wasting bandwidth since 2005

I ran across this today searching for reference photos for a project I was working on. I was checking out some old postcards and a bunch were mid sixties SoCal tourist shlock. This particular group was of Beach Blvd motels surrounding Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park. A place where I am all too familiar with (or at least I used to be) from growing up near by in the seventies and eighties. I can tell you the place was choked with this crap well into the nineties. Same went for the miles surrounding Disneyland. A lot has been torn down, but there are still some of these old haunts all over the tourist spots of OC though probably not retaining much of their old look. They have been face lifted and renovated. This gem was the Capri located at 7860 Beach Blvd. Amazingly I just did a quick Google Earth search and this place still exists pool and all. Next time I’m in town I will have to check this place out and take a pic to compare the then and now.

But this is not why it got image of the week. It made that distinction by being a picture I burst out laughing at the moment I saw it. Really look at it. I could not love this picture any more. My mind immediatly saw the photo shoot as hysterical. This person grabs twenty freinds, guests, or a combo of whoever was around for a postcard photo. Then he obsesses on the setup. Notice how everyone is perfectly spaced. Everyone has been placed right where they need to be for him to get the balance just right.

Photo Guy: “Okay stripes girl I need you to sit on the diving board and look back at grandpa and the baby. Okay bikini girl #3 fourth stair hands on the rail on your left only. Guy on diving board stand just on the edge like you are sizing up your dive. Kids in pool no no no I want you to just both hold on to the ladder rails. Okay… Bikini girl #1 I have a blank spot. I need you back on the other side to sit in one of those chairs… yeah that’s it now put your legs up on the chaise next to you. Perfect.”

This went on for, I imagine, 2 hours.

After all that work you think he would have airbrushed out the high tension wires and the apartment complex in the back of the shot.

Masto.

Lately I have been reading a lot of old Sci-Fi Fantasy Adventure stuff. You know, Wells, Verne, the old stuff. Some of this I remember fondly from my youth. Some of it is stuff I always wanted to read and never got around to. Right now it’s Edgar Rice Burroughs. I know what your thinking… Tarzan. No it’s the “John Carter: Warlord of Mars” books I’m into right now. I forgot how much fun those kind of pulp stories are to read.

Of course it’s hard for me to not think of these books without all the great illustrations that adorned the paperback versions of these, and other Sci-Fi books in the Sixties, which my Image of the Week comes from. Frazetta was the best of these. Lots of imitators but Frank is the coolest. None of that “Boris” posed body builder crap. Just good ol’ fantasy comic book stuff, with cool monsters, and bodacious broads. As a matter of fact this is in the small minority of his illustrations that don’t have some girls large naked ass in it. Still his old school style of drawing women reminds one of the day when big curves where hot.

If you saw this woman in the mall this afternoon odds are you would be think she was a lard ass.

Masto.

“Your bound to find hundreds of exciting and unusual uses for me” Truer words were never spoken (shudder). The thinly veiled wink, wink, nudge, nudge, subtext to this ad is hysterical. “Made with startling detail” I am to assume means some kind of orifice in the vicinity of the crotch. How many 13 year old boys did they think would mail off their hard earned lawnmower money for the possible opportunity of a humiliating conversation with their mothers after retrieving the days mail.

Mom: “Jimmy! Why the hell is there a inflatable doll in the mail addressed to you?”

Jimmy: “I thought it would be a great burglar deterrent (read ad copy).”

Mom: “Why does it need a vagina then?”

Jimmy has spent the majority of his adult life in therapy.

Masto.