Excited! 11: Postcards 📮
Hello!
This week, after returning from two weeks away on business, living out of luggage, I happened to get a postcard from my friend Matt.
His cheerful note on back of the postcard (thanks, Matt!) is not really relevant to this story—BUT it was the latest reminder that sometime in the recent past, sometime before I slipped under this tidal wave of work, there was a person with my very name who was good at planning things, a person who had gotten back on the proverbial wagon of regularly mailing postcards. Yes! So hard to believe, I know! It feels like soooooooo long ago. 😞
This revival in sending postcards, a few years back, had been largely due to two things:
- Having grandparents who don't get out so much any more, who might enjoy tiny snowglobe-paragraphs from far-off cities.
- Finding a lost hoard of oh the shaaaaame decades-worth of unsent blank postcards while decluttering.
The collected postcards are a gallimaufry: random, low-tier Kickstarter rewards (CONTAINER SHIPS OF THE PANAMA CANAL!); keepsakes of evocative artworks from museums (including, apparently, oof, an obsession with Modigliani, thaaaaanks a lot, past me); hastily photoshopped eastern European wish-you-were-heres; and your usual airport newsstand staples, the tackier the better. PORTLAND: CITY OF ROSES! SAN DIEGO. ATLANTA, GEORGIA. NEW ORLEANS! MINNEAPOLIS. OHIO: BIRTHPLACE OF PRESIDENTS!
Suffice to say: there's a stack of postcards. As I type this sentence, it sits juuuuust out of reach, on the corner of my office-supply landfill of a drafting table.
📮
The other thing you should probably know, at this point in the story, is that I've been gulping down library books lately.
Y'know, HAHAHAHA tug-on-the-collar-nervously, JUST AS ONE DOES when corralling several freelance projects and toiling on a startup and working through weekends. Totally normal!! Why would you simply ice skate at an ice rink, when you can rope a late-model Volkswagen Golf to your abdomen and ice skate uphill while juggling cats who are also on fire, am I right?
And it's not just physical library books, from the nearby city branch, but audiobooks and ebooks from the county system. Books books books everywhere, anytime, all the time, fiction and non-fiction alike, replacing toothgnashing time online, yes please and thank you, enough distractions to keep from being distracted. The recent releases are often on hold for weeks (or months), so I put my name on the hold request queues for all the variants, not knowing when my turn will come. Sometimes both formats arrive all at once.
Which is what happened this past week when I began Hank Green's novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,—a novel I've queued knowing absolutely nothing about, only because the author did a great job of enthusiastically explaining DNA transcription—so I pong between the ebook and the audiobook, both now loitering impatiently on my virtual shelf.
Somewhere in Chapter 6 (while I trundle bedward Friday night), the art-obsessed and sleep-deprived protagonist, April, is visiting the office of a Hollywood agent.
...a fashionable young man called our names and we followed him down the hallway and I was trailing the group from the beginning, but about ten feet into our journey I stopped because, half dead and tired as I was, I did not miss the Sherman original in the hallway.
Who? (I never went to art school.)
I had some inkling that most great art is in the hands of private collectors, hiding in places where only a few people get to enjoy it. I understand that is part of how art works, and I have no problem with it; it was just abstract to me at the time. Like, I didn't ever expect to see truly great art anywhere but in a museum or in photos online. But here, sitting right in front of my face, was a photograph that at minimum cost tens of thousands of dollars and was worth every penny.
By this time my head is on the pillow, the audiobook sleep timer is on. Memo to self: search web for photographer Sherman
tomorrow. Keep paying attention as you flail toward sleep, Jason, maybe the text will explain more?
"April, I'm sorry we lost you." His voice was sweet and soft and made me believe it was legitimately their fault I'd been left behind. "What you're looking at is Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Still #56, part of her Untitled Film Stills series. Each photograph is of the artist, but she has set herself into various roles with the goal of making it more clear that our culture has constructed ideas of gender that can control us if we let them."
I knew all of this, but I let him finish because I thought it was nice that he didn't just bark at me for standing in a hallway like a dolt. I figured they made everyone learn a bit about the art so that the whole thing could seem more impressive. Did I mention it was working?
Right. Cindy Shrmzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz—
It was a good night's sleep. For the first night in over a month, I didn't set an alarm.
In the late morning, over breakfast, while tallying the long list of things that I inevitably will not get done on a Saturday, I spy a quartet of errant ATLANTAs by the keyboard, and 💡 OH YES POSTCARDS THIS IS A THING I CAN DO i owe matt a postcard and probably several other people, too
Let's get up off our duff and look at that stack.
Oh!
I remember this one! It was on the racks at the Walker Art Center's gift shop in Minneapolis, after hours at INST-INT, and it stopped me in my tracks and had no idea who made it and I wonder who—waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaait.
Each photograph is of the artist, but she has set herself into various roles
Get. out.
✨
Sure enough.
Well, Matt, ...I guess you're gettin' a Sherman now.
📷
(If you're curious about Untitled Film Still #56—heck, at this point, I definitely was!—, you can see it here via NYC's MoMA, with more information on Sherman's work at Sweden's Moderna Museet. While I'm verrrrry late to the party, if you're also new to her work, be forewarned that, as with much art, her larger oeuvre is wide-ranging. Some pieces might not be your cup of tea and some miiiiight be not safe for work. I'm no Eleanor Shellstrop, but those clown photos are pretty dang creepy.)
If you're not Matt, I probably owe you a postcard, too! Sorry about that.
Big thanks to Mariano for telling me about Libby at the end of last year. One tends to have low expectations when it comes to the apps for public institutions, but Libby is such a beautifully designed experience. If you haven't already, see if your local library has it, and turn on that literature firehose. 😍📚
What's happened since last time in the world of CODE-NAMED PROJECTS?
- [✓] Taught three completely different, hands-on workshops back in February and March:
- DERBYSHIRE (with B.) was a two-night, six-hour intro to programming in Processing.
- PINAX (with E.) was a workshop on designing for physical space, for a librarian user experience conference in Austin.
- GALETTE (with C.) was a Raspberry Pi workshop on Pi Day. (Did not wrap up RIO GRANDE, but …I might be asked to work on that this coming month.)
- [✓] Had so much fun on quick-turnaround project HOOKSWITCH! Put C.H.I.P. computers inside old touch-tone phones for the Museum of Man's new PostSecret exhibit.
- [✓] Lots of work done on STRAYLIGHT, including a conference trip to Atlanta in April, illustrations for a new video, a heckton of slides, and volumes of code. So. much. code. Learned enough to be (more) dangerous in Python, PostgreSQL, Amazon Web Services, Swagger, API Blueprint, and ECMAScript 2017, ...plus Vue.js, DNS records, the best practices of writing RESTful APIs, how modern pub/sub frameworks work, ...it's been a long slog, and there's too much going on here to fit into a brief bullet.
- [✓] Oh! I went to Alaska again. Taught three classes of elementary/middle schoolers the basics of sketchnoting; kayaked along the coast(!!!); made lots of new friends; had long/useful conversations about KIMON.
- [✓] Finished two iterations of HATCHEL, a Processing project with C. for the North Carolina Museum of Art.
- [✓] Learned the ins-and-outs of the EPUB and Kindle formats and screenreaders while working with A. & L. to make an accessible ebook of comics for MANUTIUS. (It was a joy to work with them, and I figure that knowledge will come in handy going forward!)
- [✓] Shipped v2.0 of KIMON. Rewrote a whole bunch of underlying code to make the engine future-friendlier. And it launched officially a month ago!
- [⋯] Still working on additional milestones for KIMON.
- [⋯] Still knitting together code for STRAYLIGHT.
- [⋯] Contributing to a workshop we'll call BETAZED (we're making a zine, and I need to finish my pages ...last week).
- [⋯] Talked with L. about BOMBILATE! and C. about DIASPORA!! Recorded our first interview for DIASPORA, even.
- [⋯] Started fiddling with CHRYSAOR, and learned ...that I have a lot to learn. Got to play with it for some penpal mischief at the end of summer, and more recently my friend T. stopped by and schooled me / inspired me with a 🤯 mic-drop of a project.
- [⋯] EJECTA has been running in bits in the background. Two steps forward, one step back.
- [→] When things ease up (ha), I need to work on UMAMI and BROCKEN, just to set those in motion.
- [→] Put together a pitch for CITADEL, with J. and R., working with H., but it was put on hold for now. Holding out hope!
- [→] Hoping to start work on CALAFIA shortly after Thanksgiving.
- [→] Nothing to report since last time on ARETHUSA (although it may be tied to HOOKSWITCH). Same for COLLINS, HAMMERSTEIN, or BAYEUX.