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"Bob." (Image by Timothy Sanford.)
I’m selling Bob, my giant bull skull. He’s about 32″ wide (horn tip to horn tip) by 18″ long. He has teeth! Quite easy to pick up and carry on the subway. Some staring to be expected.
A few search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Astounding simians since 2009. (Image by T. W. Wood.)
Judging by this commercial for the erstwhile Indiana-based national restaurant chain, Burger Chef, patrons were allowed to sit on the roof and ride horses around the parking lot. There’s not a Burger Chef anywhere in the country anymore, but at its apex, only McDonald’s had more fast-food locations in America. Founded (almost incidentally) by Frank P. Thomas in 1957 in Indianapolis, the chain of hundreds of outlets was sold to General Foods in 1968. That company subsequently sold the restaurants to Hardee’s in the 1980s, which discontinued the brand. An excerpt about Burger Chef from the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis:
“In 1957 Frank P. Thomas opened a pilot restaurant at Little America Amusement Center to promote and sell the automated hamburger grill he had invented. Failing to sell the grill but successfully marketing his 15-cent hamburgers, Thomas instead opened the first Burger Chef.”
Tags: Frank P. Thomas
Orson Welles’ 1974 cine-essay about the art of the hoax is sensational in both senses of the word, zestfully beginning as an examination of one fraud and stumbling ass-backwards into an even bigger scam. As if the engaging, globe-trotting Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory wasn’t a fascinating-enough figure for this uncommon documentary, his biographer, Clifford Irving, who was interviewed extensively by Welles for the film, proved to be a better one.
Failed fiction writer Irving seemed to hit his stride in 1969 when he published Fake!, a true-crime account about de Hory, a perpetually struggling artist who decided to exploit his incredible facility for mimicking the painting styles of masters. He’d whip up a Matisse or Picasso and feign being a former Hungarian aristocrat who was selling family treasures because he was cash poor. Plenty of art dealers knew it was a ruse, but since de Hory’s work was so convincing, they tacitly went along with the con to get rich. De Hory’s forgeries purportedly hang in museums all over the world, and his remarkable tale made the book a best-seller and gave Welles his initial subject.
But then a better subject emerged.
While the film was being made, Irving’s own more spectacular fraud began to be exposed. His new book, an “authorized” biography about reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, whom he had never met or spoken to, was proven to be a phony. The fallout gave Welles an even richer palette to work with, and his story gleefully bounces from faker to faker, examining how they did what they did and how they came undone. The resulting work is a playful, freewheeling meditation, a Godardian Welles film, that examines a pair of hoaxers from every angle with eagerness and a respect that’s far more than grudging.
The third hoaxer in the film is, of course, Welles himself, a self-professed “charlatan,” whose 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast about Martians invading Earth caused widespread panic in a country that was still very naive about media manipulation. Welles admired scammers because he knew that legitimate artists con their audiences into believing an illusion and that hoaxers are just their purer brethren and their creations valuable. As de Hory says of his uncanny canvases, “If you hang them in a museum long enough, they become real.”
____________________________________
Welles made a nine-minute trailer that used material not in the final film. Click on the “Watch on YouTube” link to view the short.
Tags: Clifford Irving, Elmyr de Hory, Howard Hughes, Orson Welles
An 1857 illustration of the the Dead Rabbits battling the Bowery Boys.
In the raucous and often lawless Lower New York City of the nineteenth century, many a vicious gang was berthed in illicit groggeries stashed in the back rooms of corner groceries. But there wasn’t always honor among thieves and sometimes gangs splintered. In his great book, Low Life, Luc Sante relays how such a fragmenting led to the formation and naming of the Dead Rabbits. An excerpt:
“The Roach Guards, named after Ted Roach, the liquor dealer who backed them, suffered a factional dispute some time in the 1830s. During the argument a member of one feuding sector evidently threw a rabbit carcass into the assemblage of the other. These recognized a potent symbol when they saw one and hoisted the corpse as their banner. Henceforth they called themselves the Dead Rabbits, an epithet whose pungency was not diminished by the fact that in flash lingo ‘dead’ was an intensifier meaning ‘best’ and a ‘rabbit’ was a tough guy. Further distancing themselves from their former parent body, the Dead Rabbits sewed red stripes down the outer seams of their pants; the Roach Guards continued to sport blue ones.”
More Afflictor Luc Sante posts:
Long Form pointed me to a great post on Ptak Science about the history of hobo language and lexicons. It includes the above “Glossary of Slanguage,” taken from an anonymous 1946 pamphlet called “Hobo Exposed, or How to be a Hobo.”
More Afflictor hobo-related posts:
Wired has a story by Spencer Ackerman about plants being engineered by biologist June Medford to detect explosives. Expect them to be in pots in our airports very soon. An excerpt:
“Picture this at an airport, perhaps in as soon as four years: A terrorist rolls through the sliding doors of a terminal with a bomb packed into his luggage (or his underwear). All of a sudden, the leafy, verdant gardenscape ringing the gates goes white as a sheet. That’s the proteins inside the plants telling authorities that they’ve picked up the chemical trace of the guy’s arsenal.
It only took a small engineering nudge to deputize a plant’s natural, evolutionary self-defense mechanisms for threat detection. ‘Plants can’t run and hide,’ says June Medford, the biologist who’s spent the last seven years figuring out how to deputize plants for counterterrorism. ‘If a bug comes by, it has to respond to it. And it already has the infrastructure to respond.’”
Tags: June Medford, Spencer Ackerman
"The toy has to be a human shaped Stretch Armstrong though, with the corn syrup inside." (Image by Alex Beattie.)
I am in this band called Sediment Club that is making a music video. we have been looking on ebay for a reasonably priced stretch armstrong toy for this one scene, but we’ve been having a hard time. If you have one of these toys that still stretches, and would be willing to work something out, please email us. we don’t need any collector items or rare toys, it can be beat up and scoffed or used or whatever, as long as it can still stretch. we only need it for one short scene, so if you’d even want to rent it out to us for the day, that would be fine, too. we wouldn’t need it after the scene anyway. we aren’t on a huge budget, but we can pay you $20 if you want to sell and $15 if you want to rent the toy out. if anything it would be helping artists make weird art. we’ll give you a copy of the video when it’s done.
the toy has to be a human shaped stretch armstrong though, with the corn syrup inside.
Before the Super Bowl was sold as a global event, it was a national one. At Super Bowl III in the Orange Bowl, a trio of Apollo 8 astronauts led the crowd–which included Joe and Ted Kennedy, Bob Hope and Spiro Agnew– in pledging allegiance to the U.S. flag. The Florida A&M University marching band provided the halftime entertainment.
Tags: Bob Hope, Joe Kennedy, Spiro Agnew, Ted Kennedy
"They receive visitors of the other sex, and ply their vocation on the streets for a livelihood."
Alison Leigh Cowan of the City Room at the New York Times has an interesting piece about an 1870 guidebook, The Gentleman’s Companion, which was a directory of brothels and streetwalkers in Manhattan. The Times got to briefly handle a crumbling copy that is kept under lock and key at the New-York Historical Society, but there’s a digital version for everyone to read. A few excerpts from the publication follow. (I’ve left the writing as it was, though some of it is patchy.)
••••••••••
In passing up Broadway, any evening, between the hours of 7 and 11 o’clock, one is surprised to see so many well-dressed and comely females whose ages range from fifteen to twenty-five years, unattended by companions of the opposite sex.
These young ladies are Nymphes de Pave or as they familiarly termed ‘Cruisers’ have furnished rooms in which they receive visitors of the other sex, and ply their vocation on the streets for a livelihood.
As a general fact, these girls are smart. good-looking, well-educated and are neat and prepossessing in appearance. This is especially the case with those who are called ‘Badgers,’ but more widely known as panel thieves. These plunderers have had full swing, of late, and have robbed many an unsuspecting stranger of his all. The sooner justice puts an end to their swindling career, the better it will be for public and for the girls themselves.”
••••••••••
"It is a third class house where may be found the lowest class of courtezans."
The house No. 58 West Houston street, is kept by Mrs. Mayer who furnishes the best accommodations for ladies and gentlemen. This house is kept in a very quiet and orderly manner. The next house, No. 55, is kept by Miss Ada Blaghfield, the dashing brunette, who has eight boarders, both blondes and brunettes. These are a pretty lot of girls, of pleasing and engaging manners. It is regarded as a first class house, very quiet and orderly and is visited by some of the first citizens.
••••••••••
The establishment at No. 111 Spring street is a house of assignation kept by Hattie Taylor. It is a third class house where may be found the lowest class of courtezans. It is patronized by roughs and rowdies, and gentlemen who turn their shirts wrong side out when the other side is dirty.
Tags: Alison Leigh Cowan, Hattie Taylor, Miss Ada Blaghfield, Mrs. Mayer
IBM celebrates its century mark with a 30-minute film called “They Were There,” which was directed by Errol Morris and scored by Philip Glass. I interviewed Morris once, and I was depressed when he told me how much trouble he has raising money for his amazing documentaries. That’s probably true of every non-fiction filmmaker who isn’t Michael Moore. Well, at least there are coporate gigs to pay the bills.
Boing Boing pointed me to a remarkable site called “Marshall McLuhan Speaks: Centennial 2011,” which celebrates what would have been the media philosopher’s 100th birthday. It contains clips of McLuhan opining about things he saw on the horizon that others didn’t. It’s amazing to think how celebrated and discredited McLuhan was in such short order during the ’60s and ’70s, but I think his ideas are mostly a good legacy. A transcript of McLuhan’s words from 1966, describing what sounds very much like the Internet:
“Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have been 5,000 copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems, and they at once xerox, with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where we’re heading under electronic information conditions.”
More Afflictor posts about Marshall McLuhan:
Tags: Marshall McLuhan
"The searcher after health and beauty must blow as large a bubble as she can while seated."
Society has come up with many ways to drive women crazy, but few of them involve blowing soap bubbles. One such instance is described in this groundbreaking health reporting in the September 27, 1902 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“The latest suggestion for acquiring health and beauty is to practice bubble blowing with a clay pipe. It is claimed that if a woman will adhere to the practice for a reasonable length of time she will find her cheeks have become plump and the contour of her neck decidedly improved. Blowing bubbles is a similar operation to the deep breathing exercises now so highly recommended, and the searcher after health and beauty must blow as large a bubble as she can while seated, blowing slowly and gradually, for fear of bursting the bubble. After a few minutes the exercise is repeated standing.
Then she lies flat on her back on the floor with chin as high as possible and blows as long as she can, the first bubble slowly and then as rapidly as possible.”
"No poop."
We are a green building company seeking baby diapers. Urine is ok. No poop.
We use them as a base in our green roofs.
The diapers hold huge amounts of water and the urine is good fertilizer.
Turn the world green! Keep those diapers out of the landfill and help make green roofs!
Forget Purell dispensers, this hospital needs condom machines and gun racks.
As America fiddles, China continues to move into a more sustainable future, this time with a solar-powered train station in Nanjing that will allow for clean and efficient rail travel. (Thanks Reddit.) An excerpt from a post by Tracy McGill on the Metaefficient blog:
“Efficiency abounds in China as the world’s largest building integrated photovoltaic project prepares to power the railway station where some of the world’s fastest high speed trains pass through. China Sunergy, a solar cell and module manufacturer based in Nanjing, China, has recently signed a deal with CEEG (Nanjing) Solar Energy Research Institute to supply the 7MW solar modules for the Nanjing South Railway Station. When it’s finished, the Nanjing South Railway Station will be one of the most energy efficient public buildings in China.”
“Dear Sarah, Beverly and All, I am enjoying the trip and safe so far. I slept all night at Snyder, Texas, at the Strayhorn Motel and feel rested. I sure wish you were with me. Today I went to Carlsbad Caverns. Love, Bill. P.S. I am sending you and Beverly a package from a souvenir store near here.”
During a 1958 visit to New Mexico, Bill Bragg sent a postcard to his wife at their home in Macon, Georgia. It just recently arrived after being lost for 52 years. Thankfully, the Braggs had never moved. Ed Grisamore of the Macon Telegraph has a story about the long-delayed card. An excerpt:
“The 5-cent postcard — with a few bumps, bruises, blue-ink smears and a 3-cent stamp barely hanging on — somehow reached its final destination.
The postmark was Nov. 10, 1958. It had been mailed from Whites City, N.M.
Oh, well. Better late than never.
A lot of things have changed, though.
Wilmer ‘Bill’ Bragg Jr. was a 30-year-old Marine when he penned those words. He’s now an 82-year-old great-grandfather and needs a magnifying glass to read them.
The Braggs still live on the same property along Liberty Church Road. It has been in Sarah’s family since 1943.
‘This incident is extremely rare and, over the course of postal history, it is always a great moment when we are able to deliver the mail no matter what condition it is in,’ said Nancy Ross, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Service in the South Georgia District.”
Tags: Bill Bragg, Ed Grisamore, Nancy Ross, Sarah Btagg
Stock being sold al fresco on Wall Street on October 2, 1920.
Not so long ago, the New York Curb Exchange was a place where small companies could literally sell stock on the street with the aid of what were called curbside brokers. The above 1920 photo from Bain News Service captures the mad scene. More about the Curb Exchange from Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City:
“Until 1921, the New York Stock Exchange–the largest trading floor in the city–was accompanied on Broad Street by the Curb Market, where outdoor brokers gathered around lampposts and mailboxes to transact business. In many ways, this was the outgrowth of the fact that some traders had not signed the Buttonwood Agreement in 1792, and thus had not been invited into the circle of brokers who moved into Tontine’s Coffee House as part of the official exchange. After the California gold rush brought more capital into New York, the Curb Market expanded to handle more transactions, often for companies deemed too small or too new to gain entrance to the New York Stock Exchange. (Many of these companies–like General Motors–did eventually graduate indoors.) In boom years, the Curb Market was sometimes trading 10 times the number of shares that were being sold on the Stock Exchange’s floor.”
(Image by George Grantham Bain Collection.)
McCracken discovered that "pitchers have very little control over what happens on balls hit into the field of play." (Image by schwenkenstein01.)
Arizona baseball stats geek Robert “Vörös” McCracken had the kind of idea that can make a career, but he instead watched his life come undone. McCracken was the wunderkind sabermetrician lauded in Moneyball for figuring out a radically different and improved way of ranking pitchers. It made him the next big thing in baseball numbers circles, the heir apparent to Bill James, and landed him a job with the Boston Red Sox. But bipolar disorder and a number of other setbacks led to unemployment, poverty and depression. Jeff Passan profiles McCracken and his current between-innings life in “Sabremetrician in Exile” for The Post Game on Yahoo! Sports. An excerpt:
“He visited a doctor, was diagnosed with a mild case of bipolar disorder and received a prescription for Seroquel, a popular antipsychotic drug that would help him sleep and prevent the ruminations.
‘At some point, if you’re not mentally well, nothing else matters,’ McCracken says. ‘Nothing good happens. You’re forced to make decisions. And because you’re forced, there’s no guarantee they’re the right ones. But they’re decisions you’ve got to make. I can either spend the rest of my life in an institution, or I can change the way I think about what I’m doing with the rest of my life. I can continue to ratchet up the stress levels and be the supergenius who makes millions of dollars, or I can calm down and be satisfied with my lot.’
Satisfaction is an ongoing battle. McCracken gave up baseball for a few years before he starting blogging about it again. The frequency of the posts petered out as his attention moved to soccer, and the demand for employment there exceeded any bites he got in baseball.
McCracken tried. He spoke with Cleveland and San Diego. Nothing materialized. Last year, he was hoping to get a job with the Diamondbacks, whose stadium is less than 30 miles from his home in Surprise, Ariz. Then GM Josh Byrnes was fired, and McCracken never heard from the organization again. He tries to understand why, whether his time with Boston hurt him or his mental illness scares teams off or his appearance — McCracken is significantly overweight – hinders his reputation.
All cop-outs, McCracken says.”
"Some of the tenements managed to boast a saloon, brothel, or dance hall on every floor."
An excerpt about raffish pre-Civil War New York saloons from Luc Sante’s great book Low Life:
“The low-class Bowery dives just emerging featured a novelty: no glasses. Drinks, at three cents per, were served from barrels stacked behind the bar via thin rubber tubes, the stipulation being that the customer would drink all he wanted until he had to stop for a breath. Needless to say, there were many who developed deep lung capacity and tricks of circular respiration in order to outwit the system. In the decades before the Civil War the worst dives were located on the waterfront, and they traded with a highly elastic clientele of sailors. Sailors were free spenders, rootless, and halfway untraceable; they were marks of the first order. The street most overrun by sailors was Water Street, and there some of the tenements managed to boast a saloon, brothel, or dance hall on every floor. Notable were John Allen’s saloon-cum-whorehouse and Kit Burns’ Sportsmen Hall, which was an entire three-story building in which every variety of vice was pursued, but none so famous as its matches to the death between terriers and rats, held in a pit in its first-floor amphitheater, hence the resort’s more common name, the Rat Pit. Commerce was aided by the fact that, whether through fluke or graft, Kit Burns’s was the terminus for one of the early stage transit lines.”
Tags: John Allen', Kit Burns, Luc Sante
Reddit pointed me to this 1987 commercial for what was a really cool and inexpensive black-and-white camcorder for kids, the Fisher-Price PXL 2000. It was a handheld camera that recorded footage using audio cassettes. Intended as a toy, the lo-res pixelvision product was a flop with kids but became a popular, artsy cult item with adults, especially indie filmmakers and graphic designers. It was created by Andrew Bergman, who passed away in 2007 at the young age of 57. An excerpt from a remembrance of the ecelctic inventor from a Stickley Museum newsletter:
“Andy was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, and schooled at Carnegie Mellon and Southern Illinois University, where he taught with prolific innovator Buckminster Fuller. In 1992, he formed the Bergman Design Consortium, a force in the toy design industry. As a self-taught sculptor and furniture designer, Andy spent many summers at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Island, Maine. Andy’s zest for life was abundant and was evident in his joyous creations.”
Tags: Andrew Bergman, Buckminster Fuller
"A delicate monkey fur trim around each tier."
I have this really beautiful 1920’s Silk and monkey fur cape.
It has multiple tiers of silk cascading around the entire cape, with a delicate monkey fur trim around each tier.
It has a lining of 100% silk also.
Considering its age it’s in quite good condition, with some minimal marks that aren’t noticeable when worn.
This looks very dramatic when worn and would be a great addition to any vintage clothing collection.
31″ long, one size fits all (0-16)
Asking $99 which is MUCH less than what I bought it for. This is a steal!
In 1972, scientist and Polaroid co-founder Dr. Edwin H. Land released the SX-70 collapsible instant camera, which featured a new type of self-developing film that required nothing of a photographer beyond a point and a click. In the October 27 issue of Life that year, Land unveiled his new invention and opined on the nature of creativity. In his description of the birth of the first Polaroid camera in the 1940s, he offers a pretty great explanation about the creative process in general. An excerpt:
Many people are creative but use their competence in ways so trivial that it takes them nowhere. Their kind of creativity is not cumulative. True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each depending on the one before and suggesting the one after. This kind of cumulative creativity led to the development of Polaroid photography.
One day when we were vacationing in Santa Fe in 1943 my daughter, Jennifer, who was then 3, asked me why she could not see the picture we had just taken of her. As I walked around that charming town, I undertook the task of solving the puzzle she had set for me.
Within the hour, the camera, the film and the physical chemistry became so clear that with a great sense of excitement I hurried to the place where a friend was staying, to describe to him in detail a dry camera which would give a picture immediately after exposure. In my mind it was so real that I spent several hours on this description.
Four years later we demonstrated the working system to the Optical Society of America. All that we at Polaroid had learned about making polarizers and plastics, and the properties of the viscous liquids, and the preparation of the microscopic crystals smaller than the wavelengths of light was preparation for that day in which I suddenly knew how to make a one-step photographic process. I learned enough about what would work in different fields to be able to design the camera and film in the space of that walk.•
___________________________
In 1970, Edwin H. Land gave a tour of the Polaroid company.
Tags: Edwin H. Land
1931 poster advertising Green Bay Packers vs. Providence Steam Rollers.
The Green Bay Packers, headed to the Super Bowl, are the only non-profit, publicly owned major-league American sports team. In a post for the New Yorker‘s News Desk blog, Dave Zirin explains how this unique arrangement came to be. An excerpt:
“In 1923, the Packers were just another hardscrabble team on the brink of bankruptcy. Rather than fold they decided to sell shares to the community, with fans each throwing down a couple of dollars to keep the team afloat. That humble frozen seed has since blossomed into a situation wherein more than a hundred thousand stockholders own more than four million shares of a perennial playoff contender. Those holding Packers stock are limited to no more than two hundred thousand shares, keeping any individual from gaining control over the club. Shareholders receive no dividend check and no free tickets to Lambeau Field. They don’t even get a foam cheesehead. All they get is a piece of paper that says they are part-owners of the Green Bay Packers. They don’t even get a green and gold frame for display purposes.”
Tags: Dave Zirin
