DIY Deco: Moleskine Notebooks

Now, anyone who's read EVERYTHING I'VE EVER WRITTEN EVERYWHERE may have detected by this point that I'm favorably inclined toward Moleskine (MOLL-eh-SKEEN-eh: I correct myself whenever I say it). And I have found there are two Moleskine websites: Moleskine (Europe) and MoleskineUS. Why are there two? I dunno, maybe it's just easier to have a European headquarters that takes care of all nations outside of the U.S.

The Euro Moleskine site has what they call an Artists Marketplace: users are invited to buy Moleskine notebooks, decorate them inside and/or out, and sell them here to a global market. I decided to try my hand and take the plunge, but so far there have been no takers. None from other countries, anyway: my friend Kate met me and, over ice cream, perused my selection and decided which (of the three I'd produced) she wanted.

Let me tell you about these notebooks. I purchased the pack-o-three "large" unlined Moleskine Cahiers with kraft covers. Among my statio is a file of old maps, so the notebooks are covered in a 1965 National Geographic world map. Their covers feature the South Atlantic Ocean (pictured), the North American continent, and the Scandinavian nations and northern Europe.

Imagining Someone Else's Life

This is a picture of a worker with Amar Touring Cinema, in India. The card describes that he is respooling the film between showings of whatever movie was in circulation at the time.

This is from a set of Bollywood postcards I picked up at World Market, way back when they still had a brick-and-mortar outlet around my city. There were two, in Roseville and Bloomington and I think we went to one in Spring Lake Park or further out, but they weren't doing well here so all their outlets shut down. This was heartbreaking for me because I used to love to just wander around in there and look at everything, dreaming of where it came from, dreaming of how it would look in my crappy little apartment if only I had a substantially greater income.

But they closed, and one of my parting gestures was to pick up a square, tin box of these Bollywood postcards. I like the trend that suggested nicer postcards should be packaged in little metal boxes, you know? Nicer than shrink-wrap, though they're doing some cool things with cardboard boxes and Velcro/rare earth magnets, lately.

These postcards are themselves square, which means they incur a 13¢ additional handling fee, regardless of domestic or foreign postage. Being that I don't have any 13¢ stamps--indeed, they are not printed in this country--the best that the Postage Stamp Calculator can suggest is one 98¢ stamp and two 10¢ stamps. That's fine, that's only a little over, it's not going to drive me into ruin. (No, two months of joblessness would drive me almost up to the front door of ruin--and still require a tip.)

One of the cards featured a man sitting on the bonnet of his pick-up truck, on which had been mounted large wooden-case speakers and a couple placards. He was also part of a traveling cinema display troupe, like the guy in this picture, driving from village to village and showing movies out of the back of his truck, throwing the image up against a bed sheet or the side of a building, depending upon resources and size of crowd. That sounds like a fun life to me: I could do it for a couple months. In fact, I was so inspired by the other card (not pictured here) that I wrote a short story about it. Not knowing much about India, of course, I was careful not to make any distinct cultural references. I only made vague references to environment and appearances, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks or simply accept the story in its own context.

The Bollywood cards I'm sending this time around (my Postcrossing limit has gone up to 10 cards at one time!) are headed to China and Finland. I made sure to clarify that the scenes depicted did not occur in Minnesota, though there's probably no confusion over the matter.

New Word: Suzuribako

Guess I can do a "word of the day" here, since I said I was going to and failed to do so. Today's word is: suzuribako. (Oh yes, I never said I'd stick to English words.)

A suzuribako is like a little stationery set from feudal Japan, precursor to the inkstand or desk set. It contains an ink-stick, a grinding stone (suzuri), several brushes and perhaps a container for water. The box is usually of lacquered wood, but this means it needn't always be, and in fact it seems I have a suzuribako at home. It's made of a flimsier cardboard body covered in fabric, which is more commonly found throughout stores that sell exotic merchandise in the States. It fulfills much of the function of a suzuribako but isn't as durable or, I suspect, respectable.

That is to say, it's good enough for me and my purposes, but I wouldn't show it off to honored guests. As of this writing I'm including a picture from the Vanderbilt gallery but tonight I'll replace that with a shot of my own suzuribako.

Why would I have one? Once upon a time, I fancied I'd attempt to learn Japanese brush painting, and then became immediately intimidated by all that it entailed. Then I figured I could at least learn to write kanji, and I did in fact practice for a whole week yet somehow failed to attain complete fluency in the Japanese language. I couldn't even remember any of the characters I practiced, so... I keep it around in my stationery chest and will probably take it out and practice it when I'm a little more earnest about learning Japanese (or, for that matter, any of the Chinese dialects).

Actually, You Know What's Hot?

I know this is old news, but it's still one of my favorite pictures: Paris Hilton strutting around in her DIY T-shirt.

I know some people are like, "Aw, man, come on, lay off of her. At least she's trying, you know? At least she's doing stuff. How many shirts have you made lately?" (The answer to that is two, plus one creeper.)

Others are confused: "What's wrong? What's the joke?"

And to them I say, once again, everyone needs an editor. Mme. Hilton only hammered another nail in her credibility's coffin with that T-shirt, of which she was so proud. She doesn't think she needs an editor, but she's unable to pick up on her errors. It would be like someone saying they don't need a car engine because when they sit in the driver's seat, they actually lapse into a convincing hallucination in which the landscape around them is flying past. They are unable to detect what's wrong at all.

That's a pretty terrible analogy, I know, but I can step back and look at it and know it needs to be recast. People who need editors can't. They make these laughable or compromising errors and they have absolutely no faculty with which to self-monitor their work. I think that's even worse than someone who looks at the gaffe, shrugs, and insists it's "close enough."

There should be no editor out of work (unless they're very poor at their craft), and there should be at least one in every business in the world. What a dream it would be for me to work for a company in China and get my hands on every document before it leaves the office and gets disseminated around the world! People who collect hex errors, though, would become bored and furious at me for it.

"Is it a perfect plan? ...No, but I think that's what I like about it." - Captain Amazing, Mystery Men

Nostalgia in 4" x 6"

There comes a time, in correspondence as with everything else, when you have to give up something that means a lot to you. In the realm of stationery, maybe you've held onto an item for too long without having used it sufficiently; maybe it's taking up space and you can't justify retaining it any longer; maybe you know someone who would like it better.

This is one postcard among many in my collection, and I just decided I had to give it up. It's an image from a collector of retro memorabilia, a photograph of these little cards called "Winky Dinks," I believe. It's that simple Cracker Jack prize concept: the front is a corrugation of little triangular rows that emphasize one gatework of printed image or another--you wiggle it back and forth to see the different scenes and in this manner the illusion of movement is suggested. These cards in particular demonstrated old dance moves from the '60s, and you turned the cards back and forth to see how the simple steps were achieved. (Hullabaloo was a popular dance/music show of the era, kind of like American Bandstand.)

It's nothing big, nothing to scream about. The postcard itself did not achieve this effect. Why does this card mean so much to me? Personal reasons: where I got it, where I was in life when I picked it up, things like that which it represents to me. But now I have to think about conservancy of physical space, and since virtual space is so vast and cheap right now, I scanned the card in and kept it that way. This postcard went to China, received by a young woman who appreciated it.

So it goes.