Chalk Outline Mystery

 Chalk outline detailing position of head with knife in hand. LAPD/Fototeka, 1950 via Huffington Post

Growing up in San Francisco in the 1970s I went on many school field trips. One of them made quite an impression. While walking around the outside of the Academy of Sciences, a museum located in Golden Gate Park, we saw the white outline of a body on a tree-shrouded path. For some reason at the time I believed this was the outline of a jumper. Regardless, I never forgot it and, since the arrival of the internet, have periodically Googled it to see if I can find who had jumped off the roof of the museum.

Last week I remembered having seen the chalk outline and Google it once again. However this time I learned about artist Richard Hambleton's Image Mass Murder.

Postcard of Hambleton’s Image Mass Murder 1976-1979 via Gallery 98                       //     via Woodbury House Art

In 1976 Richard Hambleton moved to San Francisco to attend the SF Art Institute. He made Image Mass Murder soon thereafter. It was a series of site specific artworks, created from 1976 to 1979 under the pseudonym Mr Reee, in which he asked friends to lie down and he'd trace their outlines in chalk and splatter red paint on them to emulate homicide victims. Hambleton's series "resulted in 600 crime scenes on the streets of 15 major cities across the United States and Canada." 1

 Outline on a Vancouver sidewalk by the street artist R. Dick Trace-it, 1977, via Woodbury House Art

"It was on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner in December, 1976, that Hambleton was called a “psychic terrorist” and a “sick jokester” for his fake murder scenes."2 The police did not know at the time they were dealing with an artist. Hambleton also used the pseudonym R. Dick Trace-It for the "detective" "solving" the crimes using "Wanted" posters for fake felons.

I ask myself, is it possible the outline I saw in Golden Gate Park that day was a Richard Hambleton artwork? I am reminded that while chalk outlines are no longer used by police today, but they were common in the past. But who would jump off of a two story museum? The mystery persists and my search continues for someone who may have documented the locations of Hambleton's Mr Ree works in San Francisco in the late '70s.

 Weegee, Outline of a Murder Victim, 1942 via Met Museum

1. Spellman Gallery
2. Vancouver Sun Obituary 2017

Love is liking ideas.

Charles M. Schulz

Dear Reader, 

I want to tell you that everything will be okay.
I want to tell you that it will get better.
I want to tell you that it all works out in the end. 

But sometimes it doesn’t. 

Most times it is hard and we usually end up getting used to it. 

But there is something you can do in response: read. 

Read until your heart breaks and you can’t stand it anymore.

Read until you have paper cuts from turning pages or blisters from swiping a screen. 

You see, here’s the thing: even at their worst, books won’t abandon you. 

 If they make you cry it’s only because they are that good. 

You can depend on books. 

They will always be there for you. 

Their patience is infinite and they have been known to save lives. 

They can help you become a smarter, more interesting person.

 Embroidery by Sarah K. Benning

Books can probably help you get dates, 

though I don’t recommend you ask that much of them too often 

(you don’t want to limit their power). 

Books — like dogs — are among a handful of things on this planet that just want to be loved. 

And they will love you back, generously and selflessly, requiring very little in return — until they are complete, their light and their wisdom and their hearts sputtering to an inevitable, lonely end. 

Debbie Millman

Dali Does Alice

When I was a girl I was a stage actor. I played Alice in a production of Alice in Wonderland. This led to decades of collecting Alice books and ephemera.

I have a number of editions by wonderful illustrators, including Ralph Steadman and Barry Moser, but had never heard of the ones by Salador Dalí. What a lovely surprise to stumble across these vibrant images from an edition published by Maecenas Press-Random House in 1969. The set includes 12  heliogravures  - one for each chapter of the book. It was printed in a limited edition of 2500 copies.

Old Age Advice

Writer Grace Paley told a story about getting advice from her father on growing old.

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.

They said, Really?

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.

[…]

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

via BrainPickings / Image CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Elise Feliz

Harry Dean Stanton

I had the immense pleasure of watching Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction on a plane over the holidays a few years back. I took notes....

David Lynch: How would you describe yourself?

Harry Dean Stanton: As nothing. There is no self.

David Lynch: How would you like to be remembered?

Harry Dean Stanton: Doesn't matter.

David Lynch: What were your dreams as a child?

Harry Dean Stanton: Nightmares.

   

My old man used to say, go straight ahead until you hit something.

I've avoided success artfully

It's all gonna go away. You're gonna go. I'm gonna go. The sun's burning out. The earth is going to go. It's all transient. Everything is transient, so it's ultimately not important. It's all fleeting. Passing. But it's liberating. Just everything happens. It's one connected whole that's happening. That's the Buddhist take but I'm not a Buddhist.

David Lynch: What are you?

Harry Dean Stanton: I'm nothing. When you're nothing there's no problems.

Get Busy Living

Actress Elsie Ferguson by Baron de Meyer, c.1921.

The evening chant at the end of the last sitting in a Zen temple: Let me respectfully remind you, life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken. Take heed. Do not squander your life.

A Taste of Brooklyn History

“We mark ourselves by what we choose of our past to shield from the churn of change. Much of this, whether an old building or historic landscape, is lasting and durable by definition. That something as soft and perishable as cheese should make it across 75 years of time and space, outlasting brick and mortar — indeed, much of the city — is beyond remarkable.”

A bit of Brooklyn history told through the story of a round of cheese. Delightful!

“I returned to the city with the edible heirloom that was most likely made from the milk of sheep that grazed on the Lazio plain as fascism gripped Italy and Europe descended into war; that crossed an Atlantic harried by U-boats; that dodged the wrecking ball of urban renewal and survived even suburbia; that was finally, safely home.”

Don't miss reading the full piece in the New York Times by Thomas Campanella, a professor of city planning at Cornell University and author of the forthcoming “Brooklyn: A Secret History.”