The Escape Route

Well.... not sure if this actually was someone's escape route---no explanatory clipping on the back of this archival photo from the Baltimore Sun.  All it says is 'Penitentiary--Maryland, 1956'; a quick skim in Google doesn't turn up anything obvious.

But what appeals to me most in this picture is the big black inset circle, which lends a graphic and abstract quality to the thing, especially with the dotted white lines and 'X.'  I've got a small mini-collection of photos with such circles.  They were intended, one surmises, to hold a cameo picture of somebody involved in the story.

Maybe I will post some of these 'black spots' tomorrow or the next day.

Baker's Dozen

Not quite sure what those things are that several of them are holding (one fellow is biting into one).  Some sort of pretzel?  Sausages? Peculiarly thin croissants?  Carrots?

All very 1920s and Eastern European.  And some gorgeous young men in the mix.

Czech Titties

A card from a junk shop in Prague this summer.  There was a 'Hooters' around the corner from the slightly seedy Sheraton in which we were ensconced.  This card is truly dreadful.  The idiocy of (Social Realist) rural life.

Oh, Odette...

...as in Odette Myrtil.  As marvelous a name as Ruby Philogene.

Oh, Odette, I need a shot of your tuxedo love. Or else the world's biggest carnation to sniff.  Have been so busy with deadlines, and the dream of a common language, I've had to forego any blog appearances this week. Please forgive me, ladies and gents and lady-gents.

And La Myrtil?--actress, violinist, singer (1898-1978), born in France, ended up in vaudeville in London and New York, followed by a 20-year career in Hollywood films as a character actress. Married twice (can that be the whole story?) and lived in New Hope, Pennsylvania in later life, where she opened a restaurant, Chez Odette.  The latter is supposedly still in existence--one must check.

The Auteur

Mermaid Smoke

We put on our felt clothes and bag hats and had a ball.

Same-Sex Marriage

Raymond Burr and Barbara Stanwyck, one imagines, are celebrating again, in some lovely heavenly place.

Serpent Cucumber . . .

. . . . terrorizing tomato.  Tomato's expression will be mine tomorrow if a certain incumbent is not victorious.

Bacchante from Pompeii

Don't get me wrong: I'm voting for Barack.

Yours diaphanously, TC

Fluttering and Pointing

The American actress and dancer Betta St. John (born 1929).  She appeared at the age of ten in Destry Rides Again (1939)--later in several Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals.  The X crop-marks--like vaunting white cranes, thermaling in the deepest, darkest warm night.

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.