October 30, 2010
Dear Clusterflock,
What is this thing?
It’s for sale at The Cure, an East Village thrift store, but nobody seems to know what it is. Suggestions include
- a samovar
- a microwave from ancient Egypt
- a very, very old fashioned water cooler
- the top half of Lady Gaga’s next outfit
- a Dalek incubator
- a charcoal grill
Other notable items from among The Cure’s offerings include Ellen and Arthur’s lovely wedding album, a vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fanny pack, a drag-queen-sized excellent silver gown, a cool little bookcase, and this, for Cindy.
comments
I will ponder and report my conclusion.
Really wish I could read the label on the mysterious thing.
If you click through on the photo via the link you get to a larger view.
The label says “The Chisholm Company, New York”
A little googling resulted in only one relevant link, for what seems to be an olde straight razor. Following that logic I’m gonna say it’s some sort of barbershop gear – like maybe a hot towel steamer?
Like this maybe?
Dang! I bet that is it! A barber shop towel steamer.
P.S. I love this thing. It is so steampunk.
Wow, Marco. You are awesome.
Until I read the comments I was going to say, “Compost tea brewer,” not that I know what that’s supposed to look like.
You rule, Marco.
As a concluding bonus, I’d like to point out the Cure’s Regretsyesque View It in a Room shot.
The View It in a Room shot is splendid and, yes, it does call to mind Regretsy.
I really wish I had photographed some of the things in what was for a time a Chicago “antique mall” and was later condo-ized. The building had for years housed a vocational school, and it retained that institutional feel.
The lower levels featured enormous spaces stacked high with banks of railroad and subway car seats, shop fixtures, bits of scavenged architectural elements, and the effect was very Xanadu (in the Citizen Kane sense).
The best, though, were the tableaux created in rooms that may have been offices. The rooms were office-sized, but each featured a very large window that looked out onto the corridor. They suggested interrogation rooms as much as anything. The windows’ purpose may have had more to do with the inadequacy of early twentieth-century interior lighting than with surveillance, but the impression created was grim.
The tableaux suggested the “model rooms” of department or furniture stores, but of course everything was second-hand. And someone with a good deal of flair and humor had put much effort into them. Someone, I suspect, with the set-dressing sensibility of Our Rick.
My all-time favorite was the one a friend and I called the Baby Jane Room. A bedroom tableau featured off-white “French Provincial” furniture that was discolored and reminiscent of nicotine-stained fingernails or teeth. On the dresser was an array of old perfume and lotion bottles filled with bilious-looking liquids, and I think that a few pieces of old sheet music were strewn on the table’s surface as well as affixed to the mirror.
The instant my friend and I walked into this room, we began to sing, “I’ve written a letter to Daddy . . . . “
I guess it’s too late for me to guess “Marvin the Paranoid Android”
Great work, Marco.
I like my local barber shop but if they had a Chisholm Company towel steamer, I’d probably be sporting the kind of cut that requires weekly maintenance…and lots of hot towels.
My favorite Cure thrift store item is, however, the vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fanny pack.