Incoming....

[David Stafford]

Okay here goes another blogathon...This may be three weeks worth so it's quite a haul. First off....MomKat weighs in with three, count 'em three cards from the old country. Birthday greetings and a surrealistic collage that features a guy that is a dead ringer for a childhood friend of mine, Danny Cubiciotti who died at 27 so it's strange to see him creeping across the freeway. Thank you, Katerina

Next up: Thom Courcelle who sent me this beautiful envelope with Victorian fairy tale enclosed. Thanks, Thom. (The statue looks uncannily like me after my weekend at the DayveSpa).

I received two lovely boekies from Marie Wintzer in an exquisite envelope which resembles a locked chestful of secrets.

Inside two radically different boekies...one visual, one literary and both assembled with the care of the high archivist of the ancient scrolls of Hokkaido. 

Here is The Ange Man's Ange Tale in which the text is pieced together in type and echoed in handwritten text which, by a strange alchemy, renders the collage into poetry or even epic tale. It's a sort of translation from concrete poetry into lyrical poetry and works quite beautifully.

In this boekie the various stages of a post Utagawa woodcut are level one, then level two is their evolution into a kind of erotic storyboard and level three is the artfully torn holes in the  narrative to reveal...what....the blood red juice behind the demurely erotic facade....Thank you, Marie

Diane Keys piles on the trashpo...Here we see the Chinese Food Takeout Trashpo which is chockful of signs and portents of which I have extracted the most important (see top of illustration). I have a vision of Diane scouring her neighborhood for flotsam and jetsam and getting a weird sort of rep. People start saving stuff for her, depositing their treasuresin her shopping cart as she wheels through the mean streets of Elgin. As always the trashpo is threshed out of the trash and reassembled  in its PROPER form as a vehicle of meaning from the fourth dimension. Thank you, Diane.

I have to confess that I didn't open this bright yellow envelope for a week. Hey, it's sewn shut and it felt like opening it would violate the seal of the royal alabama masonic temple but when I saw the ATCs appear on the IUOMA site I figured I was supposed to rip it open...What can I say: I'm a late bloomer. The treasures were inside but I sorta liked the inviolate envelope for its own red threaded sake. Here we see a moon rising over Birmingham with the Blake Ray fixating it with a serene smile. Thank you, Stephanie.

Nancy Bell Scott's collages inspire something literary in me which is not always a good thing but here Nancy has provided her own narrative for her piece. The off-ground police, for those not in the loop, are the cops that go around making sure nothing untoward happens in the offground areas: balconies,  rooftops, ladders and the like. You'll have to get out the zoom and enhance features on your computer to observe the guilt in the trespassers above. But it's there alright. Thank you, Nancy.

Marie's not the only person who is riffing on the Japanese woodblock. Here J. Block has sliced and diced the floating world until it becomes something new. I'm christening it "Dames at Sea" or "Ripping a Hokusai a New One." God, I can be sooo crude. Forgive me, Fadder...and J too. Thank you, J. You'll be getting your Ann Margret soon.

Nadine Wendell Mojica is another who has sent multiple pieces between blogathons...yikes...This last batch included several boekies that might be called post-modern lobby cards. One, includes stills from Do The Right Thing that be viewed as a storyboard or simply placed in the bathroom for a quick guest read. Love them Shags...for those who have never heard the Shag story it's worth a good google. Prepare to be waylaid for half a day. Of course, Nadine has festooned everything with drawings including a vivid reimagining of Commander Uhura as a blonde. Finally, Nadine wrote me the nicest note which had me beaming from id to ego. Thanks so much, Nadine.

Like so many before her, Vizma was concerned that my unsigned cards might wind up mistaken for original Ray Johnson's floating eternally upon the postal sea. This fear is not without foundation. So she provided me with this rubber stamp (just beneath her note) for easy identification. Vizma also provided me with a boekie that I'm still plumbing for hidden meanings and sexual double entendres. My annotated list will be provided in future blogs. Thank you, Vizma.

Something about Mim Golub's card put in mind of a cityscape at night. So think of this as the Macro and the Micro Mim Noir. You can almost smell the gasoline and hear the tinkling of martini glasses. Thank you, Mim.

Forget to call out Nancy's terribly unpc stamp...but scroll up and check it out.

Yikes, this went on like forever. Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks to everybody.

[Rebecca Guyver]

Great to read and well worth the effort. Thanks for  blogging!

[David Stafford]

You're welcome, Vizma and thanks for your stamp...I have not, as yet, deployed it because of contractual conflicts with my branding manager. Mr. Mergenthaler has assured me that the mystery of the non-signed card is worth its weight in gold in creating an aura of menace and mystery. In the promotional material they showed me I was always portrayed as a creature in the halflight, nose only emerging from shadow. It was soooo over the top film noir that I fell for it bigtime. But look where it's gotten me.

[vizma bruns]

Oh that stamp! I laughed out loud and feel terrible for doing so!

No, maybe it was leftover laughing, this really is an entertaining blog!!  Thanks David S!!