The Bleat - updated M-F. Dashed-off tripe, with links to all the ongoing updated projects. The blog's been going on since 1997. Archives of a sort can be found HERE.

Lileks @ Lunch - Star Tribune blog, aimed at a general audience. Oh, who am I kidding? It's all about stuff I find interesting. ;Uupdated M-F at noon.

Twitter - Of course. You're dead if you don't have Twitter. Dead.

LINT - Tumblr for detritus; updated M-F. Peculiar ads, mostly.

Instagram - I do not use retro filters. I post a couple times a week.

Pinterest - Really? you ask. Yes. It's got stuff from all over the site.

 

What is the Institute? A good question. It began as a repository for odd things I scanned - and by “scanned,” I mean I took pictures with a video camera, and used a frame grabber to get the images. Cheap scanners didn’t exist.

As time went on, anything that was “vintage” or “retro” and could be gently mocked went into the Institute.

HERE'S the main page. At present, the Institute contains these sites:

The Gallery of Regrettable Food. The classic from 1997, it spawned two books.

Interior Desecrations: bad interior design of the 60s and 70s.

The Gobbler: the Grooviest Motel in Wisconsin.

The Art of Art Frahm: the effect of celery on underwear elastic.

The 70s: a brief account (only 100 pages so far) of the worst decad ever. Also linked in the 20th century project.

The Permanent Collection of Impermanent Art: what if we treated advertising illustration with the same pretentious analysis we use for museum art?

Comic Sins: a small name for a huge site. It contains:

Advertising in Comics. Arranged by genre, of course, for all the anal-retentive types out there.

Covers: an ongoing site, updated Tuesday. There are lots of sites on the web that post old covers, and this without question is one of them.

The Funny Pages. A study of old newspaper and magazine cartoons. Contains several subsites:

Lance Lawson, a short-lived Minneapolis you-solve-it strip

Mr. Coffeenerves, a real bastard

Jerry on the Job, a 1920s gag strip that used the flip-take a bit too much

High-Pressure Pete, another obscure 20s strip

Worst Comics Ever. In my opinion. Includes a bad Spirit someone was kind enough to show to Will Eisner.

Abian Wallgren: his WW1 soldier comics.

Caspar Milquetoast: an appreciation.

Gluyas Williams: also an appreciation.

The Laxies: an ad strip designed to induce defecation.

King Features: the entire 1949 line up of artists and strips. More than fifty!

Miscellaneous comics.

Stagworld! Ooky old men’s mags. Closest thing this site comes to for NSFW.

Compupromo: promotional art for the old calculating machines.

The Nervine Joke Book. 1920s hardy-har compendium.

East is Red, Butt is Numb. Postcards celebrating Chinese Opera. Really.

Patriotica: WW2 homefront propaganda.

Archives of the American Home Ironizer.

Dorcus Collection: Unfortunate men’s fashions.

Story of Bread: 1949 Promotional Brochure about the wonders of bread.

Meet the Dayalets! Creepy undead vitamin illustrations.

Ozark Vacation Dee-Lights: 1972 vacation promotional brochure.

Dateline: Kennel Dogs in newspapers.

Bad Publicity. No such thing? Think again.

Orphanage of Cast-Off Mascots (offline at the moment.)

History of the Institute. Early site about the Institute itself.

This site began as a dumping ground for ideas that didn’t fit anywhere else. It’s grown to rival the Institute is size. The main index page is HERE. The sites are:

1961 Monkey Wards: Almost every color picture in the catalog; ongoing as of Fall ’12, with more than 130 pages.

A week in TV Guide. Every page of a 1967 issue, embedded with links to YouTube residue.

LA 1962: Every page of a dining guide, embedded with links and pictures to whatever remains from the last days of the post-war world.

LA 1941: An earlier version of the dining guide.

Small-Town NODAK: Google street views of old, tiny downtowns on the edge of America.

Big Tiny Little: his life in album art.

The SS Lurline: an old cruise ship brochure.

A Girl in NYC: She sent a friend a letter in the 1920s.

Postcard Portfolios: The art of the souvenir brochure

Missing: ads from people looking for long-lost friends in the 1940s

The Dells! Promotional brochures from the 1970s

1960s Hardware Circulars. That about says it, no?

Goodbye to Telegrams: the forgotten art of telegrams.

Short History of Swimsuits. Old news-service photos of bathing beauties.

The Letters from the Antique Store. A tale told in ephemera.

Hotel Stationery. Engravings and current views, if possible.

1953 Buick: a gorgeous brochure for the year’s models.

The American Motel. The great signs of the days before the chains changed everything. Ongoing through 2012 - the site’s being overhauled with new postcards, larger sizes, and many more Google Street View pictures.

Coffee and Chrome: old restaurant postcards.

I keep forgetting about this site. It’s a salute to wavy lines in tiny pictures! It’s odd to forget something like this, because it has approximately 13 bazillion pages.

Curious Lucre: the money of other lands. I won’t break them out by nations, but there’s about 50.

The Gallery of Corporate Allegory. The art of Stock Certificates.

First-Day Covers: lots of vignettes of people, places, and events celebrated by the Postal Service. That’s not as dull as it sounds.

Cities Old and New. Some of these sites are new; others are in need of a refresh. We have:

Minneapolis. It has old views, present views, and the U of M.

New York. Old postcard views of office buildings and hotels; a look at Times Square; some of my shots.

Ghost Ads. Faded pictures painted on brick walls.

Main Streets. Bygone town centers before the malls emptied them out.

Main Streets at Night: neon!

Malls of Yore: 1960s mall postcards.

Modern Churches: modernism applied to religious structures.

I’ll get around to them all eventually. For now there are three.

The Twenties. Ongoing at present; magazines covers, and a rather significant selection of movie ads from Film Daily magazine, and some spicy - but SFW - publications.

The Thirties.

Sears 1934: 100 pages from the catalog, scanned, color-corrected, and annotated.

Magazine ads. I don’t know how many, exactly. Over 200.

Bygone hooch. A site devoted to brands that have passed from memory.

A kitchen brochure. What things looked like.

Magazine covers.

Music. Playlists of the hits of each year.

The 1933 World's Fair. Yeah, we need another site about this - but it has some stuff you might not have seen.

The 70s A site in the Institute, with lots of brown horrors. We have:

The Ice Follies. Three years of programs.

The Faces of Match Game. Says it all.

The Faces of the Price is Right. The hairstyles!

Search. My favorite show when I was a kid.

Sears 1973: a small selection of fashion.

Radio. PSAs and beautiful music from early 70s airchecks.

Dorcusella: lingerie from the early 70s

Mass Media, seen through two particular filters.

Black and White World. As the title suggests: the visual media before color.

The Jazz Age.

Hard & Snappy: the 30s.

Film Noir.

Forties dramas and musicals.

Fifties morality.

Monster Movies!

Bug-Eyed Monsters: early sci-fi

TV, including Perry Mason.

The Disney Project.

Oswald and other early shorts.

A rather comprehensive collection of Cartoon Titles.

It’s possibly one of the largest repositories of Matchbook art on the internet - it’s certainly one of the few that actually researches the books, or offers commentary. do I sound defensive? I suppose I am.

Anyway, it’s HERE, broken down into categories. If you want the full experience, start with the splash screen, here.

 

The Diner My old KSTP AM-1500 radio show is back in podcast form. Over eighty half-hour episodes available - with some original shows from the 90s as well.

Small Films Movies from buzz.mn & lleks.com. Additional 80s KTCA films viewable at my YouTube site.

Bleatophany. Remixes and compositions.

Your Host Bio, family stories, dog photography

Travel Where I was.

Photos What I saw.

Contact Where I am.