Giant Instamatic

Here's a picture of me holding a giant Kodak Instamatic 126:

This was an outtake from my 1985 (or '86, or '87) Christmas card, shot in the portrait studio at Moler's Camera in Wichita, where I worked at the time. The plaster bust of Lincoln came from an old schoolhouse, I think.

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

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.

Bookseller

I found my old B. Dalton Bookseller nametag in a box of old slides I've been scanning:

This provoked a very vivid B. Dalton dream last night. In the same box, three photo booth pictures from around 1982, smack dab in the middle of the B. Dalton years:

In the top one I'm doing my Stan Laurel face. I also had Stan Laurel hair. I was very, very young. And callow!

The Wayback machine

In the eighties I managed a cafeteria in a dormitory on the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris. We only served a continental breakfast in those days, but earlier in the century the dorm provided three hot meals a day for its several hundred residents, and the abandoned institutional kitchen in the basement was a source of spooky fascination.
Rotting furniture:
Kind of a "Shining" vibe here.
A bin full of sawdust, for what purpose I don't know, unless it was for that time-honored tradition of absorbing vomit off the floor upstairs:
Drawers full of unused silver. Bet that drawer is empty today.
The building's main elevator would take you down there, but the only way down from the cafeteria was via a very rickety old spiral staircase, and it was dark as hell down there. I am not ashamed to admit that I was scared shitless every time I had to go down there by myself.

As always, click to enlarge! (Images copyright Scott Phillips, 2010)