A
Anonymous
Guest
Just look around; you never know what you’ll find
January 09, 2005
The antique photograph -- the found object -- retains its morbid mojo more than two decades after it tumbled out of an old book I was holding.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it. A man, wearing what seems to be a rubber sheet, his black hair clamped back in rollers, is seated in the center of the photo. He is bleeding profusely from the left side of his head. Blood streams down his face and onto the rubber sheet, where the camera captures its sheen.
A man wearing something resembling a butcher’s apron over his suit grasps the bleeding man’s head, pulling the skin of his cheek back toward his ear, as if to expose the wound. Clustered around them are five younger men, wearing suits, ties and what appear to be 19th-century regimental caps. All of them gawk and stare at the bleeding man, except for one who looks directly into the camera with a killingly cold eye.
But that’s not the spookiest part of the photo. In the background -- almost too faint to show up in the old print -- is a painting of the Madonna and Child.
The photograph was hidden away in a book that came from the library of a doctor’s old-maid daughter. I can’t recall the/stitle -- its spinster owner favored saccharine poetry and Victorian travel guides -- but I remain haunted by the photo.
If you like to wade through the untidy world of junk shops, auctions and estate sales, you probably know that second-hand books are a primary source of found objects -- things that people either have deliberately hidden away or used as page markers and forgotten.
Sometimes these objects can be as sentimental as a pressed flower or a lock of a loved one’s hair. They may be shockingly personal as well.
Interviewed in Found magazine, an offbeat journal devoted to these kinds of discoveries, a former clerk in the Boston area tells about a woman who came in to sell a stack of old books when a photo fell out of one of them.
“It was a picture of her, naked, in the midst of a strip poker game," he says.
The nude photograph lay there between them for a long, silent second. Then the woman slammed her hand down over the picture, snatched it up and ripped it to shreds.
After that, of course, the clerk was hooked. He began closely examining every volume coming into the store.
The things he found were remarkable, like Wolf Blitzer’s business card from back when he worked for the Jerusalem Post, or Archies Fan Club membership cards. He also recovered notes, receipts, bumper stickers, journal entries, letters, birth announcements, $600 in cash, death certificates, sketches, a handwritten will, efforts at poetry and lots of interesting photos.
Found magazine -- devoted to “the best lost, tossed and forgotten items from around the world" -- is full of this stuff. Letters left lying on the streets. Shopping lists discarded in grocery carts (“beer/meat/dog food/boloney/bread/sanka" reads one that the magazine editors titled “Health Nut"). Achingly juvenile missives swept up from school floors (custodians are among Found’s major contributors). Nasty notes left on people’s windshields. Things that defy (or invite) explanation, like the crudely scrawled message on a piece of crumpled notebook paper, found in Charleston, Ill., that reads “IT STAYED ON THE GRILL BITCH!"
“Missing Cat," announces a neatly printed notice someone found in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Grey and white fat cat. Answers to Jack and Food."
That’s marginally better than the name on the flier of another lost cat, this time in Los Angeles: “Bitchy."
“Missing a chicken?" asks a posting from Harper’s Ferry, Va. “If you or anyone you know is missing a chicken, please call ..."
Items like these only begin to suggest the breathtaking range of things just waiting to be found.
So much was mailed into Found magazine that its creator, Davy Rothbart, compiled the best findings into a book.
Titled “Found" (what else?), the collection takes the reader on a wild rampage through the human experience.
One correspondent writes about her interest in lost or discarded keys.
“Whenever I find a key, it’s a big event," she writes. “I’ve trained myself to note what I was thinking the instant I spot one; sometimes the thought proves to be a key to a door inside that needs opening."
She’s from Berkeley, Calif., wouldn’t you know. A photo of some of her found keys, taped to a board and arranged in a circle, accompanies her ode to opening.
Other Found correspondents report finding objects about -- well, finding things. One mailed in a note he found, written in a callous scrawl, that reads “Guess What Cindy found the cancer The skin cancer this morning."
Another, recovered from the nation’s capital, reads simply, “We might be able to find."
There are poignant found objects as well, like the letter, found on a rain-soaked street in Erie, Pa.
The author was a cook, working for $6.50 an hour. From the letter, we learn that his dad, in Arizona, is planning to rent a mobile home for $100 a week.
The son tries to write encouragingly, saying he wants to get $49 together to take a bus out to see his father and maybe even rent an apartment nearby if there are any cook jobs available.
"I can cook some meals up for us got a grill and can cook on that," the son writes. “Also I got a lot of CDs like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Over Kill, Metallica, Pink Floyd ... we can jam out and have lots of fun.
“(IMPORTANT DAD)
“I’m going to send you some stamps so you can wright me back and I’m going give you a calling card so you can call me ..."
The terrible loneliness that divides them echoes between every line.
I thumbed through the book looking for an antidote. A list found in Edmonton, Alberta supplied it.
Apparently written as instructions to the leader of a wedding band, it rivals the Capital One TV advertisement in its list of 'no’s."
“No Macarena, No Grease Stuff, No Country/Western (only 1) (if request), No New Hustle (not Stevie Wonder)" “No Group Dancing, No Drop the Bomb, No Superfreak, No 50’s, No Green Day, No Lady in Red."
So what music would suffice for this wedding party? “Two polkas," reads a note in the margin. “Big Band."
At the bottom is an addendum, penned in an apparent afterthought: “No Garter, No Bouquet."
No fun.
Alabama gets its due in “Found." A Birmingham reader mailed in a note she picked up that says “Don’t Ask Don’t Know More info. In Hat."
A series of photos, found in the parking lot of The Home Depot in Montgomery, shows a sleeping or drunken Auburn fan being dressed by two friends in an Alabama shirt. A note explains the significance of this daring deed for out-of-state readers.
It’s not in the book but one of the more interesting found objects that I know of is a note found taped to the windshield of a car outside the old Chukker bar one night. “From the one that cut you," it read.
It shocked and puzzled the guy who found it. He hadn’t been cut at all.
Tim Reed -- a visual artist and musician who issued a series of delightfully demented albums that are now cultists’ collectors’ items -- figured it was a case of mistaken identity. But he was so taken by the message that he used it as the title for one of his Rev. Fred Lane Shimmy Disc recordings.
There is, granted, an element of voyeurism (or worse) in all of this poking, rooting and finding. Yet, as Found’s Rothbart writes, the discoveries offer “a shortcut directly to people’s minds and hearts ... It’s startling and it’s magical."
The response to “Found" magazine has been so startlingly successful, in fact, that the enterprise branched out to include a new publication, “Dirty Found," devoted to raunchier discoveries. I haven’t explored that one yet; information on the whole Found shebang is available on the Internet at www.foundmagazine.com.
I do recommend the Found book highly, though be warned in advance that it has some raunch of its own. It’s not pornographic, however -- just twisted or interesting or both, like almost everything else the book chronicles.
I spent an hour or so poring over it before the bug hit me. I had to get out into the street.
I’m perfectly suited, temperamentally and physically, to be a finder. I’ve been a rummager and a packrat for as long as I can remember, and surgery on my neck five years ago left me naturally inclined to look down.
Fired up by Found, I grabbed my walking staff and set out in the neighborhood to see what I could discover.
There were lots of castaway things, but little to write home (or even to an eccentric magazine) about. They were mostly of the tossed-beer-can and used-Christmas-tree variety. Someone had even thrown three big pumpkins down a wooded ravine alongside a road not far from our house.
But there was something else, as well -- a pile of rained-on baskets, boxes and bags dumped around a road sign.
I poked around with my staff. It was something of a mishmash: little glass cups wrapped in newspaper, bleeding Christmas cards, bits of plastic.
But hey, what’s this? Two cassette tapes.
I fished them out. Def Leppard, the English metal band; and acerbic “comedian" Sam Kinison, who died in a car crash in 1993.
Not my cup of tea, but I hung on to them. I tried them out when I got home, and both actually played.
I thought about what the Berkeley woman wrote about discoveries opening doors and tried to make a case for finding hard-edged rock and comedy among the Salvation Army store place settings. But I never quite made it fit.
Then I thought of a postcard that shook out of a junk shop book I bought a couple of weeks ago. It’s something about jazz but written totally in Hebrew.
But this stuff wasn’t even in the same league with the found objects in Rothbart’s book and magazine.
A find that a friend at work passed on to me recently is a different story, however.
His wife was at a chain store in Tuscaloosa that had one of those newfangled photo machines. You stick in your digital camera card and it spits out the pictures you’ve selected.
In the tray was a heavy-duty found object -- as spooky in its own way as the head-cutting photo from the doctor’s daughter’s book.
It’s a picture of a graveside service. A line of six white tombstones cuts across the front of the photo; a mortuary tent embossed with “Oaklawn Memorial Garden" stretches across the upper right corner. Mourners, male and female, are ringed in a semi-circle around the tent.
They all wear Ku Klux Klan robes -- the women in white, the men in scarlet.
Directly in front of the tent is a contingent of 10 men in green outfits wearing gold helmets, apparently serving as some kind of honor guard. In the background is a circular wreath with the UKA -- United Klans of America -- logo.
“What happens to pictures people leave behind?" the finder asked a clerk at the store.
“Oh, we usually put them up here on the counter," she answered cheerfully.
“You want me to leave THIS up there?" asked the finder, placing the Klan funeral photo in front of the clerk.
She blanched.
“I don’t think so."
But my friend knew exactly where to take it.
The picture is so unusual that I toyed for a while with the notion of having it framed.
Thankfully, I decided against it. I’ve found a better place for it.
Some day, someone who opens my old copy of Rothbart’s “Found" book will have an interesting surprise.
Reach Editorial Editor Ben Windham at (205) 722-0193 or by e-mail at [email protected].. Feel free to tell him about your finds, which may wind up in a future column.
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs ... 90362/1027
http://www.foundmagazine.com/
___________________________________________________
sureshot
January 09, 2005
The antique photograph -- the found object -- retains its morbid mojo more than two decades after it tumbled out of an old book I was holding.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it. A man, wearing what seems to be a rubber sheet, his black hair clamped back in rollers, is seated in the center of the photo. He is bleeding profusely from the left side of his head. Blood streams down his face and onto the rubber sheet, where the camera captures its sheen.
A man wearing something resembling a butcher’s apron over his suit grasps the bleeding man’s head, pulling the skin of his cheek back toward his ear, as if to expose the wound. Clustered around them are five younger men, wearing suits, ties and what appear to be 19th-century regimental caps. All of them gawk and stare at the bleeding man, except for one who looks directly into the camera with a killingly cold eye.
But that’s not the spookiest part of the photo. In the background -- almost too faint to show up in the old print -- is a painting of the Madonna and Child.
The photograph was hidden away in a book that came from the library of a doctor’s old-maid daughter. I can’t recall the/stitle -- its spinster owner favored saccharine poetry and Victorian travel guides -- but I remain haunted by the photo.
If you like to wade through the untidy world of junk shops, auctions and estate sales, you probably know that second-hand books are a primary source of found objects -- things that people either have deliberately hidden away or used as page markers and forgotten.
Sometimes these objects can be as sentimental as a pressed flower or a lock of a loved one’s hair. They may be shockingly personal as well.
Interviewed in Found magazine, an offbeat journal devoted to these kinds of discoveries, a former clerk in the Boston area tells about a woman who came in to sell a stack of old books when a photo fell out of one of them.
“It was a picture of her, naked, in the midst of a strip poker game," he says.
The nude photograph lay there between them for a long, silent second. Then the woman slammed her hand down over the picture, snatched it up and ripped it to shreds.
After that, of course, the clerk was hooked. He began closely examining every volume coming into the store.
The things he found were remarkable, like Wolf Blitzer’s business card from back when he worked for the Jerusalem Post, or Archies Fan Club membership cards. He also recovered notes, receipts, bumper stickers, journal entries, letters, birth announcements, $600 in cash, death certificates, sketches, a handwritten will, efforts at poetry and lots of interesting photos.
Found magazine -- devoted to “the best lost, tossed and forgotten items from around the world" -- is full of this stuff. Letters left lying on the streets. Shopping lists discarded in grocery carts (“beer/meat/dog food/boloney/bread/sanka" reads one that the magazine editors titled “Health Nut"). Achingly juvenile missives swept up from school floors (custodians are among Found’s major contributors). Nasty notes left on people’s windshields. Things that defy (or invite) explanation, like the crudely scrawled message on a piece of crumpled notebook paper, found in Charleston, Ill., that reads “IT STAYED ON THE GRILL BITCH!"
“Missing Cat," announces a neatly printed notice someone found in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Grey and white fat cat. Answers to Jack and Food."
That’s marginally better than the name on the flier of another lost cat, this time in Los Angeles: “Bitchy."
“Missing a chicken?" asks a posting from Harper’s Ferry, Va. “If you or anyone you know is missing a chicken, please call ..."
Items like these only begin to suggest the breathtaking range of things just waiting to be found.
So much was mailed into Found magazine that its creator, Davy Rothbart, compiled the best findings into a book.
Titled “Found" (what else?), the collection takes the reader on a wild rampage through the human experience.
One correspondent writes about her interest in lost or discarded keys.
“Whenever I find a key, it’s a big event," she writes. “I’ve trained myself to note what I was thinking the instant I spot one; sometimes the thought proves to be a key to a door inside that needs opening."
She’s from Berkeley, Calif., wouldn’t you know. A photo of some of her found keys, taped to a board and arranged in a circle, accompanies her ode to opening.
Other Found correspondents report finding objects about -- well, finding things. One mailed in a note he found, written in a callous scrawl, that reads “Guess What Cindy found the cancer The skin cancer this morning."
Another, recovered from the nation’s capital, reads simply, “We might be able to find."
There are poignant found objects as well, like the letter, found on a rain-soaked street in Erie, Pa.
The author was a cook, working for $6.50 an hour. From the letter, we learn that his dad, in Arizona, is planning to rent a mobile home for $100 a week.
The son tries to write encouragingly, saying he wants to get $49 together to take a bus out to see his father and maybe even rent an apartment nearby if there are any cook jobs available.
"I can cook some meals up for us got a grill and can cook on that," the son writes. “Also I got a lot of CDs like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Over Kill, Metallica, Pink Floyd ... we can jam out and have lots of fun.
“(IMPORTANT DAD)
“I’m going to send you some stamps so you can wright me back and I’m going give you a calling card so you can call me ..."
The terrible loneliness that divides them echoes between every line.
I thumbed through the book looking for an antidote. A list found in Edmonton, Alberta supplied it.
Apparently written as instructions to the leader of a wedding band, it rivals the Capital One TV advertisement in its list of 'no’s."
“No Macarena, No Grease Stuff, No Country/Western (only 1) (if request), No New Hustle (not Stevie Wonder)" “No Group Dancing, No Drop the Bomb, No Superfreak, No 50’s, No Green Day, No Lady in Red."
So what music would suffice for this wedding party? “Two polkas," reads a note in the margin. “Big Band."
At the bottom is an addendum, penned in an apparent afterthought: “No Garter, No Bouquet."
No fun.
Alabama gets its due in “Found." A Birmingham reader mailed in a note she picked up that says “Don’t Ask Don’t Know More info. In Hat."
A series of photos, found in the parking lot of The Home Depot in Montgomery, shows a sleeping or drunken Auburn fan being dressed by two friends in an Alabama shirt. A note explains the significance of this daring deed for out-of-state readers.
It’s not in the book but one of the more interesting found objects that I know of is a note found taped to the windshield of a car outside the old Chukker bar one night. “From the one that cut you," it read.
It shocked and puzzled the guy who found it. He hadn’t been cut at all.
Tim Reed -- a visual artist and musician who issued a series of delightfully demented albums that are now cultists’ collectors’ items -- figured it was a case of mistaken identity. But he was so taken by the message that he used it as the title for one of his Rev. Fred Lane Shimmy Disc recordings.
There is, granted, an element of voyeurism (or worse) in all of this poking, rooting and finding. Yet, as Found’s Rothbart writes, the discoveries offer “a shortcut directly to people’s minds and hearts ... It’s startling and it’s magical."
The response to “Found" magazine has been so startlingly successful, in fact, that the enterprise branched out to include a new publication, “Dirty Found," devoted to raunchier discoveries. I haven’t explored that one yet; information on the whole Found shebang is available on the Internet at www.foundmagazine.com.
I do recommend the Found book highly, though be warned in advance that it has some raunch of its own. It’s not pornographic, however -- just twisted or interesting or both, like almost everything else the book chronicles.
I spent an hour or so poring over it before the bug hit me. I had to get out into the street.
I’m perfectly suited, temperamentally and physically, to be a finder. I’ve been a rummager and a packrat for as long as I can remember, and surgery on my neck five years ago left me naturally inclined to look down.
Fired up by Found, I grabbed my walking staff and set out in the neighborhood to see what I could discover.
There were lots of castaway things, but little to write home (or even to an eccentric magazine) about. They were mostly of the tossed-beer-can and used-Christmas-tree variety. Someone had even thrown three big pumpkins down a wooded ravine alongside a road not far from our house.
But there was something else, as well -- a pile of rained-on baskets, boxes and bags dumped around a road sign.
I poked around with my staff. It was something of a mishmash: little glass cups wrapped in newspaper, bleeding Christmas cards, bits of plastic.
But hey, what’s this? Two cassette tapes.
I fished them out. Def Leppard, the English metal band; and acerbic “comedian" Sam Kinison, who died in a car crash in 1993.
Not my cup of tea, but I hung on to them. I tried them out when I got home, and both actually played.
I thought about what the Berkeley woman wrote about discoveries opening doors and tried to make a case for finding hard-edged rock and comedy among the Salvation Army store place settings. But I never quite made it fit.
Then I thought of a postcard that shook out of a junk shop book I bought a couple of weeks ago. It’s something about jazz but written totally in Hebrew.
But this stuff wasn’t even in the same league with the found objects in Rothbart’s book and magazine.
A find that a friend at work passed on to me recently is a different story, however.
His wife was at a chain store in Tuscaloosa that had one of those newfangled photo machines. You stick in your digital camera card and it spits out the pictures you’ve selected.
In the tray was a heavy-duty found object -- as spooky in its own way as the head-cutting photo from the doctor’s daughter’s book.
It’s a picture of a graveside service. A line of six white tombstones cuts across the front of the photo; a mortuary tent embossed with “Oaklawn Memorial Garden" stretches across the upper right corner. Mourners, male and female, are ringed in a semi-circle around the tent.
They all wear Ku Klux Klan robes -- the women in white, the men in scarlet.
Directly in front of the tent is a contingent of 10 men in green outfits wearing gold helmets, apparently serving as some kind of honor guard. In the background is a circular wreath with the UKA -- United Klans of America -- logo.
“What happens to pictures people leave behind?" the finder asked a clerk at the store.
“Oh, we usually put them up here on the counter," she answered cheerfully.
“You want me to leave THIS up there?" asked the finder, placing the Klan funeral photo in front of the clerk.
She blanched.
“I don’t think so."
But my friend knew exactly where to take it.
The picture is so unusual that I toyed for a while with the notion of having it framed.
Thankfully, I decided against it. I’ve found a better place for it.
Some day, someone who opens my old copy of Rothbart’s “Found" book will have an interesting surprise.
Reach Editorial Editor Ben Windham at (205) 722-0193 or by e-mail at [email protected].. Feel free to tell him about your finds, which may wind up in a future column.
http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcs ... 90362/1027
http://www.foundmagazine.com/
___________________________________________________
sureshot
I don't know what he did with it in the end, anyway it's not here any more.
)
