These four postcards arrived in the mail over the course of a week and a half recently, and, as far as I can tell, are the wonderful holiday postcard equivalent of a happy, drunken New Year's voicemail (I did receive both communications from the lovely group of people who went in on writing and sending these postcards). Online sleuthing (instagram) tells me that these four postcards were likely purchased and prepared over the Thanksgiving holiday last fall in Boston, and then mailed from New York City some time later. It took a long while for them to get to my mailbox, but they were a treat well-worth waiting for.
If you turn them all over, they fit together in order to reveal a drawn drunken X-mas tree formation. I would have taken a photo, but that would have entailed a bunch of blurring out of names and addresses. NO THANK YOU.
More photos on Instagram. Besos and abrazos to the Padrón-Blanco-Thomas's for sending me a series of postcards that made me very happy.
And nostalgic, and maybe even a little bit weepy, too. Remember sitting on the floor of your bedroom and listening to "Life on Mars?" while cutting and pasting bits and pieces of things together for your 'zine? And it was a track on the b side of a mix tape? Cassette tape? And you knew you'd only damage the tape if you were to rewind and listen again and rewind and listen again, so you would flip the tape, listen to a Smiths song, and then flip it back again? And you were fifteen years old? Of course you do!
I woke up listening to David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" for the first time in a very long time Sunday morning. My dad had put it on in the living room while preparing breakfast. He's a Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech employee and member of the Mars Science Lab team; Sunday was, of course, the day of the rover's landing on Mars, and Jason, Roscoe, and I had driven down to LA the day before to be there with the rest of the family for the big event. Gushing about my dad's super important and awesome role in the team would compromise the certain level of anonymity I like to maintain on this here blog, so suffice it to say I'm incredibly proud of my dad and his team's accomplishments. Here's a little Bowie for them; their rover, Curiosity (aka Johnny 5); and the decades of technological and scientific advancements their mission will (continue to) give us. Bowie salutes you as you take us five million steps closer to answering his question!
For your viewing pleasure, here is the first episode of the Nano SciFi Tales series by director Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes [2003] and the very recently released Extraterrestrial [2012]). Each Nano SciFi video is under 21 seconds and totally and completely charming.
I can watch this one video, in particular, over, and over, and over. And laugh out loud as it ends, every single time. Enjoy!
Catch the rest of the nano videos at the WOPP YouTube channel, here.
