Dream Factories of Another Kind

Edith and that silly hat. 1910 ish. How would you like your fashion faux pas’s immortalized on future blogs by some witless click-happy descendant?

Well, the Academy Award nominations came in this morning, and I was glad to see my favourite Colin Firth nominated for best actor (although like most of his fans, who are being cautious, methinks, I have yet to see his performance.) But I also love Jeff Bridges and as a good Canadian I want Up in the Air to do well. I saw it and enjoyed it. I also saw the Blind Side (enjoyable but I don’t think Bullock’s performance holds a candle to Streep’s in Julia and Julia) and An Education which is too arty and restrained for most people. I loved it, though. District Nine was so unHollywood I am freaked that it was even nominated.)

And then there’s James Cameron’s Avatar, which I haven’t yet seen because I can’t get into the theatre on Saturday nights.

Speaking of James Cameron, I’d like to slide into my topic here, on this blog entry, Hats and Big Hats and the Millinery Profession of Yore.

As I’ve written before on this blog, hats will never come back into fashion, because ‘hair’ is the new ‘hats.’ When those fashion-role models to us all, the resplendently bony actresses attending Oscar, parade the red carpet, stopping once in a while to spout nonsense to those obnoxious, obsequious (but necessary and rather parasitical or is it symbiotical) Infotainment hosts or hostesses, they will NOT be wearing hats. Even that actress who played Coco, in Coca before Chanel (if she attends) won’t be wearing a hat, despite the fact Coco Chanel started her career making hats (smaller) for her rich friends.

(If Princess Diana and Kate Winslet’s character in Titanic couldn’t bring hats back, no one ever will.)

Besides, hats cover hair and hair is a HUGE industry. Hats get caught on the top of car doors, too.

But the 1912 era was the era of the BIG HATS and in my next chapter of Flo in the City, my novel in progress about a young girl coming of age in the 1910 era, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ , I will have Flora visit town Milliner Miss Eugenie Hudon to ask if she can work as an apprentice. And Miss Eugenie Hudon will burst her bubble. I have no idea if Hudon was a sweet and kind woman or a bitter business woman, or anything in between, but (as I wrote in an earlier blog) I will pattern her after this awful woman who once interviewed me for an advertising job.

I know Miss Hudon is a savvy business woman from the invoices for her business: “all accounts must be settled 30th of each month” and because of the famous hat incident involving Flo’s mother, Margaret, who, in 1909, was tricked into buying a big hat she didn’t want.

I have two interesting archival documents to draw from: one that discusses millinery as a career for women (in 1908) and says, basically, that the field is overcrowded, underpaid, ‘parasitical’ in that it employs girls who still live at home, for no one can live on 6 dollars a week outside the home.

But it is also the ‘glam’ job of the era. (Few women then (none, maybe)considered the movies (well, motion pictures) a glamourous profession, as they were very low rent and tarty.)

Millinery was GLAM because it was creative work, and clean work, as opposed to factory work, and a very few very lucky individuals (working for big department stores) made it BIG TIME, and earned up to 1,000 a year and travelled to New York and Paris.

Millinery, back then, was just like the acting profession today, one might say. Or the music profession, or pro sports, or the lottery -or, ahem, writing: BIG DREAMS sustained industry workers, who slogged on for little recognition and less pay.

A Picture is worth 1000 words?

Flo and friends, circa 1910

I just saw the movie, Up in the Air, with George Clooney, directed by Jason Reitman, a Canadian. It is an extremely well crafted movie, and very enjoyable, with some very clever and funny lines. My only problem with it, was a sign of its flawless execution, for it was a cold movie, with a bit of a documentary feel – as befits its story-line and main character.

I suspect that it won’t be a movie (like Michael Clayton) that I will watch over and over… I think MC has one of the best screenplays ever. I love Tom Wilkinson’s ‘bread’ speech.

Yet, I also suspect that Reitman’s Up in the Air will go down in cinematic history as a classic because it captures the moment perfectly, and that it not easy to do in a time of rapid change.

Due to the new technologies we live very different lives from people 100, 50, even 20 years ago.

People in The Tighsolas Era (1908-1913)were also experiencing a paradigm shift, as they say.

Flo and Edie, who loved to watch the TV show Gunsmoke in their later years, saw more change in their lifetime than any who came before.

In 1908, when our Tighsolas story unfolds, airplanes, or aeroplanes were just getting off the ground and the auto was becoming a desired item among average middle class men.

Motion pictures were just becoming popular and the theatre industry was worrried about its survival. The ‘cheap’ seats were going unfilled.

Talking Machines (victrolas) were bringing music into the home (which worried some mothers).

Home movies, in the form of various machines that projected images, were being pushed big time. But they never really took off, did they? At least until VCR’s were invented.

Marconi was just experimenting with his wireless signals. He felt that his invention would change the world order by empowering ‘the little guy’, just like what people hope for with the Internet.

But technology changes us in ways we can’t predict.

For some interesting articles on entertainment in 1910 go to www.tighsolas.ca/page597.html.

As my Tighsolas story reveals, in 1910 people were still very social. Your connections in 1910 were your lifeline: family, friends, camarades at the Masons, at church, were everything to you. A person without family and connections was a lost soul, unable to marry or find any work (hence, the ‘social evil’ of prostitution). As the family became more and more privatized over the decades, a person became less reliant on family and friends. Jobs and networking became what’s important.

The social safety net and good union contracts took up the slack.

But what happens in a ‘super-privatized’ environment like today, when jobs become scarce and work-security non-existant?

After all, we’ve given up, over the century, what we all used as back-up in time of trouble. Connections. We are, indeed, all up in the air….We do, in fact, rely on ONE PERSON, our mate, for security, support and help. Wow, scary. And if you don’t have a mate, what do you have?

As I was discussing Up in the Air with my 23 year old son, who ‘wants to be free’ as they say, to do what he wants and go where he wants… I was reminded of something I heard on BBC Radio Four.

An interviewee was defending those obscenely overpaid Wall Street and Bond Street brokers (during ‘the downturn’) saying that ‘they give up everything to do their job. They never see their wives or their children.’ I found this line of thought rather lame: so being a lousy husband and father, a robot of a kind, is justification for making huge amounts of money -even when you’ve failed miserably at this job.

Up in the Air is about just this kind of person, I think, except Clooney’s character is One Up on the Wall Street types, for whom money is the be all and end all. He actually has some human contact, although only with human beings he is firing, people he never sees or hears about again. I guess that is the central irony of the cautionary tale.

I should think about this and write a better essay.