New Tools

Well after doing several correspondence pieces where I have been painstakingly cutting 1/4" strips of paper I finally realized today that it was a total waste of my time. I went and bought a machine to do it. it's this amazing invention called a paper shredder. i don't know why I never thought of it before. the idea came to me while I was watching the pile of hawaiian shirt pattern color copies pile up. I'm going to use them for the Newman correspondences. I would have had to cut down almost 200 sheets of paper by hand. So lets do the math on that one.

200 sheets @ 11" tall

11 x 4 = 44 1/4" pieces per sheet

44 x 200 = 8800

8800 hand cut strips... ok that's just not gonna happen. So thank god for the 'straight cut paper shredder'. Now there are only two major drawbacks to using this type of method. (1) you can only feed the sheet in long ways — 8.5" (2) the shedder knives leave the slightest of frays on the edges... but I think those will be almost unnoticeable when the strips are finally glued down. So all in all I'm pretty excited about getting started on these Newman pieces. With the new tool i should be able to get all 20 of the cards strip portion completed by the weekend.

Also today I created the base foundations for my Hollenbeck correspondences. I first met Hollenbeck in New orleans at the HOW Design Conference. At some point during one night of drinking we got into talking about my paintings & work and somehow in the conversation I said i'd really like to have some human bones. After being home for about a month I received an envelope from Hollenbeck. Written on the front was ' put your best foot forward'. As I open the envelope an removed the other envelopes from the inside I noticed more references to feet. Finally i reached the last bulky envelope and inside was the skeleton of a humans left foot. Hollenbeck told me later that someone had given it to him and he had decided to pass it along to me after our conversation in New Orleans. The foot now hangs over my front door. So last night i decided to start a new set of correspondences with Hollenbeck. I got a fresh sheet of white paper and did a tracing of my left foot and then photocopied the image onto 50 sheets of white cardstock. This will be the basic structure around which I'll compose each of these correspondences. Each will be placed into a 9" x 12" white envelope and mailed accordingly.

MAILING TRANSFERRAL
JANUARY 07, 2005
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BARKER - John Wayne Fan Club (letter)



JOHN WAYNE FAN CLUB