And (since all of these last few entries seem to have a name attached at their start) this one came from Jade T. I stumbled across the blog quite a while back, before it became a genuine cultural phenomenon I think (or, at least, before I was aware that it had become a genuine cultural phenomenon), and enjoyed it at the time; the premise - soliciting the anonymous revelation of secrets by postcard, decorated to taste, to be published for all to see - still appeals to me, both in terms of the 'communal art' aspect and as far as the 'anonymous disclosure of secrets' goes, tho' then as now it's only the first of those which actually attracts me as far as my own potential actions go.
So it's neat to be able to leaf through this handsome volume and revisit/rediscover. It's in the nature of the exercise, I suppose, that a lot of the postcards make one feel just a little bit grimy to read them - these are, after all, other people's secrets, even if they've chosen to reveal them to the world. Despite obviously being an extremely critical person, I have a real tendency to idealise others (and, I suspect, myself) - which doesn't always mean seeing the best or the most exalted in them (although it probably often does), but does mean that I tend to like to gloss over the nitty-gritty, mundane things which ground us all in our factical real lives (and, quite possibly, hence - while I'm casting all these aspersions on myself - a large part of my attraction to phenomenological and 'postmodern'-type lines of thought, and folks like Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, etc, though I haven't thought this through enough to be able to justify that 'hence'), and in large measure it's those things that I'd rather ignore about people, or pretend don't exist, which are on full display in this book. So, no doubt there's plenty to be said about the cultural significance of the project and all, but evidently one of the more immediate effects it has is to get the spectator thinking about themselves...
Anyway, to come back to the point on which I started that last paragraph - most of the postcards reveal unhappiness and/or dissatisfaction of one kind or another...I suppose that these are the kinds of things that people keep secret. The mode of expression reminds me rather of open diary (back in the day, that is - I've no idea what kind of beast OD is nowadays), though it's perhaps a bit more creative and less overtly self-absorbed...that same kind of matter-of-factness coupled with the desire to emote, to solicit, to reach out without quite knowing what it is in oneself that's missing. I generally prefer the funny ones, or the more abstract, artistic ones (my favourite in the book is a simple, colour spectrum type thing - you know, sort of blurry-edged horizontal bars shading into each other, from yellow through oranges to pinks, with the words "I feel lighter" written on its left-hand side)...I also like the way that the book can function as a kind of tarot deck equivalent, or magic 8-ball - open it to a random page and divine the answer to your question, or meaning in general, from whatever you find there...
