BOOK TOUR 2013!

 Here are the dates, times and places where I'll be shocking young, old and in between: 

Date	Location	Time
6/13	Square Books
	160 Courthouse Square Oxford, MS 38655 662-236-2262	5 p.m.
6/15	Murder by the Book	1 p.m.
	2342 Bissonnet Houston, TX 77005 713-524-8597
6/16	Mystery People	7 p.m.
	Noir at the Bar With Jedidiah Ayres and Jesse Sublett for a night of music & noir at Opal Divine's Austin Grill. 3601 South Congress Avenue Austin, TX 78704 512-707-0237
6/18	Nightbird Books	6 p.m.
	205 W Dickson St. Fayetteville AR 72701 479-443-2080
6/19	Watermark Books	7 p.m.
	4701 East Douglas Wichita, KS 67218 316-682-1181
6/20	The Raven BookStore	7 p.m.
	6 East 7th Street Lawrence, KS 66044 785-749-3300

1930s Stereo Gals!

I will be posting one or two of these a day in hopes of getting back into a good, regular blogging vibe.

These were taken by a French amateur during the 1930s. I'm not sure if he's the same fellow that took the one I posted a few months back, but the style and situations seem similar. (Two of them are outdoor, the rest appear to have been made inside a brothel.)

Oh boy! Upskirt. These seem to have been taken on different days, unless they're two different models. But they're wearing the same shoes!

Anyway, vintage amateur smut for your approval.

Paris Nights

Here's a magazine I found a while back:

Nice to know that nudie mags "did their part" for the National Relief Organization back in the day. It's full of mildly smutty cartoons and stories which I will try to scan later once I figure out how to do it without damaging the spine. Meanwhile, here's an ad from the back cover:

 

"Nude Study" indeed!

More Parisian Rooftops

From, I think, the top floor cafeteria of the Galeries Lafayette, with the Opéra Garnier in the distance, circa 1985: 

Shot using a Pentax LX, what lens I don't remember, using Kodak Technical Pan film. Click to enlarge!

Paris Obstetrics

Here's a picture I took out my apartment window in 1982, when I was managing the cafeteria. Having the apartment instead of living upstairs meant getting up at 5:30 and catching the Métro to get there in time to start breakfast, but it was a swinging bachelor pad in the Marais, so what the hell.

The owner of the apartment was a somewhat shadowy figure whom I never met face to face. The previous subtenants (it was a summer rental only) pointed out to me that he had a stash of pharmaceuticals in a cupboard, all of them seemingly childbirth related. We called him the Phantom Obstetrician.

This image started life as an Ektachrome slide.

New Book! And Trailer!

My newest book comes out in France today:

That's my eye on the cover, taken right in my publishers' office. It's part of a series of thirteen novels, all set in Paris and all taking place in part on Friday the 13th. (Nothing to do with the series of horror movies of the same name, although my friend Scott Phillips of New Mexico wrote a Jason tie-in novel a few years back, so this is really going to confuse the shit out of people.)

Three of the novels are already being turned into TV movies, and I'm hoping this will be the fourth. It's loosely based on a period in the early nineties when my friend Lane Davies and I were running around Paris trying to raise money for a movie. Lane was the star of a soap opera, "Santa Barbara," that was broadcast with great success during prime time in France, and was such a celebrity there that we were certain we could get this thing made. We didn't but hijinks ensued and when les Éditions la Branche asked me to write something for the series I asked Lane if he'd object to me depicting him as a murdering psychopath (in the novel, things go slightly more haywire than they did in real life).

Hell, no, I don't mind, he replied, can I play myself in the TV movie?

We just got done shooting a book trailer and are just starting to edit. Here's a shot of one of the sets, showing tireless cinematographer/editor Jenna Marguerita with indefatiguable grips Tony and Nathan, and seated at the bar, Anita Romero, playing Esmée, the femme fatale:

And here's the lovely Anita in character:

The book will be out in July of 2013 from Counterpoint Books under the title "RAKE," with one of the best covers I've ever had. Until then, you can get the French version here: http://www.furet.com/nocturne-le-vendredi-2084107.html

Fire Eater

This guy was a regular fixture around the Centre Pompidou in the eighties and early nineties. He was a fire eater, and he also had a repulsive specialty: he could suck his abdominal organs upward until you could damn near see his spine sticking through the skin of his belly (no, I didn't get a picture.) He was French and I believe he'd been a paratrooper (note the tattoo on his biceps) and he was quite gracious about having his picture taken.

This was originally half of a stereograph pair. Until I started cleaning the dust off of this negative digitally I hadn't ever noticed the burn scars on his arms, back and sides.

My Old Writing Space

In the interests of posting random and uninteresting pieces of my past, here is the door of the tiny squalid fetid cramped dusty room I used to rent on the rue Yves Toudic in the 10th arrondissement in Paris for 500ff per month, about $100 at the time:

My next door neighbors were an elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter, who always smiled sweetly in the stairwell but who shrieked the vilest of obscenities at one another inside their apartment. They ended up in a novel and a short story both, as did the junkie who used to leave his works in the communal toilet down the hall. In the lower right hand corner you can see part of my porno trunk, a "must" for a young lusty bachelor!

Taxidermied Sewer Rats, Twenty-five Years On

 Here's what the Arouze Pest Control company in Paris looks like today.....

 And here it is around 1985. As you can see the muskrats at the bottom of the display have been moved over to the other side, and the hanging sewer rats raised.

And here's a closeup of the right side:

Human Remains for Sale, Paris, 1985

I'll bet that headline is going to get me some interesting Google searches. This skeletal hand and its companion foot were on sale at a bookstall on the Left Bank of the Seine in that halcyon summer of 1985:

Sorry I've been backsliding this week! I've been busy scanning and cleaning up old negatives like this one. Tomorrow I head for Oxford, Mississippi to talk to my friend Jack Pendarvis's class about Wichita in the 1940s, thence to Atlanta, Georgia to record some video with my friend Lane Davies, thence to Columbia, Tennessee to see my cousin Lindsey Page and then to Nashville to visit Roy Acuff's Record Store! So believe you me I will have lots to blog about.

Pretty Cityscapes

Some of you probably think this blog is turning into a mere outlet for vintage cheesecake. Not so! Just to prove otherwise, here are two colorful views of famous cities: (CLICK TO ENLARGE!)

This is Paris, France, photographed from (I think) the top of the Montparnasse Tower.

And this is a street scene from Brussels, Belgium in 1984.

Next time: more vintage gals!

Dubonnet Ghost Sign and the Magic of the Digital Darkroom

Here's a picture I shot on Ektachrome in the summer of 1983 of one of the last Dubonnet wall paintings. The slide itself is disgustingly moldy, the mold attracting dust, but I was able through the magic of the digital darkroom to get this lovely image:

Here's what it looked like when I scanned it:

Hungry gargoyle

Paris, Tour St. Jacques, mid-eighties. I've always liked this picture because it either looks like the gargoyle is guarding the tots on the carousel or preparing to devour them one by one.

That's all I got today!

Portions for Taxidermied Foxes

 From an Antique Mall in Michigan, a fox kept on a high shelf that made him difficult to photograph:

 Even at this angle, though, you can tell he's a bit moth-eaten:

Here's a prettier one from the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt in Paris, circa 1986:

 

And look, he's got flowers in his mouth. Just like a real fox.

Another French Book Poster

CLICK TO ENLARGE!

















I picked this up already framed in Paris a few years back for about fifty Euros. It's a lithographed advertisement for "La Porteuse de Pain," a popular novel of the 1880s by Xavier Montépin. A huge bestseller in its day, it's still in print, and as Montépin's French Wikipedia entry points out, it's been adapted for stage, screen and television. The ad is for the first installment of the book's serialization.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_de_Montépin
(If you don't read French, one interesting fact in the article is that one secret of his phenomenally prolific output was the extensive use of ghostwriters.)

I don't know how many copies of this there are floating around, but here's one from the Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, and I know that the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris has one also:
http://www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CPicZ.aspx?E=2C6NU07A8UCT
This one is unique (as far as I know), though, in that it has had addenda pasted onto it stating that the first installment is free. (Shades of modern viral marketing campaigns.)

Get a load of this beautiful litho:

(Sorry about the glare. That's some cheap glass on there and I'm too thrifty to get it reframed.)

Get a Haircut, Hippie

This is my old Carte Orange, a Paris subway and bus pass holder. I'm guessing this is circa 1989, when I was in my late twenties and had a lot of hair. Too long in front to be a mullet, too long in back to be a real pompadour, it's my opinion in retrospect that I look like a douchebag. Not as much as in those press passes, though.