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Category / People / Icons / Muses

All the Sneaky Tricks of Prohibition Bootleggers

I found this photograph floating around on the internet today of a truck ingeniously camouflaged by bootleggers during the Prohibition, being inspected by authorities in Los Angeles, California. You can tell even those inspectors are impressed by the level of artful deviousness. It got me curious to see what other tricks these bootleggers tried. The crazier the caper,…

Discovering Black Outsider Art in a Whitewashed World

Their abilities don’t come from any artistic establishment. They didn’t have any formal training and they were not influenced by other mainstream artists. Hailing from places like Mississippi, Tallapoosa, and other rural pockets of the deep south, they’re the African American Outsider and Folk artists whose voices and colour palettes explored a world that wasn’t…

She was the Hostess of Greenwich Village a Hundred Years Ago

Marie Marchand, better known as Romany Marie was one of those eccentric characters that stood out in a town full of them. During the first part of the 20th century, her informal Greenwich Village cafés drew a society of artists, anarchists, activists, playwrights, musicians and bohemian intelligentsia. If you were looking for la vie bohème…

Forget Count Dracula, Meet History’s Most Prolific Female Serial Killer

Every year, nearly a million people flock to Romania’s famous Bran Castle, a medieval fortress in Transylvania often referred to as the home of Dracula. Us mere mortals have a morbid fascination with the seductively taboo tales of vampires from deepest Transylvania and the immortal be-fanged and be-cloaked Count Dracula – but what of the Countess Dracula?…

Meet the Trendsetting Mystics that gave The Beatles their Psychedelic Style

The Fool left its mark all over the 1960s, but few can match the name to the art today. The Dutch collective of artists and designers who named themselves after a Tarot card that’s often numbered as zero in the deck – as in the first – were unquestionable pioneers of the psychedelic aesthetic that defined…

An Ode to the Patron Saint of French Art Nouveau

Paris is synonymous with the florid, tendril-like entrances that so eloquently frame one’s rabbit-hole descent into the belly of the Parisian metro, almost like a piece of theatre. The vibrant sage green cast-iron portals to the underground, often flanked by botanical stalks exhibiting the bulblike red lights overhead, are beacons that connect a modern metropolis…

The Dapper Rebels of Los Angeles, 1966

In the summer of 1965, riots broke out in the Watts neighborhood of southern Los Angeles. Over a six-day period, 34 people were killed, 1,032 injured and over 3,438 arrests were made. In 1966, LIFE magazine revisited the site of the worst riots America had ever seen in its history. The photo essay depicting the…

The Wise Woodsman

He sounds more like a poet than a wood worker, but Josh Vogel of Blackcreek Mercantile & Trading Co is a man of profound thoughts and words. (And I like his outfit too). The Scout magazine visited Josh in Kingston, New York in 2010 and stepped back in time with the wood sculptor to document…

The Curiosity of Unrelated Lookalikes

Doppelgängers are just fascinating, celebrity or not. And there’s always that question: how is it possible? How can two people who are not genetically related look nearly like twins? But I suppose the question we should really be asking ourselves is: on a planet of seven billion people, how can some of us not lookalike?…

Hitler’s Waldo: The German who didn’t give a F**k

Just a photograph of your average Nazi rally in Hitler Germany. Or is it? At the launch of a German army vessel in 1936, attended by Adolf Hitler himself, the crowd was doing their best impression of brainwashed Nazi enthusiasts and saluting Der Fuhrer. But at a closer look, the photograph shows one man who…

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