Fun with postcards

Thursday, January 24, 2019 – My friend Mike Haas has a curious obsession. He discovered – how I don’t know – that many postal services no longer check that the postage on a mail item is legitimate. So he takes old stamps from his boyhood collection, including already cancelled stamps, pastes them on postcards and hands them to friends and acquaintances to mail back to him when they travel. It doesn’t matter that the stamps are of the wrong country or that they’re decades old, it’s amazing how often the cards make it back. I sent him one from Newfoundland with a pre-1949 Newfoundland stamp on it, which he received.

On this trip he wanted to try something different. He’s sending me postcards from home. We received one when we were in Scotland at Christmas. It was a 4x6 print of our team hockey picture. I like to imagine a Scottish postal worker puzzling over the picture of a bunch of grinning, padded geriatrics in ice skates! Clearly nobody looked at it, though. He’d used an old British stamp and a 1930s German stamp with a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Didn’t matter. I’m waiting for one to be delivered here in Valencia. I arranged with our landlady to get the key to the apartment’s mailbox so I could receive it.

I had thought of trying a variation on the game, counterfeiting a stamp of a fictitious country – Republic of Scotland, maybe, or República de València. (Both places are semi-autonomous regions with semi-serious separatist movements.) Alas, it’s more difficult than I reckoned to print a convincing-looking postage stamp on a home printer.

Next best thing: I picked up some old Spanish stamps at a flea market on Sunday and I’ll send Mike a postcard with a few of them on it. You can tell the bottom has fallen out of the philately market. I bought a package of 16 mint (unused) stamps dating from before Spain switched to the Euro in 1999 for €2.75 (about $4.25). I doubt I’d have paid much less 55 years ago when I was a collector. Here’s my card. Oh, yes, part of the game is that they’re always addressed to Mike’s cat, Tyger.

So that’s it. That’s how old farts fill their time when they’re not playing hockey or watching TV. Or rambling around Valencia.

Speaking of which, we rambled some yesterday. We had lunch out at a little Turkish place a couple of blocks away. Karen’s meal was okay – a nice salad with shaved meat on top, and for segundo, a plate of fries and little hamburger patties. Mine was disappointing: hummus for primero, nicely presented but sadly lacking any garlic flavour, and a doner wrap for segundo, also nicely presented, but with dried up doner meat and almost no flavour of any kind. The baklava for dessert was good. One drink included: awful wine – I generously gave mine to Karen and ordered a beer. Total: €20.75. I doubt we’ll go back.

Later in the afternoon, we went out with the idea of going to the Fundación Bancaja, the cultural foundation of one of Spain’s largest banks. It has art and music spaces in several cities. The one in Valencia is in a lovely old building in the centre, with three floors of display space. Admission is always free. We check it out every time we’re here. We’ve seen some fabulous exhibits, including one of Picasso prints in 2016. The foundation appears to have huge holdings of Picasso prints. Another year, we saw a very good, completely different Picasso print exhibit at the Bancaja centre in Sagunt, a small town near here.

Bancaja foundation building in Plaza de Tetuan

Getting to the foundation this time proved problematic. I knew approximately where it was. We headed in the general direction, over into the centre, then made the mistake of consulting Google Maps on the quickest way to get there. The app got confused. It took us in the exact opposite direction, dropping us in a backstreet in Carmén. I still don’t know what that was about. Or why we listened to Google when it was clearly sending us the wrong way. In any case, we used paper maps after that. It took awhile to backtrack and find it.

Andreu Alfaro

There are three exhibits on right now. The big one, the only one we took in on this visit, is a retrospective of the work of a mid-20th century Spanish sculptor, Andreu Alfaro (1929-2012). The English-language version of the exhibit guide claims he’s “one of the main Spanish sculptors of the 20th century,” but he doesn’t even rate an entry in the English-language Wikipedia. (He does in the Spanish.) I like sculptors from this period – abstract, often playful. Alfaro mostly worked in metals. Karen is usually not that thrilled by sculpture, but even she found quite a bit to like in this show, especially the late-period pieces in the Jazz and Angels series.

Andreu Alfaro

Andreu Alfaro

I ran this morning – down Regne de Valencia to the river, along it for a bit, then back up Marques de Turia. About 5K. Not sure what we’ll do this afternoon, maybe bike.

Later.

Nope, we didn’t bike. We walked, about two miles, right across the city centre to the river, and beyond, to a new (to us) art gallery called BombaGens. It’s run by a private family trust, La Fundació Per Amor a l’Art (Foundation for the Love of Art?), set up in the last few years and housed in an old factory that built hydraulic pumps. The site includes a bomb shelter that was used during the Civil War. (Valencia was one of the last strongholds of the Republic, and was bombed unmercifully by Franco’s Nationalists and their German allies.) The place has been beautifully renovated as an art gallery. There are temporary travelling exhibits, but the foundation also has a substantial collection of its own that it shows. Photography is a specialty.

BombaGens: inner courtyard and gallery entrance

Almost the first thing I saw when we walked in was a small selection of prints by Henri Cartier Bresson, one of my early photographic heroes – including some of his iconic images. It may be counter-intuitive to non-photographers, but seeing prints actually made by, or under the direction of, these artists is a totally different experience from seeing the images reproduced in a book. It’s like the difference between standing in front of a great painting and seeing a picture of it in a book.

One of the Bresson images on display at BombaGens

There were also selections of work by Helen Levitt, Paul Frank and other renowned street photographers of the mid-20th century – legendary names. There was a whole special exhibit of work by the American photographer Joel Meyerowitz, most taken in the mid-1960s when he was briefly living in Malaga. I even recognized some of the locales from our time in Malaga two years ago. For me, this was an incredibly rich gallery experience. There is much more in the main collection that I haven’t mentioned. I was suffering gallery fatigue within an hour – just too much to take in.

The other big exhibit on right now is of late-period work by a Norwegian/Swedish painter I’d never heard of: Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987). She had spent much of her artistic life as an illustrator and figurative painter, but discovered abstract art in the 1960s. I really liked some of it, Karen not so much. Still, I think we both enjoyed the visit. I’d go back in a shot. We’ll have to keep an eye on the website to see when new exhibits appear. 

Anna-Eva Bergman

We walked back along Carrer de Guillem de Castro past the massive Torres de Quart, the second of the two medieval gates still standing – the other is Torres de Serranos (shown in the postcard). They really are amazing monuments. They were built in the 1400s and still show the scars of shelling by Napoleon's forces in the early 19th century. Living history.

Torres de Quart