Miles and Flora

Deaths Head Girls (With Mounts), 1915

So this must be why little girls dream of being princesses.  Here, on the left, in the garb of the Death's Head Hussars, famed German cavalry regiment, Princess Victoria Luise of Prussia--the only daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm--demonstrates her bloodthirsty, happy-go-lucky spirit.  She lived until 1980.

On the right:  Princess Cecilie, wife of Frederick William, Crown Prince of Prussia.  Cecilie--former Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin--married the Prince in 1905 in a spectacular ceremony complete with 'artistically decorated procession through the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin.'

'Cecilie quickly adapted to the role of Crown Princess' (according to Wikipedia) 'and became popular both with the public and within the court. She is described as quiet but friendly, a natural beauty with an interest in fashion.'  The Pickelhaube suggests as much.   

Flower Drum Song

One of several stamp collage cards I've acquired lately.  Good, but also strange, the Euro-
pean-looking head on an otherwise 'chinoiserie'-style body.



Further pitfalls of mimesis: the ornamental vegetation on right might be 'read' as a waterfall, over which the little sampan here is about to plunge.

New Faces of 1906

Want the shirt and tie very badly.

White Clothes

Tintype of Tintype Collector

Yes, the collector had a tintype of herself made yesterday.  (More fun and less narcissistic than getting one's DNA through the mail?  Who can tell.)  Given the brutal honesty of the tintype plate it's actually hard to be too vain.  Through some strange alchemy of tin and chemical solution, the image shows freckles---everywhere--that were last seen when I was six years old. 

As close as it gets to seeing oneself dead.   Especially given 19th-century 'old weird America' look the process gives one.  She died in an asylum in 1911.

From a Zine

Photo of a photo -- one I took of an image by the marvelous Dutch photographer Anouk Kruithof.  This pic shows one of several page spreads from a zine by Kruithof entitled 'The Daily Exhaustion': a series of pictures, printed on large floppy newsprint, featuring this same  beautiful young woman in various states of sweaty-looking ennui, fatigue, acedia, tired preoccupation,  etc.

See Kruithof's website for some of her other works, including Becoming Blue,  one of the strangest and most haunting photo-books I've come across lately.

My Understudy

On the left: Elsie Hitz, actress and radio personality of the 1930s, shown here with Thelma Marsh, a young Broadway actress hired to be Hitz's understudy in the popular CBS radio show of 1933, 'The Magic Voice.'  Marsh, 'Radio's First Understudy'--according to the photo caption--was selected after many auditions because 'her voice most nearly duplicated that of Miss Hitz.'  To judge by the sultry looks being exchanged here, she and Hitz seem to be duplicating in other ways too.

Elsie Hitz was said to have the 'most beautiful speaking voice on the air' in the early 1930s.  She also starred in Dangerous Paradise, a radio adventure serial in which she and the actor Nick Dawson played two castaways shipwrecked on a desert island. What happened to Thelma is a mystery.

The Birth of Civilization

My spouse has just purchased a 'kick' scooter.  Unfortunately not big enough for me to sit on the back.  In fact there is no back.

Tintype Types

Rich and Poor Meet Together

Miss Italy of 1946

Silvana Pampanini--b. 1925 and apparently still alive--Italian movie star and 'sex symbol' of the early fifties.  Here she is in O.K. Nerone (1951), described in the caption of this publicity photo as 'An American-Language Comedy Spectacle.'  Silvana's Wikipedia entry--badly translated, it seems, from the Italian--is likewise something of an American-language comedy spectacle.  She is described as having refused an invitation to make films in Hollywood because she "found English too difficult and because she had some problems about tax office."

Likewise fascinating: "In the opinion of the press, she filtered with personalities as Tyrone Power, William Holden, Orson Welles, Omar Sharif, George DeWitt, Jimenez and Fidel Castro; despite of this she never married." You can see her filtering here, but also why she found the mens disappointing.

Who's Your Daddy

Well, now that you ask...

Insouciance

Classic 'bad' amateur snapshot -- 1960s vintage, judging by the car (Chevy? Rambler?)--but also a paean to a certain Southern Calif-ornian civilization one recognizes all too well. One has 'lived' that Kodachrome blue sky, that flat concrete driveway, that scrubby attempt at a lawn, that faded green plastic hose snaking around between the kids' legs and under the car.

The scene itself has a certain dramatic charm. Who's the old guy with the strange gray box?  And what's the bigger kid--the one caught in jaunty contrapposto--telling him? Is that the mother leaning on the back of the passenger seat of the car?  The little brother standing on the hose is nothing less than one's beau idéal-- then and now.

Moslem Treasurer

Delusional on pretty much all counts.

A Meritorious Artist

'Mac Fric' turns out to be Martin Fric---Czech actor/director/writer involved in 132 movies (almost all released only in Czechoslovakia) between 1922 and 1969.  Advokatka Vera ('Lawyer Vera') is apparently a comedy from 1937.  No, I haven't seen it.  Other Fric flicks sound oddly enticing: Tears the World Can't See, Condemned from Pinktown, The Star Called Wormwood, Dogs' Heads, Winter Sports Champions, and Meritorious Artist Terezie Brzková.

Someone Lost to Time

Grail Music

---and Liebig's Fleisch Extract.  Scored these six lovely comic-strip-style Parsifal cards-- along with numerous postcards showing hefty, fur-sporting, horn-helmeted late 19th-c. Wagnerians -- in an antiquary's shop in Bayreuth.  (Click image to see captions, etc.)

Somewhat aghast, though: despite all briefings to the contrary, the Bayreuth Parsifal audience did clap at the end of the first act.  Whatever happened to absurd yet venerable Festspielhaus customs?