Is this the Scariest Clown of All Scary Clowns?

At least of all Scary Clowns riding tiny, tiny tricycles.

Just look at this guy!

He's the corpsiest clown ever. Even if you're not scared of clowns, you should be scared of this guy.

Because You Demanded it: Honest Abe!

I have been a very bad, backsliding blogger! To make up for this, here are two sexy pictures of Mrs. Phillips wearing an Abraham Lincoln plastic mask in Kentucky:

The bustiest Emancipator ever!

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.

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.

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.

The Cabinet of Dr. Sweeney, plus Bonus Ghost Sign

 A couple of years ago my filmmaker friend Mark W. Stone took me on a tour of the neighborhood where Dr. Francis Sweeney, almost certainly Cleveland's infamous Torso Killer, had his practice.

 Which building it was is impossible to say at this point, but these were the buildings that held those sorts of offices at that time.

 This one still houses some medical offices.

 On the right, a library converted into a chapel.....

 And here, windows both broken and boarded up.

And finally, a really nice Ghost Sign, in multiple languages (Czech?) advertising Mail Pouch tobacco.

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.

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!

Out of the Past

Here are some lovely Detective mags I picked up while on the road. This one's pretty old school, from '72. Lots of keen ads.

And here we have a much later example, when instead of "Damsel in Distress" the generic cover theme had mutated to "Hottie with a Firearm."

I find this woman disturbingly exciting, especially with her gun pointed at the words "human flesh."

But this gal, she's the one! There's something about her out-of-date, slathered-on makeup and eighties hairstyle that really get to me. Also, maybe without realizing it I was part of that "Hottie with a Firearm" target demographic. All these mags had pretty good ads, but the genre was hurting enough by the late 80s that much of the back of the book was filled with classifieds. Stay tuned.

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.

Car Wash Camel

Continuing this week's "Belgium" theme, here's a stuffed camel advertising a restaurant in Brussels in the mid-eighties. It's parked in the lot of a car wash right next to the Hôtel des Colonies, which used to be (might still be for all I know) a decent and inexpensive place to stay very close to the Gare du Nord. It's also on the outskirts of Brussels's picturesque red light district.

 

This is what you might call Bad Taxidermy!

Dead Coyote

From the attic of an antique mall in Alton, Illinois, a rather sad-looking coyote.

He almost looks tame! I wish I'd taken a better close-up picture of him and his bedraggled lower jaw and broken ear.

 Now compare him with his fierce relation in some town I passed through in the Kansas Flint Hills sometime in the eighties:

 

Double Bonus! On the floor to the right is a coyote rug, and in the shadows of the upper right-hand corner, there's a bobcat. Bobcats are increasingly important to this blog.

I seem to recall I was passing through late on a Sunday afternoon and the whole town was shut down and spooky. I'd say this was the scariest sporting goods store in America.

That Pesky Rat!

Here's a stereo card I found in St. Charles Missouri today for three dollars, the tragic story of a family tormented by a rat!

Click on it for its full-sized glory. And if you have a stereo-viewing apparatus such as a stereoscope or a lorgnette or if you have mastered the arcane art of "free-viewing," then you can see it in glorious three-D!

Thrift Store Pictures!

Look what I found! Some more thrift store/antique mall paintings.

I call this one "Lucille Ball Taking Notes at a Horserace."

And this one is "Springtime Crucifixion in the Alps."

"Good Monk, Bad Monk." Look how happy Good Monk is!

But Bad Monk looks like he's going to beat up a suspect with a phone book! Probably a hand-illuminated one.

I hope you have enjoyed this excursion into the wonderful world of art.

Random Scary Images

Scary, Norman Bates-style stuffed Buffalo (Bison bison, for you sticklers):

Scary, decaying mannequin from a mining museum:

Scary Honey Wagon (that's a toilet on rails for use by the miners) from the same museum:

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)