There is o better way to serve a proper tea than with real china handed down through the generations.
Category: ultrascrapbook
Eye in the Sky
Some of my favorite outdoor signage in the neighborhood adorns the outside of the American Museum of the Moving Image. It’s mostly that giant floating eye that I adore so much.
Not-So-Scary Ghost
Just a Halloween lawn ornament I stumbled across one night.
Statuette of Liberty
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.
Barry Supply Co.
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.
Scary Baby
Somewhere in the East Village, someone tossed out the baby with the bathwater. Or the coffee. Whichever.
Advanced Dentistry
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.
Big Gay Hallway
Drummer Magazine
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.]
Plan Nine from Chelsea
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.