Blast From the (Holiday) Past

I know many people will think this perverse, but I love holiday shopping. Normally I hate struggling with crowds, but once Thanksgiving has come and gone and the Christmas season is properly begun, I love getting out in the stores and malls, mingling with the happy throngs. Charlie Brown and Snoopy can whinge all they want about commericalism; I just adore the sounds and sights and smells and joggled elbows of the winter retail rush.

But this weekend, I didn't have to go to the mall to get my blast of holiday nostalgia: It was waiting for me at the local CVS:









It's the DiscoveryKids Color Me Rocketship, and it took me straight back to my childhood, when I had, courtesy of the ads in the back of my comic books (or maybe it was Boys' Life?), first a cardboard spaceship and then a cardboard submarine!

 

These cool — and huge — toys provided a lot of under-the-tree impact on Christmas morning for very little money (even in late-60s dollars), and were incredibly cool to play in. Not the most durable of toys, but they didn't require any batteries, and any toy you wear out through happy play beats the ones that break down on Christmas morning, or eat batteries like Pez, or never really work at all. Just the right amount cooler and fancier than an empty refrigerator carton, these corrugated ships of dreams presented the same blank imaginative canvas.

I hadn't thought about my childhood fantasy transports for years, but stumbling upon the drugstore Space Shuttle brought it all back. The new version is improved in some ways: The tab-and-slot construction is undoubtedly safer than the sharp-edged rivets of the 60s versions, and I don't recall the old interiors being as detailed and play-friendly as the new one. But maybe the best thing about the Color Me Rocketship is how powerfully it reminded me of my days as Buck Rogers and Captain Nemo in those back-of-the-comic-book marvels.

I doubt there are any pictures of me in my submarine or spaceship, but teh intertoooobz has pictures of everything, and if it weren't for the fact that my backyard didn't have a fence, this could easily be me and my "Polaris Nuclear Sub," right down to the hair color (not to mention the Polaroid print).

RIP, LeRoy Nieman

When I heard today that artist LeRoy Neiman had died at 91, my first reaction was surprise that he wasn't already dead; I haven't thought about him, nor heard anything about him, in years.

That's not to say I haven't ever thought about him, though: My father, who passed away in 2005, was a big fan of Neiman, who was most famous for his brightly colored, kinetic sketches, paintings, and serigraphs of athletes and sporting events. Serious art critics and aficionados typically wrote him off as "garish and superficial," when they weren't ignoring him altogether, but Neiman's work was wildly popular in its day, and he lived a flamboyant, globe-trotting public life: Imagine the commercial success of Norman Rockwell, facial hair to rival Dali, and the lifestyle of a happy version of Hemingway.

And then there was, of course, Playboy.

My father genuinely loved Neiman's painting style, no matter what the critics said, and even consciously emulated it in a couple of his own amateur paintings, one of which hangs in my upstairs hallway. But in the 60s and early 70s, Dad was also one of those white-collar suburban sophisticates for whom a subscription to Playboy was a point of pride. It can't have hurt Dad's opinion of him that Neiman had been involved with the magazine since its first year of operation; had created Femlin, the iconic "curvaceous brunette who cavorted across the [Party Jokes] page in thigh-high stockings, high-heeled shoes, opera gloves and nothing else" [NYT, 6/20/2012]; painted the running Man at His Leisure feature; and was generally more closely associated with the Playboy lifestyle than any nonphotographer not named Alberto Vargas.

As I learned researchingGoogling stuff for this post, Neiman's memoir All Told: My Art and Life Among Athletes, Playboys, Bunnies, and Provocateurs was published earlier this month, and I'm thinking it might be worth a look. Maybe it's time for another look at his art, too, now that his personal celebrity and commercialism no longer obscure the view. Personally, I always found the energy and dynamism of his images appealing. Much of it is "merely" illustration (but you could say that about plenty of other great artists, couldn't you), but not all. This image, for instance, is oddly reminiscent of one of my father's other favorite artists, Winslow Homer (compare):