Yesterday I thought--for the first time in, literally, years--about my grandparents' pink kitchen in the Massachusetts house my grandfather built, by hand, using GI Bill money after his service in World War II.  The pink of my grandparents' kitchen was a very specific pink, not hot pink, not Pepto-Bismol pink, not rose, not baby pink, but a rich true-pink color that was popular in the 1950's.  Look at color photos from the '50's and '60's, or magazine ads from that era, and you will see appliances and furniture and fabric in that shade.  The cabinets, floor, and walls in my grandparents' kitchen were painted that mod pink when I was a small child.

Because we now live in the age of Google, the instant I thought of my grandparents' pink kitchen, I Googled "pink kitchens" and learned a) that pink was a popular mod color, b) once upon a time you
could buy almost anything in that shade, and c) there are people today who love that color, particularly in vintage kitchens, and those aficionados have created Pinterest pages devoted to mod pink kitchens.

Naturally I clicked a link and proceeded immediately to Pinterest, and there viewed a variety of pink-painted vintage kitchens, as well as pink refrigerators and pink blenders and pink
dishes.  I had a strange sense of traveling through time because, as stated above, this was a very specific shade of pink.  Gazing at the "pink kitchen" pictures on Pinterest, I returned to my grandparents' old kitchen via memories that were more textured and three-dimensional than any I had conjured before consulting the Pinterest pages.

I am a recent convert to Pinterest.  A month ago a friend and fellow author (Jack Witt, "Cut, Cool & Confident" and "Tight, Tone & Trim") suggested that I create a Pinterest site for inspiration and to promote my books.  Jack's advice is usually spot-on, so I created a Pinterest site (it was quite simple) and then a few "boards".  The concept of Pinterest--a highly visual environment--is that you post or search for images (sketches, paintings, or photos) of items that interest you, and you then "pin" each image to a "board".  If you like soccer,
for example, Pinterest allows you to "pin" your own soccer photos, and others' soccer images, to a virtual corkboard that you name something such as "Soccer".  Other Pinterest users--called "Pinners"--can view your boards (unless you designate them as "Secret" and allow access only to friends).  Other Pinners can "favorite" and "share" and "pin" your images.  Theycan follow your "boards" and you can follow their "boards".

Pinterest won me over quickly.  It was simple and intuitive to set up, and simple and intuitive to create boards.  At its most basic level, it's like a virtual scrapbook.  If you like the theater, you can pin images of theater marquees, posters, press releases, and cast photos.  It you like a certain city--let's say, for example, Philadelphia--you can pin images of its landmarks, landscapes, and famous people.  If you like jazz, let the jazz-image pinning begin!

For visual people--and most of us are, to some degree or another; it's hard-wired into us to help us recognize and elude danger--Pinterest rapidly becomes more addictive than, well, anything else
(name your poison).  Once you create your boards and populate them with images, you want to find more images.  And then more.  Pinterest is a deep, deep rabbit hole that branches off in myriad directions.  The images you encounter suggest other images, and even other boards.  Like a hunter stalking its prey or an artist pursuing a muse, you scour Pinterest for that perfect image of, say, a ballet slipper.  Or a banjo.  Or a Peruvian basekt.  Or a Christmas tree in the snow.  Or an Irish Setter.  There are so many things to seek and collect, and each discovery sparks another idea.  Before you know it hours have passed and you have created multiple boards and collected hundreds--even thousands--of images.
 
At its most basic, Pinterest is a virtual scrapbooking site.  But it quickly grows to much more than that.  Before you know it, you are a gallery, even a museum, curating collections.  The
"boards" become collections and rooms and wings of your virtual gallery, your virtual museum.  Pinning is an exciting and rewarding endeavor, and when you have completed each hunter-gatherer-curator session, you actually have something to show for it.  Something instructive.  Something beautiful.  Something moving, even.

And so I pen this blog, a complete and unapologetic Pinterest addict--although I prefer the term "curator".  And I encourage you to join the Pinner ranks.  Pinterest is free, simple, educational, and inspirational.  It will give you ideas for your own projects, whether you are an artist, mom, mechanic, gardner, musician, athlete, or historian.  It will give you a forum to collect your favorite images of bottle caps or fans or gardens or statues or parkour moves or jars of jam or Civil War battlefields--anything that interests you, anything you care to imagine.  And it allows you to share all the wonders that you collect, your Aladdin's caves of treasure, with other Pinners and
even with non-Pinners (who are allowed limited yet intoxicating glimpses of the visual riches Pinterest holds).

Perhaps most wonderfully of all, Pinterest can transport us to other times and places.  A cafe in Paris.  A library in London.  A garden in Tokyo.  A farm in the 1920's heartland.  Anywhere.  Even to our own pasts.  As when I view a snowy street in Germany.  Or pink kitchens like the one in which my grandparents' cooked for us and made us laugh.

We do indeed live in an amazing age, a nearly magical age.  The world comes to our computers, and we can find and create and share beauty with everyone around the globe.  It is a new era.  An age of Pinteresting times.
 
[You can follow the author's Pinterest boards at http://www.pinterest.com/leslemonauthor.]

In celebration of  National Record Store Day on April 19, 2014, I'm blogging my never-published  "LA City Guide" piece about the beauties of vinyl and the shops that sell it. 

If you grew up spinning Floyd and Zepp way too loud on turntables in the basement, you understand the near-mystic allure of  listening to music on vinyl.  The warmsizzle-pop-hiss of an LP isn’t a flaw– it’s a strand of music.

Angelenos and tourists who miss the hiss can rediscover the natural beauty of records at one of the music shops – mostly mom-n-pop, pocket-sized caves – where L.A.’s vinyl renaissance thrives.  The city that launched bands as diverse as the Doors, the Beach Boys, N.W.A., the Go-Gos, the Byrds, Black Flag, Metallica, Tierra, and the Runaways is, not surprisingly, a center of old, new, and rare vinyl.

You don’t have to be a hipster-of-a-certain-age to understand vinyl’s appeal. 
Digital technology paints every overproduced note with unsettlingly perfect clarity, so music lovers of all ages turn to vinyl for a toothy sound  that feels deeper and more real.  For oldsters it might be nostalgia.  For the D.I.Y. generation, the sizzle of vinyl feeds a craving for authenticity.

Art lovers worship vinyl’s eye-popping cover art (which is never as seductive when shrunk to fit CD sleeves or clickable “download” icons).  Album covers
make an ideal canvas across which images flow in a swoon-worthy melt of color.  There is something primal in eyeballing a great piece of cover art, picking up the album, and turning it over in your hands.  Holding an album is the musical equivalent of the hunter’s “proof of kill”.

Amoeba Music is the King Kong of L.A. music shops, boasting an encyclopedic selection, expert staff, and frequent concerts.  Amoeba came early to the
vinyl renaissance.  It launched in Berkeley in 1990, opening the Hollywood store a few blocks from the iconic Capitol Records building in 2001.  Scoping records at Amoeba on Sunset is like digging through the exhaustive vinyl collection in your cool friend’s basement pad, if he had a really big basement, say, the size of an underground NORAD hangar. In a contemporary twist, Amoeba is now digitizing a curated vinyl collection in their Vinyl Vaults.

At the other extreme, small record shops are quirky labors of love launched by owners who share the magic of vinyl with their neighbors in historic districts that have tumbled into decay – hello, reasonable rents! – but are trying to rise from the ashes.  Local culture – art, eats, and vinyl – often play a big part in steering a depressed neighborhood back from the brink.  These little shops can feel held together by twine, tape, and wishful thinking – but deep music passion and knowledge are there.

Small music shops excel at handcrafted touches like the silver labels affixed to many records at Mount Analog, album descriptions ranging from the workmanlike to the poetic (consider “bubbling funk,” or comparing an album’s sound to time spent “in Laurel Canyon”).  Mid-size shops have their charms and treasures too, like the bargain bins at the Last Bookstore, where a discerning customer can purchase the “Carousel” LP (cover graced by an impossibly young Shirley Jones) for 99 cents.
 
Four fabulous vinyl destinations for music lovers in L.A.:
 
1. Everything and the Kitchen Sink

 Amoeba
Music –
6400 W. Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA  90028
 (323) 245-6400  |  www.amoeba.com 
  Hours:  10:30 am – 11:00 pm Mon – Sat, 11:00 am – 9:00 pm Sun

 CDs, DVDs, and armadas of vinyl.  Buy, trade, sell.  Concerts and events. Vast selection.

 
2. Shoot from the Hipster

 The
Last Bookstore
–
453 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA  90013
(213) 488-0599  |  http://lastbookstorela.com 
Hours:  10 am – 10 pm Mon – Thu, 10 am – 11 pm Fri – Sat, 9 am – 9 pm Sun

 Used books and vinyl.  Art galleries.  Events. Quirky, artsy, gritty downtown hipster-haven.

 
3. On the Dark Side

 Mount
Analog –
5906 ½ Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA  90042
 (323) 474-6649  |  www.climbmountanalog.com
 Hours:  12 pm – 8 pm Tue – Sat, 12 pm – 6 pm Sun, Closed Mon

 New, indie, and rare vinyl.  Dark and edgy, with occult wares like Tarot cards.

 
4. Cheers!

 Wombleton
Records –
5123 York Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA  90042
 (213) 422-0069  |  www.wombletonrecords.com
 Hours:  12:00 pm – 10:00 pm Thu, Fri & Sat, 12:00 pm – 7:00 pm Wed & Sun, Closed Mon & Tue

 Classic, imported, and rare vinyl, with a heavy British inflection.

It always confounds me when pundits worry about the younger generations, about the Millennials (b. circa 1980 – 1999) and the Digitals (b. 2000 – present).  All I can picture when those pundits wax gloomy is Mr. Wilson shaking his fist at “Dennis the Menace”.  Whenever this happened, Mr. Wilson’s wife, Martha, promptly dosed her husband with a spoonful of his “nerve medicine” and told him to go lie down. Then Martha said something nice to Dennis, and gave him a plateful of cookies.  See, Martha got it.  Dennis, however irritating, was part of a dynamically disruptive new generation that was going to change the world.  He didn’t mean to turn everything upside down.  But it was his destiny, and his generation’s.


 So, the Millennials and Digitals are less … aggressive than the Boomers were.  They aren’t as strident or as chipper as they Boomers were—but they are more stylish.  The Millennials and Digitals are going to change the world—are already changing it—in a quietly disruptive way.  A politely disruptive way that will ultimately be constructive. Because one of the many things to admire about the younger generations is that they are creators, as well as consumers.  They create as well as consume culture, entertainment, design, goods, and technology.  And they not only create—they share what they create.  With everyone, and anyone.  Often for free.  They create for the sake of the act of creation, not to become billionaires (although that does, sometimes, happen along the way).

 
For this new youth, the act of creation is more important than the perfection of that which is created. The artifacts produced and widely shared by the Millennials and Digitals often have an appealingly hand-crafted, heartfelt, “let’s put on a show in the barn” quality.  Everything from music to art to video to gadgetry to throw pillows should have a texture—a smudge here, a stray thread showing there.  Artifacts that glow with shiny-bright perfection are either dismissed by the M’s and D’s as too finished, or consumed by the M’s and D’s as an act of conscious irony.

 
What I admire most about the M’s and D’s is their appreciation for the past.  Not merely the recent past, but distant (by the American reckoning of time, anyway) history.  Shawl collars are back—for men—as are pork pie hats and big dark-framed eyeglasses.  And while young men today appear to have stepped out of time machines installed in the 1920’s, 30’s, or 40’s, young women echo the sartorial time warp in their vintage Depression-era dresses and chunky shoes, or their seventies Boho silhouettes.  These retro-clad young hipsters are moving into affordably shabby gentrified lofts and houses, and downloading onto their“i”-everythings selections of digitized vinyl classics that could have been heard wafting from open windows on Tin Pan Alley or Don Draper’s apartment.

 
Which is not to say that today’s young people are not forward-looking.  While the M’s and D’s are visiting, even basking in, the past, they are creating the future, which promises to be an increasingly diverse, creative, and communal world, if its designers and future inhabitants are any indication. But our youth has no problem shifting amorphously from the present to the future to the past, and back again, endlessly, and effortlessly.

 
It’s no accident that many of the programs, films, and video games most popular with this demographic feature supernatural creatures—often stylish reboots of very old classics (see “Grimm” or “Dracula” or “I, Frankenstein” or the “Mass Effect” games). These supernatural beings are typically diverse (racially, ethnically, socioeconomically), but they are always beautiful, frequently ancient, sometimes immortal.

 
An important quality is their connectedness.  Whether they are trying to save the world, or trying to destroy it, they are all up in each other’s business.  Among these highly social, communal creatures, one person’s problem or secret or drama ends up impacting everyone else, usually in unexpected ways.  Therefore, one person’s problem or secret or drama belongs to everyone.

 
It is this connectedness that makes it clear that these supernatural beings are avatars for the M’s and D’s (the generations who are  linked to each other, almost every moment of every day, via text messages, social media sites, multiplayer online games, and share-sites YouTube and Instagram and Vine).  The fictional, supernatural heroes and villains portray how Millennials and Digitals see themselves, or want to see themselves.  The fictional worlds the M and D’s avatars inhabit are aspirational as much as they are reflective.  M’s and D’s have identified with supernatural characters, banded together in diverse, close-knit, purposeful tribes, since the first episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (arguably the prototype for this sort of ensemble) enthralled teen Millennials in the mid-1990’s.

 
View any 2014 episode of “Dracula” or “Sleepy Hollow” or“The Originals” or “Reign” (or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” for that matter) and we see tightly linked groups of beautiful young people who are heroic and witty and talented and tolerant and flawed—yes, even “the bad guys”. Their lives are deeply entwined.  They all have purpose.  And they seem to slip effortlessly between different historical periods, through time and space, fantasy and reality, just as modern technology has allowed the M’s and D’s to shuttle along non-linear paths between the real and the virtual, to experience history, to listen to music and wear clothing from eras that seemed “old” even to their grandparents.



“Wired” (the February 2014 issue) and Chuck Klosterman (in“Eating the Dinosaur”) remark upon the way the past, present, and future are collapsing.  These kids today—they can (and do) listen to Frank Sinatra, watch painstakingly restored footage of early 20th-century battles and historical events on an electronic device that they can hold in their hands, wear the aforementioned shawl collars (un-ironically), and stream episodes of "Supernatural” or read a digitized copy of Bram Stoker’s original “Dracula” at the tap of an icon.

 
Because the past is deeply, instantly present for today’s young people, one thing you will find them doing in droves is revitalizing lovely old buildings—entire neighborhoods, even—that have fallen on hard times.  Today’s youth sign petitions to save these places, and rent or buy property at these locations, and attend meetings and rallies and fundraisers to resurrect the past in all its glory.

 
They apply their DIY creativity to open bars and cafés and restaurants and stores in these “undead” neighborhoods, in a conscious effort to revitalize them, to galvanize them back to life.  The M’s and D’s who cannot afford to open bars or restaurants or stores patronize them. The simple acts of drinking, eating, and shopping therefore become meaningful because those acts, in those locations, support a greater cause, fostering a building (or neighborhood, or city-wide) renaissance.

 
Wherever they live, drink, eat, or shop, the M’s and D’s are recording their experiences in words and images, and sharing the experiences via the worldwide electronic membrane, a medium that is increasingly become a quasi-real “place” populated by the people we wish we were (and kind of are) and the surgically extracted moments of our lives that we not only want to preserve but want to communicate to others. Nearly everything has become communal. Our image, and bits and pieces of our lives, once uploaded, become omnipresent and eternal and the de facto property of all.

 
The tendency of the M’s and D’s to commune and communicate is outstanding for historical preservationists, particularly in Downtown Los Angeles, where legions of hipster Millennials and Digitals have moved in and are reclaiming the once-blighted landscape. They are not tearing down old properties in a mad rush to build the new.  Rather, they are thoughtfully, appreciatively resurrecting the long-neglected beauty that was already there under layers of peeling paint, crumbling drywall, and icing-thick graffiti.

 
Our young citizens don fedoras, checked jackets, vintage dresses and boots, and attend preservation events.  Such gatherings are often held at “new” venues that conscientiously revive bygone worlds:  vinyl record shops, classic diners, gloriously restored golden-age movie palaces.  And, of course, the M’s and D’s record and then share their impressions of these events, the sounds and words and images, spreading the message, raising the profile of the cause, driving up interest.

 
When is the last time a vast population of young people was so entranced by what came before them?  One glaring example:  Millennials and Digitals wear three-piece suits and top hats and flapper gowns to Disneyland on“Dapper Days”.  If you have attended one of these stylish events, you know that almost without exception Dapper Day attendees, with their parasols and suspenders and pocket watches and canes, range in age from fifteen to thirty-five. These are the youths who watch the ubiquitously popular ghost-hunting programs more for the historical content than for the ghosts.  This genuine reverence for the past is a generational hallmark not seen, perhaps, among our youth, since before the Great War.

 
There are, of course, posers among the M’s and D’s, as there are in any group.  There are young men and young women who dress like hipsters and listen to Doris Day and Tweet about“Supernatural” merely to be part of their generation, merely to ensure that their selfies and their social media pages are in line with their peers’.  However, posers seem to be a small subculture.  And the M’s and D’s, being particularly earnest and self-policing generations, have a nose for sniffing out the most egregious and obnoxious poseurs in their midst and dealing with them in the global stocks of the worldwide web.

 
I admire the Millennials and Digitals immensely, nearly everything about them.  The Mr. Wilsons of the world need to take their nerve medicine and go lie down.  Let the M’s and D’s go about their creative, non-linear travel among time and space as they construct our brave new worlds.

 
Yet … I can’t suppress a slight feeling of unease whenever I see advertisements for uber-popular cable program “The Walking Dead”.  Because when I see the rotting zombies scurrying after the pretty young cast, I can’t quite shake the feeling that the fleet-footed zombie slayers reflect the M’s and D’s, whereas the zombies shambling after them in a disorganized, uncoordinated ballet … that’s my generation.



I don’t know—yet—exactly what that means, but the zombies are GenX, infected with … what?  With some defect that the M’s and D’s escaped, most likely—and quite paradoxically—because GenXers have been such excellent parents?  If so, it isn’t right … and it isn’t fair … but, somehow, the zombie is me.