The Best of the Worst Postcards

I've been keeping this news article open in my browser for about a week. It's high time I shared it with everyone else (so I can close and refresh my freakin' browser).

Bad Postcard of the Week sounds maybe a little mean-spirited, if you have an underdoggish view of the postal system, but the writer isn't deriding postal transmissions. He's simply acknowledging that alongside the quaint, gorgeous, and touching postcards flying around the world for over a century, there are also some really bad examples too. There are postcards so ugly, they transgress the border of surrealism.

It is not the postcard's fault. Nobody's saying that.

What I like is that he accepts submissions, so his collection has got to look like the fabric from which nightmares are cut. Can you imagine? In Postcrossing, participants commonly ask for themed postcards: one girl collects black-and-white images, another retiree would like pictures of lighthouses, and some young guy is asking for anything porn-like that can legally be sent through the mail. Everyone has their preferences.

Now, imagine what would happen if you asked everyone for the most garish, confusing postcards anyone could get their hands on. Try to imagine what would show up in your mailbox each week. I'll give you a hint: you can't possibly imagine. The images that would enter your home have the advantage, in that they represent the end-product of someone else's lifetime of poor judgment and damaged aesthetics. You can't sit there for ten whole minutes and guess what otherworldly creations have been orchestrated and set to print.

But it's intriguing, isn't it? Even if you asked for something particular, like "a woman holding a candle" or "a young man in a hat," you would receive the entire world's creative interpretation of those themes. You could conceivably end up with over a hundred different images of a young man in a hat. Isn't that intriguing?

Postcards Maintain Friendship

"The postcard maintains the friendship."


I have nothing more to add to this.

Broken Images

I apologize for the sudden disappearance of all the images in this blog. I was tooling around on Google+ and saw that all my Picasaweb albums manifested in the Photos section of my new account. Not wanting them to appear in my profile--they wouldn't make sense outside of their blogging context--I deleted them in Google+.

Today I discovered that also deletes them in Picasaweb, where all my online albums are stored. Now I have to go through my backed-up archives, dig out all the photos, re-upload them and re-link them to each individual post. I'm very upset about this hassle and embarrassed about the inconvenience, but at least I learned something and therefore grew as a person.

Images will be restored in the next week or so.

Today We Mourn An Address Book

In the process of moving into a new place, in the process of taking things out of boxes and finding places for them to go, one is forced to reconcile with what one wants to keep or [donate/regift/trash].

Red Horseshoe (link in my sidebar)
provides many fun and exotic
accouterments for letter-writers. 

This process also happens when one is packing things up in the first place. One is compelled to touch and handle every single stupid object one has accrued, and after 10,000 repetitions of this action one has to wonder how much stuff one really needs.

We have augmented this process with a third step in the middle: placing all our crap into storage. It happens in the middle. We packed everything up, placed it in a climate-controlled storage facility, and now we're shipping it from the facility to our new apartment. When one puts things in storage, one is compelled once again to weigh the worth of each object and how badly one needs to keep it in storage.

I love Moleskine notebooks. I love them so much, I've bought too many of them. I've rationalized and bargained my way into getting more. Why? I dunno. I love the concept of them, I love the color and texture of the paper (though admittedly Clairfontaine/Rhodia is consistently better), I love the reputation that comes with them. I traveled throughout Asia happily penning (most of) my adventures in a Moleskine, and it was no rare occasion to see other tourists with their Moleskines doing exactly the same thing, as tourists have done for decades.

Not personal information: that's no longer my number,

and my name/e-mail are easily had through this very blog.

But if you use a notebook sufficiently, there has to come a time to get rid of it. Obviously I would never throw away a travel journal, but there is a point when an address book has outlived its usefulness. Like when you fill one up, lose contact with many of those people, buy a new one, transfer the addresses you need, and that new one also comes with a smaller address book that could be used for some special... addressy... purpose. Yet to be determined.

So what happens to the old one? You could tras-... no, you could keep it. It's like a souvenir of an era, right? A chronological souvenir of where you've been in life's journey. And you have to protect those addresses, too. Even if you're no longer speaking with some of those people, you don't want to just hand out their addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses to anyone on the street, and if you put it in the trash you're basically doing that. Trash is public access, after all. TV and movies are full of people finding all sorts of things out about you by going through your trash, even stealing your identity. And that starts with knowing your address.

I decorated the interior with labels from sheets of collectible

 stamps, an original linocut, and misc. stickers.

That sounds good, but when the fervor dies down and your vision returns, you know you've got to get rid of it. It's no good keeping it. Small as it is, it's still taking up room and it still needs a place to go. I have a much better one and though those addresses are also going extinct, it's easier to paste over them with Moleskine paper from another notebook because this new address book is larger. So when you want to throw away something you want to keep, what do you do?

It's easier now than it was before: take a picture. In the past that would've meant turning film in for development and waiting a week to pick up another physical object to take up space in your life. Now, however, I can take a digital picture and store it on my laptop. So everyone can take a moment and meet one of my beloved Moleskines even as it's on its way out the door.

Update, Such As It Is

Uploaded new postcards from Postcrossing.

Not much else going on, I'm afraid. You'd think with only too much time on my hands (due to unemployment) that I'd be exploring all my creative projects. Not so: a portion of my day goes to job hunting and the rest is frittered away on Facebook games. I'm not proud of that but I've got to be honest about it.

I started a new blog where I take one picture of myself every day, 365 XN in 2010, and I've resumed writing one short story a day, but I've fallen off the wagon on that last bit. Einstein knew what he spoke of when he suggested the best job for a brilliant, creative mind was mindless drudgery. Under that yoke you would seek out and pursue creative projects to relieve your mind, but left with too much free time--as I am--I just become doughy and sluggish.

New Online Technique

Sorry I skipped the entry yesterday: recent personal events have made things confusing.

Lately I've been trying to extinct my Yahoo! usage and get rid of that account altogether, but that would mean deleting my (paid) Flickr account as well. I have thousands of photos stored there, though people rarely stop in and look around. I'm exploring free alternatives: Photobucket is an excellent containment facility for lots of photos but I think they have to develop their layout and navigability to something less clunky, more intuitive. Adobe Photoshop allows you to upload, modify, and store photos online. For that matter, Facebook and MySpace both have reasonable photo gallery functions.

But in terms of multi-platform compatibility, I'm going to spend more energy exploring how Google (Sites, Maps, Profile, &c.), Picasa, and Blogger work with each other. I've only started to explore their features and capabilities, I know they're capable of much more than I'm aware. I don't expect anyone else to follow me down this path, but I will make it easy for anyone to see what I'm doing.

For instance, here is a link to my collection of Holga photography. This is just about everything I've done with the Holga (and there might be some Diana shots in there as well). I even have it set up so that when I store anything in my Holga folder on my computer, it will automatically upload to my online Holga folder as well. I'm very excited about the potential for this, for getting all my operations running in one sleek little ring rather than asking a bunch of unrelated programs and sites to pull together for me.

Holga

Grandmother's Wooden Stamps

Last year I visited my grandfather in Idaho. One thing I always looked forward to in visiting my grandparents was rummaging through their books and creative supplies. I always had a set of favorite books I needed to find again and reread, and I also looked forward to finding new material that perhaps I wasn't hold enough to appreciate in years previous.

Last year's trip was no different, except I was about 30 years older. I found my old favorite children's books and reminisced over the feelings that these illustrations and stories made me feel. There was a giddy magical feeling to them, in that they only seemed to exist at my grandparents' house. I was not just separated from them by geography: even as a child I knew these books were representative of an entirely different generation from my own.

But this time I dug through the office supplies with intent to chronicle, and I was amazed at what I found. I'll post various of these pictures as we go along, but right now I'll only mention the cork stamps. I think they were cork, or else carved out of some other very soft, light wood. They were manufactured in India, according to their markings, and their surfaces were deeply dark and dyed from dozens of uses.

They were simple floral stylistic designs. I didn't know their exact purpose but I imagine they decorated the corners of pages of writing paper, in a letter to a friend, or the backs of envelopes. Really they could've been stamped anywhere, and a child would have stamped them anywhere, but if an adult had a set of these stamps, I tried to imagine when and why they would use them.

The Holga and Postcards

This is one of my favorite pictures, out of all those I've taken with the Holga. I was walking around Uptown with my camera and saw a clothing store display where one mannequin had fallen off her stool. It seemed uncommon and looked a little creepy, and the traits of the Holga captured that most satisfactorily.

The Holga was created in Hong Kong, in 1982, by T.M. Lee, and is simply a light plastic toy camera. The seams are imperfect so it allows some light-bleed in the film, and the whole thing (including lens) is made of plastic, so the focus is imperfect--but these qualities have endeared the Holga to artistic photographers. In particular, I use it because it tends to create antique-looking photos with black-and-white film; in color, they look like vacation snaps from the '60s.

The darkened area of the photo, ringing the image from the sides and corners, resembles a technique called vignetting (related to the English vine--imagine it winding around the periphery of an image). It referred to a decorative border surrounding a picture, intended to place the focus upon the subject matter in the center, but also applies to a simple darkening, saturation, or blur effect around the image.

What I did with this photo, and a few others, was e-mail them to Zazzle.com and convert them into postcards. At the time only a few companies offered this service; now, a great many do and rates can be quite competitive, to the customer's advantage. The quality of these postcards was rather nice and I felt pardonably proud in sending them out to friends and pen pals around the world.