What have you done for me philately?

"What should I do? 

I think the best thing is to order a stamp with my face on it."

-- Charles, Emperor of Austria 

(1882-1922 on learning of his accession to the throne)

Face in a shop window 8-16-13

"Next time ask my barber to approve them 

before you issue stamps with my portrait." 

-- King Christian X of Denmark 

(In 1924 he was shown commemoratives of 300th anniversary of Danish Posts. The stamps showed his portrait facing the left and the right and his hair parted once to the left and next to the right)

Face in a shop window (2) 8-16-13

I was window shopping for faces again and found this one gazing aloofly through the front window of an art boutique downtown. 

It tickles me how this girl seems to be trying not to look at the postage-stamp-covered torso/trunk standing right behind her. It also tickles me that so many of the stamps on the torso/trunk are face stamps. 

And I must admit that if I found myself eye-level with someone's Homer Simpson-stamped mons pubis, I'd probably act cool and look the other way and pretend I didn't notice it too. Maybe.

But since this torso/trunk is not human, I felt free to gawp.

I couldn't identify all of the faces, but here are the ones I could:

Plastic Man
Spider Woman

Homer Simpson

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch right there on the left inner thigh.

Gerald Ford

Many iterations of the Madonna and Child

Yoda 

Selena

Mickey Mouse

Lisa Simpson

Roy Rogers

Jimmy Stewart, right in the groin

A few nutcrackers

A reindeer

A bear

Frank Sinatra 
Frosty the Snowman
A gingerbread man
A Naval officer named Doris Miller
A baseball player
Ronald Reagan 
Rube Foster, of the Negro League
Gary Cooper

... the list goes on.

I'm not sure what the artist is trying to say with his/her body covered in faces. But I was pretty intrigued by the juxtaposition of faces stamped on a body standing next to a face.

I'm easily entertained.

Vintage visages

"I look at a little hat like this, 

I lift up the veil, 

and I try to imagine the face beneath it.”

-- Isabel Wolff, A Vintage Affair

 

 

Vintage hat forms 8-8-13

 “Every face, 

every shop, 

bedroom window, 

public-house, 

and dark square 

 is a picture feverishly turned ...”

-- Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

 

Vintage hat form 8-8-13

"She had not realized how wonderful glass was,

how it protect you and kept you inside."

-- Caroline B. Cooney, Evil Returns

 

Vintage hat form (2) 8-8-13

Every week I drive past this antique shop, and every week I see these two vintage hat forms staring out at me.

These two faces are like captives.
Hostages.
Stuck in time.
Fixed in place.
Gathering dust.
Trapped behind panes of dirty window glass.

I have never seen the shop open.
The stuff seems to stay in the same places, week after week, month after month.

All year I've been telling myself to stop sometime and take pictures, but I keep forgetting to throw the camera in the car.

I finally remembered the camera, and I finally stopped.

Of course, the shop was closed, so I had to shoot the pictures from the sidewalk, with my camera pressed against the dirty glass.

I like to think that by putting their picture on the blog, I have given these two ladies a little exposure, gotten them out of their limited little world and into the bigger, wider one beyond the shop windows.