Would ya like some more cheesy pattycakes, then?

Whoa! Check out these new awesome Victorian masks I found at the party store on Western yesterday. They were only $2 each. I am so in love with masks. I want to start a collection. I love how photographing people with masks on adds this whole new complex dimension to their personalities. They still look like themselves but another version, a slightly off version, cartoonish. B and had to drop off our (late!) rent check at the realty office in Roscoe Village and while we were waiting for the bus, B suggested we run over to the party store to look for costumes for our new wacky band. Brian found this awesome green jacket with gold lame $$$$ signs all over it but sadly, it was $40 (boohoo). It looked like something Rodney Dangerfield would wear if he was working in a casino. I told Brian I'd try to make him one for a lot cheaper, so that's my next project.

But back to the masks...we went back to the bus stop and tried on our masks and immediately started talking like little british schoolchildren with cockney accents. I even came up with a new cockney word for pizza (according to schoolchildren, of course), cheesy pattycakes! Haha, endless amusement.

Here's some mask pics. See what I mean about the weird extra dimension the mask adds to the portrait?

first ever Pumps set list...

hands hands hands hands hands hands hands hands hands hands

More on the Belles Lettres Project

So the more research I do on this, the more interesting it gets. I went to the library yesterday and found literally 25 or more sources to research on the topic. I'm breaking it down into some different categories:

The history of letter writing
The history of mail art
Letter writing as a teaching/social tool
Images of Mail art
Images of my own/friends personal letters
Interviews with friends/others and their firsthand relationships with letters

This may seem like a lot, but it's better to have too much than too little. Eventually, I'll pare all this down to the bare essentials and make a rad book. Maybe I can even do the typesetting on the letterpress (or is that a little too ambitious?) Remains to be seen, I suppose.

Life right now is pretty much school, school, school, drool. But it's the best thing that has happened to me since...well, ever, I guess. You might think I'm exaggerating but really, I've never felt so totally immersed in schoolwork and creating before. It's wonderful.

Oh yeah, if anyone has any letter stories/cool images, hit me up. And if you don't now, expect and e-mail/survey/somethingsomething from me in the near future.

Belles Lettres

To Whom It May Concern,
Anyone interested in this? I'm thinking of making a zine for one of my design classes called Belles Lettres involving letter writing--kind of a spin-off of that Letters I Never Sent idea I had a few months ago. I've been really interested in the ways letters look, especially old ones and was thinking of putting something together that combines some really cool pictures of letters. I also need to interview people about their letter writing experiences and take pictures of their letters (all anonymous of course). Would anyone be interested in helping me with this?

Forever Your Most Humble Servant,
Bebe Gun


Here's my proposal for my teacher:
My project will address the issue of letter writing, and specifically the visual nature of it. My format will be a ‘zine exploring how people visually express themselves when writing letters. It will be a parallel study between the visual nature of the letters and my interviewees personal connection with letter making. My main question here is: “How is letter writing a unique form of communication in comparison with speaking, or any other form of communication?”
My assumption is that letter writing as a form of expression has become more obsolete since the advent of the Internet and e-mailing, and I’m hoping to research more about people’s relationships to letters they have written in the past, if they still write letters, ways they have adorned their letters, and if they store their letters as special keepsakes—basically, what their relationships to their old letters are.
I plan to interview a wide range of people about their personal experiences with writing letters, receiving letters, saving them as keepsakes, etc. I also plan on taking a lot of photos of letters to convey their unique visual nature.