Ragtag grab-bag
I just stumbled across this study I did for a poster illustration. I couldn’t find a stock image of the statue that worked for what I had in mind, so I bought this statuette at a gift shop across the street from the Empire State Building and photographed it from the angle I needed. I’d forgotten about this study image, which is interesting in its own way.
This gem of a hand-painted sign is tucked above a nondescript door on West 17th St., I think. I’m actually afraid to go and find out exactly what they sell, because the reality is sure to be more drab than the sign itself.
Somewhere in the East Village, someone tossed out the baby with the bathwater. Or the coffee. Whichever.
Now tilt your head back and open wide. Be careful, though, not to let that head fall off its little stand. This surreal little gem was from a series of photos of life at the Boston University Goldman School of Graduate Dentistry. It warms the cockles of my heart to know that I have a mouthful of fillings inserted by someone who trained on a scary, plastic, robot head. No wonder my dentist was so impersonal toward me. And I thought he was just distracted because he needed to fly back to California for a court date.
Fetish magazines aren’t usually where I’d expect to find exuberant typographic solutions to design problems, but life is full of surprises. I guess this is from some time in the late seventies. [Update: Volume 1, Issue 6, from 1976. Read the entire issue here.]
To the best of my knowledge, this book was not really written by Ed Wood the filmmaker, nor is the gentleman featured on the cover a gay black. My guess is that “Ed Wood” was chosen at the time as a nom-de-plume by the author back in the days when Ed Wood was still something of a cultural obscurity. But I could be wrong. I do know for a fact, though, that the photograph on the cover is not supposed to represent Charlene, the hero/heroine of the book who escapes a tortured youth as a sharecropper to go an become a cross-dressing bitch for a series of con men and thieves.
This little example of vintage “erotica” turned up in a yard sale in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, one day. I really got a kick out of seeing how dirty stories were written back in the good ol’ days of the year I was born. I almost feel a pang of regret that contemporary smut has lost that sense of the hero being really deviant and indiscrete: it seems a lot more thrilling than than the explicit, happy rainbow crap that gets churned out these days.
Pray at the altar of energy. Yet another incredible find from the archives of the ASME, this one from a German electrical engineering journal. Leave it to the Germans to portray this large bit of mystery apparatus as some giant totem pole for the modern age. So sleek and precise!
Oh, the sad and sorry life of Francine Fishpaw! But the pungently sweet glories of having my very own Odorama card! Carefully preserved since a 1988 showing of “Polyester” at Cinema Village in New York, I only take this out once every couple of years or so in order to let someone or another have their very own sniff of this holy relic.
This card became even more important to me during college, when I went to a double bill of Hairspray and Polyester at the Somerville Theater, hoping to get my hands on another card or two. I was anxious because the show was billed as having the last load of Odorama cards in existence, and sure enough, I arrived five minutes after the last ones had been dispersed.
I’ve heard that New Line Cinema manufactured more cards to be packaged with the laserdisc of the movie, but apparently they were not able to perfectly duplicate all the original smells.
