A Tour of Staunton Virginia With Diana Hale

In early June, Misty, Miles, and I went on out first family road trip. It was a relatively short affair, about ten days long. If it were up to me, I would have pushed for at least two weeks, but we weren’t sure how Miles was going to react on long car rides. It wasn’t so much of an if he likes it or not situation, it was more of dipping your toes into the water of inevitability. He’s going to enjoy road trips. I like putting them together and I like driving very long distances. Misty likes riding and Miles is strapped into a chair and cannot move…for his safety, of course.

The trip was to take us from Winston-Salem North Carolina and up to the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. Along the way we’d make stops in D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Only one long drive was planned, and that was the first day of driving. 

First few hours of our road trip.

 

The first official stop was to see the great mail-artist Diana Hale in Staunton Virginia. I have sent mail-art to Diana for years and got to know her a little bit through ZMAG (an online group of mail-artists) meeting on Zoom. We’ve done a few projects together and it’s always a pleasure to see her work in the mail. Not only was it exciting to meet up with Diana, but I was extra excited to see her “space” in downtown Staunton, just in the shadow of an old courthouse. It’s a location that she’s been renovating for some time. She creates from there, and she exhibits the work of others, and has mail-art centered public shows.  When we visited, she was still showing work from “Stamp Out Ice.” In that show, she had artists contribute work, many of which were artist stamps sheets, concerning the influx of Ice agents on American streets. Even some of my silliness was there in the form of Vanilla Ice themed stickers, that Diana had graciously turned into stamps sheets. 

 

List of Stamp Out Ice participants. 

Diana Hale showing us parts of the show. 

Come see the archive!

It’s rare when I got to meet a mail-artist. Usually, I go to them because no one’s coming to the fifth largest town in North Carolina. I have met a few folks, some in the U.S., and some out of the country, but that doesn’t happen all that often. At some point I need to go to one of these big gatherings. It’s nice to be around someone that knows postage rates and the problems everyone has with that one mail-artist…you know that one. It’s dorky, painfully specific fun.

Diana had us park right in downtown Stanton; a city located in the Shenandoah Valley. I especially liked the fact that she directed us towards free parking, those little details are what make for a good host. I appreciated that. After our hellos, we made it over to space. Walkin there, it felt like we had dropped into the late 19^th century. I imagined gas lamps and men in top hats wondering the streets near the towering courthouse. I could imagine a dastardly crime committed in one of the adjoining buildings. Right as the coppers were about to pounce, the cloaked character ducked down an alley and into a dark entry way.

Inside 7 Lawyers Row, I’m not sure there’s an official name, Diana graciously led us around. We looked at the stamps on the walls, and the items on the circular table in front of us. Many of the items were left over from an earlier protest that coincided with the Stamp Out Ice show. In the middle room, we looked at the artifacts she had hung on the wall, an impressive display of mail memorabilia. For a few seconds, Diana and I named the artists solely from their unique personal style. She had books too, a small library of anything related to mail-art, mail, or adjacent subjects. I imagine she’s still accepting donations for the collection. The backroom is a place where she creates work when the space (I hate I keep using this word) is open for visitors on the weekend. He work tools are in that room.  The jewel in her bonnet is a stamp perforator. People who make artist stamps covet these hard-to-find items built around the time gas lamps would have been used on the streets just outside the door. They know the years and the history behind them, who made them, and where they came from. To own one is to announce you’re “the real deal.” Although I liked the main event, I like to see how people work even more. I’m always interested when you get to see how artists create their work and where they create it. Positioned around the room was work she was currently developing, some of which I could make sense of from social media posts and Zoom meetings. Seeing these sorts of things, make a person that you’ve only known through their work a lot more real. 

Miles and the perforator. 

 

After the tour, we went over a few blocks to get lunch. Diana pointed out a few of the more unique elements of Staunton’s architecture as we went. We especially focused on the new “social areas” in the street. These areas are little places where people can sit on wooden benches on top of indoor grass and relax. They took up space where cars could have parked. While waiting on a seat for a burger joint, Miles took advantage of these recently installed areas by rolling around in the grass, which felt like was playing in the middle of the street. It was slightly nerve racking. He tried out both areas in front of the restaurant.

The four of us finished up lunch and strolled back towards are car, looking at a large group of tourists who seemed to be on some sort of official tour. They were looking too long into buildings for it not to be...something. We filed past them as they twenty or thirty of them started to stream into Diana’s building. Misty and I thanked Diana for the tour and the wonderful afternoon. It was on to the next stop. You must move quickly if you’re going to The Luray Caverns, don’t you know.

Thanks Diana.

If you’re in or around Staunton VA or just want to send Diana Hale some mail-art, you can find her at 7 Lawyer’s Row Staunton Virginia 24401. 

 

Let Me Take You To Your Grave Nice Picture

 

I wrote the following while engaged in a summer marathon of rock and roll-based movies. While writing, I was watching a lot of movies about people making their music, their mythologies, and their typical cliched skirmishes. I adore these rock and roll clichés, but I cannot get away from the differences between the world of musicians and that of people that “make stuff.” Anyway, wrote an essay about, here it goes.

This is an essay about practice leading to final creation.

This is my second draft of this report.

Whenever I practice making things, I end up with a thing when I’m done. This might seem obvious, but it’s something that needs to be stated. That thing is right in front of you. It takes up space in your room. You have to find places to put them. You might cut them up in anger or you might set them on fire. If you’re an idiot, you might even try to sell them. The biggest problem with all of this is that they’re not all winners. So much of what you make, while you’re making it, is just shit. Once in a while you’ll pull something nice out of a pile of failure, but that’s not always the case. 10% at best. No matter, it’s there. You have to do something about it. You’ve created a thing that exists in the world for better or worse.

Musicians can practice and it all simply goes into the air and then disappears. There’s no body to dispose of. A day’s failure is just gone. A day’s success needs to be reproduced.

I am writing this to address the difference between musicians and makers. I say makers because artists seems pretentious, it’s actually hard for me to say it. Artists use paint, right? Sorry, an old association, artists stack dirty dishes in the corner of whitewashed rooms while trying to pay down hundreds of thousands of dollars to RISD, right? I’m not a crafter, that’s the worst. A crafter makes things that are clearly beautiful or well-defined, something to go onto a wall or to tie a room together, something that could be useful. On the rare times I see my things on peoples walls, I wonder why they have them up there. A few people have printed 16x20 images of my face on their walls, and I can’t understand how they’re able to look at that for months, or even years on end. I just call them “makings.” I like to use that word because it seems vague, but also a fun way to play with the language. The “makings” consist of collages, assemblage pieces, and weirdo digital / analog amalgamations called broadsides. They have little meaning except to exist.

I know a lot of musicians personally, almost all my close friends play music to varying degrees. Some have properly trained, some have toured, many have made records, but most still collect fancy guitar pedals for discussion at mixed company parties. Although I have a lot of musician friends, I don’t really know anyone that makes things. Not having that connection creates some communication issues, especially when I try and make things for musician friends.

It’s something I’m used to. Being that they make my favorite drug, this isn’t much of a problem for me. For these musician friends, I have carried their heavy equipment into the club. I have tried to lift heavy bass cabinets by myself. I have hauled drum hardware up thin stairs. I have sold merch, something I hate more than carrying gear. One summer, I even drove a band on tour for a month. For that whole time, I was paid $125.00 dollars. The RV I drove didn’t have air conditioning and I mostly slept on the floor after driving to the next venue in the middle of the night, alone. That was fun, no complaints there. I have stood and watched friends bands that I didn’t like very much, telling them they had a great show even if I was thinking of something else while they announced from the stage, “Thanks for coming out.” Best of all, you get to pay 5-10 dollars at the door for that support. It’s not all woe being a friend of dudes (almost always dudes) in a band. Periodically I’ll get drink tickets that go unused. Once that led me to playing drums outside a New Jersey venue on the sidewalk. Some dude kissed me that night. Maybe I got in free.

No one has ever asked if they could come over and help cut paper, or collect paper, or put addresses on envelopes…no one. I practice upstairs while listening to podcasts in a long thin attic that gets way too hot in summer.

There’s a public culture that goes along with playing music, one that I’ve been able to engage with for decades. I’ve enjoyed doing all those little things that help make like easier on a band. Like an idiot, I even volunteered (more liked forced) my services as “executive producer” for a band over the past couple of years. I chose that title for myself because it seems rather meaningless. Manly what my job title has entailed is designing T-shirts and flyers and doing a little light clerical work. I’ve even taken on trying to design record covers, not that anyone has really asked. I just make the thing and then text it to them. Sometimes they respond and other times they do not. Right now, I have dozens of collages made of them but I’m not sure what to do with them. Not that musicians, or anyone for that matter, know what they want when you design things for them, especially when they haven’t asked for them. People only know what they don’t want, not what they do want. Keep in mind they’re musicians, not always the smartest people on earth. Count to four. Tune the guitar. Go to a party and talk about guitar pedals for hours on end, that’s the sort of things they know how to do. They never seem to know if a collage is “too linear.”

When I text them things they don’t know I’m practicing. If they don’t like something, I’ll just make another thing. If that thing sucks, it doesn’t matter other than having a body left to deal with, a thing sitting on my desk or in a giant pile of things. No one said stop either, I just keep going, I need the practice. Maybe I’ll make the bodies? Maybe I’ll cut them up? Maybe I’ll add them to an assemblage piece.

Every couple of weeks I’ll print some new images of them and move them around in a collage. Sometimes I’ll play with the image digitally. My favorite thing I made from one of these sessions is an image that appears in my summer report zine. I think it looks amazing, but I have no idea if they like it or not. Who knows if anyone said anything about the image when I send it to then. Either way, it exists and that’s the most important thing. I’ll find a grave for it later.

The New Bindle

 

I like looking for things along the roads. I like finding toilets, bumpers, rundown houses, and recently, discarded shopping carts. Shopping carts are interesting to me because they’re ubiquitous and multi-functional. They can be easily turned into something else without much work. They’re sturdy and easy to steal. They’re like post-industrial cars that haven’t received their motors. They’re trailers. They’re big trashcans. Most importantly, they’re somewhat expendable, tossed aside whenever their function has been exhausted.

They’re like “the new bindle,” and who doesn’t like hobo evocation?

Peter’s Creek Parkway, the road that crosses Silas Creek Parkway in Winston-Salem NC, is lousy with these. For the past few years, folks have set up residences in the woods up and down Peter’s Creek and Silas Creek Parkways, right beside Interstate 40. To move their “treasures” around, many of these people take shopping carts and pile as much as they can inside of them. I imagine it’s things they collect from the road or from dumpster diving the many shops in the area. I once saw a cart filled with shoes and a hand painted sign advertising a “sale” on the lot. Twenty dollars, not a bad deal. Sometimes these carts have five or six feet of stuff in them. Ride down either of these roads, and you’ll see carts off to the side of the road or just sitting in the green-space in the middle of the road. I don’t know where the collectors go. I don’t know why they take so much time to collect the items just to abandon them.

It’s an activity that draws attention to itself. In recent months, I’ve noticed that the piled high carts have started to mostly disappear, leaving only the modestly filled ones to languish by the major thoroughfares. Always looking for another thing to look for, find, and then document in some ridiculous way, I started taking pictures of these carts whenever I was driving around. Any creative use of a shopping cart I snapped a picture of, mostly looking for carts filled with weird stuff, or in an odd location. I pull up and snap a picture, most of the time I don’t have to get out of my car.

I had a few minutes to waste when I went on a shopping cart hunt. The sweet spot for shopping carts is off Silas Creek Parkway. From Compare Foods until Taco Bell, you see at least one of them daily. Since I like to get some variety in my pictures, from many different places as possible, I only go by there occasionally. It had been a while, so I thought I was due to treat myself to the wealth of carts lined up in that area, three of them.

I took pictures of the first two, nothing out of the ordinary, but then I came to the third cart which was right by IHOP. When I put my head out the window and extended my phone, I noticed paper inside the cart. Lots of paper. Most of my waking life is spent looking for paper so seeing it sitting out for me, in broad daylight, was a dream come true. An oasis in the middle of a Chinese Restaurant buffet made possible by roving hobos. What grabbed my attention is that I saw that infamous Avery logo that goes with printable labels. It was enough to get me out of the car to check it out. Clearly, someone did some dumpster diving at the Office Max in that shopping center. I’m sure they tried to sell what they picked up. I ended up taking a few unopened packs of printable labels, blank greeting cards, and something you attach to windows. Later in the day, I thought about going back and taking the rest of the stuff, spreading the wealth around.