frescadp

I've been enchanted with some of the gender-swap art of other fandoms, but I've seen none for Starsky & Hutch. (Have you?)
So I decided to make my own girl!Starsky/Hutch.

I couldn't believe my luck in finding a fashion photo featuring a striped-tomato jumpsuit from the 1970s (and a blonde + brunette) to work with! [original in post above]
I just added some "accessories" (shoulder holster, basketball, beer, & donuts).

This really could have happened:
The Enterprise went back in time to San Francisco, 1985-86. Starsky’s cardigan would’ve only been ten or eleven years old, and it’s quite likely he and Hutch had moved to SF to live together by this time.

David wants to look like Starsky's car.

Are any of you LJers over on Tumblr? (I found this there.)

I like this work in progress better than the final manip (in the post below).

If I keep doing this, I need to get Photoshop or GIMP or something.

I wanted Hutch to be looking at Starsky, who's practically posing as Michelangelo's David.

(I guess Huggy Bear goes to fish off the stern, to give the boys some privacy.)

After futzing with the photo manipulation forever to merge the top two screencaps below, I ended up liking the work in progress better--I'll post that one next (in post above).

+ plus

equals =

However you want to read their relationship, I figure Starsky would give this "I'm not gay but my boyfriend is" T-shirt to Hutch.
And Hutch would not be amused.

I've started a new project, moving Starsky & Hutch a little bit closer to each other through the blessing (? curse?) of digital photomanipulation-that-looks-so-easy-
and-three-hours-later-you-have-to-start-all-over-because-you-just-can't-get-Hutch's-hair-right magic.

It feels almost pointless to do this because Starsky & Hutch already stand so close (so, so close) and look so intimately at each other, as you know.
But it's interesting to see how the mood shifts––or doesn't––when the gap closes. (And who minds spending a few hours looking at the boys anyway?)

I couldn't take them any closer than I have here without eye contact, especially, getting way out of alignment. That was probably the trickiest thing to get right. Also, disclaimer:
I don't have Photoshop, so these are not seamless. Don't look too, too close...

I'm a little embarrassed to admit (*bad fan*) that I don't know the names of each of the source episodes. If you do, please feel free to let me know in the comments--suitable quotes (and photo suggestions) welcome too!

I'm curious which manips work best, if you care to say.
(I have my favorites, of course).

In case the original stills aren't already burned onto your retinas (aren't they?), I posted them separately (in the previous post), here: "Mind the Gap".

And now-- Starsky and Hutch with a lot less air between them.

1. "I happen to be a virgin in these woods myself."

2.

3.

4.

5. Garage I

6. Garage II

7. Reel You In

8.

These are the original screencaps that I used in my "come a little bit closer" photo manipulations. They're already very intimate... It was interesting to take them a little farther. Or, rather, closer. (I couldn't bring them any closer together than I did or the eye contact and body angles went all wonky.)

The numbers of these originals correspond to the photo manips in the "Come a Little Bit Closer" post, above.

1.

Oh, those Star War fans, they think they've discovered lip biting, do they?

I have fallen for the Inpsector Lewis fandom so hard, I have even written a fic.
A mildly slashy fic.
This is the first I've ever posted, actually, on AO3.

And here is Sgt. Hathaway looking lavender--though more like a lavender point Siamese cat than an iguana...

I'm excited to see my friend FreshCandy posting actively on LJ about the boys.

This is for her. Because, Starsky's dangling feet:

My big plan today, in the face of the jumbled state of the world [terrorist bombing in Paris], is to bring some order to my sewing supplies,
which are all muddled up on my new '70s bamboo bookshelf. >

Someone had put this out for free on the curb and I thought it looked . . .

1. lightweight enough to carry
2. useful
3. like Starsky & Hutch

I've paid a lot of attention to Hutch's stuff.

Turns out, now it's Starsky's stuff I'm looking at.
______________________________________________

Starsky: Swim Poster, Being Jewish, and the 1972 Olympics
(featuring Starsky's back)

I went looking to see if my bookshelf shows up
in Starsky and Hutch---(it truly is from the Seventies, and it would match Hutch's houseplants).
But, alas, S & H fandom does not have a huge database of images like Star Trek's Trekcore.com.

So I can't argue from its absence online, but I couldn't find a picture of such a bookshelf in S&H.
I did, however, see its matching bamboo "peacock chair" in Starsky's place--in a tiny image at Barbwire's "Da Little Tings".

(She calls it wicker, but it's bamboo.)
I remember this chair as the most uncomfortable chair ever.)
Oh--here's a larger shot of the chair, on Starsky's right, from the episode "Running" (1976).

Along the way I also came across this screencap of Starsky's apartment (below, from the episode "Foxy Lady", 1978).

As you can see, the person who took it was interested in Starsky's menorah. (I believe it's never stated Starsky's Jewish, though the actor, Paul Michael Glaser, is.)
I got curious about the poster above the menorah.

I tell ya, the Internet is so great, isn't it?
I just googled around:
"1970s swimmer poster" didn't bring it up;
but, guessing, I added "olympics", and there it was!

A swimming poster for the 1972 Munich Summer Olympic Games.

One of a series of posters thirty-five world artists created for the games, organized by the games' lead designer, Otl Aitchen.
This one is by artist R B Kitaj.

I thought Kitaj was British,
but no, he was an American Jew who lived in England, and, according to his NYT obituary,
"Later in his career, Mr. Kitaj (pronounced kit-EYE) celebrated Jewish culture and his Jewish identity in his art."

So, a poster by a Jewish artist, above a menorah. Could there be a connection?

Starsky's apartment seems like a random jumble of stuff, but in this case, there is a connection:
The 1972 Olympics were the ones where Palestinian gunmen killed eleven Israeli athletes.*

From "Olympic Posters" in The Telegraph:

1972 Munich, Germany
Designated the “Happy Olympics”, the 1972 Munich games were anything but. Conceived to promote a positive and peaceful image of modern Germany, these were the games when the Utopian Olympic ideal came most badly unstuck.
...these games were overshadowed by the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by members of the Palestinian Black September group. The games continued with flags at half-mast, with American swimmer Mark Spitz winning seven gold medals.

Also, Starsky likes swimmers, I presume, since he has a Speedo poster in his kitchen. Which one? Does anyone know?
I can't find it, so I added Mark Spitz in his Speedo.

I was eleven during the 1972 summer Olympics, and I remember the buzz about the men's Speedo tiny (for the time) swim briefs.

But I didn't remember that Mark Spitz is Jewish and during the 1972 Olympics:
"Mark Spitz, the American swimming star who had already completed his competitions, left Munich during the hostage crisis (it was feared that as a prominent Jew, Spitz might now be a kidnapping target)."

Yes, and so, my conclusion is:
I am not going to get much done today, after all, because I spent hours establishing that Starsky is a Jewish guy who likes swimmers and has some feelings about the 1972 Olympics...

Also, he has nice shoulders. But you knew that. Maybe he's a swimmer himself?

*googles again*
Wow, huh:
according to the Talmud, Jewish parents are supposed to teach their kids to swim.

From Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, "Learning to Swim":
"The Talmud (Kiddushin 29a) enumerates three specific requirements for what parents must teach their children: the Torah, how to make a living, and how to swim.
The first two seem obvious, but how to swim?
Swimming, literally, is a life-or-death matter. The authors of the Talmud recognized that parents must teach their children how to survive — how to come out on the “swim” end of “sink or swim.”
Even if we live far from water, even if we think our children will never accidentally enter a pool area, even if we ourselves hate water, we must ensure that our children have the basic skills necessary to survive."
_____

* Weird coincidence:
According to wikipedia, the night before the Palesitinian attack...
"Monday evening, 4 September [1972], the Israeli athletes enjoyed a night out, watching a [live theater] performance of Fiddler on the Roof"

As I assume you know if you've read this far, the coincidence is that Paul Michael Glaser was in the movie version of Fiddler released the year before, in 1971.

"Starsky & Speedo" from OK-7's Tumblr post "Some Thoughts on Starsky's House"

My friend who introduced me to Starsky & Hutch (she's the real fan; "FreshCandy" on LJ, and "Milkweedy" on youTube, where she has a few other S/H vids) just made this genius Film Noir–style S/H vid "Somewhere in the Night":

The song is "I'm Your Man", sung by Michael Bublé

**I. Reading Lolita in Bay City**

Marz and I clicked through another Starsky and Hutch scene in Hutch's Bay City [LA] bungalow. (Episode: "Kill Huggy Bear", 1975)

"What's that book on his table?" Marz said. "It's . . . I think it's Lolita!"

We googled Lolita covers, and there it was--the 50¢ Crest Giant edition, published in 1959, five years after the novel's first appearance; so Hutch's copy is sixteen years old. Maybe he bought it years ago and is only now reading it, or re-reading it?

[Onscreen, the "–lita" on the curled-up book cover is clearer than in this screencap.]

Why is Hutch reading Lolita?

No doubt he's professionally interested in sexuality that leaves "a sinuous trail of slime".*

I suspect Hutch is personally interested in sexual difference too--cf. his Toulouse-Lautrec painting of two women in bed. He looks like the clean-cut one, but it seems like he's repressing a lot. (Starsky seems more straightforward [not to say "straight"] to me.)

Hutch, I contend (in my view of him as NOT coming from an upper-middle class background), might also be making up for lost time by reading his way through the Modern Library's "100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century" (from 1998, but he'd have had some such list).
Lolita is no. 4.

II. More '70s Poster Art

The poster on Hutch's wall above Lolita is never in focus, but I had a vague sense it was a bicycle poster.

I'd forgotten, but they were in vogue when I was a teenager.
[Being reminded is one of the pleasures of watching this show.]

Sure enough--I googled images of vintage bicycle posters, and it's a 1970s reprint of a poster from the late 1800s for Clement Cycles of Paris. Hutch seems to have a small thing for French fin de siècle art.

The Esty seller says:
"From A 1973 Collection Of Old Bike Posters.
The book was produced on the 100th anniversary of the invention of the bicycle.
It was also the 100th anniversary of color lithography which made mass produced color posters possible. "
________________________________________
* Re slime, from Lolita, II.3, by Vladimir Nabokov:

"We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep."

I'm enjoying paying attention to the 1970s backdrop of Starsky and Hutch, like I enjoyed finding the 1960s design influences in Star Trek.
But of course, S&H is set on Earth––the Earth of my teenage years, so I recognize some of the props.
Curious about how they'd dressed the set for Hutch's home, I slowed and rewatched a scene of it.
That fuzzy poster on the wall. [Recognize it?] Is that, could that be....

Sure enough.
It's "In Bed" (1893)--one of a series of paintings Toulouse-Lautrec did of two women lovers who worked as prostitutes in Paris:

And in the shadowy room behind Hutch is what looks like a Toulouse-Lautrec poster. T-L created art to be posters, so it makes sense they were popular on 1970s walls, as were Alphonse Mucha's posters.

I wonder if college-age people still put them up?

"In Bed" is sort of an odd choice, but I imagine it's not meant to signify much--this was, after all, long before viewers could freeze-frame video-- except to reflect that Hutch went to college, an accomplishment he lords over Starsky in one scene. (Did he study art history?)

Some fans say Hutch is the son of a doctor or lawyer, but upper-middle class people don't brag about going to college. Of course you go to college.

Having just returned from Duluth, I suspect Hutch is a Hillsider--someone who grew up in the working-class hillside neighborhoods, the ones that take the brunt of Lake Superior winds, where you have to push the lawnmower up and down a slanted lawn.
Maybe Hutch could watch from his bedroom window ocean-going ships pass under the aerial lift bridge.

Painting above, "Over Duluth", by Brian Stewart

I learned the term "hillsider" from the title of the autobiography of current young mayor (40 when he took office), Don Ness:
Hillsider: Snapshots of a Curious Political Journey.

It's set-dressed with photos and art, like a really cool website.

The center quote of the "Craft Beer Capitol" spread reads:
Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians. ––Charles de Gaulle

Duluth reminds me of that other inland port city, Portland, OR, but seedier still, and with far less hipsters. Maybe like Portland was pre-1990s?

Ness is kind of a hipster--he could definitely be a character in Portlandia, like the former mayor of Portland, Sam Adams [real name] who appears on the show as an aide to the fictional mayor played by Kyle MacLachlan (from Twin Peaks):

*SET DRESSER, from Film Connection
"The set dresser on a movie is responsible for making the location of every scene look convincing. This may sound easy, but in the magical (i.e. fake) world of movies, this can mean turning a dilapidated warehouse into a swinging 1960s nightclub, or a sunny California bungalow into a "snow"-covered French cottage. One of the set dresser's primary responsibilities is to select the props that will decorate every scene. If it's a period film, it's especially important to be historically accurate, often down to the year that any given product came on the market. (Found a great vintage coffee pot that came out in 1965, but your movie takes place in 1964? Dump it–or face the online wrath of eagle-eyed movie-goers everywhere.)"

I've always loved to go to Duluth, Minnesota, and I'm going this week. So I spent most of today looking up its history.

Duluth, southwest corner of Lake Superior:

I focused on Duluth's mid-century history because Detective Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson (Starsky and Hutch, 1975–1979) was born in Duluth in 1943.

I assume. His actor, David Soul, and Starsky's, Paul Michael Glaser, anyway, were both born in 1943, anyway.

Here's a young David Soul looking like a Midwestern pastor's kid [which he was]:

It's funny to try to imagine a fictional character's "real" life;

I went looking for the backdrop of Hutch's youth in Duluth.

SOURCES: Unless otherwise linked, I selected vintage postcards from Lakes n Woods: Duluth Gallery and Greetings from Duluth, MN. Also I gound lots of good info at News Tribune Attic: "Odd, obscure, historic, humorous, random and/or relevant items from the archives of the Duluth News Tribune."[DNT]

BELOW: "A Thrilling Sight" The towheads watching the Aerial Lift Bridge are a couple decades older than Hutch, but he must have looked like them.

(Do little boys still hold hands?)

BELOW: Duluth kids at the zoo in 1943, the year Hutch is born.

BELOW: And another view from 1943 (Lift Bridge in back), "Bus Service on the Beach"

BELOW: The same beach in summer: Park Point Beach, 1946
"Duluth, The Air-Conditioned City"

BELOW: 1950s "Mrs. Roland Wright and son Jon” in the Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Babbitt, MN (west of Duluth), DNT

BELOW: Duluth Ski Club at Chester Bowl park, c. 1940s–1950s.
Note nonironic use of reindeer sweaters.

BELOW, 1950s: "Schoolchildren greet Albert Woolson of Duluth, the last surviving Union veteran of the Civil War [he died in 1956]." --From the DNT

Front row, right: That boy in suspenders, with his hands in his pockets: where's his coat?

BELOW: On Jan. 31, 1959: Buddy Holly, “The Big Bopper”, and Ritchie Valens played the Duluth Armory. Two days later they died in a plane crash.


Waylon Jennings (!), Buddy Holly, and Tommy Allsup at the Duluth Armory, Jan. 31, 1959.

“This was the biggest teenage music show we’d ever had at the Armory. ... We found out later Bob Dylan was there [born in Duluth in 1941, grew up in Hibbing],” said the late Lew Latto.

Bobby Zimmerman [Dylan] would have been seventeen. Surely 15-year-old Hutch was there too? Maybe they met down by the Lift Bridge? v

Bob Dylan by the Lift Bridge in [looks like Duluth, but it's] New York City (1963?), ^ by Richard Avedon

Ugly Duluth History:

June 15th, 1920 - Three African-American men were lynched in the streets of Duluth, Minnesota. An angry mob attacked Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie (members of a traveling circus) after they were accused of raping a white woman. The Duluthians hung the men at the corner of 1st Street and 2nd Avenue East--a short walk from the house Bob Dylan grew up in many years later. A photo of the lynching was printed on postcards and sold around town.
Bob Dylan referred to the lynching in his song "Desolation Row" (1965):
"They're selling postcards of the hanging. They’re painting the passports brown. The beauty parlor is filled with sailors. The circus is in town."

Joe Huie’s Café

Neat! Joe is the father of famous Twin Cities photographer Wing Young Huie, born in Duluth in 1955 (below, left, in 1959), who took this photo, right, of his father in front of his famous eatery.

"Huie’s served classic Chinese and American food, and was a favorite of Duluthians... famous for its jumbo butterfly shrimp and remain[ing] open twenty-four hours a day; a sign on the door read 'lost key, we never close.' "

Oh, wow---I must go: Today a Huie family relative runs Duluth’s Chopsticks Inn (505 East 4th Street).

BELOW: Central High's boys basketball team won State in 1961. Was eighteen-year-old Hutch on the team?

BELOW: Before the Lakewalk opened along Duluth's Lake Superior shore in 1988, Canal Park was an industrial site and a junkyard (photo from the 1960s).

ABOVE: A commenter recalls: "As a kid in the early 50’s I remember scrounging around that area and watching a big old crane with a giant electro-magnet separate the iron/steel junk. We used to get old rope there also to make swings in the trees at our central hillside neighborhood."

BELOW: Duluth's Edgewater Hotel, 1967

(Twenty-four-year-old Hutch would've been long gone to Police Academy, where he met Starsky.)

_____________________________

Pre-Hutch Duluth

Some postcards I couldn't pass up.

BELOW: Duluth, 1906 "A Hustling Town"

BELOW: Duluth (Chester Park, 1908?): "Ski Jumping"

Duluth c. 1910, photo by John Wedmark , "Moose Hunt", from Shorpy

BELOW: August 1937. Ojibwe girl, daughter of blueberry picker, near Little Fork, Minnesota, [northwest of Duluth] photo by Russell Lee for the New Deal FSA.

Hutch would probably not have known any Ojibwe people as in 1960, there were only 420 Native Americans living in Duluth.

From Shorpy. A commenter on Shorpy says, "She is an Ojibwe girl also commonly known as Chippewa ~ we too used to pick wild blueberries ~ buyers used to pay us 10 cents a pound for blueberries ~ we also used to do guiding for hunters and fishermen...."