I’ve got a new hobby
I’ve got a new hobby: collecting old postcards of local scenery. They’re cheap and plentiful in junk shops and on eBay, especially if you buy them in lots.
The thing I love most about it is that the famous tourist spots have been done again and again, from exactly the same angle, sometimes dozens of times. And the only way you can tell the nearly identical images apart is an Edwardian hat here, a 1950s skirt there, sepia tone, hard color, a horse cart, a motorcycle. It’s like a weird time machine with an almost (but not entirely) unchanging landmark in the background and a shadowplay of fugitive humanity drifting around in front.
Spooky.
I’ve also decided that postcards are the path to artistic immortality on the cheap. Oh, you can’t make money on them — the scale is bad and the math is all wrong — but as long as you can sucker someone into selling them in a tourist town, they will be saved and collected forever and ever.
You know what, though? I have a suspicion this one isn’t really from 1650.
p.s. Cold, day 3. I am Ye Olde Snotte Monster. I’m taking one more day off tomorrow and then I really must pull myself together, unpleasant honking sounds or no.
May 19, 2015 — 9:10 pm
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