Showing posts with label retro style. Show all posts
Showing posts with label retro style. Show all posts
I'm tearing East on 7th Avenue, almost to the bottle depot. I pay attention to my surroundings, I'm a good cyclist -- there's a few cars behind me, some oncoming traffic. On the sidewalk, pacing me, there's a dog in a side-car, armed with a machine gun. ... Okay, I'm armed with a camera.
Gary is out for a ride with his dog Yoda, who has the look of a dog accustomed to travelling in style. Gary is better known a Mad Dog, a multimedia artist, with deep roots in the Vancouver arts and music scene going back to the late 1970s local Punk scene.Mad Dog built this one-of-a-kind side-car, for his not-mad dog Yoda, from an old tin baby buggy. You can see an earlier incarnation of it on his Facebook page. He makes this sort of stuff for both his living, and his art. The fit and finish of the work is impressive, and displays all kinds of serious know-how. It's so, uncompromisingly great, on so many levels: concept, engineering, workmanship, steampunk, badass-attitude, sense-of-humour, and don't the ladies just love it! Click the images to enlarge them.
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Does she make you thirsty? A detail from a 1953 Shiner Texas Special beer ad, by a master of the pin up form, Gil Elvgren (1914-1980). Click image to see the full image.[/caption]
Slight irony: I make money collecting beer cans to recover the deposit value, but I can't stand to drink the stuff; just thinking about the taste makes me bilious. I'm half-Chinese, and a lot of Asians have a poor tolerance for alcohol, due to a particular ALDH enzyme deficiency. Whatever the reason, I don't drink much at all.
But I do like to look at the pictures. Female glamour has long been used to sell beer (I drew my share of flaxen-haired, buxom beauties hefting tankards of brew for Oktoberfest events) but it's been a lowest-common-denominator, easy, animal brain sell. These days we're seeing a more nuanced use of female allure; the blunt sex sell is filtered through the retro visual vocabulary of mid-Twentieth Century pin up art. I say this is thanks to the safe icon-ification of 1950s pin up model Bettie Page, and thus the notion that Burlesque can be empowering for women, as well as the modern acceptability of tattoos, which are all about retro visual vocabulary. Pin up imagery is cool, and a politically-correct way to sell the hell out of sex, and beverages!
From left to right: a Lagunitas beer box I've just seen in an alley, though I haven't seen the bottle yet; Red Racer, a Surrey, B.C.-based beer; Old Milwaukee, is brewed in Canada by Sleeman Breweries in Ontario. A popular beer, empties-wise, with several different pin up model cans to choose from; Happy Water isn't beer, but this Vancouver, B.C.-based company is pushing it's new therapeutic water, beer-style, with classic pin up imagery. Click the images to enlarge.
Does she make you thirsty? A detail from a 1953 Shiner Texas Special beer ad, by a master of the pin up form, Gil Elvgren (1914-1980). Click image to see the full image.[/caption]Slight irony: I make money collecting beer cans to recover the deposit value, but I can't stand to drink the stuff; just thinking about the taste makes me bilious. I'm half-Chinese, and a lot of Asians have a poor tolerance for alcohol, due to a particular ALDH enzyme deficiency. Whatever the reason, I don't drink much at all.
But I do like to look at the pictures. Female glamour has long been used to sell beer (I drew my share of flaxen-haired, buxom beauties hefting tankards of brew for Oktoberfest events) but it's been a lowest-common-denominator, easy, animal brain sell. These days we're seeing a more nuanced use of female allure; the blunt sex sell is filtered through the retro visual vocabulary of mid-Twentieth Century pin up art. I say this is thanks to the safe icon-ification of 1950s pin up model Bettie Page, and thus the notion that Burlesque can be empowering for women, as well as the modern acceptability of tattoos, which are all about retro visual vocabulary. Pin up imagery is cool, and a politically-correct way to sell the hell out of sex, and beverages!
From left to right: a Lagunitas beer box I've just seen in an alley, though I haven't seen the bottle yet; Red Racer, a Surrey, B.C.-based beer; Old Milwaukee, is brewed in Canada by Sleeman Breweries in Ontario. A popular beer, empties-wise, with several different pin up model cans to choose from; Happy Water isn't beer, but this Vancouver, B.C.-based company is pushing it's new therapeutic water, beer-style, with classic pin up imagery. Click the images to enlarge.
A nice look at Happy Water's colourful promotional van ►
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