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July 7, 2018 by tomdalzell

Body Parts (and Mannequins)

2217 Parker

2217 Parker

When I ran this picture a few months ago, a Quirky Berkeley adherent looked at it and wrote, “You should do a blog on body parts.”

3f5722a6d8161eb45aa6adcc8ce14fcb

Bingo indeed. A brilliant idea.

I could have looked at that bathtub of body parts all day and all night and not stepped away to see preparing a compilation.  Some people can see that, look at a collection of letters and see a word, look at a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces and see fitting, look at flowers on a vine and see what needs trimming.

So, to implement this brilliant idea, I had to do a mental data bank search and remember where I had posted photos of body parts.  It would have made life a lot simpler if I had tagged the photos but I didn’t.

That’s okay.  Here are the ones I can remember:

Studio of Susan Brooks

Studio of Susan Brooks

The hands are at the studio of Susan Brooks in the Sawtooth Building, 2547 Eighth Street, Studio 24a.

While hands are at hand:

Unknown

Unknown-1 Unknown-2 Unknown-3These four hands are in window displays at Payne’s Stationery, 1791 Solano.  It is one of the few surviving stationery stores.  It deserves our support and business.  The real deal.

1426 Parker

1426 Parker

2155 Vine

2155 Vine

I haven’t posted this photo yet.  It is from a glorious small world on Parker.  Small world + peace + hand.

1411 Ada

1411 Ada

1411 Ada

1411 Ada

1411 Ada

1411 Ada

Body parts galore in Theresa Lipton’s front yard small world on Ada.

Quirky Berkeley 10-31-2018

2600 San Pablo

And a random leg at the Missouri Lounge.

2634 Webster

2634 Webster

2634 Webster

2634 Webster

Boy does he creep me out.

2634 Webster

2634 Webster

Julie Partos is constantly changing the installation in front of her Webster Street home.  To do so requires a supply of body parts and mannequins.

akuna-Matata1The butt says hakuna matata, the best known Swahili phrase in America.  It means “no trouble.”  I did not link this photo to the address where I saw it.  Bad bad bad. It was early in the process.  It was just south of Dwight. No trouble!

Quirky Berkeley 11-11-2015Janna Olson and Roger Carr are Quirky Berkeley superstars.  At their house on Shasta they have build the Grotto of Santa Basura  (Saint Trash).  Doll heads!  Creep factor high.

Quirky Berkeley 12-30-2015

Quirky Berkeley 12-30-2015 Quirky Berkeley 12-30-2015

These wig heads and mannequins, whole and partial, were found at Urban Ore on a December, 2015 visit.

Quirky Berkeley 11-11-2015 L1360298 Styrofoam-Head-1 Styrofoam-Head2 Styrofoam-Head3

Arlene Mayerson bought a box of styrofoam wig heads at the Center for Creative Reuse.  She reused them, and did so very creatively.

Quirky Berkeley 11-11-2015

Not your run-of-the-mill mannequin, this acupuncture points mannequin model rocks Very quirky, no?

Quirky Berkeley 12-30-2015

Quirky Berkeley 12-30-2015

Will Squier buys, collects, and sells kitsch.  And he reuses baby doll body parts in a creepy, kitschy way.

Tyler-Hoare-dolls

Berkeley artist Tyler Hoare, about whom I have posted, made this piece in the early 1960s.  A young graduate student at Cal bought it.  His name was Robert Regan.  Dr. Regan became my Most Beloved English professor at Penn between 1969 and 1971.  We stayed in touch and we stayed friends.  In later visits we spoke of his time in Berkeley, of Tyler Hoare, and of what I knew of Hoare. When Dr. Regan died, his widow sent me the sculpture.  Body parts!

The Vinograd sisters each offer up an example:

Quirky Berkeley 05-04-2017

Painter Debbie offers a hand.

Quirky Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., on May 4th, 2017.

 

And a painting – of her friend M K Chavez holding a mannequin missing body parts.  That counts, doesn’t it?

Quirky Berkeley 6-15-17

Poet Julia offers a wig head.

On notional holiday field trips, I came across body parts and mannequins, which I will include here, having obtained implicit informed consent from you about infusion of this out-of-Berkeley experience.

Quirky visits Sebastopol

Easily creepiest of show.  No competition. These doll body parts are in the backyard of Art Moura’s Sebastopol home. He is an outsider artist. CREEPY!

Quirky Berkeley 10-06-2017 Quirky Berkeley 10-06-2017 Quirky Berkeley 10-06-2017

Last Halloween I led a notional holiday field trip all the way to Alcatraz Avenue in Oakland.  At 1075 Alcatraz was a tree with a couple dozen decorated wig heads dangling from the branches and impaled on stakes.

Quirky Eureka 04-02-2016

Quirky Eureka 04-02-2016 Quirky Eureka 04-02-2016 Quirky Eureka 04-02-2016

In April 2016, I visited genius mosaic artist Laurel Skye in Arcata.  She clearly creates beyond mosaics – steampunk bathroom and these mannequins to start with.

Quirky Berkley 09-03-2017

Quirky Berkley 09-03-2017 Quirky Berkley 09-03-2017 Quirky Berkley 09-03-2017

We visited the Alameda Point Antiques Faire on Labor Day weekend, 2017.  It was hot AF. Really hot. But there were body parts!

Quirky Berkley 09-03-2017

What a metaphor!  End of a long and hot day, heading home, pulling a body part.

I showed my friend the post.

“Challenge – best body part in popular culture. Gotta be visual, no Frank Zappa ‘What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?'”  He handed me a slip of paper.

We each wrote our choices down.

He went first.

the39steps03

He had first written down “Nine-fingered man from Thirty-nine Steps.”  He had crossed it out.

the-fugitive-bill-raish-one-armed-man

The one-armed man from The Fugitive. I admired these choices because in each case it was the absence of a body part, not the part.  But he had crossed it out and gone with –

tumblr_n5mmuoYfmU1r4j2t6o1_500

From Robert Whitaker’s 1966 photo shoot of the “Butcher” cover for the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today.  “GOOD ONE!” I almost shouted.

Now, my turn:

leglamp12

I did not use my personal favorite – too personal, but instead a cultural icon – the leg lamp from Christmas Story.

My friend spoke simply: “State your case.”

151222_CBOX_Jean-Shepherd.jpg.CROP.promovar-mediumlarge

1957-04_mad_page_41-1

mad3

I did.  “It was based on stories from Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories. I claim that along with Mad magazine he was the most disruptive cultural force in America in the 1950s.  Nobody has ever touched him on the radio.  He was the champion of the night people, the non-conformists. The Beatles were big. Shep was bigger.”

My friend gave me a thumbs up.  “We’d pick up WOR on our transistors in Detroit some nights, Earl and I did.  We’d listen to Shep all night when we could.  He was the truth!”

I accepted his concession and asked what he thought of the post.

Quirky Berkeley 05-12-16

Posted in Uncategorized. RSS 2.0 feed.
« Fourth of July Field Trip: The Avenue of Giants at Bell Plastics, Hayward
Missing Body Parts: To Have Ten Toes »

2 Responses to Body Parts (and Mannequins)

  1. Maureen Hanlon says:
    July 7, 2018 at 9:38 pm

    Please look for mannequin Ophelia on the 1600 blog close of Virginia. She makes her appearance in red white and blue bikini on summer holidays and

    Reply
  2. Ron Sullivan says:
    July 10, 2018 at 3:53 am

    I read TNPvsCM in my dad’s Mad magazine when I was seven.

    It saved my life. I wasn’t the only one!

    Sixteen years later, I landed in Berkeley, and instantly I knew I was home.

    Reply

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