Gateshead Snow Plough

Does industrial design get any better than this?

Gateshead--angel of the north.

Where Is My Alice?

Moping away the days with flu and pesky sore throat, hence a pair of convalescent shots with nurses.  The first pic shows an array of tonic-style medicaments (brandy?) and a caretaker with both fan and a vague resemblance to Alice B. Toklas. 

I don't think I look quite as bad as the limp and somewhat spotty invalid in the first.  Prefer to compare myself to the young lady in the second, obscured as she is by coverlet and sheets.  She and the nurse regard the camera enigmatically --almost as if they were 'playing' at Nurse and Patient.  A tiny bit sly?

More Equestrianism

An 'exquisite cadaver' style image: the long rectangular pieces of plinth, horse, and rider require vertical assemblage, though not of a particularly challenging kind.  I have two other word-and-picture card sets like this one.  One depicts George Washington, and the word spelled out on the side is "American."  The other one shows a native American with arrows, quiver, blanket etc. and spells out the word "Indian."  And there you have it.

Horsin' Around

Definitely some rough and tumble pelvis play going on here.  But I'm also enjoying the drab if not pokey late 19th-century boarding-house bedroom decor, and the very chic --not kidding-- ticking fabric on the mattress.  Click to enlarge.

The Chevalier d'Eon

                                                                                                                                                                   

An oddity to say the least: very old man-doll in pretty muslin dress.  A recent addition to the vintage puppet/doll assembly-room that used to be my study. He inevitably reminds me of the notorious Chevalier d'Éon---"a French diplomat, spy and soldier," Wikipedia informs us, "whose first 49 years were spent as a man, and whose last 33 years were spent as a woman. From 1777, d'Éon claimed to be anatomically a woman, and dressed as such. Doctors who examined the body after d'Éon's death discovered that he was anatomically male."  Of great interest to us 18th-c. masquerade fans, drag kings and the like.   See images below for a portrait of him in female dress, as a 'half-man, half-woman,' and fencing in a dress.  I think he must have been charming--a real Enlightenment type.

Supremacist Street Art

Let's Put the Tree...

....in front of me to disguise my weight gain.

The second image (below)--unusual in its documentary frankness for the time, ca. 1900.  The average diet of the period didn't exactly conduce toward obesity.  The junk food epidemic of the later 20th century is a historical aberration of some--ahem--magnitude. 

Elephant Tea Through the Ages

Not exactly in a postcolonialist critique mode.  (It's the 1930s.)  Art deco elements pronounced: we see the kind of visual world Jean de Brunhoff, the author of the Babar books worked in and out of....