Backpedaling

What a great design for a bicycle-shipping crate! I’m pretty sure that it can also double as a caddy for enormous slices of toast or as the armature of a hoop-skirt.

The Victorian-era crate (with bicycle) was sold recently at the final auction of items from the now shuttered Pedaling History Museum. It’s yet another sad story of historic and cultural preservation gone awry in Buffalo, NY.

Lots of cyclenalia(?) to ogle at the Copake Auctions site.

Shawmut racing safety bicycle new in crate (c. 1913). Never uncrated. “New old stock,” as they say.

Some modern “crates.”

Bicycle stand, 1896

Rex bicycle, c.1898

Quintuple five man bicycle, signed "Francisco Cuevas" on frame.

Rollfast ski bike, DP Harris Co. NY.

Identified simply as "Bicycle Photograph."

What will they think of next?

Vintage 2012 Scarf

Happy 2012 to all.

So if the year is less than a week old, how, pray tell, can this NYC 2012 scarf possibly be vintage? The Oscar de la Renta piece dates all the way back to 2005 and resides in the collection of the New York Historical Society.

While the NYHS lends any item a patina of age, to confer vintage status on something not even seven years old, is still a bit of a reach. Even for the fashion cycle. But consider that it was designed for New York’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics, and that scarf starts to look like really old news. There are no doubt events from 2005 which feel like they happened yesterday, but I remember how ridiculously far off into the future the idea of the 2012 Olympics seemed at the time. Perhaps "vintage" adheres to its own laws of relativity. And so much for telling the age of a scarf from the date printed on it.

The 100 members of New York's 2012 delegation were outfitted in Oscar de la Renta for the city-selection event that took place in Singapore. According to NY1, "The attire consists of a printed NYC2012 blouse with matching printed scarf, white blazer, and navy skirt for women while the men will be wearing a navy blazer and solid blue dress shirt, a printed NYC2012 tie and white pants."

Needless to say, the NYHS is a treasure trove of the city and of the country’s past. And they’ve got newly renovated digs.
Their online scarf collection isn't exactly extensive, but here are a few to get us in the mood for another kind of competition--the presidential election this fall!

The George McGovern scarf is from 1972, the year he lost
to Nixon in a landslide. The Nixon scarf, though,
is from 1968. It is described on the site as “designed in
the "groovy" aesthetic of the 1960s…”


Carter-Mondale, undated.

Eugene McCarthy's 1968 peace campaign.


Norman Thomas was a six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America. This kerchief from 1932, includes names of Socialist Party candidates for New York State governor and NYC mayor as well.


Constitution-preamble and 10 original amendments, 1941.

Ephemera Out of Egypt

The Egyptian Museum, which dramatically served as the backdrop for the recent events in Tahrir Square, reopened last week, along with the Pyramids, and other archeological sites in Egypt.

I’m not sure exactly what kind of renovation has taken place over the last 20 years, but in 1991, my visit to the Egyptian Museum was unlike any other museum experience I’d ever had. I had already seen The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the Met Museum some years earlier. The boy king’s New York debut, which famously introduced the phenomenon of the “blockbuster” museum show, came complete with elaborate sets, advance ticket sales, and long lines.

In Cairo, I was wandering amongst the same artifacts, but without the special effects and the hype. I’m pretty sure that everything I found fascinating about the experience--the quiet emptiness, the dank mustiness, the wood cabinets with drawers of artifacts, the atmospheric dust glistening in shafts of sunlight--would leave any museum director, curator, or conservator, cringing and infuriated. But for me, and a handful of other tourists, it was like we were literally “discovering” the treasures some archeologist had dug out of the ground. Very 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.'


I was only in Egypt for three days, so it was necessary to fly in order to visit Luxor and Valley of the Kings.

I can't seem to part with this translucent onion-skin receipt.

You can't help but drink lots of water.

Chromatic Inversions

I don’t know what made me decide to “invert” this coral-sprouting goddess, using Photoshop, but it looked so cool that I tried it on everything. Here are the ones that also looked cool …

Daphne by Wenzel Jamnitzer, c. 1550, Musée National de la Renaissance.


Ancient Egyptian linen, British Museum.


Egyptian tools, British Museum.


Nets of native cultures, for fishing and trapping, Peabody Museum and National Museum of Australia.


Back view of a Greek Kouros statue’s head (this is the “hair”) Metropolitan Museum of Art


Horsehair Headdress, High Plains, Dakota, Peabody Museum.


Pink feather.


Oil-soaked pelican from the Gulf. If only Photoshop filters worked
in real life …
AP Photo/Charlie Riedel