Aug 28, 2010

Hindustan

As you no doubt remember from my lengthy blog posting back in October of 2009 about "The Rules", all qualifying Junk Pirate treasure has to be donated to the Junk Store without intentions of it becoming a "Junk Pirate-thing" (blog entry, zine image, artwork, etc).
Be that as it may, I'm now warming up to the idea of people giving me stuff with the intention of it being put into Junk Pirate context. A prime example of this would be when my pals Dan & Lexa scoured the continent that India is on searching the diseased streets for discarded matchbooks.





Oh yeah, check out Dan's book, perhaps the second greatest thing ever published. 

Aug 24, 2010

the Office

It may have started as a shenanigan, but the sorting room office has evolved into an indispensable part of our ongoing operations.  

An old Remington typewriter that just won't fail, an old rotary dial phone (which is incapable of accessing the Junk Store voicemail), a paper shredder, some stackable paper trays, a few three ring binders, and the latest broken office chair that got dumped on us, and we have a fully functioning phone-logging system.
Throw some executive desk toys and a disorganized stack of random notes and memos and I feel like a real world executive.

Aug 22, 2010

The pictures... they're coming... alive.

While still a rare and exciting donation for me, I don't even really take pics of old super8 film movies for this blog anymore. This Heckle & Jeckle cartoon reel deserves a mention, though. For a professionally package piece of motion picture material like this I'm will to bust out the old Bell & Howell projector.


Aug 20, 2010

Ditto


I long while back we got a phone call from a teacher clearing out her school, you know, the usual. But what stuck-out from the banal routine call was the mention of a ditto machine. "A mimeograph?" I enthusiastically asked. "No," she replied, "A Ditto machine. There's a difference."
Dreams of printing zines in that faded purple tone fluttered in my brain, but the machine didn't show.


Finally, about a month later, it finally showed up. Sure enough, it is a "Ditto" brand spirit transfer duplication machine, completely hand-cranked. There was surprisingly little information about these machines on the interweb, and my experiments with carbon paper yielded little other than my hands covered in toxic "duplicating fluid" (methanol).
The crank both shuffles your paper over the drum, to which you attach some original to copy, while simultaneously hand-pumping the fluid onto the paper so the ink transfers. Super toxic and with lots of places for things to go wrong.


As luck would have it, just as I was about to give up and toss this 60-pound behemoth in the metal recycling bin, a pack of Ditto brand masters got donated and I was in business... sort of.


I wrestled with this thing for a weekend and wasted a lot of newsprint. I wasn't able to do any straight-up duplicating, but I got some pretty artsy effects and managed to keep the methanol spills to a minimum. Not quite the purple retro-art prints or publications I was fantasizing about, but I'm still glad I got a chance to wrestle with one of these archaic beasts.

We're still looking for that mimeograph, though.

Aug 13, 2010

Classic Cassette Recorders

We here at in the Junk Store sorting room all love a good old fashioned portable audio cassette player. The are surprisingly durable, fit perfectly in a bike basket, and are usually even good to get a quick recording on. While they tend to distort almost all volume levels, and you will eventually spend a small fortune on D batteries, we still put these guys to full use at every opportunity.
Here are some of the better one to come in this summer:





And then this stylish Panasonic shows up new in packaging! Tremendous!



Aug 6, 2010

Be Black Immediately

We're heading up the coast today for arrival this evening in Fort Bragg for the "Everything Never Goes Away" exhibition at Lost Coast Culture Machine, featuring all the remaining pieces of Junk Pirate artworks from the June exhibition. It's a group show, but unless someone else is bringing up several hundred dice, I think we all know who's art will be the focus.

I was thinking that I might pop this pill so I could "be black" for the reception...


Aug 2, 2010

Dark side of the moon

This interior design linchpin is a genuine vintage/collectible masterpiece.


The wax inside is also of the "vintage/collectible" variety and just sort of sits there in a murky glow.