La Garçonne

Three French 'romance' postcards--from the teens or 1920s--all with the same rather peculiar 'male' model.  I'm pretty convinced the 'he' is a she.   I have other cards featuring this same highly androgynous little mannikin.  See post from 3/11/11, 'The Mysterious Madeleine.'

When I did the collage for the cover of The Professor I used the hand and cigarette from this card.

The Empress

 A rather wonderful 1920s AP photo of Empress Kojun (1903-2000), wife of Hirohito.  The strange barricade with its strong graphic element and her unusual expression attracted me to the image.

Born Princess Nagako, Empress Kojun became the longest living Empress Consort  (and Empress Dowager) in Japanese history.  She died at 97, having been Empress for 74 years and outliving her husband by over a decade.  She had seven children, one of whom is the present Emperor, Akihito.

According to her Wikipedia entry, 'Nagako's formative years were insulated deep inside a former period of Japan. She would become one of the last Japanese who could remember what life was like inside the aristocracy early in the 20th century.'  Amazing that she lived until so recently.

One of the last photos of her--a haunting image, especially when juxtaposed against the one above.

Isn't She Lovely--and Sticky Wonderful?

Girls Dancing in Heels

No idea where this wire service photo originated, only that it's from the 1980s.  A dyke bar in San Mateo in 1985?  The one girl's wicked leather jumpsuit reminds me of a mortgage broker I once met named Tammi who had one in turquoise.

But Beautiful

Go Away A Little Closer

Now this is what you call curating.  Bye bye, Rudy Vallee, hello Alice Faye.

Please Stop Quivering

... or twitching or fidgeting or whatever it is you're doing.  I feel a case of the D.T.s coming on.

Sailor's Delight

Greetings from Postcardlandia.  Weather forecast: crepuscular showers, with chance of   fuliginousness later.

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.