Crepuscular Fancy

Not old, not vintage, just a fabulous postcard on a fabulous theme.

The Royal Pavilion (Brighton) by dusk.  Took BV there last week: my third visit, her first.  Delightful, diverting--as always.

Postcards from the 15th Century

Four lovely faces from the rood screen at Binham Priory, Norfolk.  The painted figures were covered over by Protestant fanatics during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, who also inscribed passages on the screen from the Cranmer (English) Bible.  The whitewash has gradually begun to flake off, revealing the pictures once again.

The mash-up of imagery and text seems utterly contemporary, despite the age of the screen.  Could be a postered wall in the Mission.

Child Goddess (Artemis)

According to legend on back this RPPC shows Artemis/ Diana, goddess of chastity and the hunt.  Comes from a French pc series (ca. 1900) of gods and goddesses represented by child models.  

Not sure, however,  I would I have known which goddess this little girl was meant to portray without the explanatory title.  She seems to lack any of the conventional emblems of Artemis--the crescent moon, the bow and arrow, dog and/or accompanying virginal maidens. 

A 'concept' piece that doesn't quite work.

Yu Need

Only a couple of days late.  My excuse: doddling around many thousands of miles away--in Brighton by the seaside.

Oedipus

RPPC I've had for a while--no identifying information ---but the Greek theme suits.  (We left Rhodes today, now in fuggy grey tourist-packed London.)  Yesterday--at the Temple of Athena on the rocky peak above the town of Lindos--we scrabbled over countless ancient stones and broken columns very like those in the background here.   Lindos a wind-swept mystery, high above the blue Aegean, and surely one of the most captivating sights this indefatigable tourist has ever seen.  Blue wildflowers, yellow too.

The actor here wearing the mask of old ruined blind Oedipus, of course--Oedipus at Colonus.  The element of photo-uncanniness: the very young-looking arms of the actor.  As in Exquisite Cadavers game, head and arms seem to come from different beings.

Altered (Tourist) Postcard

...from Greece, a few years ago.  Tomorrow: tiny plane from Chios to Rhodes.  Not exactly how the Knights Templar came in.

The Poetry of Sappho

Plank Board and Bear

....and a delicious mustard-yellow phone.

A Sad One from 1914

A so-called 'Bertillon' mugshot---pre-fingerprint technology.  Bertillon  was a French detective who devised a system for taking cranial measurements etc to establish identity.

Don't have the card in front of me so I can't check the name of the woman here (usually with Bertillon cards it's on the back--along with crime one has been accused of).  Her occupation listed as 'waitress' but something in her look tells me it's a case of 'Maggie, A Girl of the Streets.'

Almost too much disparate information to process here.  The slightly collapsed look of mouth/chin: a reminder of how awful people's teeth still were, even at the beginning of the 20th c.

And, yes: an American mugshot--from either California or Oregon as I recall--but still one can't help gawping at the date: August 14, 1914.  World War One had just begun in Belgium and the north of France and was starting in on its third surprisingly bloody and horrible week.

Plumero Electrostática

Obviously not a postcard--more a sort of ecstatic electrostatic plumerillo kind of thing.  But memorable nonetheless.

What they start calling you at Stanford University when you've gone beyond being a "fuzzy."   Not "fuzzy-emeritus," but "fluffy."

A New Girl Every Year

Two lovely Blackie's Girls' Annual covers from the 1930s.   I when I lived in England as a kid my grandparents frequently gave me an 'annual' for Christmas---tho' none from this series, which I believe may have been discontinued by the 1960s.   Had several Rupert books and a fascinating 1961 (?) 1962 (?) volume called Mainly For Children--with articles on all kinds of odd things.

Henri de Haiphong

Wonderful old image from Indochine--another of those mythic postcard places.  The way the tie seems to be imitating the beard is a piece of charming preciosity.

This fellow is not identified on the back--it's a very beautiful mauve-tinted cabinet card---but he's always made me think of the diplomat from M. Butterfly.  Costume-wise at least.  He looks a bit too wily, perhaps, to play the gullible Bernard Boursicot....  

The White Stag

Mysterious old illustration I found in a junk store in Prague last year.  I especially like the secondary characters here: the alert yet wary dogs (one a Great Dane?); the doe and the Baby Deer.  I also like the stag's balletic pose--hooves marvelous, jeune premier-like.

Propped Baby

The weird thing about 19th-century photographs is that everybody in them looks post mortem, even when--as in this painted tintype--the image is  purportedly that of a living (?) person.

What Is To Be Done?

The dialectic tells me--after a lovely few days in NYC--that I need to lose some weight.

"Yellow wrapper for animal, and white for human flesh."

Eight Men Wearing The Same Hat

Exemplary modernist emblem: Chaplin, Magritte, Laurel and Hardy, Hitchcock, et al. 

But don't forget John Steed, Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Liza in Cabaret, und so weiter.  

I want one.

The Carnivalesque

Compare and contrast with previous post.  Another pairing, but in somewhat more festive costume.   Peacock feathers and blue feathery ruffles.  The taller one seems to have a little grey tail, but maybe that's simply the fringe at the bottom of her frock.

Venuses in Their Furs

No, I don't own a fur coat.  Did once though---a ratty muskrat (??) affair, with no lining and one sleeve ripped up and hanging by a thread.

Didn't get the point of it until one night in Minneapolis in the 1970s.  Temperature in the 50-60 below zero zone.  Esther D. and I were at a bus stop and I had never been so cold in my life.  And suddenly one got it: without the fur--and only the fur--one would be a goner.