Sunday, November 27, 2022

Post 497 - Battle Creek in the 1980s - World Hot Air Balloon Championships - IN STEREO!

Various 3D photographs from 1981-1986 from The Event for the Surreal City at the time - where everyone first complained nonstop about all those bothersome crowds but then noticed afterwards they'd done a month's worth of business in three days.  They complained, nonetheless, and it was a shadow of its former self by the early 1990s.  But it was fun while it lasted, and your humble blogger had the good fortune to have press access, first as a grip for an early CNN reporter in the area (thanks, Joe!) and later, as a gaffer for a local videographer (thanks, Al!).  I took along an 8mm movie camera and a Stereo Realist, even then an outmoded bit of technology.  






























(c) 2022 Jim Middleton, The Animating Apothecary
(use with permission only, please - I like to know where these things end up)

A video montage of the events is available on my Vimeo page - https://vimeo.com/775219731

Posat 496 - 1979 - Battle Creek Michigan in STEREO 3D!

Taking off on an Air Wisconsin flight from the Battle Creek Regional Airport (back when it had commercial flights)


The Official Radioactive Black Squirrel from HELL - near my brother's first apartment


The secret entrance to Willard Library for after-hours reading


The pathway to pharmacy and cafeterias from HELL - no, just the way to get to the coffee machine at the now-not-even-a-parking-lot location of the Lakeview General Osteopathic Hospital


A little snow, surrounding my first car after college - it tried to kill me several times, but it got good mileage


The downtown unnamed alleyway from HELL - no, just a walk-by of the now-demolished "flat iron" building downtown.  It was packed with several floors of historic artifacts that all went down with the wrecking ball.


Now a great restaurant (Clara's On the River), but in 1979 it was still the Station On the Rails for Amtrak


A walking mall in a Michigan downtown, where winter arrives in October and leaves by May.  What could possibly go wrong with that business model.  This sculptural do-hickey was moved to the Leila Arboretum to the west when the mall returned to a road in the 1990s (the same consultant group recommended the creation of both events), but somewhere along the way, it lost its ball.  Ouch.


The "Capri" downtown was one of three adult theatres in 1979 Battle Creek.  This one was originally the "Rex" - it featured westerns back then - but went for other varieties of leatherstocking tales.


The Emily Andrus Home - for retired ladies seeking sanctuary and access to a convenient mailbox.


The flat-ion building again, because it had such great texture for 3D.


Fort Custer helped protect the Surreal City from invasion by Augusta.


Mr. DNA wants you to study SCIENCE!


My visiting brother from another pan-dimensional universe.


C. W. Post, looking toward the north in 1979.  Now he looks eastward, where a factory bearing his name still makes cereal products.

 

Monday, November 21, 2022

Post 495 - Some Random Specimens from "Tour of the World" - a Keystone Stereo View Collection

 ...from the late 1920s to early 1930s...items from the ephemeral archives around the Animating Apothecary studios...

                                                                Zeppelins over Arabia


                                                                         Mt Vesuvius


                                                            Hall of Mirrors - Versailles


                                                                    Dancers Thai one on


                                                                         Ruins in Rome


                                                                You want your mummy?


                                                                    The Old Curiosity Shop


                                    Niagara Falls - slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch...


                                                                            Mt Ranier


                                                                        Stone-faced Abe


                                                        Where Abe was purportedly born


                                                The pretty Great, if ineffective, Wall of China


                                                The Grand Tetons, and I do mean Tetons!


                                                                            Glacier Park


                                                                        The Fullish Moon


                                                            Anne Hathaway's Cottage


                                                                That wacky Tour d'Eiffel


                                                                        New Yawk, NY


                                                                    The Capitol at night


                                                    Where the Canterbury Tales wound up


                                                Some of these statues are still in England

                                                                The Arch of Triumph


                                                        Better not firgit this one, pard...