Colin Smith

“Old and new New York”, by Alfred Stieglitz, 1910.

It makes me smile, but that doesn’t mean I don’t honestly adore it. I would love to see film from the period of someone with the poise and the cool to pull it off.

I genuinely love its audacity.

I like to think of it as a Star Trek homage of sorts.

From August 1971’s “Hit Parade”, this fabulous knit jump suit that’s surely ripe for today’s fashion pages. Mind you, I put $39.99 in 1971 into an inflation calculator & it’s the equivalent in purchasing power today of $321.24! That was one expensive knit jump suit!

“Reading Is Fun!”

The great Maurice Sendak’s poster for 1979’s International Year Of The Child.

“Old and new New York”, by Alfred Stieglitz, 1910.

Truth.

It really is!

I see that now :)

You know, I’m not anything close to a kid anymore & my hearing is, shall we politely say, less than optimum. But I enjoy music more than I ever did, which is saying something. Recently I’ve been playing 70s albums I’ve never really heard before: crikey there’s so many of them. It’s been such fun.

David Niven in a promo photo for 1946’s classic fantastical movie “A Matter Of Life And Death”.

“Reading Is Fun!”

The great Maurice Sendak’s poster for 1979’s International Year Of The Child.

The older I get, the more singing about small personal pleasures in a laidback way seems inspiring and laudable.

J J Cale. I let that wretched creature Clapton put me off him, but when I did arrive in his proximity in late middle age, Cale was perfect for my ageing bones.

Gentlefolks I invested a shocking £5 in these CDs at a Friday morning carboot sale. Exorbitant.

😀 😀 😀

Sorry, I should’ve have sounded the #nichecanon to warn you about the above.

Luckily it only involved the changing of one page. Had it been the issue after, 6 complex Gene Colan pages would’ve needed changing.

I love the little details you pick up from old fanzines. As here, from 1970’s Marvelmania #3, where we’re told Captain America #115 was completed with guest-stars The Avengers before it was realised Hawkeye had just been transformed into Goliath. So Yellowjacket was drawn/written into his place.

🖖

You’re so right about the distribution of wealth. It was the same in the UK. Even in the worst of the Thirties, some areas/classes positively thrived. This is why we need the post-scarcity mass affluence of replicator technology. That’d help solve it :)

Yep, quite feasible variables. All the same, each issue in the period was hundreds of pages long, packed with features & glorious photos & masses of ads. It was clearly coining it during dark days. (I just put its 1937 ad profit alone into an inflation calculator & it’s $38 million in 2026 terms.)

Workers clearing the slums of London’s Sidney Street & Clarendon Street c.1931 mark the last stages of their work by burning effigies of the vermin that had infested the old buildings. There’s something very powerful & ancient & Fortean about this & someone has surely spun a horror tale out of it.

Batman rescuing a nipper from a burning tenement, by Irv Novick & Dick Giordano et al, from Batman #221, which was out this very month in 1970.

I’m amazed at how much Fortune magazine must been making in 1936, right in the middle of The Depression, to be able to commission & print Stanley Huber Wood paintings for a piece on a profitable Newport shipmaker.

! That’s unexpected. But you know what, it sounds like a really interesting way to reexperience the music too.

Gentlefolks I invested a shocking £5 in these CDs at a Friday morning carboot sale. Exorbitant.

They’re 👍 aren’t they?

I think it’s the Mad Thinker.