TVanR.5: Bernadette Peters as Marie Kimble

In a letter to me, Theadora Van Runkle described Bernadette Peters as “adorable,” and it’s hard to think of a better adjective. This drawing doesn’t do that adorableness justice, although it does suggest failed attempts at sophistication—something that rings true to the character of Marie.

Theadora really brought the world of The Jerk its charm, opting for a subtle absurdity that syncs well with the movie’s childlike tone. Who can forget that raggedy bathrobe? She dressed Peters again for 1981’s Heartbeeps, an Andy Kaufman film about robot domestics on the lam. 

Tomorrow: Dolly Parton as Miss Mona Stangley!

TVanR.4: Raquel Welch as Myra Breckinridge

I really wanted to draw Mae West as Leticia Van Allen for this post. Raquel Welch is a bit of a dead pulse in 1970’s Myra Breckinridge,  a movie notorious for making critics’ Worst lists. Its costumery is really what takes center stage, each scene a new and different sartorial showcase, and it looks like Theadora Van Runkle had a really good time dressing the movie’s cast.

Except that Thea didn't dress West. For her return to the silver screen, the aged icon demanded she be outfitted by an equally legendary artist: Edith Head. So, while West’s dresses may look fabulous, they are not technically Van Runkles.

Several years earlier, when Theadora was shopping for fabric for Bonnie and Clyde, she'd run into Head and asked for advice. “Oh, darling,” Head said, “do everything in chiffon—you’ll have no problems.” Bonnie and Clyde ended up being noted for its chiffon-lessness, and when the two designers collaborated on Myra Breckinridge, their differing visions resulted in just one of many on-set aesthetic clashes: West’s signature look for the movie was black and white, and when Welch came to set dressed in a black dress with a white ruffled collar, West demanded the collar be spraypainted blue.

I liked drawing this look because of its tension between the profane and sacred, the cleavage taking center stage amid an almost saintly hood. That iconic American-flag one-piece does this too, I guess, but I wanted to draw something here that was a little more Thea and a little less Raquel.

Check back tomorrow for Bernadette Peters as Marie Kimble!

TVanR.3: Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker

Theadora Van Runkle taught herself how to design during her inaugural costuming job: 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde. Rather than go with 1930s high femme for the period piece, she took a tomboy approach that was unconventional for the time, and ended up sparking a fashion trend. Following Bonnie and Clyde’s release, beret sales soared, maintaining their popularity well into the ‘70s. 

Her vision at first was met with resistance. “Faye thought I didn’t care how she looked,” Theadora said in a 1989 interview. “Faye thought I was trying to make her look ugly.” Nonetheless, Theadora went on to costume Faye Dunaway for The Thomas Crown Affair, and even dressed her off-screen for her 1969 Oscars appearance.

I wanted to avoid that iconic beret for this drawing, and so picked this moment, which although it’s just as posed as every other still from Bonnie and Clyde, still comes across as more intimate. Warren Beatty is somewhere in the background taking a bath, and Bonnie sports an embroidered slip tucked into her midi-skirt as she flirts with the idea of a hat with a brim.

Tomorrow: Raquel Welch as Myra Breckenridge!

TVanR.2: Shelley Long as Phyllis Nefler

It was really hard to choose a Phyllis Nefler outfit to illustrate, there are so many in Troop Beverly Hills that look fun to draw. The original drawing I sent to Theadora Van Runkle was of one of Phyllis's Bo Peep-ish outfits, and it ended up looking even more awkward than this. I decided to go with one of the more restrained ensembles—a suit with a giant bird attached to the shoulder. I figured showing the conservative end of the spectrum would better emphasize the otherworldly sort of Beverly Hills that Theadora created here. My biggest regret about this one, though, is its lack of a hat. TBH director Jeff Kanew on Theadora: “The producers wanted to hire one of the designers from Dynasty, and would have pushed for a much more ‘tailored,’ tasteful style. And it would have been BORING! My big contribution was to fight for Thea and support her vision.”

For more on Theadora Van Runkle, read this. Check back tomorrow for Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker!

It's a Van Runkle. Isn't it fabulous?

Thus speaks Phyllis Nefler (Shelley Long), the spoiled fashion plate/housewife who tries to get earthy in 1989’s Troop Beverly Hills. Phyllis cycles through costume after elaborate costume, each one more fantastic than the next, and even when she dons her Wilderness Girl uniform, she does so with perfectly tailored—albeit, absurdist—flare. All of this is thanks to the brilliant Theadora Van Runkle, who died this past November.

When I was a kid, my dad said we had some sort of relative who was a Hollywood costume designer. It seemed like a strange thing for him to make up, so I always assumed it was true, although I never found out any details about the relative. Years later, as an adult, I happened to catch the costume designer’s name in the credits of Troop Beverly Hills: Theadora Van Runkle. I knew my family had dropped the Van from our name during World War I, and so I wondered if Theadora was that mysterious relative. A little further research (i.e., her IMDb page) found that her other work had been just as energetic and imaginative as TBH. She also outfitted the casts of Myra Breckinridge, The Jerk, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, as well as The Godfather: Part II; I Love You, Alice B. Toklas; Peggy Sue Got Married; Rhinestone and New York, New York. She was nominated for an Oscar for her breakout work in Bonnie and Clyde, and was respected for the influence its iconic costumes had on the mainstream late-1960s fashion world. Finding all this out about her made me really hope that she was the one.

So I found her address and decided to write her. I told her I was a big fan of her work. I drew a picture of one of Shelley Long’s costumes in TBH (which, having since seen Theadora’s beautiful sketches, I now feel pretty ashamed of). I asked her if we were related.

The letter I got back, in beautiful, hand-brushed calligraphy, answered no. Her husband had died very young, Theadora said, and she kept his name to use professionally. “I think it sounds art deco,” she wrote, “don’t you?” She also claimed the name had brought her luck. She started out working as a sketch artist for Oscar-winning designer Dorothy Jeakins after meeting her at a party. The veteran costume designer went on to recommend Theadora for what Jeakins described as “a little western over at Warner brothers”—a movie that turned out to be the acclaimed Bonnie and Clyde. Theadora, who had never designed before, winged it, and went on to receive that Oscar nod. The letter went on: “My first screen credit inspired others with unique names to use theirs without changing to something less ethnic or more conventionally glamorous.” She ended the letter by saying Warren Beatty had encouraged her to change her name to Thea Vee, but she refused.

Theadora wrote that letter in 2009, when she was 81. I feel privileged—despite the fact we’re not blood-related—to have gotten to know, however slightly, an artist with such warmth and singular vision. In memory of Theadora’s passing, I’m going to post a drawing a day this next week: five Van Runkle-costumed leading ladies from some of my favorites of her movies. They’re not attempts to compete with Theadora’s original sketches, which are genius, seriously—you should look at a couple here and here. The drawings I post this week are through my own awkward film-viewing lens, and are gestures of love and admiration.

Look for Shelley Long as Phyllis Nefler tomorrow!

Blue Santa

I’ve grown used to spending Christmas alone. There’s something therapeutic about it, and I’ve learned to really embrace the lows. I’m not looking for pity; I enjoy this way of celebrating. I’ve cultivated my own family-unfriendly rituals, stockpiling frozen pizzas and bottles of wine. Sometimes I join my friend Janelle for her Christmas-day tradition of seeing the shittiest movie in the theaters (Yogi Bear: The Movie; Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel). These are some pretty consumerist traditions—I won’t pretend otherwise. Yet there’s something weirdly purging about such solitary, small-scale binges. By the time the holiday’s over, I feel refreshed.

This year, I caved for a family Christmas. My boyfriend has a generous, welcoming family who lives in suburban SoCal and who really embodies the Yuletide spirit. They’ve invited me to join them in the past, and I’ve turned them down in favor of my usual solo Christmas. This year, though, I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s about presents.

I knew this, of course. I was a child in an American middle-class family, and spent a lot of time circling things in the Sears catalog. I watch TV, I see the wish-list fervor, I see the reports of injuries and mania that ensue in the rush of the holiday sales. I love to get gifts, myself, and while I could really take or leave Shopping, I like giving gifts, too. But, goddamn, the presents.

We spent a lot of time opening gifts. I mean, a lot of time, to the point where we were long past the point of feeling loved, where we weren’t getting things we needed anymore, but rather bracelet after bracelet, cologne after bottle of cologne, reindeer after nutcracker after angel. Because Santa and the gang were going gangbusters, Christmasland was out in full force (a kitsch that seems so cliché it’s not even kitsch): Caroling snowman families. Miniature ragtag pageants. Santa-capped puppies. Angler elves with baubles on the ends of their poles.

On the drive back to northern California, we made a stop at a thrift store, where all the holiday trinkets had been crowded onto a half-off table. In among the polar bears and wise men and sugarplum snowglobes, sat a holi-deity like none I’d ever seen. It was a Santa, not a Saint Nicholas or Father Christmas, but that twinkly-eyed, cotton-bearded type who was first drummed up by Clement Clark Moore. He had the black boots, the fur-trimmed jacket drawn close to his potbelly by a shiny belt. He looked jolly. But here’s the kicker: rather than red, he was dressed head to toe in blue. Blue Santa. I felt like I’d discovered some undocumented species of bug.

The variety of consumer goods is just that great.

Has the actualization of human desires become so perfected, that the diversity of trinkets has surpassed that of nature? Meanwhile, the number of plant and animal species that disappear increases each year. We sit around a tree, a dead evergreen—always—an evergreen that slowly sheds its needles. Perhaps someone hands us a gift-bagged ornament: a giraffe, the evolutionary marvel of its neck bedecked with twinkling lights. The giraffe, in all its evolutionary wonder, has somehow become entangled as it reaches for that star at the top of the tree.

And like that giraffe, with our everlasting plastic and our distant nations full of barely existing slaves, we too, reach for the star, or stars rather, until Christmas becomes about seeing how many shiny things we can hold in our hands. And once we have too many to keep track of, we panic.

We are panicking, right? We just don’t want to say so for fear of ruining Christmas?

And that’s why I like to spend the day alone. At least when I’m alone, I can create a psychic cap. There are only so many bottles of wine I can drink without dying, only so many pizzas I can fit in the freezer. There are only so many classic cartoon characters they can convert into CGI blockbusters, right? Only so many sequels they can squeeze out of each before one loses money.

And Santa—that most generous of spirits—Santa can only give so much before he drains himself blue.

The Long Awaited Fall of the Triangle Fruit Company

Interview with Katarzyna Bazarnik & Zenon Fajfer

Katarzyna Bazarnik and Zenon Fajfer are a Krakow-based duo that coined the term liberature, a literary genre that focuses on the physical form of a text. “The term we coined for this kind of writing,” the couple says, “points out that it is nothing else but literature in the form of the book (one meaning of Latin liber), liberated from any literary and editorial conventions (another meaning of Latin liber)—it is a kind of ‘book in freedom’.” Baxarnik and Fajfer have released a series of liberatic titles under the Liberatura imprint for Korporacja Ha!art publishing house. They recently toured the US, where they participated in a “Liberty Poem” at an Occupy Wall Street action and visited Mills College here in Oakland as artists in residence. They graciously answered some questions for me this month, which are posted at San Francisco Center for the Book’s blog:

The Liberating Bond: An Interview with Katarzyna Bazarnik & Zenon Fajfer

Letter from Pedestrianica.3

When I was in my early 20s and at the height of my intellectual hubris, I made a zine. It was called Now It’s All Behind You—appropriate, right, for something you pick up again years later and feel really embarrassed about? The whole thing is vaguely themed around physical space (and by extension, time), from comics about maggot real estate to artsy analyses of industrial displacement in Eraserhead and Daydream Nation. But the feature that’s really stuck around—both for the shame it causes and because it articulates a way of thinking I still haven’t outgrown—is something called the Pedestrian Manifesto.

Have you ever tried to write a manifesto? Well, this was my only stab at it, and I have to say it was kind of fun. I can feel it when I read it today: as cringe-worthy as it is, there’s actually a sort of energy that makes me want to keep going.

I may have been young and dumb, but I was smart enough to take a certain precaution: Irony (after all, this was the late ‘90s; what other stance could I really take?). I knew the other meaning of the word pedestrian, and how at odds it was with the urgency I was trying to create, as well as how perfectly that other meaning described the style of most political screeds. So excuse me while I pat my younger self on the back.

Because there’s A LOT in the Pedestrian Manifesto that’s not so pat-worthy. I make questionable use of quotes from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire to advance my argument. I write lines like this: “How can the modern-day walker … waltz drunkenly amid the urban confines of right angles?” My levels of condescension are at an all-time high. I don’t allow for the privilege inherent in walking, and for the existence of physical disabilities. I also don’t get much further than a lengthy introduction before bringing out that lazy old standby: To be continued . . .

But, yes, irony: here you are, just like I knew you would be. Here to represent, to offhandedly deflect my shame. Because I didn’t really mean it!

And because all the while I must have secretly believed I would outgrow this idea.

And thus, irony has rewarded me. Can you blame me then, for the detachment I maintain today, as I pick up where I left off twelve years ago and write these Letters from Pedestrianica? Because it remains something I feel passionate about: The stale, unceasing onslaught of car, after car, after car, after car, after car. I mean this. I do. It’s a feeling I have yet to outgrow.

It’s hard to approach a utopian project without a certain level of ironic distance. Humor is protective. The levels of dysfunction and cruelty are staggering, the odds unbelievably low. I’ve been watching, a little at a time, Chris Marker’s protest documentary, A Grin Without a Cat, and have come away from it pretty discouraged. Patterns are on display here—popular calls for change and resulting state suppression—patterns we’re once again in the midst of repeating. But there is hope still, there in the moment, just before the cops show up with their scowls and their batons. And while A Grin Without a Cat is far from being laughably earnest, its disconnect is not to the extent that it doesn’t mean what it says.

But: By simply envisioning a different world, will it come to fruition? No. Especially if your utopia is as logic-less as mine.

Maybe utopias aren’t meant to physically exist, at least not in the ways they’re first imagined. And perhaps they’re better conjured, anyway, through a series of letters rather than a systematically propagandic presentation of logic. Especially, I guess, for a brain that’s twelve years further frayed.

So this utopia—the one I’ve named Pedestrianica—is a personal place, but it’s not exclusive, and while I’d like to see profound changes in the way we move, I’m not trying to start a movement (or am I?). When it comes down to it, I guess what I’m hoping for is some sort of confirmation I’m not nuts. Perpetually hyperbolic, yes. But not nuts.

Is it nuts to address a letter to a carless nation?