#weird old things

[ehdub-thundercat]

[myaire21]

20 Unforgettable Moments from Ralph Bakshi's 'The Lord of the Rings'

20 of the best and most unforgettable moments in gif form from Ralph Bakshi's 1978 'The Lord of The Rings'.

I...just.... can´t

[lafindesiecle]

Something oddly fascinating and eerie about this -- 100 Abandoned Houses, documenting urban decay and abandonment in Detroit and the once-wealthy neighborhoods on its outskirts.

[lafindesiecle]

MARTIN LEWIS

More things we know by now: I am, it seems, a completely incurable nostalgist for all things New York and something of a weird local history fetishist,. (Wait! We need to point out some greatest hits of my obsession! The jail on Ludlow for suffragettes! Lady pirates of the Hudson! The dangers of petticoats in snow! My undying love for Bruce Davidson's Brooklyn Gang!)  Naturally, the sketches, prints, and etchings of Australian-born artist Martin Lewis (apparently a friend of Edward Hopper, whom I'm always weirdly drawn to for similarly NYC-biased-reasons) cater pretty directly to that weakness.  

Lewis' drawings and etchings appeal to me so much, I think, because despite being from the 1920's and 30's, they still look so familiar to me -- the stylishly dressed midtown crowds pushing against the wind, the angles of the street corners, the open fire hydrants on hot summer days -- streetcars and cloche hats aside, this still looks pretty much like every day to me.  But mostly I think it's something about the quality of light and shadow he captures -- on streets still busy at night, during a thunderstorm, at dusk on a fire escape -- which I don't really have much to say about other than that is is exactly how it looks here and this is how I think of this city, as mostly grey with extremes of light and shadow. Am I too grossly romantic? Either way, the images are pretty awesome.

More after the jump, but you can also find a plethora of them online from the Dia and at the Brooklyn Museum.

[lafindesiecle]

hell's angels

SO. My obsession with the LIFE Magazine archives has come up before, as well as my affinity for photos of white trash gangs of the 50s and 60s (how many times can I post Bruce Davidson photos?) Also I have recently become a Person Who Watches TV On The Internet after years of being a Person Who Does Not Watch TV And Makes Snarky Comments About People Who Do, which I feel medium-serious conflicted about, but either way amongst the TV I have been watching on the internet is Sons of Anarchy, so maybe I just secretly am into really badass motorcycle chicks and trashy clothes or something.  SO IT IS NOT A SURPRISE that I basically peed myself over this formerly-unpublished photo story about Hells Angels in California in the mid-60's.  CAN WE PLEASE NOTE the a.) curlers and b.) broken nose above?!

More after the jump, and the full story (minus crappy watermarks from saving) here. 

[lafindesiecle]

The Delineator, published by the Butterick pattern company from 1873 to 1937 (thanks, Wikipedia!) was one of the preeminent women's fashion magazines of its time.  There's plenty of copies and scans of various issues, ads, and illustrations floating around eBay and the internet... It's crazy comparing this -- text-heavy, flowery descriptions of the latest fashions, complete with intricate etched drawings -- with today's magazines or even, you know, MY BLOG.

Something else to note in reading these early issues is that a huge portion of it is dedicated to explaining to women how they can make these fashions for themselves or what fabrics will work best, though I guess the fact that it was circulated by a pattern/sewing company had some effect on that, as they sneak in a lot of references to their available patterns. (More of that 1883 issue here, and a 1891 one here.)

Prior to photography, obviously, fashion magazines had to rely heavily on illustration and text -- I loved browsing the cover archives of the magazines and seeing how their cover design changed to reflect not only the fashions, but the developing art styles and flexibility of new printing techniques of the times. (Those first ones? Probably all etched and letterpressed... crazy... Must have limited layout and production so much.)  Some examples below from the magazine's full run, more complete archive here.

[lafindesiecle]

So we're all sick to death of hearing about the Alice in Wonderland by now (despite the awesomeness of those MMM/Ann D/Kirkwood/etc Alice in Wonderland sketches I posted a while back) but, seriously, bear with me here: the first-ever film version of the novel, a pretty impossibly delightful short silent film from 1903. (How great is that double-exposure Cheshire cat? And the fact that it basically looks like a stop-motion of a play, since, uh, that's sort of what film WAS in 1903?)

At the time, it was the longest film ever made in the UK (at 12 minutes, or, you know, 800 feet) and -- as Tim Burton did 117 years later with Helena Bonham Carter -- it turns out that the wicked Red Queen is played by the director's wife. More info from the British Film Institute (who restored the film) here.

[lafindesiecle]

Bushwick BK posted this great video of a 1976 NBC newscast about 'youth gangs' in the good old 83rd precinct, which in the 70's was the precinct with the most crime in all of NYC -- and has been my home for the last year.  (Interestingly, many of them seem to be skinny white kids in hoodies and denim jackets who look more or less like my friends who live in Bushwick now.  Also was surprised by the lack of racial and class commentary in the whole feature, which is of course almost always mentioned as in most of today's discussions about Bushwick and crime.)

Related and interesting, from the NY Daily News archives -- this August 1977 exposé on the "Dying Neighborhood" of Bushwick., covering lootings during the '77 blackout and stranger things, such as the eviction of locals for the construction of public housing (weird, never thought about that.) They wrote: "Like the South Bronx, blocks of Brownsville, Harlem and the lower East Side, [Bushwick] is a shell of shattered dreams - the rotted body of a neighborhood consumed by the cancer of urban decay that is even now creeping into other sections of the city."