokes my interest. Shown above, an envelope (currently for sale on eBay as I write this) with an impressive Felix logo. Postmarked November 10, 1938, with two cents metered postage and addressed to the Southern California Telephone Co. (begging the question, why and how did it get saved?) it got me thinking a bit. By coincidence, Kim had just pulled the photo below off of Pinterest to show me and share on Facebook so we had just been discussing the dealership.

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This is quite curious, the woman, holding a package, is posing in front of the post office, with this wonderful Felix who not only has the Chevrolet sign across his tummy, but boasts, Order Yours from Felix. I doubt the post office was planning on delivering them, but this three-way advertising bonanza remains a visually pleasing mystery to me as well.

As far as I can gather, it seems the story of the Felix Chevrolet advertising goes something along the lines of this: Winslow B. Felix was a bit of a genius at inventing advertising and selling ploys for his dealership. As the inventor of sales innovations such as the two-day trial for new cars, asking his friend Pat Sullivan for the use of Felix the Cat’s image for advertising – the deal sweetened with the gift of a new car – was a natural. Soon after Felix makes his first appearance on behalf of Chevrolet in 1923 with signs, stationary, statues and who knows what all evolved that is lost to us. Shown below is another one of his advertising tableaus snatched from the Google image file.

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Sadly, a victim of living the high life, Winslow Felix died of head injuries following a polo accident in 1923. He was only 42 years old. Clearly his marketing lives on today. Apologies for the sort of dreadful photo of him below – he deserves better – but it was the only one the internet coughed up for my use.

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Cards of Christmas Past

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Here at Pictorama we’ve decided to kick of the holiday season with a multi-post look back at some of the Deitch-Butler cards of years past. We have never dated our cards and, other than by identifying the cats portrayed in the cards (even that is a tad sketchy – there have been a lot of tuxedoes!), I have no real idea of dates.

Kim and I collaborated on our first card only a little more than a month after we first started dating. He was between projects and I had started making Christmas a Valentine’s Day cards a few years before so I suggested it. Sorry to say, I have not uncovered card number one yet, although I am sure either the original art or one of the cards exists in my files or his somewhere. By my calculation, this years card should be our twenty-first!

The unwritten rule about drawing the cards is, if we appear as figures, we draw ourselves. In early years this lead to a slightly strange combination of styles, although over the years we have somehow managed to come up with some thing coherent. I usually do a first draft, then Kim – back to me and then he inks.

Here I offer three examples featuring us with our cats of days gone by, Otto and Zippy. Ho, ho, ho!

Tom Turkey and Cats

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: As another Thanksgiving slips into the past, sending us racing toward Christmas and the New Year, it seems to me like a moment to pause and consider the relationship between large fowl and cats – sort of an interesting one. As shown here, they can certainly co-exist, but there always seems to be something lurking deep in the instinctual cat brains which is saying,  “It’s really large alright, but I think I can take him. Yum!” I don’t know off-hand if cats actually do kill turkeys, geese or other large birds. I may have told the story of the neighbor’s cat, Tiger Lily, who jumped on the back of a goose one day with evil intention, only to be taken out into the river by the irate bird – requiring her to abandon her plan and swim back to shore. This leads me to think that for a cat killing a goose is harder than it looks. Turkeys look even tougher.

As some of you may know, my mother aided and rescued injured water fowl for years. More often then ducks or geese, this most frequently took the form of swans with various injuries – many had swallowed fishing line which required surgical removal by a vet, but others had been pinioned and thoughtlessly left to starve in a pond with no food source. (Swans, geese and ducks cannot survive on scraps of bread and food does not just appear in small man-made ponds for them.) Anyway, at one time my mother had a (relatively) small swan she was caring for and she would bring it into the house at night. Water rats can and will kill an injured bird so it was necessary and I cannot remember why the garage was not a suitable place. Anyway, my mother’s cats would all watch with huge, shining eyes when this swan was brought past them, through the house, to spend the night in the guest bathroom. They would gather by the closed bathroom door…considering, thinking, dreaming.

This card was never sent, but on the back, in pencil is written Lottie’s Tom & cats. Lottie’s gray cats have clearly multiplied and to my count there are seven in this photo. The one with the white bib looks somewhat philosophical, but the two gray ones coming at the camera – and Tom the turkey for that matter – have something more in mind. They are coming right at the camera. Take care, turkey eaters!

Rats!

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Our friends over at Google translate this as Lucky Airplane and certainly they are taking no chances! Bedecked with every lucky symbol, as well as a few I didn’t know, such as the ladybug (I know it is bad luck to kill them) this is a plane promises quite a ride. I admit I’m not sure what the thing that looks like a beehive or the pansy-thing are – I’m open to suggestions – and everything is tied with a bow which is a nice touch. The black cat is obviously lucky (see our recent post Lucky Black Cat if you have any questions), although the fact that he’s peddling this plane into flying seems a tad ambitious and he does appear to be concentrating.

I had to cast around a bit on the subject of those industrious looking white rats as lucky. Logically though, rats are seen to have a sixth sense about danger and death, so I guess if the rats are satisfied all is good and these are all but dancing on the wings.

This card belongs to the same family as the one featured in Speaking of Cats which I show here below. These seem to be WWI genre cards – different companies, Rex 696 and the one below by Idea. 

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I have included the back of the card, and perhaps a French reader will be kind enough to send us the gist of it, as it is too densely written for me to begin to translate. Despite the writing, it does not appear to be postally used or properly addressed which also does confuse me. However, for  now I just say, Up, up and away!

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