Charles Phoenix (born December 20, 1962) is an American pop culture humorist, historian, author and chef whose work explores 1950s and 1960s kitsch and Americana.
Phoenix is widely known for his "Retro slide shows" featuring a collection of vintage film slides capturing mid-century American life and culture -- set to Phoenix's commentary. He's known also for his "test kitchen" creations of exaggerated novelty foods and desserts, including the Cherpumple, a three-layer cake/pie hybrid. Phoenix has appearanced as a recurring judge on the Food Network series Cake Wars and served as a frequent guest commentator on NPR and KCET.
Biography
Early life
Phoenix was born in Upland, California in 1962 and raised in neighboring Ontario, the son of a used car salesman and a "happy homemaker. He traces his love of things vintage and retro to his early years spent on his father's used car lot, where he became enamored with the automobiles, which he learned to identify by make, model and year by the time he was six. Phoenix's obsession with classic cars ultimately led to his interest in mid-century architecture, fashion and photography.
In 1982, Phoenix moved to Los Angeles and attended the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, after which he started working as a fashion designer. According to Phoenix, after repeatedly getting fired from every design job, he returned to his first passion and began a second career buying and selling classic cars.
Retro Slide Shows
In 1992, Phoenix was shopping for vintage clothing when he came across a shoebox labeled "Trip Across the U.S., 1957" filled Kodachrome color slides of an unidentified family's vacation photos at numerous roadside landmarks. Fascinated by the vivid color depictions of the era, Phoenix began scouring thrift stores, flea markets and estate sales buying boxes of slides taken from the late 1940-1970s, amassing a sizable collection.
Phoenix began developing his slide show in the mid-1990s when he would show his collection with accompanying commentary to his friends and acquaintances at private parties. Encouraged by his friends, Phoenix took a chance at presenting one of his shows to the general public. His first public event, entitled "God Bless Americana: The Retro Vacation Slide Show of the USA", was held at the California Map and Travel Store in Los Angeles in 1998. According to Phoenix, he originally intended for his slide shows to be straightforward and serious presentations, but the inherent kitsch of his slides invoked frequent laughter from the audience, prompting Phoenix to restructure his show with a more comedic tone. Phoenix now takes an observational comedy and storytelling approach to his slide presentations, usually attempting to employ a narrative using what few facts Phoenix can derive from the slides' annotations with his knowledge bank of history and pop culture trivia as well as juxtaposing slides from different collections, though he emphatically states that he never fabricates any portion of his narration.
Despite the overtly comedic tone of his slide shows, Phoenix has stressed that his shows are explicitly about honoring and celebrating American culture rather than mocking it. Describing his shows as "history disguised as comedy and comedy disguised as history", he has been quoted as saying "My goal, first off and foremost, is to entertain people, but just below the line of entertainment is to educate and respect the past", hoping that through humor he can instill an appreciation and admiration for mid-century culture in people otherwise uninterested or unaware of such topics.