Love with Grotesque Monkeys; Waitress with Ass in Skillet; The Chef Examines His All-Girl Staff; Lady Diner Admiring Sommelier’s Tight Trousers; Diner with Hard-On Sampling Ferret Paté; Young Woman Smiling at Filthy Thought; College Professors Touching Thighs on Dais, with Name Tags and Bow Ties; Woman in Kitchen Watching Monkey Humping Casserole; Leather Madness Bewitches Waitress; Romberg’s Symphony Orchestra in Carnal Frenzy, with Toys and Language Poetry Manifesto; Lady Mary Campbell and Her Vibrating Oboe; SS Einsatzgruppenführer Discovering Louisville Slugger in Rectum; Quartet Party in Nude Frolic on Lawn, with Dried Leaves and Canned Peas; Henry Norman Surprised Anew in the Boys’ Room; The Famous Vienna Lady Orchestra Let Themselves Go; A Morning Ride, or, Unnatural Congress Between Lady Julia Pemberton and Her Stallion, “Lucifer”; Jenny Lind and Max, the Polish Tenor, with Charlotte Russe, Gourd, and Corsets; Miss Lind in the Puttit Inn Motel, with Ham on Rye; Madame Nellie Melba and Father Dirk Scucciamenza Between the Pews; North Dakotan Monkeys and Lotte Peschjka-Leutner with Her Sister, Candi Brittnee, in Bondage Frolic; A Musical Doctor Alone with a Prized Student’s Skirt; The Village Choir at It Again, with Lawn Jockey; Wandering Minstrels with Lutes and Exposed Privates; Mabel A. Royds Corrupting Altar Boys, with Missals; The Delaware Minstrels Discover the Joy and Warmth, Courage and Heartbreak of Gay Life; and, perhaps the most remarkable item, a rare and perfect dry-platinum-and-alum-process linoleum blocking of Cleveland and Billy Hill in their Great Double Song, Dance, and Buggery Act, with Banjos and Trombones, Cricket Bats, and Hand-Colored Daguerrotypes of Lady Edith Tyne-Fforke and Lady Martha Barley-Headde, Aspiring Pilots Both, Legs Akimbo, Sweating and Moaning Beneath a Perfect Replica of the Tattered Union Jack Flown by Lord Nelson at Trafalgar and the Second Battle of the Nile.
NEPER
A legerdemain icon, carefully handcrafted in the ancient and sadly anachronistic “tile mills” of Tynemouth-Bourne-Stetson on Palseyshire, broods, as it were, monochromatically, above the grime-streaked window that looks out on the rain-darkened street below. The difficult configurations of the disconcerting “construction” remind some visitors, paradoxically, of the hand-colored wood engraving of the assassination of Abraham (“Abe”) B. Lincoln at Ford’s Famous Theater and Emporium (such a realization is invariably chilling, and has made more than one person quite literally sick); still, the “moral intrusiveness,” as Michelle Caccatanto has trenchantly put it in one of her dazzling occasional essays on popular culture—which is, as she has noted, “so much more than popular culture”—of “La Folie au Monde,” the title by which the work is commonly known, has convinced an equal number of viewers to see in it a classic Dutch street fair with traveling stage and performers—the latter joyously akimbo in the whirl of a traditional Dutch Sunday in Neper. Such, then, is the power of the ancient Tynemouth craftsmen and the products of their time-tested thunking, gathering, carding, wooling, ratcheting, and blooring, made, as they have always been made, in the mist-shrouded valleys of the lower-central-midlands of the verdant Cotswolds and their crystalline lakes, aromatic fens, and glowing heaps of tossed midden, not to mention the acres of dead-grey gorse that say “home!” “La Folie,” as it is familiarly known to its many devotees, can be, as Ms. Caccatanto has noted, “many things to many persons,” yet it always gently insists on its “grave, brooding humanity” and its “true message” of steadfastness and “courage.” A few commentators have suggested that Ms. Caccatanto’s deeply respectful essay quietly suggests her hidden sense of herself, in the presence of so immortal an icon as “La Folie,” as a deluded purveyor of empty blather, the very picture of the
NEPER
A legerdemain icon, carefully handcrafted in the ancient and sadly anachronistic “tile mills” of Tynemouth-Bourne-Stetson on Palseyshire, broods, as it were, monochromatically, above the grime-streaked window that looks out on the rain-darkened street below. The difficult configurations of the disconcerting “construction” remind some visitors, paradoxically, of the hand-colored wood engraving of the assassination of Abraham (“Abe”) B. Lincoln at Ford’s Famous Theater and Emporium (such a realization is invariably chilling, and has made more than one person quite literally sick); still, the “moral intrusiveness,” as Michelle Caccatanto has trenchantly put it in one of her dazzling occasional essays on popular culture—which is, as she has noted, “so much more than popular culture”—of “La Folie au Monde,” the title by which the work is commonly known, has convinced an equal number of viewers to see in it a classic Dutch street fair with traveling stage and performers—the latter joyously akimbo in the whirl of a traditional Dutch Sunday in Neper. Such, then, is the power of the ancient Tynemouth craftsmen and the products of their time-tested thunking, gathering, carding, wooling, ratcheting, and blooring, made, as they have always been made, in the mist-shrouded valleys of the lower-central-midlands of the verdant Cotswolds and their crystalline lakes, aromatic fens, and glowing heaps of tossed midden, not to mention the acres of dead-grey gorse that say “home!” “La Folie,” as it is familiarly known to its many devotees, can be, as Ms. Caccatanto has noted, “many things to many persons,” yet it always gently insists on its “grave, brooding humanity” and its “true message” of steadfastness and “courage.” A few commentators have suggested that Ms. Caccatanto’s deeply respectful essay quietly suggests her hidden sense of herself, in the presence of so immortal an icon as “La Folie,” as a deluded purveyor of empty blather, the very picture of the
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