More things I didn't buy: Game of Thrones edition

I bought a ton of stuff this past weekend at one major blowout of a sale (books!), but now that school has started and I'm back in the blogging saddle, I need to catch up on some old, dusty posts first. Like, don't you want to know all the stuff I haven't been buying? Starting with this totally awesome lantern sconce, which reminds me of Game of Thrones, probably because I really, really miss Game of Thrones, though it wouldn't be out of place in any medieval-style restaurant or B-movie. I appreciated it, but I didn't want it. There is a difference.

I seriously wanted to buy this giant medallion/sun dial wall plaque thingie (is it Mayan? Incan? cursed in some way?) because I have seen similar ones proudly displayed over fireplaces (as this one was) in many of my vintage Sunset Books. It's clearly the only place you can hang one of these things. But in my house that would mean relocating the family-room flat-screen and I don't think that's a negotiation I would win.

It amused me to see someone's old cache of Playboys squirreled away in a closet at an estate sale. I'm guessing this is where the original owner kept them and the estate-sale company didn't have the stomach to display them more prominently. All my early encounters with Playboy were in the closets of friends' parents or brothers (I think that sounds worse than it was), so this came as no big surprise. Sadly, these issues were all from the ’80s and I draw the line at the 1970s when buying nudie mags (and $3 each? Oh, honey please).

The people have spoken: more retro nudie pinups

The Model, by Fritz Willis, published by Walter T. Foster. (Annoyingly undated, like all of them.)

In honor of my just realizing that May 4 marked the second anniversary of this blog, all this month, or hell, maybe just this week, I'm going to attempt to please you, my random readers, by revisiting some all-time favorite posts and/or by simply giving you more of what you seem—based on Blogger statistics—to want more than anything: pictures of nekkid ladies.

See, back in the dawn of time  (i.e., 2004), when I started my first blog, Blogger (neé Blogspot) didn't helpfully crunch the numbers the way they do now. I was blissfully unaware of which of my posts attracted the most traffic, whence the traffic came, and by what combination of search terms said post was discovered and enjoyed.



Well, let's just say that this new feature has been quite enlightening. I did not realize how many people were googling "nude girls draw" or "drawing naked girls" or, my special favorite, "naked girl with guitar" and ending up at my humble blog. So pleased I could provide you all with an appropriate destination! (The naked guitar player can be found here if you missed her the first time around.) I also really enjoy the search key words that bring weary travelers to Thingummery, like "nude finnish men sauna," "70s wigs for women and dolls" and "Carol Burnett naked." Only one Thingummery post actually meets that search criteria—can you guess which?





One of the things I've learned over the two years I've been blogging about my stuff is just how popular Walter T. Foster art books—particularly those about nude girls and clowns—really are. They seriously deserve their own blog, or better still, tumblr, and if I can figure out how to pull off one devoted to Sad Nude Girl Clowns, I will.

Actually, that probably already exists. I'm not going to google it, though. Are you?

The Babe Rainbow connection

So this is the big score I was referring to last week. A big score that I didn't realize was a big score until I got over the initial sticker shock and consulted my trusty iPhone for some background on Ms. Babe Rainbow (seriously, how did people shop without their iPhones back in the day? I can't remember and I think it was only a few years ago...).

What I learned is that Babe Rainbow is a limited-edition screenprint on tin (there were 10,000), created in 1968 by Peter Blake, "the godfather of British pop art" best known for designing the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover. On the back is a museum-label-type potted history of the piece and Blake, who says Babe is one of a series of fictitious wrestlers he painted:

She is twety-three years old and has broken her nose in the ring. She was born in New Cross, London and wrestles mainly in Europe and the USA as there have only been a few contests between lady wrestlers in London. She is the daughter of the notorious Doktor K Tortur.

According to the description, Babe was commissioned by Dodo Designs and is the "first painting ever to be commissioned for reproduction as a picture on tin." Impressive stats that meant nothing to me in my previous existence, the one in which I was blissfully ignorant of Babe Rainbow and her potential value (like, how many of those 10,000 tin screenprints do we think have survived?). Suddenly acquainted with these facts, I had to decide: to go to the ATM or to let her go?

Normally I write checks to estate-sale companies for amounts ranging from $15 to $30. I don't get into the triple digits except when furniture is involved and I've pretty much stopped buying furniture as our house has come to resemble a kind of showroom for weird, mismatched chairs. Since it was the first day of the sale, I decided to return the next day when the prices dropped and see if she was still there—then I could hem and haw some more, but I would have the kids with me and they would seriously cut into my hem-haw time. This is a wait that's usually fraught with anxiety. What if someone buys her for full price? Because according to what I'm seeing online, they've seriously underpriced it. But then, who would buy this besides me? But then again, who was the person who owned it in the first place?  This is just the kind of surprise I like to find behind the door of a faceless suburban tract home. But maybe it wasn't so surprising—maybe there are tons of houses in San Antonio occupied by Pop Art-collecting baby boomers and I'm just not going to the right houses!?

Normally, I would've gotten Lindsay to weigh in on a purchase like this, but he was in Mexico and apparently too busy to look at the photos I'd texted him till long after I left the sale. His (tardy) response was emphatic: BUY HER.

Not a huge surprise that he would be partial to the portrait of wrestler who looks like Suzy Quatro.

So, I went back the next morning, and there she still sat on a sofa, ignored by all shoppers. Should I have waited one more day for the price to drop by another 25%? The kids wouldn't let me: We want Babe! We want Babe Rainbow! they caterwauled, reminding me why I try never to shop with children: They are so irrational!

Just like their father. As soon as he saw Babe in person, he put the kibosh on my flipping her for a tidy profit. Not that I don't love her—though she lends a man-cave vibe to the place that doesn't seem entirely appropriate—it just seemed so reasonable for me to sell her. That's what a real picker would do! Oh well, at least I don't have to cough up a few more C-notes to frame her.

They're not bad...they're just drawn that way

Time to play my favorite estate-sale guessing game: What, exactly, were our late neighbors up to? What was going on behind those modest brick walls, beneath those popcorn ceilings, atop those shaggy shag carpets?

I got an armload of Walter T. Fosters at the home of yet another San Antonio Sunday painter. This person had all the great, and more rare, manuals devoted to pin-up girls (I already wrote about one here). But as I leafed through Drawing the Figure by Russell Tredell, what should fall into my lap?



A clipping from a mysterious periodical, an exposé about a "Free Love Cult in the Caves of Crete." Frustratingly, the text of the article was not saved; just this picture of a very limber free love cultist busting some kind of gymnastical yoga move on the beach of what I assume must be Crete.

This toothsome lass is on the flip side of the clipping. Free love cult member? We can only hope.



I wish I could report that after conducting a thorough investigation into the matter, I found out all kinds of interesting things about free love cults inspired by Eileithyia, the Cretan goddess of fertility who was born in one of the womb-like caves of Crete, but all I found out is that Crete has womb-like caves, many of which are believed to be the birthplace of mythological gods, including Zeus. Which makes the caves of Crete a pretty good place to start a free love cult considering Zeus was one of the earliest and most accomplished practitioners of the sport.

The strippers and the sewing book

Often at an estate sale I find myself mulling over some combo of the usual questions: How could people live like this? Why didn't their family want to keep this deeply personal item? What accounts for this fascination with Hummels? And what, exactly, is that smell...?

Sometimes I'll open up a book and something interesting and unrelated will fall into my lap. Then the question becomes, How did this end up in here...?

Like, how did this strip club table card end up inside this 1961 edition of the classic Better Homes & Gardens Sewing Book?

It's challenging, but fun, to try to fathom a scenario that'll explain it. Here's one version: Back in the early ’60s, a Don Draper-ish husband takes a business trip to L.A., joins some fellow execs for a "meeting" at Al Deitch's Body Shop on the Sunset Strip. Drink their two-drink minimum and then some. Don decides to keep the card on the table as a souvenir, stuffs it in the pocket of his gray flannel suit and promptly forgets about it (so much alcohol—how did they remember anything?). Days, maybe weeks later, the wife is about to take Don's suit to the cleaners but checks his pockets first—it is an unwritten hausfrau law that any cash a husband neglects to remove from his pocket before depositing laundry on floor immediately becomes the property of the hausfrau. But instead of a few loose bills to add to her mad money fund, she finds the fulsome Kim and lovely Lolita. What happens next?

1) She freaks out on husband, brandishing the evidence and later, after she's calmed down, thinks "Hmm. This would make a great bookmark."

2) Husband never left it in his pocket; he brought it home specifically as a souvenir for his very understanding wife who happens to be an amateur artist. He thinks she might find inspiration for her Vargas-and-Walter T. Foster inspired work in the figures of Kim and Lolita. Instead, she uses it as a bookmark.

3) There was never any business trip. Husband and wife were vacationing together in L.A. Decide to trawl the clubs of the Sunset Strip, and perhaps pick up an interested third party. Wife cherishes card, a memento of awesome love vacays she used to take with husband, before they had kids, and the kids grew up, and they grew apart, and she became a prisoner of her capacious craft room. Decides to use it as a bookmark.

Seriously, this could go on for hours, for days, years and would we ever hit on the truth? What was Really Going On in that modest split-level ranch? All theories are welcome.

How to draw the well-accessorized nude

One of the things I've learned about San Antonio since I started rifling through the things its dead have left behind (morbid but accurate) is that this town is (or was) chock full of Sunday painters. Seriously. Maybe it's not the town so much as the midcentury era when folks would take up art as a hobby. Or do people still do that? I mean, apart from Adam Gopnik, of course. (I enjoyed his New Yorker piece but it only confirmed what I already knew—drawing is motherfreaking hard.) So it's no surprise that I come across a lot of Walter T. Foster's big floppy art-instruction manuals and that I tend to snap them up because I find the colors, the type, the (false) promise of being able to render a sad clown or adorable kitten portrait as adroitly as the one on the cover just so...irresistible.

I also had a small collection as a kid—all on the subject of horses, perhaps not coincidentally the only thing I can draw with any confidence now—which makes this another one of my nostalagia-fueled pursuits, for the most part. I mean, they're also total eye candy, right? Walter died back in 1981, but the company continues to publish new manuals in his name as well as reprint some of the old ones in a Walter T. Foster Collectible Series. I was bummed to find that the company is not immune to merchandising tie-ins; most of the offerings for kids instruct them on the finer points of drawing characters from Disney, Pixar, Nickelodeon et al. Bleh. They may no longer publish a book devoted to painting clown portraits but they do have a manual devoted to drawing zombies. Never thought of looking to old Walt for the zeitgeist but there ya go.

One of the volumes in the Collectibles series is How to Draw Pin-ups and Glamour Girls; back in the day, there were several devoted to sad-eyed babes striking awkward poses in their boudoirs, including this one, The Nude by Fritz Willis. I love the models' supercomplicated hairdos, and the props. Half-drunk Chianti bottles are a recurring theme...

And there's nothing quite like an artfully placed Spanish guitar to preserve a girl's modesty, but you knew that already.

The best thing is finding old sketches stuck between the pages of these manuals. A total estate-sale bonus that sets one's mind a-wandering... Who was this amateur Vargas living in a ’60s tract house in a drab, colorless San Antonio subdivision? We'll never know.