Tiny Lloyd!

He's so tiny! He's in a clear box, sent by mail, slouched and stylish on an urban corner. He's so wonderful and he's mine, all mine.

I hope my mail lady, Margie, got to deliver this before she left our route. I don't know my new mailman personally yet, but hopefully he'll be able to deal with our creative mail-art output and input. Anyway, it's a fitting last delivery for Margie who always gave us candy and cards every holiday but wouldn't accept gifts from us because it's against the law for federal agents to do so. Or so she told me, with a sad face. I never figured out how to gift her since she as always "on duty" when I saw her. Anyway, she loved your art SO MUCH. She just beamed every time she talked about it. Thank you for gifting Margie.

Close-up

Woven

I was going to title this post, "rhymes with coven" because I love that movie so much and I love the way they pronounce, "coven". And that's a total non-sequitor. The weirdest thing happened. You know how I saw the image on your camera when I was going through those author photos? Well, when I got home, the mail art was sticking up out of the mail box and I had a momentary shock of, "I know that thing...I've seen it before", and in that split second, I knew exactly what it was I was looking at. I love this. There are little fragments of words and faces, some familiar (that you want to forget) and some I've never seen before. Last week in the NYT, I read about an artist who took some of his portrait photos and put cut outs on top of them and this gave them a whole different feeling. This is much more interesting than his work and I don't have to log in to the NYT to see it! I love the sunset effect the colors make.

GROOVY

What's inside? What's inside? Did I win a contest?

Holes in envelope give clues:

Open!

Groovy memo pad from the past!

Can't wait to make my grocery/hardware-store shopping lists! But it's almost too precious for that. It's an artifact from when all things were groovy, even memo pads. Those were the days, my friend.

Celestial Gaze

That's me waxing poetic with that title. I don't know much about either of those musicians. I did listen to some VU the day his death was announced and I felt like I should listen to more of this but I haven't. In a synesthesia-like way, when I hear those songs I think of a kind of drawing, like Giacometti's portraits, with hesitant, spidery lines, lots of them, some erased, some wider, some lighter, but all eventually adding up to a thing to be reckoned with.

Cutouts

Sturdy layers of hidden meaning...

Is it a map, a diagram, architecture, instructional brochure, historical setting, geographical place

?

And on the front:

Lemons! Which are growing in abundance in my back yard as well. I just read about an art project where you get a map and close your eyes and point your finger on a spot. Then you go to that spot and document it with drawings, photos, whatever. Your art is the result. This is like geographical spot-mapping art, but it came in the mail. And there's lemons, which I love. I will always embrace geography and lemons as subject matter.

I sent you one right away because it came together without a lot of thought or planning. Speedy.

Money in the Mail

I don't know that I've gotten cash in the mail for quite some time. Possibly since the 1970s. There have been the pseudo-checks now and again that try to get me to buckle under for some sort of scam, but no cash in many years. So, this was a happy surprise! Annnnd...it's back in my court and I must admit that I am a bit stumped as to what to do next. Now that I have more time (ahem) it seems as if I have less than ever. Today I went out for lunch with some friends from work and we had such a good time, four hours slipped by and we still weren't done hanging out. And then my day had gotten away from me and all my best laid plans to work on stuff were postponed for another day. Funny how that happens...it's like those freeways where you think you'll have more room if you build more lanes but then more traffic mysteriously shows up and clogs the freshly flattened asphalt and snarls the roads anew...this makes little sense...it would be nice if money behaved the same way that traffic does. Or maybe it does...hmmm, taking that analogy to its logical conclusion, you make more money (lanes) and suddenly there are more things (cars) that present themselves to be bought with your newly minted dough (driven on new pavement)...so, ok, I guess money does behave similarly to traffic. OK, for sure I am rambling now. But continuing on with my ridiculous comparisons, maybe money and time have an inverse relationship? Which could be a good situation for me...maybe now that I will have less money yet more time, I won't be able to spend as much? Or maybe I will have to stretch and or enlarge my coins* to make them go further, in which case, this penny is the perfect solution. And while I have you here reading my whacked ramblings, did John ever tell you the pennies story from his trip to India? I was going to put the word "pennies" where the asterisk is but thought better of it when suddenly I remembered our friend's fabled story. If you don't know the tale, you might ask him to recount it for you. You will never think of pennies the same way.

Patterns in the Mail

Handcrafted mail offerings are down, way down. Reversing this mail pattern, here is a pattern in the mail. It's a pattern and it makes a pattern and it is a pattern in the mail.

From 1982 it came

Coincidentally when I got this, I was, yes you guessed it, looking at patterns online and in Photoshop. I was looking at Greek-vase patterns, to be precise. Simple borders. Simplicity patterns.