In 1968 well-known San Francisco lettering artist Alan A. Blackman began sending hand-written envelopes as a surprise for his young son, Stephen, across the bay in Berkeley. Blackman had been an avid stamp collector in childhood and remembered the excitement that a new postage stamp could create—and the excitement of receiving his own personal mail. At the same time he addressed an envelope to his son, he addressed a similar one to himself. 

Blackman was part of a community of stamp collectors who pursue first-day cover stamps. On the day the U.S. Postal Service issues a new commemorative stamp, such collectors stick it on an envelope, take it to the post office to get it postmarked that day, and mail it to themselves. Where he elevated the hobby was in the handwriting of the address....

The envelopes were addressed in uniform style when he started out, but his creativity overtook him. “It dawned on me that since the stamps were always different, the design on the stamp could influence what the address looked like,” he told the Chronicle in 2015. “That was quite a departure. I had not anticipated it, but once I discovered it, it became a subject of great fascination to me and to my friends who had seen these things.”

He sketches “The Soul of an Officer,” which suggests that in order to forget about fear and death, the officer focuses on

Eating & drinking

commonplace chatter about war—& [?] of own escapes from shells etc.

girls & silly second rate insanity

austinkleon.substack.com

It’s not that riding my bike makes me feel like I’m 10 years old again — it’s that riding my bike makes me feel the way I wanted to feel when I was 10 years old.

(via The way you wanted to feel - Austin Kleon)

I was really trying to work with a lot of self-imposed limitations: No dialogue, pantomime strips with no close-ups, or very few close-ups. No “camera” moves. They were influenced a lot by [Ernie] Bushmiller, [Otto] Soglow too, who did The little King. It was always pantomime, the Little King character, anyway. He would only have the other characters talk. But in The Little Nun, no one’s allowed to talk. It’s all pantomime. You rarely see that stuff anymore. It’s a relatively hard thing to do. It’s not an easy thing at all.   You almost have to draw like Bushmiller or Soglow, you have to be crystal clear and ultra simple in your drawings to make them read. A lot of people still have trouble reading pantomime strips. They are not used to looking at the pictures that closely. They’re used to reading it from balloon to balloon and then going on to the next thing.

They were hard. They took a long time. I did all The Little Nuns on gridded graph paper and it was like a lot of math. Slavishly making minute changes—the kind of stuff Bushmiller did as second nature. But it was a lot of slow work with rulers and Rapidographs and drafting stuff. 

Dehn's satirical prints of European and New York scenes were the product of an unconventional Minnesota upbringing and an iconoclastic eye. The son of a feminist, socialist mother and an atheist, anarchist father, he was not destined for a quiet life. He studied at the Minneapolis Art Institute and the Art Students League in New York, after which he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War I. On his release Dehn took odd jobs and made his way to Europe, where his work as a magazine illustrator supported him and his Russian immigrant wife in their travels. While in Europe Dehn was a critical observer of the social scene, especially in Vienna and Berlin, and a light-hearted painter of park scenes and landscapes. In 1930, after his return from Europe, his work, on both European and New York subjects, was shown at the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. The critical response was good, but sales were only moderate. In the mid-1930s, Dehn began to paint watercolor landscapes, which proved immensely popular. As a result, new commercial opportunities opened, including travels through the United States, Mexico, and Venezuela. His fame led to offers to teach and then to work for the Navy during World War II. Throughout the forties, fifties, and sixties, Dehn and his wife traveled around the world, doing commercial work and lithography. His work became less satirical and more fanciful, and he experimented with new graphic techniques. He died of a heart attack in 1968 while planning new trips, beginning a book, and organizing a retrospective.

Until the age of 22, Pamuk aspired to be a painter. His forthcoming book, Memories of Distant Mountains, collects images and text from his travel notebooks that capture his sketches and thoughts in Istanbul, Urbino, Mumbai, Goa, Granada, Venice, New York, Paris and Los Angeles.

For his second talk, in the auditorium of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, Pamuk explained the writerly process that rests at the intersection of image and text. The pages of Pamuk’s notebooks contain a running commentary on the labors of writing, as well as intimacies, confessions, and symbolic or poetic codes. They not only trace his travels in Istanbul, Urbino, Mumbai, Goa, Granada, Venice, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, but also reveal what might be called the topographies of the writer’s mind. A piece of gossip sits next to an epiphany. A statement of nostalgia shares the page with news of publications or a simple accounting of the day’s expenses. That contrast, in which the profound cohabits with the quotidian, reveals the writer in the messiness of life. Pamuk’s notebooks are the calm eye of a storm of creativity. They are itinerary and raw thought, both meditative and marginal. For anyone interested in the inner workings of a brilliant mind, the notebooks are an addicting pleasure that lay bare the wellsprings of Pamuk’s writing. The images contained in his notebooks, which were projected on a large screen during the event, reveal ideas, visions, daily concerns, and snippets of conversation intertwined with vistas and landscapes. At times, the words actually constitute the “view.” As Pamuk writes, “There was a time when words and pictures were one. There was a time, words were pictures and pictures were words.”

MAN: What do you do in that book all the time, Richard? 

RICHARD SERRA: Um, I keep track of myself. 

MAN: Are you writing poetry?

RICHARD SERRA: No, it’s a way of keeping your eye and your hand together.

I played Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” for my son Owen when he was 4 years old, and he became completely obsessed with the band. Kraftwerk, it turns out, is perfect music for little kids: they wrote simple, beautiful melodies to repetitive, exciting beats and they sang about real things that kids can understand, things like roads, radios, trains, robots, computers, and bicycles. For a while, Owen and I were going to the record store every week to buy a new Kraftwerk album. Owen never wanted vinyl, he only wanted CDs: He could handle them in his little fingers, and he could skip the tracks easily. Radio-Activity a record that often gets overlooked, but shows Kraftwerk, in some ways, at their most pure: it was their first fully electronic record and it’s a record built conceptually around their weird humor and love of wordplay. (For example, on their previous record, Autobahn: “Fahr’n Fahr’n Fahr’n auf der autobahn” is a pun on The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun”: “fahr’n” means “driving.”) Most concept records fall apart after a few songs, but Radio-Activity holds together the whole way through, from “Radioactivity” (“Radioactivity / is in the air for you and me”) to “Airwaves,” which has surf-rock vibes (“when airwaves swing / distant voices sing”) to my favorite track, “Antenna” (“I’m the antenna / catching vibration / you’re the transmitter / give information”). Several of the song titles are puns: “Radio Stars,” for example, sounds like a song about fame, but it’s actually about pulsars and quasars. And that’s the genius of Kraftwerk: simple enough for a kid to get into, but deep enough for any age. (Of all the bummers of COVID-19, missing Kraftwerk play in Texas this summer is high up there.) Kraftwerk made at least five perfect records, but this is one that deserves and rewards more listens.

French artist Eugène Atget (1857-1927) focused his lens on the city and people of Paris for nearly four decades, producing more than 8,500 pictures throughout his career. In his photograph Eclipse, a crowd is gathered in Paris’ Place de la Bastille to observe the 1912 solar eclipse. Rather than recording the astronomical event itself, Atget turned his attention to its spectators. Fun fact: Surrealist artist Man Ray bought Atget’s photograph to illustrate the June 1926 cover of La Révolution Surréaliste—a subversive publication that adopted a pseudo-scientific format to explore the irrational nature of existence