That Gummy Epileptic! What a coffee-mill!

Emilie Marie Bouchaud was born May 14, 1874, in Algiers (though "of pure French stock" she was quick to add). Arriving in Paris about 1890, she styled herself Polaire and became a cabaret and stage sensation. Noted for her skittish energy and frenetic performances, she was given the nickname "la gommeuse épileptique." Google Translate renders it rather comically as "the gummy epileptic." (I'll assume we're losing a lot in English*...descriptive idioms turned hilarious crazy-talk in literal translation.) We read by way of explanation:

the gummy epileptic, she throws her head back, moving from one foot to another with clenched fists in song recitals with mocking words ... By her own admission, her feet are dancing alone in her shoes!

A petite 5 foot 3, she was celebrated for her tightly corseted wasp waist—ostensibly fourteen inches (although many promotional images seem to be retouched to alarming extremes). Decadent poet, novelist and dandy Jean Lorain evokes her mesmerizing performance as equal parts Orientalist seductress and fearsome whirling Dervish:

Polaire! The agitating and agitated Polaire! The tiny slip of a woman that you know, with the waist slender to the point of pain, of screaming out loud, of breaking in two...the phosphorus, the sulphur, the red pepper of that ghoulish, Salome-like face, the agitating and agitated Polaire!
What a devilish mimic, what a coffee-mill and what a belly-dancer! Yellow skirt tucked high, gloved in open-work stockings, Polaire skips, flutters, wriggles, arches from the hips, the back, the belly, mimes every kind of shock, twists, coils, rears, twirls... trembling like a stuck wasp, miaows, faints to what music and what words! The house, frozen with stupor, forgets to applaud.

What was performed on the stage in Paris of 1900 evidently took some time to get to America. Ten years later, after bubbling up from brothels and low dance halls, the "young set" of this country went "dance mad." (See an earlier post about the Grizzly Bear, Bunny Hug and the Turkey Trot)

Sheet music, drawing by C. Lavigne, 1900
M. DuFleuve, listed top right, is her brother
Picture from Polaire 1900

I'd love to get the back-story of this "Zippy the Pinhead" look. The intentionally grotesque character is fascinating for such a beautiful performer. Picture from Polaire 1900

My favorite image (above)— so vibrant, so kooky
Picture from Polaire 1900

postcard by Nadar, 1900
(the retouched photographer's stand, to help the subject keep still for the exposure, can still plainly be seen behind her legs) Picture from Polaire 1900

"the Female Torpedo" by Charles Leandre Picture from Polaire 1900

poster by Toulouse Lautrec, 1895. This seems to be her "gummy epileptic" dance!

Picture from Polaire 1900

Polaire was touted as having a 14-inch waist, though many of her publicity images (including this one) are noticeably retouched

As with a good many French performers, Polaire did not age well. She died in 1939.

Image above of Polaire (only) from Polaire 1900

Why is it that so many French women of a certain age seemed to shrivel into little hobgoblins? In later life, each appeared to have been issued a perennially dyspeptic expression, a slash of drawn-on brow, and an aureole of frazzled cotton-candy hair (often an unnatural shade of orange --see Jean-Claude Christo, and Sonia Rykiel).

* Michael Leddy tells me gommeuse may be "fop"—any French readers out there with additional information?

Images of Polaire are drawn from these very comprehensive French sites.

Connecticut sketches

For a brief moment I thought perhaps I should write a post about the new UK Space Agency logo or some other topical, relevant subject I've pondered recently. But then almost nothing of what I've written on this blog has ever bowed to the dictates of timeliness or relevance, so why start now. And so:

C O N N E C T I C U T

Historical Collections,

containing a

General Collection of Interesting Facts, Traditions,

Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, &c.

Relating to the

History and Antiquities

of Every Town in Connecticut,

with

Geographical Descriptions.

Illustrated by 190 Engravings.

by John Warner Barber.
 second edition.
New Haven:
Published by Durrie & Peck and J.W. Barber,Price: three dollars. *
1838 

I purchased this book for a few dollars at a local flea market not too long ago. It was gratifyingly cheap because the condition is so poor— the cover has fallen off, the fold out map is barely tethered to the spine, and virtually all the pages have foxing or are totally discolored. But every page is intact, including one at front with an inscription in brown ink ("H. P. Havens/ bo't 28 March 1838). I like the heft of the book, the substantial rustle of its 550+ cottony pages, the dark whorls of its marbled end papers. 

The numerous little engravings are of a piece: restrained, bucolic, charmingly naive. Within this engraver's earnest but narrow visual repertoire, most every town in Connecticut looks like another: white steepled churches and a few plain buildings set amidst gently rolling hills, enlivened, now and then by a coach, or a chimney belching smoke, that curious 19th century conceit that signals prosperity and purposeful diligence.

Content is a hodgepodge of pedantic identification ["South view of Fair Haven (western part.)"], colorful local lore (there's a surprisingly empathetic Indian presence), liberal use of extracts from old newspapers and town records on a seemingly random array of subjects, and curiously, transcriptions of epitaphs "copied from the monuments" in local burying grounds. This last practice appears to be de rigeur for the author, Mr. JW Barber, for imparting to his readers the true essence of each town: past highlights, if you will. An inscription found in Tolland:

Cap't Amos Fellows was captivated [sic] by ye British troops on ye Island of New York, Sept. 15, 1776, and was closely confined for several months, and there suffered repeated hardships, probably insupportable, died in captivity Feb. 16, 1777, in ye 48th year of his age. His remains are there still, and that his memory may be perpetuated, this monument is here erected by his son. A tribute of a tear is due to him who in his country's cause has lost his life.

Here's one for Molly, a young woman who died in 1792, aged 24:

Molly, tho' pleasant in her day,
was sudd'nly seiz'd and sent away.
How soon she's ripe, how soon she's rotten,
Laid in the grave and soon forgott'n.

Mr. Barber comments on the "rather unrefined" sentiment in that one.

Our author/narrator/tour guide compiled and edited this text in 1837, long ago in our past, but it isn't the 1830s that we learn much about— it's the people of his past that come most clearly into view. Barber relates or reprints many a stirring episode from the Revolution or from Colonial days, and a good number of odd and dramatic local anecdotes of fifty or a hundred years previous. When he returns to his own time, his narrative powers fail him and we're more likely to hear about the height of high tide or the situation of the local quarry.  

In Wethersfield we learn in detail about the tragic Beadle family murder-suicide: mother and five children "consigned over to better hands" by the father, who was "impatient to visit his God."
 
In Ridgefield we get the sad back story of Sarah Bishop, hermitess:

Her father's house was burnt by the British, and she was cruelly treated by a British officer. She then left society and wandered among the mountains near this part of the state, where she found a kind of cave near Ridgefield, where she resided till about the time of her death, which took place in 1810. She sometimes came down to Ridgefield to attend public worship on the Sabbath. It is said that the wild animals were so accustomed to see her, that they were not afraid of her presence. The following account of a visit to this hermitess, is taken from a newspaper printed at Poughkeepsie, in 1804. "She was without form. Her dress appeared little else than one confused and shapeless mass of rags, patched together without any order, which obscured all human shape, excepting her head, which was clothed with a luxuriancy of lank grey hair depending on every side, as she had formed it, without any covering or ornament. When she discovered our approach, she exhibited the appearance of a wild and timid animal, she started and hastened to her cave, which she entered, and barricadoed the entrance..."

Among the many extracts from old newspapers are several advertisements in this vein, reprinted without comment from the author :

Litchfield, Oct. 6, 1761.
Notice is hereby given, that there is now in Litchfield gaol, a mulatto fellow who calls himself Caesar Sambo, about 5 foot 10 speaks good English, well made, sprightly, about 25 years of age: says he is free... he was traveling without a pass...

A Likely Negro Wench and Child to be sold. — Inquire of the Printer. To be sold by the subscriber, of Branford, a likely Negro Wench, 18 years of age, is acquainted with all sorts of House Work; is sold for no fault. June 15, 1763.

 -----
*In 1838, this book cost $3 (or about $71 in today's money according to this site). I paid not too much more than the original price.

Mudlarking

During a trip to London some years ago, a friend took me for a walk along South Bank. This was before the Tate Modern opened and things were still a bit ragged around there. So when we unexpectedly took stairs down to the shoreline and he told me to watch out for "treasures," I was skeptical. (Not to mention totally unprepared to continue our walk out onto gummy black mud.) But I became practically giddy with excitement when within a brief 10 minute amble and absolutely no exertion on my part I found the bowl of an 18th or 19th century clay pipe (which I gave to my friend), and three distinctive pottery shards, above. (The blue ones are almost certainly mid-nineteenth century, the green is a mystery—1930s? medieval?) That afternoon remains one of my best excursions. It's a mystery to me why it's taken me so long to try to replicate that experience. And its only recently I learned the term for what I was doing that day...

Behind St. Katherine Docks, 1952

Mudlark: the word was late 18th century slang both for a pig, and for one of the scavengers working the banks of the Thames. Human mudlarks would root around along the foreshore of the river during low tide, searching for lumps of coal, bits of old iron and other detritus that fell from ships — anything which they could sell for a few pence. They were Dickensian characters—but were vividly captured from life by Henry Mayhew, a pioneering social journalist in London Labour and the London Poor (1851). The children (mudlarks were usually under fifteen, but old women would troll the shore as well):

....[were] scarcely half covered by the tattered indescribable things that serve them for clothing; their bodies are grimed with the foul soil of the river, and their torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description.

Today, London's Society of Thames Mudlarks comprises about 60 people in overalls, gloves, and rubber boots who have official permits (browsing along the shore is fine for anyone, but digging needs a permit) to comb the river foreshore with metal detectors.* In Thames, the Biography, Peter Ackroyd lists some of the items the river has yielded to chance and modern mudlarks:

A cup of Trojan origin was found by two dredgermen at Barn Elms, a Greek rhyton of the second century BC was found at Billingsgate...24 Viking swords have been retrieved from the Thames... in one small area just east of Blackfriars Bridge, some 250 medieval pewter pilgrim badges were discovered. In 1834 a bronze head of the emperor Hadrian was found near London Bridge.
       The Thames seems to contain the debris of the world—bird cages and urethral syringes, watches and wooden stools, pipes and phials and wig curlers...A flint hand axe might share the same stretch of river bed with a sixteenth-century pot and a nineteenth century bicycle wheel... In the ancient river all time is redeemable, past and present suspended together in intimate association.... the river is a great depository of past lives.

Ackroyd's meandering story of one of the world's famous rivers is a dreamily evocative and anecdotal sweep of history. He calls the river "a reliquary"—a container or shrine— and it is, not only in the metaphorical sense. The Thames's thick, viscous mud is low in oxygen and as a result, organic decay is greatly minimized. Metal objects retrieved from the depths look, after a swift polish, about as they did when they were dropped in. 

Somewhere there are still blackened remnants of the Great Fire or a commemorative token that slipped out of a hand during a Frost Fair (one of several times the Thames froze over and tents with food and drink, and games of archery and bear-baiting were set up on the ice). I could happily spend my time looking for those... The web site for the Mudlark Society breaks this poetic reverie just a bit. There is no romanticism on these fluorescent green pages. The site revels in fart humor, abounds in misspellings and is one of the ugliest I've ever come across. And yet... there is a fantastic array of documented finds to pore over and the chief mudlark, Steve Brooker, seems like a pretty fun guy. I intend to sign up to go mudlarking on my next trip to London.

Thames Frost, Abraham Hondius, 1677

view from Isle of Dogs, Lorna Richardson, Thames Discovery Programme

 . . . . .

If I would drink water, I must ... swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster. Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons used in mechanics and manufactures, enriched with the putrefying carcasses of beasts and men, and mixed with the scourings of all the washtubs, kennels, and common sewers within the bills of mortality.
 –The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett, 1771

 . . . . .

Mudlark finds, including medieval shoe soles and a coin bearing the image of Faustina Augusta who was briefly empress of Rome in 221 AD. These six preceding images from Thames and Field Metal Detecting Society

*Forget shopkeepers, Britain seems to be a nation of amateur metal "detectorists". Take, for instance, Terry Herbert who in July '09 uncovered a tremendous cache of Saxon gold just below the surface of a cultivated field in south Staffordshire.

creatures I have seen in my apartment

I hope I am not tempting Fate by saying that the Brooklyn brownstone I live in has been uncommonly free of the New York City pest trifecta: cockroaches, mice, rats. Nor have I ever had a bed bug visitation. For this, I am very very thankful. Perhaps because there are a lot of trees and Prospect Park is just up the street, I have had a number of other callers.

Many of the images here are not of my specific creatures— they are from the delightful What's That Bug? A folksy, useful site whose authors attempt do just that— WTB? identifies readers' entomological sources of distress, disgust, or wonder from emailed images. Fielding everything from beauty shots to scenes of carnage to drawings (bottom) the authors are able to impart an impressive amount of information considering they are both MFAs and teach photography in Los Angeles!

House Centipede
Have seen several of these periodically— I can't even bear to talk about this.

Moth
Unremarkable sightings, cat gets agitated

Spider Beetle 
(evidently harmless but it looks alarmingly like a tick to us inveterate urban dwellers!)

Brown Marmorated Stink Bug
Truthfully, I am not sure I saw this exact bug– it didn't "produce a pungent, malodorous chemical" 
when I scooped it up on a paper and threw it out the window

Daddy Long Legs
The last one I saw was about 5 inches across leg to leg. Hunched, unmoving, for 2 days in the cove molding near my ceiling it was like a visitor from a Tim Burton movie.
I also have small spiders, but I couldnt find an accurate image— they all seemed much bigger than what I have seen

little Black Ant

For two seasons I had a trail of ants coming and going single file each way from my west window. Very upsetting as I tried to obliterate them and they just. kept. coming.

Praying Mantis

This is my photo— and this is my mantis! I discovered it one night inside my apartment when its rustling against the window woke me. I was petrified since I didnt know what it was— it was just tremendous. Somehow I thought I'd shooed it out the window. By the time it appeared again, inside, I knew what it was and gingerly picked it up. I could feel its little tiny hands grasping as I flung it out the window. It (or a relative) showed up again on my geraniums.

reader-submitted drawing from the site What's That Bug?

"housecleaning"

 Silk screened dry cleaning posters showing hand lettering. Original designs, c. 1960

I went down to my unofficial deep storage in the basement the other day and I came across these posters.  

Yes, they are dry cleaners' posters.

I knew I had them, (I acquired them about 9 years ago) I just hadn't laid eyes on them in quite a while. Despite my criminally poor photographs here, they are, in person, surprisingly lovely specimens of commercial art. Large (about 17 x 42) and silk screened in vivid blues, black, and fluorescent brights, these are the real thing—not retro simulations.

How did I come to possess a package of old dry cleaning posters? Glad you're interested. One day, I stopped in at a local cleaner and inquired about a poster in his window: yellow with black and white line art of a man and woman, he in a sharp suit, she in a crisp cocktail dress complete with hat and gloves. It was so astoundingly out of date, so jarringly asynchronous with the world around it, to me it was like coming upon someone using a cotton gin. And it was sincere; it was still being used in a commercial capacity. That was what got me: this artwork, clearly depicting a lost world of men in hats and women in gloves, was still literally and unironically being used to advertise "new express dry cleaning service." After an unsuccessful bid to obtain that very poster I made a note to seek out the manufacturer, Foster-Stephens, Inc, of Skokie Illinois.

In the early 2000s I used to see posters like these—probably designed during the Kennedy administration—every so often. Naive, and practically twinkling with exaggerated cheerfulness the silk screened banners were being increasingly supplanted with other promotional material of the plastic decal variety, themselves sporting artwork a good 20 years out of date. (Many dry cleaning posters these days look like artwork from Duran Duran albums*) It was astonishing to me how the progressive, evolutionary juggernaut of advertising had seemingly passed over the entire dry cleaning business sector. It was also pretty interesting to note that these "authentic" holdouts were existing side by side with coy retro Old Navy ads and businesses like House industries and Charles S Anderson stock images whose entire raison d'etre was the recycling of vintage commercial vernacular.

I did get around to calling Foster-Stephens. I spoke with someone there who acknowledged that yes, the "streamers" were indeed silk screened, and yes, some of the designs were pretty old. At the time of my call, in 2002, the woman guessed, "they were probably designed by Owen Heitmeyer. He'd be well over 90 if he were alive." And so... I purchased a few of the designs right then and there, over the phone, for about $5 a piece. And then I wrote a little piece for Print magazine about them.

To my knowledge silk screened streamers are no longer part of the Foster-Stephens inventory.

* I intend to take a few images around the neighborhood. For now, here's a a glimpse of what I mean, found online.

And here's a British gallery selling vintage dry cleaning posters for £125...

family stories

 A detail of a crudely retouched image of "Kallikak" children which (intentionally?) made them appear grotesque. From the book The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness.

Did anyone else find the article in the New Yorker, Strangers on the Mountain, about the "Jackson Whites" of New Jersey, as riveting as I did? I'm not sure why I have an utter fascination with genealogy, ethnic tracing, endogamy, and consanguinity*. The piece was a rather unexpected investigation of the self-proclaimed Ramapough Mountain Indians of Stag Hill, New Jersey, a group of "racially indeterminate clansfolk" whose isolation, rustic customs, and general "hillbilly" designation have kept them in local legend for generations. While the article tried to tread carefully,  distinguishing between fact and folklore and long-held prejudice, it still conveyed unmistakable  throwaway descriptions of local color: the Stag Hill area dotted with spare tires and rusting appliances.

Thinking is that these "mountain people" are descendants of Lenape Indians, Hessian deserters, Tory sympathizers (from the Revolution), and runaway Dutch-owned slaves, though most of this is unproven. What is known is that many families have Dutch surnames, are "negroid" or reddish-complected, and some have blue eyes. Their reputation for close intermarriage, poverty, and penchant for squirrel meat put me in mind of the Jukes and the Kallikaks, an earlier obsession of mine. (See my earlier post on Hapsburg Jaw, and the not-at-all-sinister Cold Spring Eugenics Archive, among other topics)

The "Jukes" were a New York hill family studied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Richard L. Dugdale. He found that of 29 male blood relatives, 17 had been arrested and 15 convicted of crimes. His book, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, claimed "Max," a descendant of early Dutch settlers and who was born between 1720 and 1740, had been the ancestor of more than 76 convicted criminals, 18 brothel-keepers, 120 prostitutes, over 200 relief recipients and 2 cases of "feeble-mindedness." A follow-up study was published in 1916 by Arthur Estabrook of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York (see online archive, mentioned above).

The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, a 1912 book by psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard, was another in a stream of "scientific" social treatises published in the first few decades of the century when the eugenics movement was at its peak. The pseudonymous Jukes, Kallikaks, and Nams studies assumed iconic status and contributed to sterilization laws adopted by 30 states in the early part of the 20th century. Laws allowing the involuntary sterilization of sex offenders, habitual criminals, epileptics, and the "feebleminded" were meant to keep "defectives" from reproducing and, thus, reduce the number of those burdening the state. Additionally, there was the intent to prevent mildly retarded people from reproducing. Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered the Supreme Court's 1927 opinion upholding the legality of eugenic sterilization, which included the infamous phrase "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

In a shocking (on many levels) reprise of that famous case, this past fall a 35-year-old Tessa Savicki sued a Boston-area hospital for performing a tubal ligation, thus sterilizing her, after the birth of her 9th child. Two of her children are on welfare and she is unemployed...
------

I once sent away to get my DNA tested. I was crushed to discover that, as a female, I could only get mitochondrial DNA traced: my mother's side. Half the story is missing! The portion of me that was readable was deemed to be 89% European and 11% East Asian. Ironically, it was my father who was once mistaken for an Asian, or so the story went, much to the hilarity of all involved.
----
*update: I just realized why I periodically return to this subject with passionate interest— it is because genetic tracing, genealogy, et al. are all threads connecting the present to the past in some tangible way. It is like discovering echoes that never quite fade.

The New York Evening Journal, 1923

Arsenic, Sheep's Dung, and a Yellow called Pink*

 

From top: Ignaz Schiffermüller's chart of blue color samples, Vienna, 1772.

Moses Harris's Natural System of Colours, London, 1766 

Richard Waller, "A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt Its Properties," in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 6 for the years 1686 and 1687  

Tray of jasper trials, ca. 1773-76, Josiah Wedgwood

I'm surprised the Church never outlawed color. Not only because of its sensual enticements and potentially corrupting power but because pigments seem to have been so unnaturally poisonous. There is something almost allegorical going on there. The toxicity of these precious distillations was astonishing: the rich golden yellow called orpiment, and the pure brilliant orange, realgar, prompted early 15th century painter and writer Cennino Cennini to write "Beware...lest you suffer personal injury...look out for yourself." In the 19th century Carl Wilhelm Scheele tinkered with compounds of arsenic and devised what would become an enormously popular green. Unfortunately, Scheele's green and a similar "emerald green" proved potentially poisonous: if exposed to dampness, it decomposed into arsine, a toxic gas. It was said Napoleon may have died in part because of the exhalations of his green wallpaper.

All of the incredible images here are from a stunningly detailed monograph The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe by Sarah Lowengard, online in its entirety through Columbia University Press and Gutenberg-e. Lowengard examines the scientific experimentation which led to color discovery and the subsequent implementation. In the Age of Empiricism optics, physics, chemistry, taxonomy and naming, diagramming all came into play in the creation of color. Taste, of course, was also a motivating factor. Demand for popular colors such as pompadour, Saxon green and nankeen were offered by the dyehouse (textile), pottery and pigment (paint, ink) workshops. Thus there were the different characteristics each color took on in the different media, and each creation's fugitive or stable nature to consider.

Another color text to consult is a lecture given by Phillip Ball, a noted English science writer, author of Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (which I have not yet read), among other books. This is a far broader and briefer work. Ball skips lightly and effortlessly from the earliest color designations to Medieval minium to William Perkin's creation of Mauve from coal tar. Ball cites the science of color and each pigment's chemical properties but raises many philosophical points as well. The progression of Medieval religious art, for instance, was in some ways motivated by the creation of vermilion. The product of yellow sulphur and silvery mercury, the brilliance of this red automatically called for other colors in the palette to follow suit and match intensity. Another fact to consider: the switch to an oil base paint from the quick-drying egg tempera allowed the softer modelling and shadows of Renaissance art. It is quite interesting to think that the extreme cost of, or arduous labor involved in, one pigment versus another, or the xenophobic response to a color's origins (ie "The East") could sway taste, commerce, and art itself.

* In the 17th century, the word pink was used to describe a shade rather than a color and often meant a greenish or yellowish color.

The creation of pigments and dyes proves ceaselessly interesting to me. The ingredient lists, the labor, the outlandish processes are a fascinating window into an age when people had a different conception of time...

Dye process for Turkey red on cotton
John Wilson An Essay on Light and Colours, 1786

1. Boil cotton in lye of Barilla or wood ash.
2. Wash and dry
3. Steep in a liquor of Barilla ash or soda plus sheep's dung and olive oil
4. Rinse, let stand 12 hours, dry
5. Repeat steps 3– 4 three times.
6. Steep in a fresh liquor of Barilla ash or soda plus sheep's dung, olive oil and white argol.
7. Rinse and dry
8. Repeat steps 6–7 three times.
9. Treat with gall nut solution
10. Wash and dry.
11. Repeat steps 9 – 10 once.
12. Treat with a solution of alum, or alum mixed with ashes and Saccharum Saturni (lead acetate).
13. Dry, wash, dry.
14. Madder once or twice with Turkey madder to which a little sheep's blood is added.
15. Wash
16. Boil in a lye made of soda ash or the dung liquor
17. Wash and dry.

Get out your pince-nez and glue pots

Just when the embers of my Bauhaus-inspired armchair crafts enthusiasm started to die the Metropolitan comes up with a show to rekindle the flame, Playing With Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage.

Readers here may remember my post a year ago on Victorian collage and my Sackville-West album findings (below) from the magical George Eastman House. 

Those discoveries, some from Georgiana Berkeley's album, and much more appear to be on view. I hope to report back on the show soon.

In the meantime, by coincidence, I am supposed to go to a collaging party tonight. I hope to have something to report on that as well...
~~~
Update:  Well the collaging party was very fun, although it took quite a while to break out the scissors and paper. We filled our time with Russian plov and salad and vintage cocktails. My evening's subpar effort directly below (thats me in the photo) It's the first thing I've done in a very long while so I wont judge to harshly.

At bottom are two never-finished collages I did after visiting Detroit in the early 90s. The photos of abandoned houses were taken downtown. The desolation was unlike anything I'd ever seen. Post-apocalyptic.