I have a friend who's a couple of decades older than me. Recently, he happened to mention that his daughter, when a teenager in the Sixties, had been a member of a hippie commune in Oregon, the Family of the Mystic Arts. He recalled that Life magazine had done a photospread on the commune back then.
I remarked that all of Life's photos were now online.
We found several photos. (Alas, his daughter is not pictured.)
One is posted below.
For the other two, I'm directing you to the Life archives, rather than reproduce them here.
Why?
Because they feature bare-breasted female children.
Yes, that's right. Due to the prevailing cultural insanity, this blog cannot safely feature photos which a general-interest G-rated magazine that sold millions of copies each week could show forty years ago.
So here's a little tribute to a more innocent and less paranoid time, when "weird" was almost the dominant cultural mode.
Old amusement park attractions are inevitably weird.
Consider the Crazy House once to be found in Felixstowe, UK.
These old postcard images come from the Flickr set of a fellow who uses the handle Photoaf.
The house was part of a Butlin's Amusement Park. For the history of the founder, Billy Butlin, eventually knighted for his recreational achievements, visit here.
Wouldn't you have loved to experience this park during its heyday, some seventy years ago?
Could Russ Meyer be considered the grandfather of the popular Deadwood TV show? Check out this trailer for his WILD GALS OF THE NAKED WEST, and decide for yourself.
It's time again to play "Name That List." Identify where the items in this list come from. Googling is cheating.
longbows, kidney daggers, swords, bills and pikes, jerkins, and knitted and worsted garments;
combs, razors, a 'piss pot', pomander, handheld sundials, urethral syringes, puncture syringe, trepan and feeding bottle;
human skeletal remains and bones of immature rat and small dog, butchered meat, fish bones, plum stones and peppercorns.
An unusual psychiatric disorder swept through Europe during the late Medieval period. Many people came to believe they were made of glass "and therefore likely to shatter into pieces." Historians call this the Glass Delusion.
A typical sufferer might have believed he was "a urinal, an oil lamp or other glass receptacle, or else he might himself be trapped within a glass bottle." (A "urinal" during the middle ages referred to a small flask... essentially a glass pee pee bottle.)
One famous early sufferer: the French king, Charles VI, who refused to allow people to touch him, and wore reinforced clothing to protect himself.
A 1561 medical account describes a patient "who had to relieve himself standing up, fearing that if he sat down his buttocks would shatter... The man concerned was a glass-maker from the Parisian suburb of Saint Germain, who constantly applied a small cushion to his buttocks, even when standing. He was cured of this obsession by a severe thrashing from the doctor, who told him that his pain emanated from buttocks of flesh."
In modern times, the glass delusion has disappeared. "Surveys of modern psychiatric institutions have only revealed two specific (uncorroborated) cases of the glass delusion. Foulché-Delbosc reports finding one Glass Man in a Paris asylum, and a woman who thought she was a potsherd was recorded at an asylum in Meerenberg."
One sign of the glass delusion's vanishing is that there's not much information about it on the internet. Not even a wikipedia entry about it. The above factoids came from "An odd kind of melancholy: reflections on the glass delusion in Europe," by Gill Speak, published in 1990 in the History of Psychiatry.
Medieval monks who had taken vows of silence developed a simple form of sign language to communicate (predating the development of modern sign language by centuries), and scholars know many of the signs they used. This could be potentially useful if you plan on doing any time travel (or try it out at a renaissance fair). From the essay "Sign Language and Gestures in Medieval Europe: Monasteries, Courts of Justice, and Society" by August Nitschke:
I want to eat: repeatedly move the first three fingers towards the mouth. I want to drink: place the tip of the thumb on the lips and tilt the fist like a bottle. I am fasting: press together the lips with thumb and forefinger Bread: make a circle using both your thumbs and the fingers next to them. Milk: place all the fingers of your right hand around the smallest finger of your left and stretch the latter, imitating someone who is milking. Honey: Let your tongue protrude for a moment and move your fingers close as if you intended to lick them. A book: stretch our your hand, moving it as if turning the page of a book. Crying: take the index finger, which has been placed below the eye, moving it downward twice. The Hallelujah: raise one hand and move the slightly curved upper side of the fingers in a way that suggests a flying motion. Fire: Blow on the tip of the forefinger, which is held pointing up. A fish: Keeping the fingers together, move the right hand, keeping it straight, in front of the body in a zigzag maner like a swimming animal.
Posted By: Alex | Date: Wed Oct 01, 2008 | Comments (5)
Category: History
I loved reading Harvey Comics as a kid, and into "adulthood." (They're not published anymore, alas.) Their universe was quintessentially wacked and weird. As famed comics scribe Grant Morrison has remarked in an interview, sometimes the willed naivete of Silver Age writers following the Comics Code produced much stranger stuff than any consciously avant-garde writer could.
Take the two page strip to the right for instance, from an old digest-reprint of some Casper stuff. To parse it is to risk madness.
Is Nightmare indeed a mare, ie, female? if not, and even if so, is that the gayest hairdo ever, on horse or human? Why does a forest gnome like to hang out with a ghost horse? Why is playing human cowboys popular among the gnomes? Likewise riding an airplane. And finally, how demented does a ghost horse have to be, to stick planks up its butt and into its chest, and then purr like a cat, all in an effort to emulate a mechanical device so as to placate a gnome?
How I miss Harvey Comics! Thank goodness Dark Horse is reprinting some.....
Category: Eccentrics, Hermits, Family, History, Pop Culture, Yesterday's Tomorrows, Hair Styling, 1960's