Six-second postcards (from hell?)

Just when I thought I'd a handle on what a postcard is, Twitter call their new video-sharing-app Vine the "six-second postcard".

Here's a postcard/vine of a Hong Kong market stall by travel journalist Daisann McLane. To get the sound, click on the top left hand corner of the video.

McLane's video is one of the best travel vines I've seen - the abrupt cuts suit a market scene. But when the repeating begins, like other vines, it makes you a bit  horribly dizzy.

And that's a good one. Via Google, and away from traveling, there are some terrifying vines, their stars trapped in neverending loops of insanity. 

Below is a link to vine videos by US-model Tyra Banks: videos which are too bewildering to embed on a blog.

Friends, take care ;). Only click on the link when someone else is in the room. Tell them what you're doing, and that you want to be rescued in three minutes, or so.

Deep breath. Here's the link.

LINK

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You're back! I know, I'm sorry, I will never do that to you again. You'll stop seeing the talking copy of Vanity Fair in three days' time. I promise.

Elsewhere, there are actually lots of good vines about. Paul McCartney's created a few vine puzzles, which make you want to see the videos again and again. AND he doesn't sing Hey Jude in any of them.

Plus, here are some vines lauded at this year's TriBeCa Film Festival. The better ones play on the fact that seeing something over and over is hell-like. Jordan Burt's "Dennis" series is especially sinister.

But you're still thinking about Tyra, aren't you? It's ok. You never have to see the videos again.

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Of course, it would be churlish to criticise others and not to have a go.

So here we are - a six-second Edwardian postcard - complete with wobbling camera phone...

Secret postcards... continued

Ahead of the RCA secret postcard show opening tomorrow, I've written a piece for the Guardian on what three artists think about taking part.

Fascinating putting it together. Three different perspectives on producing secret art.

Thanks to David Bailey, Pete Fowler and Maggi Hambling for sparing their time. And to Sue at the RCA for helping to make it all happen.

I thought I'd share a few more photos of Maggi and Pete taken by the ace Katja Medic. 

And here are a few bits that didn't quite make it into the article...

Maggi Hambling on being an art student in 1960s London: "Telling people you're a painter can be so tedious. I used to say I was swimming pool attendant at Tooting Bec lido." 

Pete Fowler on the lightbulb full of water on his studio ceiling: "I think I'm going to keep it!"

Finally, from Bailey, the Lennon/McCartney postcard:

PS If you're going to the show, look out for the Alys card below. By chance, one of this year's submissions is a torn half of the card given out at Alys's Tate exhibition.

Secret postcards

The Royal College of Art's 'Secret' exhibition is back in March. To raise money for the college's bursary schemes, more than 1,000 famous and not-so-famous artists will anonymously pit their talents against the postcard's form.

At the end of the exhibition, cards will be sold off for £45 each. Post purchase buyers find out who made their cards.

Photo of the RCA Secret from 2011

Of late, I've been reading Jeremy Cooper's Artists' Postcards, an excellent compendium of how the postcard has been used by different artists since 1900. It's quite a book. And I bet more than a few RCA artists refer to it as they create their cards for 2013.

At a pace, Cooper takes you through the canon(?) of postcard art: René Magritte's postcard magazines, Gilbert & George's Post Card Sculptures, Paul Morton's Thatcher Therapy (a dot-to-dot postcard suggesting you draw a pencil mesh over a photo of the ex-PM), Joseph Beuys' wooden postcards, Rachel Whiteread's hole-punched cards...

Two cards stood out, though. It's always the personal connections ultimately, isn't it?

The first, a 1908 Donald McGill postcard titled "In the Asylum".  The image shows a red-nosed man, grinning from behind the bars of a cell door.

Above him is a sign:

CAUSE: Picture-postcard collecting
CONDITION: Up the pole

REMARKS: Thinks he's a Gibson Girl 

How cruel Donald!? How cruel.

The second card was made by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs. I first came across Alÿs when a friend showed me this film of him painting a line in the middle of a road in Panama. I love it.

This is the Alÿs postcard in Cooper's book:

Image from artpdf blog 

Copies were given to visitors to the Tate exhibition of Alÿs' work in 2010.

The card caught my eye, not just because it was made by Alÿs but because of the contrast with a Rough Sea postcard I bought recently.

The Rough Sea series was one of the most popular in Edwardian Britain. Published by Tuck's, some say it tapped into Britain's island psyche, others that the cards have a deep erotic charge.

While I really like Rough Sea cards, I resist collecting them. One thing I have learnt is that to avoid ending up in McGill's collecting asylum you have to set some limits.

Rather than buying it for the image, I bought it to add to my collection of old postcard messages. Specifically, I bought it to add to a new category of cards I've noticed: empty postcards, postcards without written messages.

Increasingly, I'm coming to think of them as secret postcards.

RCA Secret opens on Thursday 14 March at the Dyson Building in Battersea, London. The sale takes place on Saturday 23 March. If you're going, good luck!

A postcard from "G and G"

Two years ago my grandparents sent me a postcard.

On the front, in Bamforth “COLOR GLOSS”, is a photograph of Morecambe: the seaside resort where they lived from 1948 until my grandmother died in 2012. The card is written by Grandpa yet signed "G and G".

Since Granny passed away the card’s essence rests in the moment it was written, in how my grandparents would have been together when Grandpa put pen to card.

More than the written message, more than the image on the front, the card is special because it was sent by them to me: this card was with us, it appears to say, it is now with you, we once held it, today you do.

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Before it took on this aura, the postcard was primarily a puzzle. A joyful, impish puzzle.

When I first picked it up, everything seemed in order. Card No. 49 “Morecambe from the Air”, signed by my grandparents who lived there.

But although I have been to the town countless times, the Morecambe on the card’s front is unfamiliar to me. Its main landmarks no longer exist. At the top is the Central Pier, burnt down more than twenty years ago. In the foreground is the enormous Swimming Stadium, demolished in the 1970s.

The postcard was a temporal trick by my grandfather:

"Hi Guy! Thought you might like this card. I took the photo in the early 1970s. It was good to see you last week. Keep in touch. G and G."

Over Christmas I took the card back to Morecambe with my dad, on a visit to see Grandpa.

We sat in Grandpa's front room, Grandpa, Dad and I, and used the card to reminisce. Over cups of tea, he explained how and why he took the photograph for Bamforth.

To understand how he came to take the photo we needed to go back forty years. To understand the significance of the photo to him, we went back further - to the 1930s.

Grandpa first visited Morecambe when he was sixteen years old, on holiday with a friend. Training to be a musician, he was keen to go the ballroom on the pier.

He still remembers stepping into the ballroom for the first time, being awestruck by the sunshine coming through its windows: "It was like going onboard an ocean liner."

While his friend took to the floor with different Morecambe girls, Grandpa experienced a kind of epiphany. He sat by the side of the dancefloor, lost in the splendour of the ballroom, lost in the music of ‘Richard Valerie and his Broadcast Band’. Gathering his senses together, he took a long look at Valerie and thought, that’s it, that’s what I want to do. 

When he returned home, to Colne in East Lancashire, he took up the saxophone. That dance hall favourite. In 1948, having finished his training and having spent several years touring theatres in the North West, he got the call he had dreamt of. He was to become the next bandleader at the Central Pier.

Now married, he and Granny moved to Morecambe permanently. And for the next 17 years ‘Alvin Atkins and his band’ (pictured below) entertained dancers at the Marine Ballroom, above the water of Morecambe Bay.

But fashions change.

When rock 'n’ roll surfaced with “the three-chord bands”, demand for ballroom dancing faded.

Grandpa and his band had to leave the pier.

He took up a weekly residence at the Midland Hotel, the building in the bottom right-hand corner of the postcard. To supplement his income from this, and that earned from teaching music, he opened a photography studio. He began a second career as a photographer, taking wedding photos and family portraits.

It was at his studio that a representative from Bamforth called to see if he would be interested in taking aerial photos for their postcards. The rep explained how it made sense for a local photographer to take the shots; the tide needed to be in, and the weather fair, so it was too much of a risk for a photographer to travel to Morecambe in case conditions changed.

Excited by the challenge, Grandpa agreed.

One Sunday, when the weather seemed settled, he and Granny drove out to Blackpool airport where he arranged to fly over Morecambe with an amateur pilot.

Hands shaking, the lens stuck out of a flap in the door of the plane, Grandpa successfully took the photos from the sky above Morecambe. And so began a sequence of events that would finish with him selling the cards for which he had taken the images.

After the flight, he sent the ‘transparency film’ to a lab in Brighouse, West Yorkshire. A few days later they sent him a box of slides made from the film. Next, Granny and him drove the box to Bamforth’s offices in Holmfirth. And within a few weeks, after Bamforth had sent the images to Holland for printing, Grandpa had bought a supply of the postcards. From then on, outside his studio, he kept a rack of postcards for sale which included a few of his own.

As we continued to chat, Grandpa rooted out a sister card of “Morecambe from the Air”: card No. 35, “Swimming Pool and Marineland from the air, Morecambe.”

This second card shows a reverse angle of Morecambe, taken after the plane had circled the seafront. Brilliantly, as we passed the cards back and forth, Grandpa delighted in a new thought.

Noticing how much bigger the Swimming Stadium was in the second card, he laughed at how it looks like the plane must have taken a dive, flown lower on its return to Blackpool. But this was not the case. Bamforth must have cropped the image.

In fact, they cropped both cards’ images as the slides he and Granny took to Holmfirth were not in postcard dimensions; they were all two-and-a-quarter inch square. That card No. 49 included the pier and the Midland Hotel, both so important to Grandpa’s musical career, was in part good fortune.

As ever, the afternoon with Grandpa passed quickly.

Always the entertainer, he is a skilful storyteller with an ear for what makes a good tale.

And how the postcard delivered on its potential for initiating stories. As Dad and I drove back from Morecambe, we enjoyed listing all the people involved in its production and distribution: Grandpa,
Granny, the pilot, the Bamforth rep, the film technicians in Brighouse, the staff at Bamforth HQ, the printers in Holland, and the wholesalers from whom Grandpa had bought his stock.

The card from “G and G” is now back in my collection, richer for Grandpa's memories. I only wish I had taken the time to ask the other "G" for more of her stories, while I had the chance.

The full version of this article is published in February's Picture Postcard Monthly.

You can only play an ace once

All families have their traditions. When my brother and I were young, one of my family’s was to play cards, play hand after hand of whist.

In the summer, games of whist were a holiday ritual. Night after a night, a pack would come out, be shuffled, then dealt. I would partner my dad, my brother my mum. 

We had our own terminology to describe the action, the Atkins whistspeak, the Atkinsese. Do other whist players talk of  “rounds” and “trumps”? I have no idea. 

We even had our own set of clichés to call on to dissect each round. The winners' smiles would give way to groans on hearing the losers suggest some kind of altervictory. "I think we did very well, given our hands."

One set phrase has really stuck with me, become a maxim of reference in more than cards. Often when someone put an ace down, they would draw breath and declare, “You can only play an ace once.”

An onlooker (there never were any!) might have thought it meant you should wait until the right moment. Hold the ace back for when you need it most. And it did. But there was a second meaning – an ace can only win one trick, whether you play it now or later. 

In other words, just get on and play it.

Which brings me to this card in my collection. My American friends, take note, now is the time to hold onto your hats. Click on the images below so that you can get a proper look.

I found it at a market in North London, near Angel tube station. It’s not a great destination for postcard hunting, most of the traders deal in jewellery and antique furniture. But at one stall, alongside stationery from the American Civil War, were boxes of US postcards.

Spotting the postcards, I slipped into my market routine. Grab a section of cards, flip them over and scan for messages. Sift for Eluard’s gold… 

It was the surname of the recipient that made me stop on the card.

Pitt - a name of high British politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, jarring with the twentieth-century form of the postcard.

Then came the destination. Worcester College, Oxford – by coincidence, the place I studied American politics. At this point, I was already sold on paying the dealer the asking price of £3.50.

But then the message:

March 9

He's put Andrew Jackson's picture back in a place of honour. Ike had dumped it in the basement. Kennedy for President.

Michael

Of course, reading the message in Michael's handwritten scrawl gloriously delayed the punchlines, prevented me from making sense of the card in one go. I think I understood “Ike” as President Ike on only the third or fourth reading.

So there you go. The ace: a message from the Kennedy White House, sent only weeks after JFK came into office. The Best and the Brightest assembled in Washington. Hope made tangible in a card. 

And fifty years on, the card, a trace of Camelot, ends up in a Camden market. 

I bought a postcard from a museum

H and I spent Saturday in Arundel, a market town in West Sussex.

We'd wanted to have at least one day of the long weekend out of London. And as the forecast looked patchy for the bank holidays, we went for Saturday. Ready for a walk and to see some green, we arrived about 11 o'clock on the train from Victoria.

Both of us grew up a long way from London. Yet I suspect it was easy to pick us out as daytrippers from the capital. If my thick glasses and rolled-up jeans didn't give us away, then Helen clutching "Country Walks Near London - Volume 2" must have.

The series by Time Out is worth buying. Over the years it's been useful for getting to know South East England, that is what lies beyond the M25. And maybe the guides have even made London feel a bit more like home. Easier to place.

But there's no messing about. The books cut straight to the walks; buy this train ticket, visit that village, have a drink of this beer here....

And while their blurb is fair - "country escapes that breathe life into the most jaded Londoner" - there is an awkward sense of pockets of the countryside being parcelled up. Lines being drawn without much context.

Fortunately, as ever, we managed to lose our way.

A couple of wrong turns and we were off the Time Out route. With 3G phones beyond signal, we had to rely on chance conversations with passersby.

Of course, this proved to be the making of the walk.

Free from the book, we could now fully relax and take in what was around us: skylarks, field poppies, willow warblers, twisting hedgerows, and even, at one point, a pair of biplanes that looped over us from a local airshow.

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Before setting off, we'd been drawn into Arundel itself. Striding past a newsagents selling Salmon's postcards, we'd intended to look round the town's castle.

We failed.

Put off by the hill and distracted by the lure of buying something 'authentic', we ended up in Arundel Bridge Antiques Centre.

For half an hour or so, we parted company. Each off in our own reverie.

I absentmindedly climbed some stairs, and found a real treat - Arundel Photographica.

Run by Chris Nicholls, the shop is astonishing - a sort of camera encyclopaedia. Jam packed full. Viewfinders, lenses, buttons.

Every innovation from the past 120 years of photography seemed to be represented. And honoured by Chris with handwritten cards.

After a while, rather than feeling hurried by the disembodied paparazzi, you felt ok to explore in your own time. The shop's order provided a sense of calm.

The Butchers and Rochesters had been given ample room to spread their folding bellows. And the works of Exakta and Zeiss rested still - happily empty of both film and, for now at least, purpose.

This was a collection to be enjoyed. The shop was quite busy, but the merchandise didn't seem to be going anywhere soon.

Standing there felt like being in a museum. Sure, there was no entrance fee, no audio tour and no invigilators wearing brightly-coloured shirts. And unlike at a museum, with care you could touch what was on show.

But the cameras on display appeared curated first, and on sale second. They were arranged according to their history rather than their price. And crucially, Chris was there to give you as many facts and opinions as you wanted  - who made them, where they were from and how they have been used over the years.

Perhaps, coming from London, it was the presence of the owner that made me feel I was somewhere other than a store; Mr Argos and Mr Boots are rarely on hand to talk through their wares. And ultimately this is Chris' means of making a living. Stock has to turn over sometime.

Predictably, I steered my chat with Chris to postcards. And drew out from him a tutorial on how one of the Rochesters might have been used to make homemade cards.

I even managed to buy a couple of Edwardian cards from a box on the counter. Unsurprisingly, given the people who visit the shop, there were no photo-cards left.

For our walk, the cards acted as bookmarks in the Time Out guide. Back in some sort of use, after maybe a hundred years of passing between collectors' and dealers' albums.

Useful, until we lost our way.

Postcardese events

If you fancy some postcard chat over the next week or so, I've got a couple of performances you might be interested in.

Next Tuesday - 15 May - I'm giving another postcard tour of Waterstones Gower St in London. 

Last time we were helped on our way by George Orwell, Gillian Wearing and E.M. Forster.

This time, we'll be stopping off in the poetry section. And the man, Roland Barthes, is sure to get a look in too.

The tour is something of a walking essay.

With the help of the books on offer, we'll try to make sense of why old postcards are intriguing. Last time we talked a lot about the parallels between collecting secondhand books and the habit of amassing postcards.

Starts at 6.30pm in the secondhand book department on the first floor. Tickets can be bought from the shop.

Then next Friday - 18 May - I'm talking about the history of postcards at the opening of the British Postal Museum & Archive's new exhibition. 

The Post Office in Pictures is at the Lumen Gallery and runs until 31 August.

No tickets needed for this one.