Furnace of the Future

Love the 1950s-60s basement 'family room' atmosphere here, especially wrought-iron soda fountain table with strawberry and vanilla milk shakes.  We'll play darts and have our shakes, then watch 'Ed Sullivan'!   The all-knowing furnace, meanwhile -- mouth agape with foreboding-- contemplates the future: divorce, custody battles, drug overdoses, abuse, family crackup.

Mädchen

Say a little prayer for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who died this week. He outlived Roland Barthes, who found his singing too 'bourgeois', by many, many years. When I first picked up this card of two young Teutonesses, I thought the one of them was about to stab the other one in the chest. Luckily, the tree intervened.

Funambular

One of the 'Flying' Wallendas will attempt to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope--very soon. (See NYTimes today.) I saw his grandfather fall from a wire between two buildings to his death (on television) in 1978.

Buckskin, 50 Cents

Zuyah-Chee. It's hard to make profile shots come out well, but this one's exquisite. Click image to enlarge.

Scumbled Duck

From a bit ago:  my photo of a worked-over wall in Christiania, the 'free town' and pot-haven in Copenhagen.  Christiana apparently 'seceded' from the rest of the Danish capital forty years ago, and the ultra-tolerant Danes have allowed it to continue as a somewhat irregular urban redoubt ever since.  At its center Christiania is one giant pot market, full of picnic tables and merchants selling spliffs, marijuana t-shirts, and hash brownies.  Pot illegal in Denmark but Danish cops mostly turn a blind eye.  The whole area is also a shrine to street art and art installations, plus home to any number of slackers, rebels, stoners.  And this bird.

Il Penseroso

To Match Your Typewriter

Most Beautiful of Small Writing Machines

Yes, one remains a dévotée....

Click to enlarge graphic

Queer Theorist

Something at once twee and delightful here, no?  Maybe the waffle-pattern ear?

Wish Aretha would issue the copy-edited version one of these days: Who's Zoomin' Whom....

British Needles

A rough cardstock folder, front and back, full of needles, once shiny, now degraded.   World War I, one guesses.

The Beautiful Man

One of a number of anonymous photos I picked up the other day--and yes, he is beautiful.  (I think.)  One imagines an interracial element--something in his appearance evokes those now-quaint-sounding taxonomic terms of the later nineteenth century: quadroon, octoroon, terceron, mustee, and the like.  See Dion Boucicault's plays, or Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Everybody Must Get Stoned

Po-Faced

Ah, several rapt hours yesterday at the SF Vintage Paper show: the place was mobbed; a lot of heavy duty collecting going on. The potato-faced man one of one's more comic finds of the day--but some strange quarks of beauty were also to be had, and will no doubt appear here henceforth.

One Was Blind

One of my favorite cyanotypes in my whole collection: the usual questions --who? when? where? why?-- so indelible, so permanently unanswerable.

Homme de Lettres

Feigning Sleep

---for reasons unknown. One tousle-headed boy (girl?) in front is peeking, babyishly, at the camera. But the girl behind him, alone and to the left, might as well be a grande dame of stage and screen. A regal, jaunty, half-leaning pose--one knee bent, one hand on hip. Even with eyes shut, she's confident and serene, full of method: the aristocrat of the group, ready to do Rosalind or Portia or even Lady Macbeth. (Click image to see her better.)

A Puff of Cheroot and Thou

Pera, Istanbul, a periscope of smoke.

The Human Form Divine

I had a nightmare and. . . . .