The Junk Pirate Found Slide Show

If you like viewing found images being rapidly rear-projected onto  frosted glass storefront windows in Oakland, have I got a treat for you...

Hallowe'en

Happy Halloween!

Vincent Price's Favorites

OK, it's the night before Halloween, Vincent Price is still alive and he's coming over to your place to play some board games. What are you going do?

Here's a suggestions:

"My favorite game!"

But what if Vince wants to do some craft projects using old fruit?

"Create your own collection of delightful Shrunken Heads."  -Vincent Price

Miss Eyefull Tower

Halloween is coming up, so let's get it together for a few posts here and get our costumes ready.

We can start with this vintage, in the original box, mask and costume called "Miss Eyefull Tower".

Six types of Gumby!

Six types of Gumby!

Who would have thought, in their wildest dreams, that I would be come up on six different types of Gumby?!? The subtle differences of head shape, shades of green, and facial configurations make me wonder how many other types of 5" posable Gumby figures there are out there. 

I'd say this piece of Junk Pirate Art ranks right up there with "3 Lukes".

But wait, there's more! Gumby lighter!!!!

That's right. It's a working twelve inch Gumby shaped butane grill lighter. Made by "Toyco". Unreal!

Stampin'

A lot of idiots like to take perfectly good, usable US postage stamps and frame them as "collectibles" or something. Then they die or get divorced or something and eventually their framed "treasures" end up at the flea market or (in this case) the Junk Store.

I'll tell you something... stamps ain't worth shit. Many a binder of stamp collections have I tried to re-sell with no luck. Unless there is an upside-down airplane on them or something, your stamps are never going to increase in value. 

But, by all means, please continue hoarding them so they eventually make their way down to me and the Jammer. Then we crack open that frame and divy up the loot. Free shipping!

Sure, the price of postage continues to rise, but I'm more than willing to throw down enough antiquated postage to cover half the envelope sooner than purchase some new ones.

Along those lines of thinking, and in honor of a great postseason of baseball, we have these:

1 Quarter 2 Plays

The dream of dreams on the Donation Manifestation wish list is a working arcade cabinet video game. Any game, really, would just be amazing. I seriously doubt it will ever happen, but I've been forced revise my pessimism on the subject when this miracle strolled into the sorting room:

Hi-Score Pool (1971) has got to be one of the lamest pinball games ever manufactured. The flippers shoot the ball under a panel where you can't see it, and if it seems to pass under a lighted billiard ball, the lights go out. Once you get all the balls to go out... they go back on again and the game continues. On and on and on. 

After about 15 minutes of this I started to feel ripped-off, even though it was set to "free" mode.

Aesthetically it is has some allright graphics and everything lights up and works, which is a miracle, so I shouldn't complain. But still, of all the working pinball games to come into my life, it had to be the most boring one ever. Even the guys at the Pinball Museum up north didn't want it.

More details on this game here.

Nude Dude

We're training a bunch of new fish here at the Junk Store these days. Combine that with a combo of record heat with mountain of fleece, mysterious 6am trips to a city-wide garage sale, the Jammer going on vacation, and several new businesses trying to move in on our dumpster space... I hardly make time to post a blog now and again.

I'll get more going on as these new Junior Junk Pirates pay some dues by lightening my work load. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, check out this Nude Dude:

Lunch-merica

Real lunch for real Americans. Carried in this...

Goes great with a real American beverage in this...

Vote Yes on No.

Shirtless dudes

I don't know who these barefoot, shirtless guys are or what exactly their original purpose was. I only know they keep getting donated and I can't stop staring at them.

Shake The Can!

This MJB Coffee "Shake The Can!" lid was one of the first things I ever photocopied to include in the very first issue of Junk Pirate zine. 

I guess you could call it one of the first pieces of Junk Pirate Art, too, since it has been proudly displayed in my kitchen for over six years. 

Or maybe it's just a stupid coffee can lid.

Either way, another one finally came in and here it is.

I especially like the phrase "Brimful!". 

And the commanding punctuation. No less than five exclamation points!

Sparkle Spirograph

With all of our Spirograph postings, the sighting of a new non-generic box has become quite rare. That why I'm extra dazzled by the recent discovery of Sparkle Spirograph!

It appears to be just like regular Spirograph, except with metallic pens.

Cyber Cop

Nice package of cheap-o Chinese import flea market toy police set.

Ok, you got your badge, your gun, a clip of suction cup ammo, your grenade, and your Rambo knife. I don't quite know what exactly makes this "Cyber".

The best part is the inset photo of real police detectives... doing paperwork!

Adult diaper brand names that instill confidence.

A recent donation pick-up included an assortment of adult-sized diapers. This industry-wide sampling of disposable protective underwear was so thorough that I almost shit myself.

Not just the popular brands like Depend, but also lesser seen products like GoodNites, Certainty, and Affirm. And the classic generic "Walgreen's Protective Underwear". 

This donation cut down Junk Store employee bathroom breaks by an amazing 75%.

Keep Your Ticket

The ever growing tower of ticket rolls. Young J-Bone was the first to figure out the you just leave the house with a pocketful of a few tickets of each color and when you get to the club, figure out what color they are using that night for drink tickets. Ta-daaa. Drinks on the Junk Store tonight!

And by the looks of the clock it's just about closing time.

Or hoard 'em for years and post something like this:

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. 

Pope John Paul II gets laced

Muthafuckin' Pope lace:

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.

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.

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.

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!

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...

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.