Deeply Satisfying Madness

Harpo and Harpo and Harpo and Harpo....

Front and back this old Baltimore Sun newsroom photo has achieved a matchless historical beauty.  The back especially: like a Rauschenberg combine.

Medicinal

Rejoined Weight Watchers this week (sigh) so I will be able to do this again at the Olympics.

At Knossos: One Month, One Week Before

A UPI photo from October 11, 1963.  Lee Radziwill has been cropped out.   Intriguing--though I suppose if I were a full-time Jackie buff rather than a sort of dilettantish now-and-then student of her life and times--I would have known she'd already met Onassis.  Remarkable the concatenation of events. 

Comic Opera Plumes

AP caption reads, charmingly: 'Sir Colin Hardwick Thornley, governor of British Honduras, peeks under parasol carried by Princess Margaret to chat with her as he escorts her from Fort George Wharf to Militia Hall in Belize.'

Willing to Learn

You may be thinking I have forgotten all about postcards, amid the current flurry over archival news photos.  Not a bit of it.  Once one of the elder step-sisters took all of us kids--I was about 12--to a somewhat squalid roller rink in East San Diego.  (Not like the nice Belle Epoque one here.)  Indeed, that's where I learned to do the hokey-pokey.  And that's what it's all about.

Cats Dancing with Crosses

Grisaille Communists and Puppet

An example of the Gerhard Richter 'grisaille' look mentioned yesterday.  The people here are suitably Cold War in appearance: a caption describes them as 'British Communists.'   They'd been arrested for 'squatting' in a London flat (and presumably plotting against the bourgeoisie).   Amazing to see the woman with a cigarette.

Second image: a Baltimore puppet-maker, Bernard Paul, in 1930, with what looks like a Balinese puppet.   The muddy pink touch-up is unusual--and delightful.

Tosca 1956

Not possible to see and not want.  Nothing zen about it.

Find the photo editor's markups, here and elsewhere, enthralling.  (Likewise the rather terrifying Callas rictus caught by photographer.)  Gray, blue, black, white, sometimes going pink or yellow.  The white-out effects are hypnotizing after a while.  Suddenly realizing how Gerhard Richter developed the weird grisaille he used in those paintings of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Mad Dancers from Baltimore

Horrors!   Have discovered a website devoted to absolutely astonishing archival wire service photos and they have become the obsession du jour.  This is serious: I've been spending *hours* scrolling up and down pages and alas sending constant little billets doux to PayPal.   I know it's a seriously awful new fixation because I don't want to name the site so as not to attract rival collectors to it.  My moral compass has obviously gone completely haywire and is now flying around in 180 degree pirouettes, rather like these two energetic young ladies.    To be continued.

Oh Lawd

 ... I done done.

A certain previous-century Mrs. Reynolds on a visit to Naples.  Beulah, peel me a grape.

Midcentury Experiment in Eco-Living

'World famous
Hole 'n the Rock Home--15 mi. south of Moab, Utah.  Memorial of A.L. Christensen, famous artist, sculptor and taxidermist and home of Gladys L. Christensen, widow.  14 rooms (5000 sq. feet of floor space) personally engineered and sculptured [sic] into the sandstone rock by Mr. Christensen from 1945 until his death in 1957.'    Gorgeous linoleum.

Polly Himself Again

Polly Again.  A children's book from 1886 by Ella Farman--with lovely pictorial boards.   Most surviving copies--to judge by offerings on ABE--are in pretty wretched condition (including mine).   Hideously cracked spines, etc.   Which means the book was obviously much-read, and perhaps much-prized.  I myself am in love with Mr. Himself.

Polly Himself

To be explained.  It's 90 degrees today and I'm all pluffled. Too much to say anything more.

A Toothsome Pair

From the lovely oddity department: Eleanor Roosevelt and Lillian Parks, White House maid and proud author of My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, in a deaccessioned newspaper file photo from 1961.  Check out weird caption note about other White House workers 'pledging to refrain' from memoir-writing.   And all this while JFK and Marilyn were no doubt frolicking in situ.

ER--gor bless 'er-- seems to be relishing all the scuttlebutt.

Click images to enlarge

Carmel Sea View

Actually a fairly large photo; hand-tinting, as always, adds its idiosyncratic or anecdotal element--someone's fantasy of the day.



The crouching lady in fur-sleeves would appear to be an amateur nature photographer too.

Your Lupins or Your Life

Costume drama heaven:  Mr Matheson Lang.  Canadian-born Scottish actor (1879-1948), known for Shakespearean parts, including Hamlet, Romeo, and Macbeth, and Shylock in a silent film version of The Merchant of Venice in 1916.  

"He went on to appear in over 30 films and was one of Britain's leading movie stars of the 1920s. Among his memorable roles were Guy Fawkes (1923), Matthias in The Wandering Jew (1923) (which also featured his wife as Judith), Henry IV in Henry, King of Navarre (1924), and Henry V in Royal Cavalcade (1935). "

Click image to enlarge.  If you dare.

Archaic Device

Nice to know the future will have these stylish beanies.

From a series of comic cards specifically published by and for nudists in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Wave