By Ben Marks

Before MTV, and long before we could stream music videos on our cell phones, mid-1960s American hepcats gathered around 500-pound, 7-foot-high contraptions to watch 16-millimeter Technicolor films of B-list pop stars gyrating to their latest hits. The contraption in question was usually a Scopitone, one of several audio-visual jukeboxes found primarily in bars. Their reign, if you can even call it that, was brief, and by the end of the decade, the novelty of these then-high-tech devices had faded entirely.

Bob Orlowsky, a “recovering …

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By Ben Marks

Between 1966 and 1967, San Francisco rock poster artist Wes Wilson designed posters and handbills for the first Trips Festival, the last show by The Beatles, and dozens of concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium featuring everyone from The Association to Frank Zappa. Along the way, he defined the psychedelic poster, in which blocks of letters were used to create shapes, which seemed to bend and vibrate in place. In this freewheeling and candid interview, Wilson describes how he got into rock posters, what it …

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By Lisa Hix

When we first encountered Alan Scherstuhl’s “Studies in Crap” column over at the “SF Weekly,” we knew he was one of us. Every week, he goes digging around thrift stores and flea markets looking for that special book that speaks to him. Sometimes its a Kool-Aid Man comic book where the oversize beverage pitcher busts into orbiting spacecrafts, or a comic wherein pseudo-Archies are raptured up to heaven in a psychedelic swirl.

But when Scherstuhl finds the nearly inedible …

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By Ben Marks

Why would anyone pay $500 for a rusty piece of barbed wire? Well, if the 18-inch long specimen, or cut, is the only known example of the Thomas J. Barnes patent of 1907 (shown above), some folks might pay even more than that. In fact, for collectors of barbed wire, or barbwire as it’s also called, the past few years have been a veritable rust rush, as choice examples of rare wire that have …

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By Ben Marks

Today the “New York Times” reports that as many as 30 museums in Europe have experienced thefts of rhinoceros horns in 2011. A recent example occurred on July 28, when the horn of a stuffed rhino that had been on display since 1907 at the Ipswich Museum was unceremoniously snapped off. Two other rhino horns, including one still attached to its skull, were also grabbed. Ignored was a gold-leaf Egyptian death mask on loan from the British Museum.

Turns out a lot of misinformed people believe the horns …

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By Lisa Hix

Have you ever stopped to contemplate the existence of rubber barf? It opens up enough philosophical quandaries to make your head spin. Who would ever think of such a thing? Why would he feel the need to manufacture it?

Fortunately, Stan and Mardi Timm, the foremost experts on famed novelty company H. Fishlove & Co., have the answers to these vexing questions. The couple even got a personal tour of the factory where “Whoops,” the original fake vomit, is still churned out.
“We discovered a room that was …

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By Ben Marks

Of all the fashion accessories of the 1950s—Ray-Ban sunglasses, Pucci scarves, Eisenberg cocktail rings—none were more dazzling than Lucite handbags. These geometric gems, which in retrospect seem to anticipate the exuberance of the 1960s, were like portable jewel boxes turned inside out, in hues that ranged from basic black to pretty pastels to clear. Some purses were made of laminated Lucite, sealing butterflies, raffia, and multi-colored confetti within their rigid plastic sides. Others were studded with rhinestones, …

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By Ben Marks

Costume jewelry is worn to make a statement, a shorthand way to convey both one’s mood and sense of style. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright famously chose her brooches to send signals to the world’s heads of states. But long before Albright was using costume jewelry to deliver subtle messages to adversaries and allies alike, women in the 1920s and ’30s wore fashion pins and bracelets to communicate …

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By Ben Marks

The blogs are buzzing this morning with news that a 1939 Plexiglass body Pontiac made by General Motors for the New York World’s Fair, sold at auction for $308,000. In fact, a lot of manufacturers of traditionally opaque goods made see-through versions of their products. Here are a few of our favorite clear things.

The Ghost Car. This 1939 Pontiac Deluxe Six was one of the highlights of the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair (see above), which was focused …

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By Lisa Hix

The times they are a-changing: Last weekend, lesbian couple Kitty Lambert and Cheryle Rudd made history, exchanging the first gay-marriage nuptials in New York State. Just a few days before, President Obama certified the repeal of the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in the U.S. military. But homosexuality has not always so understood and accepted in U.S. society. In fact, in mid-century America, being a lesbian was seen as aberrant and morally corrupt, and because of its social stigma, authors willing to explore this “sin” sold thousands and thousands of paperback books.

…

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By Ben Marks

The Internet is abuzz with news that during a recent taping in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an appraiser for “Antiques Roadshow” was asked to place a value on five 17th- or 18th-century Chinese cups made out of rhinoceros horn. According to Tulsa’s NBC affiliate, KJRH, the cups were valued by Asian art expert Lark Mason at somewhere between $1 and $1.5 million, making them the most highly valued objects in the show’s history. The Tulsa episodes of “Antiques Roadshow” will air sometime in the …

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By Lisa Hix

Here we are, in 2011, a.k.a. “The Future.” We’ve made leaps and bounds in science that we couldn’t even imagine 50 years ago. You’d think the science toys of our age would be mind-bending in their ability to awe and inspire young chemists and biologists. Instead, kids today are being protected within an inch of their lives, while adults apparently live in dread of unsupervised children running amuck with the powers of modern science at their tiny fingertips.

So how do these new educational toys compare to those made back in the …

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