Who's gonna pay attention to your dreams?

I finally got round to reading a brilliant book that's been on my shelves for more years than I care to remember. 'Duel - And Other Stories of the Road' is a collection of short stories that loosely fall under a banner, I'm calling, Auto Noir. It's a collection from 1987 curated by William Pattrick and is crammed to the rafters with cracking good reads, all paying homage to the road and the vehicles thereupon. Charles Beaumont, Roald Dahl and Stephen King are all in there but it's Richard Matheson's masterpiece from 1971 that gets top billing: Duel first appeared in Playboy magazine (and anthologised for the first time here), tells the story of one man driving to a sales meeting on a very ordinary day & being stalked by a crazed tanker lorry driver on the open road in California - in broad daylight. Like the film, Stephen Spielberg's first ever movie, it's utterly compelling. And very chilling. Unlike my California road trip in 2022. And James' in 2020; both recorded for posterity above.

Duel - Official Trailer (1971)

Richard Matheson (1926-2013)

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

Miss November

Back in 1972 Swedish model Lena Forsén couldn't possibly have foreseen that when she got the gig to pose topless for Playboy magazine in 1972 (she was their Miss November centrespread) her, cropped, image (above) would be used worldwide for decades as industry standard for most photo image processing algorithms - what we know today as jpegs; many years later she was credited with being the first Lady of the Internet.

I heard the fascinating story this afternoon on 99% Invisible the wonderful radio show/podcast hosted by Roman Mars - now in its 14th year and with well over 500 episodes in the can. Lena's story, as with most features on the show, is fascinating. Click on the above link to find out more and here the episode in full (it's on the 'Shirley Cards' ep. - another fascinating photographic story I wasn't previously aware of). In the meantime, here's the uncropped photograph taken by Dwight Hooker as it would have appeared at the time (minus the staples).