Tomorrow, the Sunshine City Antiques and Collectibles Show opens at the St. Pete Coliseum. Here’s the details from the City of St. Petersburg Events page.

January 8-10
Sunshine City Antiques and Collectibles Show, Friday 5pm to 8pm, Saturday and Sunday 10am to 5pm, $6 adults, 12 and under are free. This nationally recognized show features nearly 100 exhibitors of antique furniture, art, pottery, jewelry, silver, toys, and glass. The event also features a two-day Antiques Appraisal Fair. Held Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2pm, $5 per item.

The photo at the top of this article is a panorama of the 2009 Antiques Show at the Coliseum. It, and of all the still photographs in this post, expand to full size if you click on them. I encourage you to at least take a peek at the panorama at full size.

Immediately above is a short embedded video from that same vantage point. I just wanted you to see the scope of the show and to hear the sounds to get a sense of the show’s ambiance.

The rest of the snapshots from the 2009 show I present without further comment except to say that two of my favorites are the model boat (immediately above), the folk-art jugs (immediately below), and the old lace exhibit (at the very end).

My sister and I were fortunate as kids because our parents were good amateur musicians who, in the days before TV, would often play together as a way to end the evening: our mother on violin, our dad on piano. I have multiple memories of falling asleep on the couch as a child listening to them play the song pictured above. That copy of the sheet music is the actual music they played from: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. It’s one of my favorite covers, not just because of the personal memories, but also its beautiful, period style of graphic design.

St. Petersburg seems to be a hotbed of vintage and antique shows and shops…I guess that’s because there’s so many antiques living here (such as myself)! One of my friends haunts these shows even more than I do and she’s kindly picked up copies of vintage sheet music she knew I’d love. The four covers above, There Are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden, Way Down in Florida – That’s the Place To Be!, Buddha, and Nola were gifts from her. The first one was an amusing favorite of a dear friend; the second has value simply for its appalling lyrics; the third was an acknowledgment of my having taken lay vows as a Buddhist several years ago; and, the last was a piece I’d been looking for for years, a piece that I played constantly as a kid, driving my parents nuts.

The group pictured below, Galway Bay, The Last Round-up, San Antonio Rose, and Mexicali Rose, are more pieces our folks used to play in the evenings. Easy to see where I developed my eclectic musical tastes (or some might say, lack of taste!). I’m sure at least some of these are “collectibles,” but their value to me is entirely personal significance. It is fun, however, to rummage through the bins of vintage music to see how much some copies bring.

As we prepare to say goodbye to 2009 and welcome in 2010, here’s the cover of one of my favorite songs when I was a kid (a song that I sang over and over and over, maybe even more times than I sang Fuzzy Wuzzy Wuz a Bear), So Long It’s Been Good To Know Yuh.

The best non-fiction book I have read this year is The Power of Coincidence: How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know, by David Richo. I don’t say that lightly, because I read a lot of books. It’s so good, in fact, that I’ve already begun rereading it.

THE CASSADAGA HOTEL
(note the spirit orb that mysteriously appeared in the photo of the bedroom)

The Power of Coincidence is a book about synchronicity. Synchronicity was first recognized as part of the human experience by Carl Jung, a student of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Jung broke with his teacher to form his own approach to psychology which became the foundation of modern depth psychology. Richo, the author of the book I mentioned above, refers to synchronicity as “meaningful coincidences…that may guide us, warn us, or confirm us on our path…always unexpected and somehow uncanny in [their] accuracy of connection or revelation.”

Why am I starting a piece on the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp with information about Carl Jung and synchronicity? I want to provide you with one possible avenue to gain intellectual entry into an exploration of Cassadaga that, assuming you’re not a spiritualist, will allow you to appreciate what goes on there. Please note, I say “one possible avenue.” There could be many others including taking the beliefs of spiritualism at face value. But, looking at mediums from the perspective of depth psychology works for me and it might for you. In fact, Jung’s writings, especially his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, explore alchemy, divination, astrology, and UFOs, from just such a perspective: mirrors that reveal glimpses of motives and feelings and desires of which we may not be consciously aware.

Of course, you could explore Cassadaga, Florida, purely for its historical charm as a town founded in 1894 that is now an historical district. But, I think it’s much more meaningful to actually take a taste of its very reason for existing: spiritualism.

Cassadaga is an entire town comprised only of mediums, psychics, clairvoyants, and diviners of different traditions, all of which are covered under the term spiritualism, which the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Association describes as a “Science, philosophy, and religion based upon the principle of continuous life.” For a fuller statement of what their church believes, be sure to read this page from their website: Spiritualism Defined.

Recently, a friend and I traveled to Cassadaga. We stayed at the Cassadaga Hotel & Psychic Center, an early 20th century hotel that is reputed to be haunted. We each had separate, private readings done by a medium associated with the hotel. We were both extremely impressed by the things our intuitive said to us during the course of our respective 45 minute sessions.

One of the contemporary terms used instead of “medium” is “intuitive.” I like that term because it fits with my own way of approaching this whole thing. As humans, we have intuitive powers that make us far more perceptive than we realize. Too often, to our detriment, we dismiss our intuition. It is totally conceivable to me that a medium can accurately intuit issues and attitudes with which a client is grappling. That insight, sincerely and empathically discussed, can then, as I said earlier, act as a mirror that reveals a glimpse into our subconscious. That glimpse, as Richo says, “…that may guide us, warn us, or confirm us on our path…always unexpected and somehow uncanny in its accuracy of connection or revelation” has the power of a synchronicity, a meaningful correspondence between the inner and the outer (a paraphrase of one of Jung’s own definitions).

I hope you travel to this historical town near us and I hope you permit yourself to suspend your hardcore rationality long enough to enjoy a session with one of the psychics. There are a list of them associated with the hotel available through the hotel website (www.cassadagahotel.net) and another list of psychics in town available through the town’s website (www.cassadaga.org). We picked ours more or less at random and were very pleased.

We also went to the Spiritualist healing and reading service that night at the Colby Memorial Temple there in town. The healing portion was particularly interesting to me. My friend has not had trouble with her knee since then. That’s the kind of tale that, of course, gives skeptics conniptions, but…a fact is a fact. It may be only the placebo effect, but placebos have a very long and very useful history.

Of course, Halloween is coming up. Halloween night, there is a Witches Ball in Cassadaga! That might be just the excuse to rent a room at the hotel, try out a medium, and get some snapshots of some ghosts. If there’s anywhere in Florida that’s guaranteed to have ghosts, it’s got to be Cassadaga.

Here is a link to a full-sized SLIDESHOW of all the pictures in this post.

The Sea Hagg is a place my mother would have adored. I guess the love of kitsch, tchotchkes, schlock, “bad” art, curiosities, and the odd flotsam and jetsam of life is an inherited trait, because I know I’ve got the same affliction: the total inability to pass a seashell store without stopping!

That’s why, when driving around Cortez, Florida, with a friend, when I saw The Sea Hagg out of the corner of my eye, I asked my friend to stop. He did so gladly because he’d found a place he’d never seen before and he’s lived down there for 20 years (his wife and kids knew about the place but he didn’t; as he says, “they go shopping, I goes swimming”). We both enjoyed this place. My friend said to the owner, “this is a labor of love.” It is indeed.

You’re only allowed to take photographs in the Salvage Garden, the area outside the actual shop. All the pictures in this post are of that outside area. Each of the tiny thumbnails below opens to a much larger image. If you find that too tedious, you might want to just watch a slideshow of the same thing. The images in the slideshow are large, so it may take each image a few seconds to load.

The Sea Hagg (12304 Cortez Rd. W., Bradenton, FL 34209; 941-795-5756; map) is open Monday-Friday 9:30-5:30, Saturday 10-5, and Sunday By Appointment. If you’re interested in souvenirs and collectables of a nautical sort, this place is for you.

Long ago, big downtown department stores would let you take a record (these big old things) into one of a number of small soundproof rooms. In there would be a record player and a set of headphones. Those devices were nothing like the sophisticated gadgets we have today. There was no foam on the headphones, just brutal plastic discs that sat outside your ears with a hole to the metal speaker diaphragm inside. The record player had a steel needle, not even a diamond needle. At that time, steel was an advance over cactus needles that you had to sharpen.

The Stix, Baer, and Fuller record department in St. Louis was indulgent in letting a little kid (me) pretend he was going to buy records. My parents would drop me off in the record department (or book department…both are still my obsessions) and I would immediately go looking for my sure-fire favorites to take into a booth and listen to: Igor Stravinsky‘s The Rite of Spring, Oskar Sala‘s Space Opera, and Dmitri Shostakovich‘s Symphony #1.

If you’re thinking those are weird records for a 12 year old kid in 1957 to be listening to, you’re probably right. Let’s just say it explains a lot, including the fact that just 10 years later, one of the composers I habitually listened to in those days, Vladimir Ussachevsky, wrote the liner notes for my own first album of electronic music released by ESM Records.

It wasn’t only record departments that had listening booths in those days. The St. Louis library had them too, and there, I could also get the musical score for the piece so I could watch the score and listen to the recording at the same time. Often, I’d get dreadfully lost in the score, but I eventually got better at keeping up.

I’d head into the booths with excitement because I knew that my favorite pieces would transport me to worlds beyond the humdrum existence of a kid’s world. My test to know if I really liked a piece or not was that if it made me “float” when I closed my eyes, it was a “good piece.” To my 12 year old mind this was an inviolate rule. Oskar Sala’s music is totally and utterly forgotten today by almost everyone, but I can still hear it in my memory, because his music relied very heavily on an electro-acoustical echo and that audio effect was always guaranteed to make me tumble slowly, head over heels in the space inside my mind.

We all know that echo sound from our youth in the (pre-Sputnik) top-40 instrumentals with guitar sounds like in Rumble by Wray, Link, And His Ray Men or Apache by Jorgen Ingmann & His Guitar, or Out of Limits by the Marketts, or Rebel Rouser by Duane Eddy, or Wipe Out by the Surfaris…on and on. At first the effect could only be created in recording studios or electronic music studios. Then by the 60s/70s there were electro-mechanical device available for the individual musician. One was called the Roland Space Echo. Eventually the delay effect was simulated digitally and now it’s so old hat that it’s invisible.

In the time I’m talking about, however, the electronic echo hadn’t really found its way into pop music but was reserved for “experimental music” like Skala’s or like Karlheinz Stockhausen‘s Kontakte. It was a powerful music effect, rhythmic as well as dynamic. Stravinsky and Shostakovich didn’t need to resort to those electronic gimmicks, though, because their novel acoustic orchestrations, primal rhythms, dissonant harmonies, and peculiar melodies excited me in a way that music of the Pat Boone ilk never could (that was “pop” music at that time).

That echo effect (DONG, Dong, dong, dong) gave rise to a whole sensibility of music that coupled with the esthetic of an earlier, non-electronic composer, Erik Satie, gave rise to an entire genre of music now known, variously, as New Age, soundscapes, trance music, electronica, electronic-music, musique concrète, etc. Those are all different kinds of music of course, but they share a common ancestory whether their composers are aware of the fact or not.

I know today there must be kids doing the 21st century equivalent of sneaking into record store listening booths for a free listen to music that makes them float. That thought makes me very happy.

In case you can’t tell, I’ve been listening to Rockin’ Instrumentals, one of those wonderfully cheesy as-seen-on-TV K-Tel collections. Sometimes when you hear certain music you can’t help but write a post about it!

Florida 1920 Foldout

For almost as long as folks have been coming south to Florida to vacation, picture postcards of Florida scenes have been a staple. They are highly collectible now. In today’s post, I’m very pleased to present scans of vintage Florida postcards from the collection of a good friend here in St. Petersburg, Fran Sims.

They’re presented here in slideshows: 400 pixel ones embedded in the body of the blog and full screen ones through external links. They’re grouped according to the descriptions you see in the headings. This first collection is from 1920.

Florida Pass-a-grille Foldout

This collection of Pass-a-Grille, Florida, postcards (see my Pass-a-Grille Beach Inkwatu post) is from a little later decade. Notice the color palette. Already you see the archetypical “Florida” colors, especially that specific quality of orange.

Florida Foldout 1

By the time of this collection, you also start to see the style of typography that is so associated with Florida “kitsch.”

There are frequent shows of vintage commercial items, including–but hardly limited to–postcards. I go to all of them I can because they evoke such warm memories of childhood vacations for me. There’s every possible item with a “Florida” theme. These things are usually described as Floridiana.

One promoter of these festivals is Hula Productions, here in St. Pete. The 2009 Festival will be Saturday, February 7, 2009, at the Gulfport Casino Ballroom (5500 Shore Blvd. South, Gulfport, Florida 33707).

Florida Foldout 2

There are, of course, websites specializing in Floridiana, such as this appropriately named website, Floridiana.

The digital Floridiana collection of the University of South Florida library includes oral histories as well as Florida African-American histories.

Florida Postcards 1

An image search for “Florida Postcards” yields well over 147,000 images. A similar web search will give websites of enthusiasts, hobbyists, and sellers. Yes, sellers—an individual postcard can easily start at $5.

A nice site, is St. Petersburg Florida Postcards which has a number of items, including maps and calendars, for sale.

There are at least two local entrepreneurs who have business that imprint enlarged vintage St. Petersburg and Florida postcards on computer mouse pads, coasters, tiles, throw-pillows, trays, etc. If you go to the St. Petersburg Saturday Morning Market (see my Inkwatu post on the market), you’ll see them there. The company with which I’m the most familiar is Bonnie and Sam Rivenbark who have a stall at the Saturday Morning Market and from whom I’ve made purchases in the past. These times make perfect gifts for your friends and relatives up north!

Again, a special thanks to Fran Sims for letting me publish scans of her collection of vintage St. Petersburg postcards.

Florida Postcards 2