"The horror!" Antique automatons

Creepiest gifs you ever saw!

I gif too much. I'm just too much of a giffer in every sense. And now this new conflict comes into my life (as if I needed one): I'm finding out I pronounce the name of my beloved mini-vids wrong, or at least wrong by the reckoning of the geniuses who invented them.

I'm spozed to say "jiff", like the peanut butter. "Giff" like I've been saying it doesn't make it cuz it isn't correct. Even worse is the way I used to pronounce it, spelled-out-like: gee eye eff.

Why NOT gee eye eff? We say "pee en gee", don't we, not "ping" or "pinge"? The arguments about this on the internet are endless and truly heated. I'm going to have to come up with my own bloody name, but until then. . .

Creepiness delights me, always has, and even more as I get older and closer to my own inevitable creepage. When I found troves of Victorian automatons on YouTube, by yar, I was off to the races.

This is Nancy the life-size automaton, and she can knit and tap her foot and stuff, but who cares about all that when you have a face like this? Those shifty eyes are something to behold. Worse than human.

Was this supposed to be pleasant at one time, do you suppose? Or did people enjoy a bit of after-dinner queasiness now and again?

They don't know how to make dolls like this any more. It would be banned immediately.

This is a rabbit violinist, mighty ratty by today's standards. I wish he'd stop looking at me like that.

I call this one Hellhound.

Saving the best 'til last, this one was featured in my Dead Monk in the Middle of the Road post of a while back. I apologize for the teeny size and graininess, but it was all I could find. This astonishing artifact came from 1560 and represents a monk who looks diseased, if not demented. He seems to speak across the centuries.

But what is he saying? If we could hear his utterances from deep in the mists of antiquity, what would they be?

"Bluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluh!"

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Cavalleria Rusticana as you've never heard it before

This was another instance of coming in the back door: I was trying to find the name of one of those old penny-arcade flip machines where you put in a penny or a nickel and turned a crank and looked in a little window and a big revolving thingammy with photos attached to it flipped around and provided a crude kind of motion picture. These were peep-show things that often showed mildly dirty movies, all of 30 seconds long. I couldn't find the name of it, so couldn't really get any information or see any YouTube clips on it. At some point, having gone through zoetrope and a bunch of other names I can't remember because they were so weird, gizmatrons and walbergerscopes and stuff, the name mutoscope popped out.

A funny thing to call it, but that's what it was. The few existing functional mutoscopes are pretty pathetic to look at, the photos all rotten at the edges like the underside of a mushroom. Women dance around with scanty clothing on, a man touches a woman's leg, two women get into bed and tickle each other, etc. Hot stuff. Ministers and arbiters of morals thundered against them:

Public response

In 1899, The Times printed a letter inveighing against "vicious demoralising picture shows in the penny-in-the-slot machines. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the corruption of the young that comes from exhibiting under a strong light, nude female figures represented as living and moving, going into and out of baths, sitting as artists' models etc. Similar exhibitions took place at Rhyl in the men's lavatory, but, owing to public denunciation, they have been stopped."


A collector's site describes the contents of one such reel, "Birth of the Pearl" which "pictures a nude woman rising from a seashell and standing." The site notes "this reel has some damage to a whole chunk of photos. They are all in a section where there was full frontal nudity and the cards are quite worn off."

Pretty hot stuff, eh? But then I started to think about a movie I saw eons ago (EONS, EONS!: see former post) called Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson. I had a thing for Joel Grey then, and he looked plain sexy in this, with a full beard that was obviously real. He looked downright Biblical in it, and I lusted. Anyway, at some point one of BB's girl friends trucks a sort of musical contraption into the Wild West show. It was a big ornate wooden cabinet with a revolving metal disc in it, and it played this unearthly music. It took me a while to track these down, too: they turned out to be just music boxes, except with exotic names like 27 Inch Regina (which, come to think of it, sounds vaguely obscene). I think they produce a sound from another time, lyrical and sweet, reminiscent of antique merry-go-rounds and Victorian parlours with tweeting canaries. The tuning is actually pretty good on these two, and the pieces complex.

I don't know who made these, or how, but it must have been quite an art. I LOVE the clatters and bangs at the start and finish, reminding us that these are, after all, hunks of tin. A marvel of design and musicianship. The way the notes decay or die off is sweet and bell-like, making the notes float into each other in a way I find enchanting.

Rah, old dolly!

Har.

The Three Ages of Man: Car; Car;Car . . .

I was going to call this post "and we'll have fun, fun, fun. . . "

On the weekend, I went to my very first Car Show. I have no interest in cars whatsoever, except that once every few years, I stumble upon an antique car that literally takes my breath away. The last time it happened, it was a burgundy-and-cream Mercury Westergard from about 1940, one of those massive, bulbous cars with a sloping back and rear tires that barely showed. For some reason this automobile stopped me in my tracks.

Hoping for a similar find, I trudged through what seemed like miles of people's most cherished babies. Old guys had worked on these for years (and maybe a few young guys with tattoos and no job). It showed. Only a few came from pre-war times, and most had been souped up or otherwise tinkered with, the running boards removed, the engines jutting out unnaturally like tumors. This was too bad, because I love Harold Lloyd cars most of all.

So I was obsessed with a search for that 1940 Mercury, hoping it was owned by a local. I didn't find it, but 3/4 of the way through our hot trudge on a sultry August afternoon, I was stopped in my tracks.

I didn't know what it was, but it was stunning, the ultimate in beauty and grace, all wetly gleaming in chrome, cherry red and pristine white.

"It's a 1961 Corvette," my husband said. (He didn't need those little white cards behind the windshields to tell him the make and year of a car. Ever. In fact, he identified a few that were so exotic, it made my head spin.)

People sigh and drool over antique Corvettes. Now I know why. It looked kind of like a skin you'd slide into, erotic. There was no back seat. (The few '20s cars I saw had boxy carriage-like interiors, with roomy, plush, sloping back seats that seemed specifically designed for sex. They also had rumble seats in the back, completely separate and open to the elements, a perfect place to stash your mother-in-law. People were ingenious in those days.)

I don't know why this car held me transfixed. I'd post a picture of it, but I can't decide which one brings more tears to my eyes. Anyway, it led me to my usual wild goose chase for information, this time on the History of the Automobile.

If you ask people who invented the car, 95% of them will say, "Henry Ford." According to that impeccable source, Wikipedia, Ford came around about 200 years after the first experimental prototypes. These were wheezy little things with sewing machine engines, some even driven by steam. (This is why one of the above models has that Jiffy Pop thing attached to it, likely blowing the car along with hot air.)

Inventors were thinking in terms of "horseless carriages" for a long time, so wheels were huge and spoked, with hard rubber tires. About a thousand different people were working on the design, so I can't name any of them because it would be so incredibly boring.

I can't get this to cut and paste, but it's too good to leave out, so I'll transcribe it by hand (while trying to eat my peanut butter toast and drink Crystal Lite iced tea):

"By 1784, William Murdoch had built a working model of a steam carriage in Redruth, and in 1801 Richard Trevithick was running a full-sized vehicle on the road in Camborne. Such vehicles were in vogue for a time, and over the next decades such innovations as hand brakes, multi-speed transmissions, and better steering developed. Some were commercially successful in providing mass transit, until a backlash against these large speedy vehicles resulted in passing a law, the Locomotive Act, in 1865 requiring self-propelled vehicles on public roads in the United Kingdom be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag and blowing a horn. This effectively killed road auto development in the UK for most of the rest of the 19th century, as inventors and engineers shifted their efforts to improvements in railway locomotives. The law was not repealed until 1896, although the need for the red flag was removed in 1878."

(Why is it that I can hear John Cleese saying, "And now for something completely different"?)

Anyway, enough of this fishy-sounding, probably concocted history written by a bunch of unemployed geeks who live on beer and Pringles. The process of developing the modern automobile was kind of like a steel mill where iron is melted down in a big blast furnace and spat out as ingots. Everybody poured something into the mix. Everyone stole from everyone else. Gradually, something cohered, solidified and emerged.

One of the first designers, back in about 1800, was named Benz. The names Daimler and Diesel came up as well. These were men, not things. This seems incredible to me, but there it is. Anyway, when the internal combustion engine was finally perfected somewhere around 1910, it was hailed as the greatest invention in the history of mankind.

No more horse dung! No more horses, period, except for the fast set who could afford polo ponies. Apart from the wheezy, rickety noises and familiar explosions, the car was deemed marvelous, and eventually, nearly everyone embraced it as a universally Good Thing.

Right. Until it began to poison the air and water to such a degree that our future survival is now very dicey indeed.

We're married to our cars. We conceive our children in them, we shine and wax them tenderly, and (especially) covet the ones we want and can't have. Some people's lives literally revolve around them. I couldn't give a shit, except when I see something like that sublime cherry-and-white '61 'Vette.

Oh OK, I'll try to find a picture already. I wanted to marry it, it was so beautiful. It exuded effortless grace and genius in design like few other material objects I've seen.

Maybe in another five years I'll see another one. Or not? I kind of wish they'd all go away. I'd have the horse shit back in a heartbeat.

OK, so. Here is my dream car

OK, it was something like this. But really, not even close.

It was like something out of a Popeye cartoon of the '40s, the really old ones, I mean the Fleischer, good ones. (I'll write about them later.) Cars already looked like cartoons then, like giant bubbles, bulbous.

And huge.

As I sit here slurping down a giant mug of Red Rose tea and eating McVitie's Digestive Biscuits (can you tell I'm Canadian?), I'm trying to piece together just what happened. This was an Event such as I only experience a couple of times a year. A sighting of beauty so sighful, it felt it almost like an affliction until I had told my husband all about it.

I was standing at a bus stop, bored, not expecting anything, vaguely aware of traffic whizzing by. But behind me was a leisurely lane leading (like the alliteration?) to the shopping area: Safeway, Canadian Tire, and other stuff.

I don't know why I turned around. As the Beatles song says, "Had it been another day, I might have looked the other way". But I did turn around, and was assailed by a vision in burgundy and cream.

Burgundy, cream, and chrome. Remember chrome? This vision had a mouth, a rather fierce grille with teeth. There followed a slipstream of shape. A little aggressive at the front, almost like a nose; bulby around the front tires; high roof with absurdly small windows, then. . . a taper.

A waterfall of car, a cascading, almost down to a point. There appeared to be no back wheels at all. The rear of the car sank right down into the pavement.

The colour must've been custom, as I'd never seen anything like it before, the two tones divided by a bar of (more) chrome. This lordly vision slowly drove past me, then turned off into the shopping area. A young guy (I barely saw him - he could've been George Clooney and I wouldn't have seen him) got out and went into the bank.

I stared.

I don't even drive. I hate cars. They belch out poisons. I fear them. I've been almost run over 100 times. What was this thing? Some sort of vintage, obviously, maybe on its way to one of them-thar car shows I never seem to get to. It appeared to sail forth like a giant boat supported by massive pontoons.

The guy came out of the bank, got back into the car and drove verrrry sloooowly over to the Canadian Tire lot, about 50 feet away. I mean, he didn't see me (I'm 56, remember, and thus invisible), but maybe he saw me seeing him (or rather, his car).

He drove away equally slowly. A float in a parade. I felt faint. I didn't want him to go. I wanted to hop in, to tootle around town with him, watching all those dials 'n' things that old cars have (and creaky old leather).

As soon as my senses would hold together, I rummaged out a pen and notebook and tried to draw it. It was hopeless. I tried eight times, then lost my pen on the bus.

My husband can tell, at a glance, the year and make of every car ever made. I am not kidding. I have never stumped him. Sometimes I check it against the internet, but I really don't have to. I described this car to him. I showed him my miserable drawings,

which looked like a car a 2-year-old would play with in the bathtub.

He didn't know what it was.

That was when I began to believe that what I had seen was an apparition. It floated into my consciousness when I least expected it, swanned past me in splendour, then disappeared into the vapour of unreality from which it had come. It un-was, or un-did itself, or something.

Well, we all die, don't we? Why wasn't this lovely thing thrown on the scrapheap in 1941? My only clue was handwritten in chrome on the rear bumper: Mercury.

"Oh, so it was a Ford," my husband said. "Probably 1940. Called a Westerbrook or something like that. Maybe a custom."

Oh, don't burst my bubble. It was a dream.