A drunken William S. Burroughs accidentally killed his wife in 1951 in the way shown here--playing William Tell. (Not while standing on his head, though, and with a handgun rather than rifle.) "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death ... The death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out". Or so he surmised in Queer (1985).
A hand-colored 'RPPC' (Real Photo Post Card). Almost everything is wrong with this photo-graph--- the 'landscape' orientation, the weird tilted camera angle, the man's rather sour focus on the dog. Still, it's somehow delightful. The colors of the couple's coats are beautiful; the dog poses nobly; the carousel horse (?) adds the necessary fantasy. The woman, if slightly anxious, is a person full of love.
One of the Hugo Brothers--Antoine, I think--holding up 'Adriens,' a well-known circus performer, and his sister Marguerite. Antoine (1876-1914) and Baptiste (1887-1916) Hugo, otherwise known as 'Les Géants des Alpes', were two giant-brothers, much studied and photographed at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. According to a fascinating website--The Tallest Man--over a hundred different photo-postcards of the Hugo Brothers were made in France during their (relatively short) lifetimes. I have 10 or 12 cards that feature them, sometimes together, sometimes separate.
Part of a comic English postcard series in which little doggies get up to mischief and talk about it. This one's from 1909. I didn't realize at first what precisely was so disquieting about it---not until the word 'rippin' flipped a switch. Memories of Jack the Ripper were still very much alive in Britain in 1909: though the last of the Whitechapel murders associated with him occurred in 1891, he had never been identified or caught. (Nor would he be.) Something about the strange position of the dismembered doll makes me think the artist was familiar with the grisly crime scene photographs taken of the Ripper's victims. Jack was far more bestial than any dog.
Who will the ice pick? An example of a home-made, one-of-a-kind Valentine card. The dog assures us that 'they'--the romancing couple--are 'harmless.' Yet considering their smarmy grins and Rorschach-blot-like shadows--more ink puddles than silhouettes--one is inclined to be doubtful.
This came in the mail yesterday--from Portugal, a country with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of old postcard dealers. The image is a 50s or 60s photographic reworking of a classic topos in modern comic illustration: fruits and vegetables engaged in human activities. The mascara'd eyelashes and crudely rendered tattoo give the whole scene a gritty, Cinecittà neo-realism, I think.
The oxymoron: a preposterous relic posing here as Jugendstil pin-up boy. The Emperor Franz-Josef, already impossibly ossified in 1908, would live to lead the Austro-Hungarian empire into war in 1914. Decadence: when youth and age, revolution and reaction, posey and potpourri, can no longer be distinguished.
