Taxidermy from the Four Corners region of Colorado

 This fox was in the window of an antique mall in Pagosa Springs, CO. 

 This bear was in the Lake City, CO Historical Museum, repository of many fine artifacts relating to the Alferd Packer cannibalism case. The bear, which has nothing to do with old Alferd or his dietary idiosyncrasies, stands only about four feet tall. (More on Packer soon!) 

And this baby ostrich stands in what might be described as an antique store or a flea market in Del Norte, CO, operated by a genial old fellow who used to run an ostrich farm. He also once built his own coffin prior to open heart surgery, which he survived. The coffin is standing up in the middle of the store and took him just a few hours to build. If you ever get to Del Norte he's a very good conversationalist and has some odd things for sale. Who doesn't need a stuffed baby ostrich?

Barbara and the Iceman

Here's a novelty postcard I picked up in a small town in the Four Corners region of Colorado. It's from the Baxtone company of Amarillo, part of its Laff-O-Gram series of comical postcards. Like this example several of these were slightly risqué, but what appeals to me about this one is how Film Noir it feels.

 Barbara's relatively realistic, naturalistic depiction looks right out of a low-end romance comic, or a newspaper soap opera strip. Consider the raised hand, as though about to cover her mouth before she can tell hubby another lie, her sidelong glance, her back to her husband and the accusatory ice block:

 She looks like she's wondering how she can convince the amorous ice peddler to knock her old man off. And the poor cuckold of a husband seems to have been drawn by another hand entirely, a grotesque, cartoonish head awkwardly appended to a relatively realistic body:

I'd love to know who drew this.

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!

Finally, the video....

Below is the link to the book trailer for Nocturne le vendredi, which came out November 2 in France. There will be an English version before the book comes out in the US next June. Ideally I will have  rerecorded the voice-over as I did a poor job the first time; this is all the more frustrating because Lane Davies, doing the voice of the psychopathic actor, gives a great performance.

The whole thing was edited by Jenna Marguerita, who also produced and co-directed the scenes with the actors, ably assisted by a group of students from the film department at Webster University. Thanks to them and to Jenna's company, Bitdepth Productions LLC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcnGPwYwQXA&feature=autoshare

(p.s.: Click the link above, not the pic below.)

Hatch Show Print in Nashville

Here's the great old neon sign for Hatch Show Print, the legendary letterpress plant:

It's on Broadway in Nashville TN and is famous for having made posters for country music shows, all kinds of stage productions from vaudeville to opera, all with a remarkable flair for snappy design that's always professional but never slick. Here's the showroom:

  Click to enlarge! You'll be glad you did. These small posters are all for sale at quite reasonable prices, and they sell t-shirts too. The people who work there are very friendly (at least the ones who were there the day I went), just make sure you don't let the store cats out when you walk in. Look online at
www.hatchshowprint.org

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.

Two-Dimensional Celebrities

 More treasures from the Pink Elephant! Above, the King. Below, Cher, even more weathered than the real one.

The elephant has been repainted since this pic was taken. That is all.

More Nudes in Nature: Arundel Holmes Nicholls

 Here are the last two of the Nicholls 8x10s from the estate sale the other week:

 

Thislady seems to come from an earlier era than the one below, whose bob places her squarely in the Jazz Age as opposed to the Edwardian.

She looks rather pixieish as well....

Ghost Signs, Beverage-Related

 The first two were taken in Nice, France in 1987. I don't know if they really qualify as Ghost Signs since they're painted on glass, but the loveliness of their deterioration is similar. As always, click to enlarge!

And this one is from Brussels in 1982--too modern to be a proper Ghost Sign, perhaps (the number at the bottom reads 1/23/68, which could be a date, though in Europe it's usually Day/Month/Year.) 

Illinois Haunted House

 After dropping my kid off at camp this summer Mrs. Phillips and I passed by this Haunted House attraction in rural Illinois.

 I imagine that in-season this portasign is illuminated and marked with directions. Or maybe it isn't. Maybe it just sits there.

 "In season" would be right about now. I should go up there and check it out! Or you should.

 Here's the sign you see as you're driving away. See the tiny little car next to it for scale!

That's all I have in terms of rural haunted house attractions.

More Nudes from Arundel Holmes Nicholls

Here are two more of the six eight-by-tens I found Saturday.

Is she the same woman from Saturday's post, the one picking up a starfish?

This one seems to have been taken somewhat later, guessing by the bobbed hair.

The Lady and the Cake, Part 2

Here are more scans of the lovely lady, clad only in a diaphonous wisp of a garment, cavorting with a birthday cake. Scans 4 through eight follow!

Cycling through the spectrum of human emotions, here in #4 she's carefree!

In #5 she's thoughtful, lighting a candle and reflecting on something deep and wonderful--

#6 finds her having a happy thought, perhaps of a far-off loved one.

But in #7 she's reminded of something sad--though her right nipple seems to have perked up between shots.

And in #8 she's practically mournful. Sorry she's still dressed! For the next and last installment she will be partially disrobed, I promise.

Nudes in Nature: Arundel Holmes Nicholls

I got lucky today at an estate sale: a set of six old eight by ten black and white nudes.

They're by Arundel Holmes Nicholls, who was active from the teens through the thirties.

Good stuff!

A Scantily-Clad Beauty and a Birthday Cake in stereo, 1927

I posted one of these a while back and now I'm going to post the whole set, a few at a time. Just like a strip tease!

Which this kind of is.

She looks like she's really enjoying the lighting process! I wish I could get that enthusiastic about things.

Sorry these are a little out of focus. The cards are quite curved. She's still a pretty thing, though, and we'll be seeing a lot more of her later.

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:

Chimp-on-Dolphin Violence

Longtime readers (obsessive, detail oriented, OCD ones anyway) will remember this post from May of 2009, featuring a photo of a sculpture in Paris's Muséum de l'Histoire Naturelle of an orangutan (or as I like to spell it, "orang-outang") strangling a man while its offspring cheers it on:

http://pocketfulofginch.blogspot.com/2009/05/attack-of-great-apes.html

It includes a link to a photo of a chimp attacking a dolphin from the Parc de l'Orangerie in Strasbourg, and my lament that I will never find my own photo of said statue. But find it I did!

Click to enlarge! I'm generally pretty displeased with the quality of my photos from those long ago days (1982 in this case) but this one came out pretty well.  And of course you can never have enough pics of chimps attacking dolphins!

Oh Boy! Vintage Sleaze!

I picked this up on eBay a few years ago. It may or may not be the work of the same photographer who shot a whole box's worth of very similar stereo brothel views in France sometime around the 1930s. That box is somewhere in storage in the basement beneath my former office and I'm in the process of looking for it. In the meantime, here's a lovely lounging inhabitant of a long-gone maison close:

(Click to enlarge, seriously. And if you have some sort of stereo viewer, use it!)

More Pepsi--for the Road!

 I'm still traveling, so here are a few more scans from the fantastic Pepsi brochure to tide you over until my triumphant return:

First, the Crown Lithographing Department!

The Label Printing Department! 

One Million  Case Storage Capacity! That's a lot of sugar water!

 Here's a spectacular view of the Bottle Fillers and Labelers!

 More giant tanks!

 And finally, the Great Battery of Pepsi-Cola Carbonic Gas Tubes!

See you soon!

Ulysses Grant smells something fishy

 

The General looks appalled.

Pepsi Beats the Others Cold

 Here's a beautifully painted and reproduced Pepsi-Cola 39th Anniversary brochure from 1939. Click to enlarge! This is some nice four-color printing, here.

 The Romance of Pepsi-Cola!

 The labs and the cola-nut department!

 These storage tanks look like something by Bruce McCall.

 Raw sugar!

 

How many men drowned in those giant syrup vats?

MORE TO COME!