Saturday, September 03, 2005

The Spider House Rules

Another day spent wandering, this time I headed down to Congress Ave. and slipped in and out of shops, galleries, and cafes, as they caught my eye, pausing in between to scribble postcards and drop them into boxes. I'm not sure what it is with me and postcards, I just love them, love sending them more than receiving them, and it made me happy to think of all my little missives dropped casually around the city and then spread out across the country. Because of Labor Day they won't be posted until Tuesday, and will probably arrive around Friday, halfway through my trip, a completely reasonable amount of time for a postcard, the long weekend disguising the fact that I started writing some the first full day I was here.

I've had, from time to time, ideas for art projects involving postcards, usually postcards addressed anonymously and laid out in a gallery for anyone to come in and read - calling attention to the public nature of them, the idea that many people could read them on the way to their final destination, which, given the highly mechanized nature of the postal system, is actually unlikely, except at colleges, where they are read by student postal workers before being dropped in the box. I guess I treat postcards almost like mini-stories or poetry, happy that they're being "published" by the public eye on the way to a friend.

So anyway today my idea was for postcards, perhaps encased in lucite, and affixed (semi)permanently to different places around the city, so people walking by could pick it up and read what I was doing/thinking in that spot, then leave them for the next person to read. I think it would work at the Fringe Fest, like that guy who tagged everywhere in the city his dog peed, with one to three stars depending on how much pee there was (I think). My friend Max got two stars in front of his house.

Derrida wrote a book called "The Post Card." I, of course, bought it, and, also of course, somewhere around page 4 gave up. I still have it, though, because I keep thinking that one day I will be ready for it. Maybe during grad school.

***

So much orange on the streets. Even during February, when every art fan in the tri-state area went digging around in the backs of their closets for that ugly orange scarf/bag/sweater Aunt Hilda gave them years ago that was never worn except for those two weeks in support of Xto, there wasn't this much orange on the streets of NY. So much Texas pride. I guess the equivalent color for New York would be black. Last week the Times' Sunday Styles' Street Fashion page was about "The Return of Black." I was like, are you kidding me? How can something that was never gone have a return?

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