Saturday I visited Hunt and Gather, the finest antique store in town. Maybe we need another term, though – “antique store” used to mean shops where you’d find items of value. Old chairs, fine china, ancient things that had outlived the chain of possession, and eventually come into the hands of someone who neither knew their value or cared what they meant to an ancestor. Now they’re places where all the flotsam washes up. Everything is valuable to someone, eventually. An old Durkee spice can. A tape dispenser heavy enough to be used as a murder weapon. Magazines, Little Golden Books, pictures of unnamed people standing in a field, beer coasters, rubber stamps from a company that hasn’t been in business in 37 years. I love this stuff. As I’ve noted before, if you’re in the wrong mood it’s all very depressing – all these knickknacks from someone’s kitchen or living room obviously meant something to someone once. I saw a cheap kitschy plaque of a mother deer and baby deer, and you wonder how that all turned out for the woman who bought it.
So what did I get? Matches. Always the matches. Bought 15 slides of a Mexican vacation – circa 1951. A 1956 Better Homes and Garden Decorating book, which is almost the exact antithesis of the ur-text I used for Interior Desecrators. The most needless purchase was this:
It works, too. I have no idea what I will do with it, except put it next to another old camera, but it’s just so beautiful.
I almost bought, and may yet go back to buy, something quite incredible: a bound volume of the 1949 press run of a small town Minnesota newspaper. I didn’t get it because it was expensive, and because I don’t know how I could scan it without cutting it up. It’s also huge. Nah, don’t need it.
Yes, will go back for it tomorrow.
Outside were several lawn chairs, beaten, weathered, repainted:
You could hang these images in a modern art museum – not because my photos are So Awesome, no. But they look like modern art.
Pass it along, if you wish
26 Responses to The Weekend Haul
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The movie camera is cool, but the really interesting part of the movie camera is the movies that were once taken with it.
I loved those kinds of metal chairs. My grandfolks had a set, gaily repainted every couple of years. Those chairs last FOREVER, and are very comfortable and rock with a gentle springing motion.
The fact they’re so durable is, I think, the one reason they are no longer made.
Goes to show how far gone Brownies are. The Twitter reference had me think in this order:
Girl Scouts (knee deep in it now!)
Brownies (you know the actual baked goods).
Blanked on the Cameras. I have an old Brownie Camera, the kind you have to look DOWN into the flip up viewfinder to frame your shot. Looks like a Tricorder. Used to take “band” photos with it back in the 5th grade. Hey, we needed Album Cover Art!
That camera looks like the sensor eye from a Scopedog.
Thanks for sharing the photo of the Kodak Brownie Turret 8mm camera. I got one when I was in 8th grade in ’74, along with a Bell & Howell projector of the same vintage. It was 20 years old and in perfect condition, complete with the #85 daylight filters and field case. I used it for about 4 years. Unfortunately, it didn’t do so well during the last 20 years in my parents basement. Corrosion got the better of it and the case. I’m glad to see that one survived!
Thanks!
I love the camera. The viewfinder looks especially interesting. Will you use it to document your UFO sighting?
All I know is that I ever got my hands on a camera like that I’d start scurrying for film right away. And it’s still out there, too…. although it’s rather expensive considering the running time you get.
I’d sure love to see a BleatFilm one of these days…
faux MOMA
I think everyone’s grandparents had those metal chairs on the front porch. I fondly remember them being painted avocado green, and the rails were white. I also remember the kind that had the small holes on them, that if you sat on them in the summer while wearing shorts, the back of your legs ended up looking like you sat on a waffle iron. They were painted avocado green as well.
Regarding the heavy tape dispenser: an old draftsman/architect’s friend. I have my dad’s.
Yup. My grandparents had those chairs at their cottage on Saratoga Lake in upstate NY. My wife got me a pair of metal chairs from Renovation Hardware a few years back. Very nice. Of course, my favorite outdoor chairs are my white wooden Adirondack chairs. Probably the most comfortable chairs I own.
Mmmm – liking those modern art-from-lawn-chair images.
I’ve got 8 of those chairs — or rather, my wife does. She’s an inveterate packrat and buys ‘em wherever found. We use them around our firepit. They’ve been painted white in their last iterations, but the old layers are starting to leak through again.
She’s also within your target market for “The Gallery Of Regrettable Food” and “Interior Desecrations”; she gave me 19 kinds of heck for buying both of them — until she read them.
Now I don’t know where they are.
‘Berg
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Is it telling that I noticed the clean desk BEFORE I started to drool over the camera?
Tried to clean the desk thrice over the weekend and made no progress.
Damn, they DO look like modern art. I suppose that’s a comment either about how modern art DOES TOO relate to people, or how anything people-related CAN SO be adapted to art.
_@_v – bought an 8mm cartridge type camera mebbe 18 years at a garage sale hoping to get to use it but even back then you could only get super8 or 16 mm film. and not the standard 8mm stuff – even tho 8mm is really a spool of 16mm that gets cut in half at the lab. in the mid-90s got hold of a betamovie camcorder for the princely sum of $5 and got some use out of that.
If the newspapers are too big to scan, use a digital camera. Use a tripod and aperture F-22. The colors will turn out very rich.
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I guess those chairs were everywhere. My grandparents on the west coast had them too. At least the ones with the blue backs and red seats. I repainted them different colors. And yes, I did rock in them. Don’t know where they ever went….
Did those metal chairs (which I lurrrrved as kid) even have names? Other than Grandparents’ Porch Chairs, I mean…
Good pix.
those chairs are very hot items these days. Can’t believe there were that many in one place. The beat up paint just adds to their appeal!
Did you notice that the cutout on the panel to the right of the lenses is shaped a lot like Minnesota?
I loved those old lawn chairs, they were so comfortable (except when they’d been left out in the sun too long). Now I own the modern version, two cast-aluminum mesh rockers painted with an enamel that never chips and never gets too hot, no matter how long they sit in the sun. Those chairs will be with me until I die.
My Dad has the same camera. In high school, I resurrected it to give it one last use. Kodak still made 8mm movie film. Man, what a hassle though. Loading in the dark. Then turing the film to expose the second half. Unloading in the dark. Showing it, splicing together reels. Using very bright flood lights in doors.
But after I learned to hold the camera steady, we got pretty good results. Great color. Even in low light.