Eph in West Greenwich doing *this* exactly correct / topsy turvy
By now you know I enjoy making cards, sending cards, receiving cards… and then documenting both the sending and receiving as possible. As you might expect, this sort of routine easy to fall behind on and well… that’s fine cause not really the important part anyway.
That said, sometimes when things slip through the cracks and/or don’t really have a theme or “container”, they seem a bit lost or sad lost in some digital shoebox. But, this is just me overthinking, right?
postcard and custom cassette mix tape (with art flag by Noriko Miyake)
Moving on, here are some cards that i made/mailed which were delivered and the recipient photographed and sent evidence. While in other cases, some envelopes received with splendid stamps on board or, cards otherwise received which possibly were not inventoried.
from the Leo card series 2021, not sure who, was it you? thanks
At the risk of redundancy, some of these may appear and other dossiers. Regardless, enjoy – there are always more more more.
another from the Leo cards series 2021, again, recipient unknown, you can see why this task is tricky right?
card from Olympia, Greece, from a friend from Germany who is often in Vancouver and sometimes in Japan
just look at this variety and detail! JMV is a master of making the historical, contemporary and relevant
from New Zealand with stamps, stamps Par Avion, i think was delivering stamps but i can’t recall
so much Canada, Canada, oh Canada
this one started to go to Greece, but came back early, did Nikos finally receive it?
this card went to an exhibit of, you guessed it, postcards, at a book store
get in on the fun by directing your postal dispatches to Tsuchida Cottage
yup, goofing with postboxes and insta-camera, very predictable dave, very / also hat from Marty the potter in Moab
Thanks for hanging out, join the DaveO Postal Club if curious for more correspondence.
Tell your stories in the way that feels comfortable, like your favorite pair of shoes.
all the mediums are yours, just bring your unique story to make
Document in the way it feels natural to you. Doesn’t have to be a blog, can be a notebook with colored pencils, or buy yourself a fountain pen, or an audio recorder.
Indeed, whatever medium/form”add context and interestingness to tell a story,
Fck stats make art.
PS Vincent van Gogh was a heck of a letter writer, Henry David Thoreau was a solid botanist, Bob Dylan is a great painter, Joni Mitchell even more so, Nick Cave is an exceptional organizer… shall I go on? No no, you go on. (And let me know what you make)
My friend Ted came to visit – he lives in Kyoto but was doing some tour guide reconnaissance/spiels on Kyushu & our home with the waystation before heading Shikoku.
me at the giggling piglet studio and consulate, photo by Ted, minor crop and edit by me
Notably, he is my first multi-time visitor to the Giggling Piglet studio besides Mac Kobayashi. Also, we went to Mac’s Goat Farm for lunch, coffees etc.
Listening to Leonard Cohen in the thunderstorm, thankful for the relatives who built this mighty store house
Dude is keeping up an incredible pace in an exceptionally hot and humid summer.
I mean, it’s really perfect mixed media creation studio
Overall, we discussed many topics. Thanks to my sweet in-laws for setting up the comfy room for him complete with the family altar/shrine open for o-bon. It’s a very special time of the year here when our passed away relatives can come back to visit for a while.
the hi-fi system is sounding great after a couple of tweaks by the piano tuner & this snap is a great angle cause you don’t see my balding spot :)
Thank you for visiting Ted, I really enjoy time with you.
photos by Ted with scenes and me and my art around the goat 
Memo: You might enjoy Ted’s snapshots of the experience in general (snaps are stashed on facespace but this is a note to add some more here down the line // Right now I’m at the doctors office, my battery – phone & human – is/are plummeting so, you know how it goes…)
[update: photos added, mostly unannotated]
These snapshots should have captions/annotations but at this point they don’t, but *they exist* thanks to Ted. At some point I’ll add a link to his “notes from the nog” blog.
My driving career officially ends today with my last license expiring.
Some of these our drivers licenses, some or not, regardless, handy
(Briefly) thinking of all the early mornings and stupid tests and crappy drivers ed classes in Utah, thinking about the hundreds and thousands of miles (approximately) driving VW buses, drive away cars, “borrowed“ vehicles throughout North America to concerts, festivals, relatives, holidays, parks, nowhere in particular, picking up the hitchhikers, mini trucks and vans in Japan delivering mushrooms, so many beater cars on Guam, and since “the illness” crashing on a Vespa, crunching the side of an SUV and being too disoriented to drive anything anymore… Anyway, I haven’t driven for years and now have relinquished the credentials.
I still have other forms of identification however
This is (also) a long way of saying “grateful for public transit“ & glad our house is right at the “end of the line“ of the fantastic Uno bus service.
Catching a ride to the Dr in wife’s 660cc kei-truck
The “origin document“ of Forgotten Vancouver Stories talk
Projects of all kinds, a talk/presentation in this case, usually start with some kind of plan… (seems obvious so i’ll explain further).
In this instance, this is the *origin document* of what turned into a talk for Pecha Kucha night Vancouver “All-Star edition” at Vogue Theatre in the 20 slides for 20 seconds each format. e
Later, the “slides” became part of a longer form version at “Poets, Punks and Revolutions: Forgotten Vancouver Stories,” Northern Voice in a three-dimensional mixed media environment (campfire on stage, easels, record players, a comfortable chair and so on.
The idea started at a sort-of-secret-hideout with single malt, in conversation with a (now-former) mayor of Vancouver, his chief of staff, and the CEO of a significant company. Realizing the mayor didn’t really know a lot of renegade Vancouver stories, especially around counter-culture, I riffed off a few and later thought might be useful, amusing/educational/entertaining, or whatever for a wider audience.
Written (maybe March 2021?) in reply to an association/community of creatives riffing off the Jack Kerouac writing for Japhy Ryder (*cough* modeled after Gary Snyder) about a rucksack revolution.
My feeling is the beat generation, the lost generation, romantics, punks/hippies/pranksters and/or whatever movement you want to namecheck are labels of convenience (we love to categorize) and – importantly – don’t live fossilized in amber.
We are who we are, regardless of generation and accidental timings of birth or state of the world, we take in all that came before us and (perhaps) we spark what will come after us. We are the rucksack revolution who found a place to sit calmly, share widely, create honestly, give openly, inspire gently and carry-on intrepidly through it all.
Ergo: people who are creating today *honestly and authentically* are part of a continuous strand which occasionally picks up names along the way.
daveo
stash your gear in a rucksack and go be in the world
We are a *new* movement whether it has an “name” or not. If you are writing, sharing, wondering, wandering, rambling, sharing, filling notebooks with joy & impunity, endless letters to lovers you’ll never meet & living full on, going going going.
Indeed for decades when I would ramble on about these literary heroes, most people would stare blankly, even lots of Deadheads didn’t trace the lineage but now, what was once “counter culture” has bubbled up into consensus reality so often.
We are the ambassadors and the diplomats but also the practitioners … and we have mighty tools available to us! So many writers were never “known“ because a suit in a New York City office didn’t *take a chance* on them (their efforts sequestered in shoeboxes in attics and lost to unknowing grandchildren or recycle bins) but now all of us can publish everything / all the time / everywhere and (importantly) cultivate a community like one does with a garden.
Now I’m so pleased and proud to help amplify these classic & contemporary stories in Japan through exhibits and examples, plus – again importantly – inspiring other people to create their stories and sprinkle them out to the universe in whatever form they choose.
Fck Stats, Make Art.
Right here / it’s all about the cycles: they showed us the way, keep your notebooks handy & pencil sharpened, remember to share, remember to seek, & remember to go go go.
“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures …”
Jack Kerouac *fictional quoting* Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums
Sometime along the way (late 2019?), Grant Lawrence, BC broadcaster and writer (and Tin Tin fan), had some question for me about the erstwhile pandemic which was here in Japan before *everywhere else* plus lots was going on in our little world, while his extraordinary wife Jill Barber was preparing for a virtual show at the legendary Palomar where my Uncle Lorne was once the maitre’d and the memory inspired this letter. I am stashing here as a diary of sorts as it catches a lot of the spirit of the time as i share some thoughts about his book Dirty Windshields and other topics. Might make sense to you, either way, carry on.
Grant and I with a crappy camera at CBC open house, prob 2006
Hello Grant, Enjoyed all the updates… Been a wild summer on this side of the Pacific for us ~ which recalls your initial questions to me back in early February when the schools in Japan were just shutting down and you were curious about how people would handle this… Or how far we’ve come!
We now have a wonderful little dude with the middle name of “Stanley“ born just before the NHL came back (not quite enough good luck with that name but still…), followed by a very unique Buddhist funeral circumstance, then a Typhoon, my 50th birthday (which included a personal archaeology project when my entire life archive a ride from various storage lockers to 150 year old grain barn now art studio/music lounge) and just recently, an oddly awesome exhibit of my poems and paintings at a goat farm, plus my singer wife (& pandemic rock who has also stick-handled through reams of paper work getting me and the official in Japan and a little dude official in Canada) returns to the stage at a cavernous convention center with her bossanova blues the same weekend as your wife hits (my great uncle’s old haunt) of the Palomar / we’re planning on “being there“.
Also, Dirty Windshield should be longer, not shorter… I mean I really enjoyed all of your books but this one was like reading about my own parallel life, ergo: we were in the same places in similar situation is just different years and circumstances. From punk rock tour vans in Germany to getting robbed in Washington DC to underground explosions in Olympia (where touring bands crashed at my house dubbed “hockey lounge“), bewildered in Japanese labyrinths, VW vans with lightspeed snowstorms & de-icing lighters… and many points in between.
evidence of my kin at the Palomar
Of course, I was Whalley trekking in by bus to York theater & making zines while you were in West Van doing the same stuff with Nards – just in different suburbs and, back in those days crossing a river *and* an inlet might as well be crossing the English channel.
Anyhow, thanks for the update – I love living here but I’ve been very much in the “Japan bubble” since all of this began so it’s nice to hear familiar riffs / let’s get you and the family over to Okayama for top-shelf beer at the goat farm, &/or a goat milk lattes! No these goats are not on the roof and they don’t do yoga.
And yes, we have trains, lots of trains which sparks a whole other idea…
dvo
Dave (with specs obv) and Dan and Bob along with Uncle Lorne who sorta inspired this riff
postal coin banks, envelope-esque pencil / pen holder, paintings of post boxes in Vaticane and Olympia, Greece as seen at Tsuchida Cottage
As will no doubt be *not shocking* I have quite-literally hundreds of photos of post boxes around the world, as well as other postal type artefacts – from “still lifes” of writing letters, to random global stamps, to paintings of post boxes etc. etc.
postboxes in a magazine seen at, yup, the Shinogoze post office
While I made a book out of some of the artifacts {Post’d: Letters to Elsewhere}, most don’t have a “permanent home” here in this creative life archive and well, it’s a bit of a daunting task to do *all of this all at once* so sometimes a collection just sort of falls together around a theme and says (metaphorically, i hope) “hey, this seems nice” and here is one of those times.
postal code mark as seen painted onto the street
In this case, a few post boxes – both for sending and receiving – in and around my Tsuchida neighbourhood and Okayama at large, and a few other snaps that friends here sent me (i think, sometimes i don’t know if took the photo or someone else did, no offence intended if i mistook).
No doubt this post could go on and on but instead I’ll say, “Here are some postal items, please enjoy (and remix as desired)”.
simple, rustic delivery box in the neighbourhood
Note: i have meant to start participating in #postboxsaturday Twitter activity, maybe this’ll help me start.
