Titanic, Period Pieces and Gambit to get your hubby to watch TV with you.

Colette in her cutting edge fashion hat from Marie Claire Magazine 1937.

My husband and I watched the new 2012 Titanic miniseries last night,well, the first two episodes, anyway.

 It was on the History Channel (in Canada) and that channel had just played a programme with ‘new evidence’ about the Titanic’s sinking (due to mirage/glare, a researcher says) which clashed with some of the old theories put forth in the mini-series.

But this Titanic miniseries was just Upstairs Downstairs on a big boat, a soap opera, so it didn’t matter. Julian Fellowes of Downtown Abbey fame penned this miniseries, which has a kind of Groundhog Day style of plot development, so the first episode seems weird.

Anyway, he clearly had lots of money so the hats were right on, with the first class women wearing Huge Merry Widow style hats and the French mistress of one rich guy wearing a smaller style more like Colette’s up there.

(In 1912, Coco Chanel was making her smaller hats for her boyfriend’s rich friends.)

Gee, you have to wonder if people are going to get tired of 1912, just I get my story Threshold Girl up on the Internet (it’s a free ebook) and I start writing the follow up Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

But my story is about the middle class in Canada, and even though it has suffragettes, I’m going to paint a more complex picture of the movement, from a Canadian Point of View.

This 2012 Titanic miniseries starts with a rich girl being released from jail for breaking windows or something with the suffragettes. (Played by Perdita Weeks, the girl who played Lydia in Lost in Austen but super thin now.) Yesterday I posted a first person testimony from the WSPU magazine,  suggesting something just like that happened. In April 1912.

Anyway, the science documentary Titanic: Case Closed featuring Tim Maltin’s theory (he apparently has an ebook or e-book out called “A Very Deceiving Night”).. supplied the new evidence that centers around the icebergs in Labrador in 1912. As it happens I’ve already posted an article from the Canadian Magazine, published in April 1912!  about those very icebergs. They were so numerous and splendiferous,they were almost becoming a tourist attraction. Hmm. Although the article was called Iceberg: Floating Menace.

Ironic, the date of that article. The History Channel Documentary revealed that the ocean liners of the time ran a gauntlet of icebergs, but it was especially bad in 1912.

It was interesting, but I thought there were some contradictions in Maltin’s theory or his presentation of same.. He goes to Hamburg to look at old boat logs from Germany. He says they’ve never been looked at before. That’s why it took until the  80′s to find Titanic’s ruins. But, a German boat that sailed shortly after Titanic apparently ran into debris and floating bodies. So the Germans knew where the boat was (around anyway) but never told because war broke out? Please explain. This documentary then recites the testimony of someone on that very German boat that clearly was published somewhere else a long time ago. Case not closed?

Anyway, this same Titanic investigator says the Titanic was very well built and very manoeverable for its size.

That contradicts James Cameron who supplied an interesting and daunting metaphor on a Titanic program aired just previous: that the Titanic is like modern man, powering along in one direction, but about to crash, (Global warming) because it is too big can’t turn fast enough, and no one is paying attention,or the wrong people are at the helm of the world, ie industrialists.

I guess the irony is icebergs play a  big part in this 2012 tragedy in the making.

Anyway, back to the Titanic Miniseries, I see that Julian Fellowes name isn’t on the IMDB entry for the series. Hmm.

Anyway, this Titanic miniseries shows why Cameron’s Titanic movie worked. It had a simple plot! I’ll still watch the other two episodes.

I found one of the miniseries’ subplots especially perplexing, a French mistress is snubbed by an upper class woman. I mean from what I’ve read of the era, the Upper Classes were all fooling around. It was what they did. Prudery was a middle class thing. Alas! (You just have to read the Nicholson Letters, upon which I based Threshold Girl.)

I noticed a while back that for the upcoming movie Gambit, Colin Firth isn’t listed as a star on IMDB.

Alan Rickman is. And yet in all the publicity around the shooting of Gambit, Colin Firth was showcased.

Speaking of Gambit, I watched Get Carter on Turner Classics last week. I recorded it thinking it was an In Like Flint movie, but it’s about a hood and pretty gritty, even for today. Not my kind of movie. But I stayed with it, as it is stylish and Michael Caine is terrific. He was very good looking, wasn’t he? Never really thought about it. I was 13 in 1968 and David McCallum was more my type

And then I watched a bit of Withnail and I,  liked it and saved it for Saturday (Titanic Night) with my husband – but my husband doesn’t get British comedy. That’s why we watched Titanic the miniseries, although my husband doesn’t get period pieces either.

I said “Wait a while and there’ll be some pretty naked people” just like your Throne of Kings. (I knew it wasn’t gonna happen, though.) He said “Game of Thrones, not Throne of Kings.”

Marion Nicholson of Threshold Girl in her big hat for 1912. I think she’s on the Charles in Boston. I will have to write about that trip in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, as she went to visit Dr. Henry Watters with her sister Edith, August 1912. Relations were trying to fix her up with another man, Chester Coy, who later went to war and lost his mind. Henry Watters never married, although very well off and about as nice a man as you could find. Hmm. He is buried in Melbourne. He died in 1937, a decade before Marion.

A hat like that could sink a boat, and I wouldn’t be writing these books.

Christmas Message – Tighsolas Style

Elizabeth Arden’s Fifth Avenue cologne bottle, sitting like a New York skyscraper on top of granite made of Lush soap. Not the Chanel bottle, but still deco. I wonder when it was designed. Chanel’s was in 1927. (Hmm. It’s a 1996 brand.)

A weird coincidence this Christmas. As I waited for the goose to cook, I opened my Christmas presents. The first one de-papered was from my eldest son and it was a boxed collection of hand cream, body lotion, perfume and cologne. The Fifth Avenue brand. I said “Thanks” as I reached for the next gift and remember thinking, at least with one part of my brain. “Hmm. That’s a blast from the past.”

Most of my gifts were bath oils and soaps, but trendy brands in bright boxes. The fruity, ecological style stuff so popular with the young. Lush has taken over from the Body Shop. My husband got me a selection of Clarins spa products, which made me feel guilty, as they are so expensive.

This Fifth Avenue gift made me feel a tad middle-aged (sic). Or it seemed more like something I might have given my mother – were she not into Chanel No. 5 right up until her death.

And then I opened another non-cosmetic gift, a large book about Women in History, that I mentioned in my last blog. My other son and his girlfriend gave me that gift along with some Fruits and Passion creams and bath products. And then I went back into the kitchen to get the feast on the table, hoping not to forget any dish. (As it was, I left the prune apple stuffing in the microwave.)

The next day I started reading the book, in my living room surrounded by unclaimed gifts, and read that part from the 1900-1910 era and read that passage about Elizabeth Arden, and how she opened her first salon in 1909 and how she soon after visited France and brought make-up techniques back to the US and how she was a pioneer in the industry, making make-up a good thing for good working girls, so to speak.

I tracked down a little more about her. She was born in a Toronto suburb and she didn’t go to high school (as it cost money, as my story Flo in the City reveals). She worked as a shop girl, cashier and a stenographer (good money in that) before going to New York and eventually becoming the richest woman in the world.

Her obit in Time Magazine says she was a petite 5 foot 2 and a half and that in 1910, when she started her business, “hissing ‘she paints’was the vilest thing a woman could say about another. I think I will use that line in Flo in the City. Maybe I’ll have Edith meet her in passing in 1908 on the train.

I’ve written a lot about Coco Chanel, on my http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website. She opened a hat shop in Paris at the same time.

Coco was an example of the right woman in the right place in the right time. But so was Elizabeth Arden, who was A CANADIAN. And she was born in 1884, the same year as Edith Nicholson!! And her Dad was a Scotchman.

How amazing! And what a coincidence, because now I feel I really have to get going, writing Flo in the City, my novel about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era. I have everything, with this bit about Elizabeth Arden the cherry on top of the cake.

As I write this, her scent Fifth Avenue, is wafting around the living room. Vaguely familiar fruity smell. A genuine blast from the past. But, wait, I do some research on Google and see that Fifth Avenue is a newish perfume, released in 1996. (So it’s all in my mind, this idea that Fifth Avenue is a ‘classic’ perfume. But then that’s the true essence of the cosmetics industry: illusion, all-in-the-mindness. I imagine the EA people were trying to evoke a bit of Chanel’s aura or at least, staying power, with this effort. The EA Brand, according to Wikipedia, was the most sophisticated brand in the 30′s to 60′s used by movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and Royalty, like Queen E and her Mom..so I was half-right, anyway. I guess the Chanel No.5 brand was resurrected with those wildly popular and widely-mocked (SNL) Catherine Deneuve ads in the (?) early 70′s.)

As it is, my chapter where Flo and Mae visit Sutherland’s drug store and discuss “rouge de theatre’ is the most popular page on this website.. I have Mae say that in Boston, the big stores sell rouge de theatre, right out in the open. (I made this up.) Yesterday, I learned that Selfridges in London opened in 1909 and sold make-up right out in the open!! (fashionera.com)

Well, my instincts are good.. I just took a guess.

A Fashion Iconoclast 1905???

No, I’m not talking about Coco Chanel, the most famous couturier of all time, not this time. I’m talking about an unknown girl captured on film in say 1905.

I decided last night to go back to YouTube to see if any new films of the 1900 era have been posted.

And yes, a person can spend a long time living in the past on YouTube. (Unfortunately, no films of Montreal.)

Someone even posted a longer, 9 minute version, of Edison’s films of the Paris Exposition.

You know what I do: I hook my laptop into the big screen TV. It’s like being there.

This girl caught my eye. She’s filmed at a garden party, supposedly circa 1900, but the hat fashions suggest later, possibly 1910.

But this pretty girl, carrying a younger girl is wearing her flowers UNDER the rim of her bonnet. As far as I can see, she is the only girl doing this at the party. All the hats on the older women are typical of the fashion of the time, with piles of flowers on top. And the girls seem to be wearing mosty unadorned bonnets. (There were fashion rules being followed here. It was a upper crust party.)

And this girl stands out because, I think, she is breaking the rules. And her style is much much prettier than the standard style. Let’s face it, piling flowers on the head looked stupid. (Yes, Marion did the same, I have the pictures which you can see elsewhere on the blog.)

Coco Chanel thought so. She began creating smaller, more elegant hats for her boyfriends’ (name Boy) entourage right around this time.

And so did this girl, who did not go on to become a fashion icon (or maybe she did). But her image lives on on YouTube.

It takes confidence to break the rules of fashion – and few do.

It is more likely that people follow whatever the mode and do it slavishly, even if it is a ridiculous and aesthically dubious fashion.. Some fashions are flattering, some ridiculous. Bell bottoms anyone?

If you read my story about Margaret’s big hat you can what happens when fashions meant for the young are worn by the older women. I published it for an education magazine. www.tighsolas.ca/page476.html

Coco Before Chanel

From the Bain Collection on Library of Congress, Creative Commons, Flickr, so I can reprint it with attribution. A Helen Gould, philanthropist of New York is in a hat shop.

I posted that picture because I am now watching Coco Before Chanel on my TV. I bought it off the satellite. I saw it in the theatre. It’s in French and they speak very very fast. I recently read a bio about her: it’s all very interesting in relation to Tighsolas. In fact, the woman is emblematic of all that went on with respect to women in the era. But she is also an BIG EXCEPTION. Beautiful, ambitious and smart, she made her way, with the help of a man’s money, and then she paid him back every cent.

Coco Chanel is a character or should I say, ghostly presence in my story, Flo in the City about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era in Canada based on the letters of www.tighsolas.ca.

Before I stumbled on the Nicholson letters I knew little about the 1910 era in Canada, well, next to nothing. All that mattered to me was La Belle Epoque. The era was born in Paris, where the first motor car was born, where they had the 1900 exposition.

So in my first chapter of Flo in the City, available in first rough draft form on this blog, I have Flo joke about moving to France and starting a hat shop.

Marion jokes that she would need to improve her French.

You know, in 1912, Marion was invited to go to Europe with family friends, but she did not have the money. These friends bring her back a present, a real Parisienne blouse.

Hags and Whores and Fashion Mores

Footwear 1909, from the Delineator, an article on the technique of the proper walk. Luckily, women had corsets to hold them up in those days, morally and physically, just don’t try running for the streetcar! If you visit YouTube you will find some wonderful era footage of city streets in those days. Pandemonium!

Highly dangerous to walk those crazy streets constricted by clothing. That’s one reason Coco Chanel claimed her clothing became popular: It freed the working woman up. In Flo in the City I describe how Marion had to take three streetcars to work at her school. Imagine this in winter with all the snow! There were heavy snows in February 1909. I think I will add a scene where Marion tumbles in a snowbank…

Hmm. So here’s a picture of stylish footwear from my copy of the Delineator. This style seems ‘witchy’ to me, since movies and such portrayed witches wearing this style. A witch, in movies made in the 30′s and later, was merely an old women, wearing old styles.

A witch today might be an old lady in bell bottom pants! Of course, for a short period in the late 1960′s, early 1970′s the Granny Look came back, with Granny boots and Granny glasses.

Ain’t fashion weird? Of course, nothing is weirder than Madonna bringing back the corset, but wearing it on the outside.

I’ve decided to read this copy of the Delineator, front to back, for research. have not done so, already, because as a modern girl I find it hard to read such wordy magazines.

But almost every article within it strikes a cord with me and seems useful for my novel in progress, Flo in the City, which I am writing on this blog.

My novel is based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ my social studies website.

Remember, the Delineator, unlike the Ladies’ Home Journal, mixed fashion news with social activism…and sometimes to odd effect as reflected in the excerpt I reprinted in the previous installment.

Here’s a rundown of some of the articles in this August 1909 edition:

Styles of the month

Concerning us all (infant mortality)

The Present Unrest Among Women (Gertrude Atherton article printed in my blog a while ago)

The Art of Mary Cassat (Impressionism!)

The White Peril (Bad Milk)

Saving Sunday for America (I’ll write about that next)

The Technique of a Graceful Walk

Good Style in Parasols

Rheumatism: It’s cure

The Delineator Child Rescue Campaign

Dauville Days (Social whirl)

And many fashion and dressmaking pages.

I may only have one copy of the Delineator for the 1910 era, as they are expensive to win on eBay…but I feel I have a representative issue.

Social Media, Social Change, and Slippery Slopes

A still from D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat, 1909, which I took from a public domain version on the Internet Archive.org. Here the rich wives of industrialists cavort while their husbands plot financial schemes which hit the poor where it hurts them the most, in the bread basket.

A while ago, I heard a BBC 4 interview with screenwriter Nora Ephron, who was publicizing her movie Julie and Julia (which I really enjoyed), a movie based on a blog, of all things, which still managed to be meaty, in more ways than one.

Anyway, Ephron, the daughter of movie screenwriters herself, said something quite remarkable, I think… She claimed that the movie medium wasn’t useful to promote social change, that it was ‘a visual medium’ and that all it persuaded people to do was (I think she said) purchase one brand of sunglasses over another.

It’s not that I am disagreeing with her, although, I’m sure many filmmakers would. In fact, I tend to agree with her. She supported her statement by asking (not an exact quote) How many anti-war films have there been made, and yet wars still happen.

This is certainly a topic for debate, hot debate. Does literature promote social change? Most people believe so, and they could point to Charles Dickens and any number of iconic authors. Yet, the point could be argued against as well. I mean, Brave New World, 1984, Kafka’s novels and Fahrenheit 451 are some seminal works predicting an ominous future for mankind (books we all read in school) and yet we continue to slide down the slippery slope they warned us about. (Actually, most books warn us about one fact: that history repeats itself. No writers see into the future, they just extrapolate.)

I watched the movie Network last night and was amazed at how prescient that movie was (is?). It’s about the corporatization (and de-fanging) of Network News and the rise of (cheap but compelling) Reality T.V. Forty years later, we are here, folks. Paddy Chayefsky, take a bow!

I tend to believe that it is technology that changes us the most; that the medium is the message, that what I am writing on this blog is less significant than the blog itself.

The fact that I was able to ‘capture’ an image from a D.W. Griffith film and post it at the top of the page is more significant than the fact that A Corner in Wheat is highly relevant with respect to the Nicholson Family experience, because it was the Wheat Boom era in Canada and because wheat was still very expensive, even for a middle class family, at $5.00 a barrel. And this supports my thesis: that the middle class is just the working class with more stuff and pretensions toward being upper class.

My story, Flo in the City (being written on this blog) about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1908-1913 era, is based on the real life letters of www.tighsolas.ca. Here is the opening essay of that website, posted on the homepage. Tomorrow, hopefully, I will write the first installment of the second chapter.

Between 1908 and 1913, Henry Ford perfected the manufacturing of his Model T, revolutionizing the way ‘things’ were made and sold and ushering in the age of mass production.Between 1908-1913, D. W. Griffith produced hundreds of his Biograph silent film shorts, effectively giving birth to the American Film Industry.Between 1908-1913, Coco Chanel launched her fashion house in Paris, just as the fight for women’s suffrage reached its apex. She eventually redefined women’s clothing, liberating female limbs and lungs with soft fabrics and shorter hemlines, but too late to soften the image of the militant suffragettes.And between 1908-1913, bark salesman turned railroader Norman Nicholson of Richmond, Quebec, his feisty wife Margaret, their spirited daughters, Edith, Marion and Flora and lost soul of a son, Herb, were a proud family in crisis, teetering on the brink of financial ruin.The family left behind a vivid written record of their day-to-day trials, thoughts and feelings, in letter-form. Fittingly, talk of fashion, entertainment and long dusty trips in automobiles pervades these letters.For those of you who thought feminism was invented in the 1960′s, these letters will be a real eye-opener. For those of you who love Canadian history and marvel at the way technology changes us, these letters, penned at such a pivotal time in history, will be something of a revelation.

Blow up of Big Hat

Here’s Marion, I guess, in a close up of earlier boat picture. It’s not flattering, but, boy, you can see the flowers on the hat. A thing like that could make a boat capsize and my husband wouldn’t be here today or my sons. (The only time I wore something like that was when I went to a costume party as Carmen Miranda. I had a parrot on top of it all. )It was not an era of high style. For instance, I have pictures of her daughters, who came of age in the 30s. In these pictures, the girls, who all inherited the good looks of their progenitors, all look wonderful and quite grown up, even as teens. Movie star ish. There was no ‘teenage’ in those days. A female went right from looking girlish to looking womanish. Of course in 1912, there weren’t movie stars to emulate. The industry was just taking off and, oddly, the stars of those early motion pictures, the Gishes and Mary Pickford, didn’t wear the ostentatious big hats. Only the stuffy older women in the silent short films of the era wore big, often ridiculous looking hats. Smaller hats were already coming into style in 1912, worn by trend setters like Colette. Coca Chanel was famously making her smaller more tasteful hats in that period.