If I had worked two months or so on a blanket to sell at this shop, it would certainly be disheartening to drop it off for my puny commission. Although it did literally take from 2 months to a year for a Navajo rug to be produced, or created rather...as that seems far more appropriate...the going "rate" around 1850 was fifty dollars. Today, a well-made rug may be worth $400 or more. Still, way too cheap. The examples here, if you can get past the visitors and their insulting big friends, look like nice ones to me.
Anonymous snapshot (Roadside "Native American" Sculptures at Trading Post) circa 1950 Collection Jim Linderman
SEE ALSO FREE PREVIEW AND ORDER In Situ: American Folk Art in Place by Jim Linderman Ebook or Paperback HERE at Blurb.com
COPYRIGHT STEPHEN MILANOWSKI
COPYRIGHT STEPHEN MILANOWSKIWhile the site here may seem to be about photos, art and antiques, It is actually about stories. I'd like to consider myself a visual artist of sorts, one who uses things to tell stories.There may be no better combination of "thing and story" than this one, and it comes to me courtesy master photographer Stephen Milanowski, who fortunately got in touch after I posted a big head. I found MY big head in the rafters of an antique store in Spring Lake, Michigan, where it cried out to me for several years before I took him down, talked THEM down (in price) and took him home. I posted the big baby HERE.Imagine my surprise when I received a splendid present in the mail. A substantial and beautiful catalog from the Museum of Modern Art, their 2012 Appointment Calendar. Mr. Milanowski has a photo in the book, one which is in the MOMA permanent collection.Nice as the book is, the card enclosed is what surprised me! Same scale, same surface, same curious holes in the head...My big baby had a FATHER and he had his portrait taken by an artist.Mr. Milanowski (who has a splendid website HERE with some serious examples of his work over the years) later took the time to tell me the story. If you deal with the kind of material I love, the story is frequently as important as the object..and this is a good one.I'll let Stephen tell it in his own words."How the Hell indeed. Some time ago, I believe on a FB posting of yours...I happened to notice, purely by chance, a snapshot of you in a den-like room, presumably in your home--and this snapshot showed you in that room with some of your collection...and I suddenly notice partly seen, in the corner of your room...Mrs. Labelle's Papier Mache Head. The Head I Photographed. And, my question was...How the Hell did Jim get his hands on Mrs. Labelle's Head?"
"The short version: before my wife and I & children moved to Madison, we lived in East Grand Rapids (my home town) for many years. On our street in EGR there lived a goofy old lady who, when I was introduced to her--I realized that she was the girls gym teacher and drama teacher at my High School--Catholic Central. I was introduced to her on her front porch...and I could tell that her house was worth being nosy about...I could see rampant pink everywhere in the interior--just by looking through the porch windows. When I then told her that I was an alum of the HS where she long taught (though then she was long retired)--she immediately invited me in--and I could tell this house was going to be a photographer's paradise. Mrs. Labelle gave me a tour...even into her basement...and it was there that she kept at least these 3 great and ancient papier mache Mardi Gras- style heads that she had long ago made for some drama class at Catholic Central. I flipped when I saw them and immediately asked if I could borrow them for photography; she said yes...and there you are."
"Every year in our neighborhood she would put the heads out on her porch for Halloween night. I should have asked her right then and there if she would sell them to me...but I could tell that she was quite attached to them."
"What I assume happened next is this--we later moved to Madison, she eventually died...and someone either got them in an estate sale...or they ended up in an antique store. And somewhere along the line...the head presented itself to you. Fill me in on the rest of the story."
"By the way--the promo card I sent you is also a Head by Mrs. Labelle."
SM
Stephen Milanowski also has work in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, The High Museum of Art and the Polaroid Collection. His Facebook page is HEREThe Museum of Modern Art Store (which is the finest shop for gifts in Manhattan) is HEREMrs. Labelle's Big Head Collection Jim Linderman
Another pair of honest. hard working guys (see post of yesterday) but today our worker class members are tin articulated railroad men. Bonus below is Warren Buffet singing the song to the Chinese.Tin articulated toy, circa 1900? Collection Jim LindermanJIM LINDERMAN DULL TOOL DIM BULB BOOKS AND EBOOK ORDERS HERELooks like Warren is getting better along with the rest of the world than some Republicans I know. Railroads are good here too...one can move tons freight with a few gallons of gas and without the diesel pollution. Warren seems to have the right idea.
Distlefinks and such threaten to bury a likely commissioned BBQ Pig at the Jacob Zook Hex sign factory and house of crafts in Paradise, PA. I believe I remember seeing that very pig sign rotting away behind a restaurant which served breakfast in a skillet 20 miles past the Delaware Gap! I had just filled up and didn't have the gumption go back in to ask if I could have it, nor the energy to steal it. It COULD have been a "later edition" as it looks like Zook could crank them out.
YES Zook is still in business and has a most handsome site HERE
Zook's hexes have "traveled to the fifty states and many foreign lands" according to the reverse.
Jacob Zook House of Crafts Postcard photograph by Jim E. Hess, no date. Collection Jim Linderman.SEE ALSO IN SITU: American Folk Art in Place Book or Ebook HERE
Caption on reverse "September 2, 1938 L.A Calif. Afternoon crowd now leaving the circus. Sideshow Band was playing in the midway."
Look close and you will see one of the acts was "The World's Lowest Type Human" and I hate to speculate on that one. Suzie born with the Skin of an Elephant.
If the date on the reverse of this photo is correct, you are seeing the sun go down in the afternoon and the lights go out in the evening. Hagenbeck-Wallace ceased operation the same year.
For those of you animal rights folks out there, in 1913 the circus lost 8 elephants, 21 lions and 8 performing horses in a flood in 1913. That pales in comparison to the train wreck they had five years later, in which an engineer further down the track fell asleep at the throttle and crashed his train into the rear of the Hagenbeck's. Kerosene lamps on the circus train spread fire immediately to the wooden cars, and 86 circus members died, another 127 were injured.
AT THE CIRCUS IN BLACK AND WHITE is a occasional feature on Dull Tool Dim Bulb. This is number 31 in the series.
Original Snapshot 1938 Collection Jim LindermanOrder Dull Tool Dim Bulb / Vintage Sleaze / Jim Linderman Books and Tablet downloads for iPad HERE
I'd like to have met this fellow.
See his brother at rest HERE.
Anonymous Snapshot circa 1940 Scarecrow Collection Jim LindermanOrder Dull Tool Dim Bulb books and ipad downloads by Jim Linderman HERE
The best "no trespassing" signs are the ones you have to trespass to read. You can click to enlarge this one, but it won't help any. Usually, the worse the sign looks, the most you want to follow the directions. I once had a shotgun pulled on me near a no trespassing sign. I had stopped not to read it, but to steal what I thought was portions of a LONG abandoned whirligig nearby. I was wrong, but learned having a gun drawn on you isn't really so bad. I was worried more about buckshot in the rental car than I was for my life.I saw those nice boys on American Pickers buy a factory made porcelain no trespassing sign this week. Two comments. Boys? That weren't no good no trespassing sign, and you don't even KNOW "Free Styling"
Original Snapshot, circa? Collection Jim LindermanBUY DULL TOOL DIM BULB BOOKS HERE
I never did find out what sideshow game Roly-Poly was, but if they really did award a prize to every player you can be sure it was from under the counter, not from the wall display in back.I will, however, take the slightest excuse to share Bob Wills, especially when it is a number performed by the great Tommy Duncan. Tommy was smooth as the expensive whiskey Bob was able to drink to excess every day, but what made the pair work so well was the suppressed, seething tension in Tommy's voice every time the lovable drunk buffoon stepped on his lines with a patented "Aaah Haah" aside. You can tell Tommy wanted to throttle Bob, the biggest country ham in the state of Texas, but it was a good gig.He finally left...and as the clip below shows, he should have stayed. Still, you have to see a real roly poly play the Bob Wills part. Gnaw on a biscuit. Roly-Poly Carnival Sideshow Sign. Circa 1930 Collection Jim LindermanORDER JIM LINDERMAN BOOKS AND eBOOKS HERE
A circa 1880 hand-painted tintype. It is remarkable to consider the photographic process which resulted in an actual unique physical object one could hold, paint by hand and frame has gone from black and white to gone in two or three lifetimes. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but the warmth of an image may have gone with the film.
As far as the public goes, each step forward in the photographic process helped the producer become more effective (and profit more) while leaving the consumer holding less of a product in his hand. While it is an art, and it is progress... it is easy to view photography from a simple supply/demand capitalistic perspective. Dags, so beautiful and shimmering, an amazing thing folks will still circle to see at a show, turned to cruddy metal tintypes which were churned out like pizza at the shore in one lifetime.
It wasn't long before paper came and paper went. Instant photos followed and dropped the quality even further. Now the darkroom is empty and the bits and bytes which tore the guts out of reproduced music have done the same to pictures.More and more recording artists are releasing their product once again on vinyl. As I understand it, digital music provides only a very small percentage of the aural quality not only possible, but once common. Once even standard. The consumer loses but pays more for it than ever before.
What is yet to be fully understood is what we have lost in pictures. Is the photo above particularly beautiful or desirable? Nope, not at all. But you could hold it in your hands.
"Full Plate" tintype (ferrotype) painted by hand circa 1880. Collection Jim Linderman
Dull Tool Dim Bulb Book Catalog HERE
Years ago, I had the fortunate pleasure of visiting one of the most prominent collectors of American folk art on a regular basis. Besides teaching me much, I was learning at the feet of a master. (Literally...there was no room in his house and I had to sit on the floor.) We traded things back and forth monthly. I would study them, he would study them, and once in a while swaps were made. The stuff didn't have much financial value then, and I'm not sure if it does today.I once brought the collector three huge carnival knock-down targets, each about 3 feet tall, with effigies of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo painted on them. I didn't want Hitler in my house, so I hoped to trade them for an equally not valuable whittled miniature cane he had by a carver from Georgia. (Years later I saw Saddam Hussein painted on some carnival punks at the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, so things never change.)
I cabbed them down and presented them saying "check out THESE punks!"
What surprised me was that he immediately asked me why I called them "punks" and I really didn't have an answer. I'd just always known carnival knock-downs as punks. The collector was puzzled, which surprised me, as he had earlier curated museum shows having to do with esoteric material culture from the sideshow and such, and he certainly owned some. I figured no one could puzzle the master.He told me "punk" was a term used to refer to a younger homosexual man dating an older man. I had no idea. To me at the time, punks were the Ramones. Or as Joe Franklin, perennial host of a local TV show called them "The Ray Mones" while appearing as puzzled by them as my collector friend was at my punks.I knew gay "punks" were called "twinks" which I believe may still be in common usage. I'm a little isolated here, so I don't know for sure, and we should refer to all without derogatory terms anyway. But that also makes sense, as my collector friend was Eastern big-city based, and I suspect knock-down targets received their punk name in the Midwest.If you look up punk in a carny lingo dictionary, the slang term has numerous uses. As a rube, a child. a trick, a fake fetus in a bottle, a person primed for a scam, an "easy target" as it were...though the punks here were intended to be a hard target. That's why they had fur...to create the illusion of width, and the carny would also encourage the punk in FRONT of him to lean in "for a good toss" because you would then be throwing off balance. He would watch as ball after ball whiffed through the fur not moving the targets at all.
I found these androgynous punks in an antique mall. My "axis of evil" punks are long gone and I can't find a picture, but I cribbed one of a similar group from an auction website below. Mine were better, as they were entirely made by hand, but these will give you an idea. As a bonus, see Marky and Joey "Ray Mone" jabber it up with Joe!
Group of three unremarkable carnival knock-down ball toss targets (Above) Collection Jim LindermanDULL TOOL DIM BULB BOOK AND EBOOK CATALOG HERE
