In the Gallery: Recommended Reading Links

I found quite a few interesting articles about letter writing, the postal service, and on-line forms of communication in the process of putting together the mail show currently at Mindport.  All the articles are available to be read here at MP, but I recognize that all that reading usually takes more time than most visitors have during a trip to the museum.  Here are the links, so you can read as you will!

Please, Mr. Postman: Reclaiming the Lost Art of Letter Writing by Elizabeth Ryan

On Practice: Letter to Holly from Cougar Ridge by Brenda Miller

Faux Friendship by William Deresiewicz

Pushing the Envelope by David Henkin

Three Ways to Disconnect from the Internet and Engage the Present by Jeff Severns Guntzel

A Family, a Nation in 200 Years of Letters by Kirk Johnson

Eight or Nine Words About Letter Writing by Lewis Carroll

In the Gallery

The mail show is up!  Write On: Going Postal in the Age of E-mail is on display through February 6.  Come enjoy this varied collection of mail – old and new – and send some of your own.

Envelopes and postcards by Pamela Gerard, Kelly Pocci, Fane Jones, Kevin Jones

For more information about the show, check out this interview in the Bellingham Herald, or this article in the Cascadia Weekly.  If you're local, the latest copy of "What's Up" magazine also features a great piece by Marie Biondililo.

Nipper Prints out his Wish List

“Nipper,” the RCA Victor dog, now visiting in Mindport's gallery window, was one of the most famous advertising icons of the early 20th century. Nipper (1884-1895), born in England, served as the model for a painting by Francis Barraud  titled His Late Master’s Voice (1898)

This image was based on an earlier photo of Nipper looking into and puzzling over the sounds coming from a phonograph.

We thank the American Museum of Radio and Electricity, right around the corner from Mindport, at 1312 Bay Street, for their gracious loan of this historic figure to grace our window. Be sure to drop by and visit them.

Looking Up

Winter in the Northwest is traditionally a time of clouds. Like bird watchers in the summer, we cloud watchers find our heyday during the season of storms and atmospheric ferment. In these days of economic disaster what better strategy for forgetting earthbound cares than to gaze toward the skies?

When I was in my Junior year of college, I was still undecided what I wanted to study. For a bit, I considered meteorology. After all, it's a field in which my father had been trained, and growing up under his tutelage I was kept informed of the collision of the fronts, the moist breath of the fog, the tower of the cumulus and the feathery loft of the cirrus. Nowadays my wife and I joke about the "upper level low-lying stratus deck." I never pursued meteorology academically, as it turned out.  I quickly discovered it was all math, a subject for which I'd never been enthusiastic. Math, after all, is only an artificial, secondary expression of the poetic forms expressed by the clouds. That's where the magic is for me.

So I became a cloud watcher and a cloud photographer. I know a little about the physics of weather and, from that perspective, why some clouds look the way they do. But I also believe cloud forms relate directly to emotion, that the flow and turbulence of the atmosphere parallel the flow and turbulence of water and furthermore, to patterns of mental process within our own psyche. After all, we are, in large part, fluid. Our physical motion is constrained by the same forces that move and constrain the atmospheric gasses and the motions of flowing water.  In the clouds we see dance. The experience of motion, modified by the forces of momentum, inertia and gravity lay the grounding structure in our consciousness for the later arrival of verbal language and thought. Consider also that from the earliest days of human existence, our survival must often have depended on an evolved intuitive ability to read the message written in the clouds.

In our culture, we speak derogatorily of someone whose "head is in the clouds." But angels sit on clouds, so why would we think less of someone whose head occupies the domain of the angels?

Kevin Jones

"A Book About Noise"

I've just finished another book dealing with one of my pet gripes, noise: The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise, by Garret Keiser.  It approaches the subject from a perspective that has barely been touched upon by other books dealing with it, namely its social and economic implications. To me, Keiser's most important point is that there's a direct relationship between the amount of noise we encounter and economic inequality. He asserts that an egalitarian culture is a quiet culture, and vice-versa, an idea that I find intriguing because it leads my thinking on the subject of noise into a whole new realm.

Keiser points out a paradox, namely that anyone who objects to noise is often characterized as a crank, yet there's a premium associated with living in a quiet place. Which is to say, property values decline in the vicinity of airports, race car tracks, and freeways. Read the classified real estate ads and notice how often a home's  location in a "quiet neighborhood" is included as an important selling point. The implication of this paradox is that those who are most subject to noise are the most powerless. If you're poor, good luck at getting anyone to respond to your complaints about excess noise.

The word "noise" is itself open to interpretation. As Keiser notes, the general definition of noise is the sounds you don't want to hear. On Lummi Island, where I live, the sound of breezes stirring the leaves on a summer day is a sweet sound. On the other hand, the constant dull roar of a winter nor'easter becomes a maddening noise in quick order.  Being a water lover and a boat person, the sound of loud boats bothers me less than the continuous passage of propeller-driven aircraft overhead. The airplanes are an irritation, whereas the boats stir my nostalgia. They usually are not nearly as loud as the aircraft, either.

Keiser devotes a chapter to the subject of a Harley rally that he attended in the town of Sturgis, South Dakota. He said one thing that surprised him was the high level of politeness he observed amongst the riders present. One of them saw him standing by the street edge, actually stopped, and yelled over the roar of his vehicle, "Would you like to cross the street."

The beauty of the beast

Later in the book Keiser defines "silliness" as knowing perfectly well that something you're doing is wrong, or doesn't make sense, but you do it anyway. He uses the noise of the aforementioned motorcycle rally as an example. As I interpret his view, politeness of the crowd there can be understood as a compensatory act to distract from behavior that in most circles is unacceptable . Which is to say, you offend everyone within 100 yards with your racket, then act super polite. . . or raise money for charitable causes, as Harley clubs have been known to do, in order to defuse anyone's annoyance at your obvious transgression of normal standards of social consideration.

An example of this "silliness" from my own life similarly concerns the intrusive racket of loud motorcycles roaring up the hill next to my house. One day I observed a neighbor of mine mounting his "rig," and plugging earplugs into his ears before donning his cycle helmet. (This is an otherwise considerate, pleasant and public-spirited guy) I wanted to ask him, but didn't, "If you need ear plugs to handle the roar of the vehicle you're riding, why would you think your neighbors would enjoy it as you pass by? He knows that noise is annoying, can damage his hearing, or raise his (and your) blood pressure, and he knows it well enough to bother protecting himself, yet does not offer the same consideration to his neighbors. This, if I understand Keiser's view correctly, is "silliness," paralleling accusations mothers make of their kids when they do thoughtless things.

In case I've offended any motorcycle buffs, let me add that my driver's license carries a motorcycle endorsement, and I have nothing whatever against motorcycles in general or Harleys in particular, other than when their racket intrudes on my property and peace.

Absorbing Keiser's book took concentration on my part because he arrives at his conclusions by sometimes circuitous reasoning interjected at unexpected times with humorous asides. These would catch me off guard so that I needed to stop and think about whether that was a subtle dig or a straight statement. He's someone who obviously hates noise but is attempting to be fair and objective about it. (Personally, I don't even want to be fair, I want them to shut up!) But, it's a rewarding read, especially if you're a noise "crank." It opened my mind to aspects of the subject that heretofore have only lurked on the wings of my musings. If noise is an issue in your life, or you'd just enjoy a new perspective on it, give this book a try.

Kevin Jones

The Island Quilters

The latest work of The Island Quilters opens tonight in Mindport's gallery and runs until December 31th. These three women from Lummi Island have been meeting together to share ideas and humor since 2004. Their last show in Mindport's gallery, in 2006, was great success and we're most happy to have our space graced once again by the cheering colors of their newest efforts.

What We're Reading Now

Sometimes books come along that, like a wise, sympathetic, and inspiring friend, let you know you are not alone in your beliefs, preferences, or habits.  Open the cover, read a few lines, and suddenly you’re part of a collective rather than being a loner.  Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Gilligan Wheeler’s book Good Mail Day: A Primer for Making Eye-Popping Postal Art has been the most recent of my “good friend” books.* 

More than a year ago, frustrated with the mass audience of facebook, I tried to renew letter-writing relationships with far flung friends and family.  It was slow going, and I began to wonder if a need to send and receive letters was just another strange quirk, like not liking the feel of wood decking on bare feet, or believing there is such a thing as “too sweet.”  However, just as I was waning in my commitment to the post, Good Mail Day appeared to cheer me on and reassure me that a small, dedicated, and sane (or at least not any weirder than anyone else) group of people still communicate through the mail.  

Good Mail Day has kept me writing to friends (new and old) and family, and it’s also inspired me to start making mail art.**  My husband says he’s noticed that I am cheerier and more focused since I decided to keep the computer screen dark at night and turn my attention to pen, paper, scissors, glue, and stamps.  So here's to the authors, my pen pals, and the USPS.   

 Envelopes/postcards (clockwise from upper left) by: Carolee W. of SF, Kevin J. of Lummi Island, Pamela G. of SF (center and lower right), Stephanie B. of NYC, and Bryan K. of Long Beach

*Other fairly recent books on the “good friend” list include The Introvert Advantage: How to Survive in an Extroverted World by Marti Olson Laney and Thomas Moore’s A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do.  

**Mail art is a decades-long tradition comprised of an interesting and egalitarian network of folks sending art through the mail. 

-T. Jones