Proste, kako se počutilo? V rovni vse, sva čustavne, da se napravim v ovom letu. Tako, ovo počutim, da se počutim v tako, da se napravim v tako, da se počutim v tako, da se počutim v tako, da se počutim v tako, da se počutim v tako, One is today, and today we will focus on architectural aspect, why micro-profile in Jakarta exist is important together, and why it is important to have both in the same application server, to be able to migrate from a monolith to a micro-service oriented architecture. Because Jakarta EE is the standard monolith architecture, and micro-profile could bring you micro-service architecture, but it's not all or nothing always, but there is something in the middle, and we need to migrate our system. Today is extremely focused presentation on the architectural side, and a reason behind, and what you find in our fly, facilitated this process and so on, is not a lot of example, I have a few, and we will see if we can have a look, but tomorrow I have a workshop at 12 am, and please join me and let's put your hand in the jam, and we will try to migrate quite complex Jakarta EE application, of course we don't have time to migrate a real world application, it's just an example, but an example that could be very useful to understand, which is the steps for migrate from an architecture to the other, and we will do that using Welfly for sure, but anything else that makes sense, if we will have time, I will demonstrate how with micro-service and micro-profile, you can mix things, and for example you can have part of your micro-service on Welfly, and part on Quarkus, and maybe on Node.js, I don't think I will have time also for Node.js, but anyway, just to get you the idea that micro-service architecture is agnostic from technology and web server or application server point of view. So, the presentation has basically three people, me, that's me, and well, I joined that ten years ago in IAPI team and Wildfly team, that formerly was a GeBoss AS, Wildfly born in 2007 as name, but is just a brand of a long, long time working GeBoss AS, started in 1990. And I joined as core developer, and then I switched to the dark side of management three years ago. My micro-focus is exactly on coordinating the effort around micro-profile in Welfly, and it's a lot of fun, both on technology side and the people side, because, you know, different technology and different people coming together with different background, and really a lot of fun, and we are achieving great result, I think. And so, thank you very much for everyone who participate to this effort, a few of them are in the room. You find me everywhere, GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn, or whatever as my stay, because I'm not so young, so I took the same nickname everywhere before anyone took it. Who is Wildfly? I don't think Wildfly need much presentation. As said, he is a brand of 2007 about GeBoss AS. He is probably one of the most well-known Java EE and then Jakarta EE application server. Open source, first of all is open source, and second, probably it works like a charm. Who is Jakarta EE? Jakarta EE is the open source, the branded version of Java EE. Two years ago, Oracle stepped back from Java EE and donate the specification to the community. Eclipse Foundation took them and founded this effort called Jakarta EE. It is fully compatible with Java EE8. It is as open specification, as open source TCK and process. This is the main difference between that and Java EE. It is no more proprietary and driven by Oracle, even if it was a community with a lot of participation. That was one of them. It is open source, open standard, open process. It could be a new bright future for those kind of specifications. Why is it important? Nowadays, if you talk with a young developer and ask how he wanted to start his new enterprise application, no one or a few of them talk about Java in general. Everyone talk about Node.js or Python or anything else. But Java still matters and is at the time, I think the last steps that I looked at is the second language used in GitHub. And Java EE still matters because there is tons and tons of installed products using Java EE and so compatible to Jakarta EE.  We will see during the presentation that we can throw away everything because it has costs, basically. And with micro profile, micro profile by its own definition aims to optimize enterprise Java for microservice architecture. What does it mean that it means that it provides standardization of best API already present in the community and in the market, driving fast innovation and having a piece, a pace of release much more quick than Java EE or Jakarta EE. Basically, micro profile has three releases per year, minor releases, one major per year, more or less, three minor or major per year. That is quite impressive. I am in the Java world since more than ten years. Ten years as a redactor, but much more than that. And as an old dinosaur of Java EE, three releases per year is quite impressive because it is not a release of a product, it is a release of specification, it is a release of standard and it is really impressive and it is driving innovation throughout them. That is not a joke to keep the pace when you are the implementor but still is interesting. Basically, micro profile is composed by value specification. Java EE, JSON, JAXRS, JSONB and so on are also part of Jakarta EE. So it is exactly what it aims to do. Optimize Java EE for microservice. So using the best part, the more agile part of Jakarta EE and on top of them is starting more. And more is fault tolerance, is metrics, is propagation of token and the rest client and so on. And this is the umbrella, the platform, the last release of micro profile 3.2. But there is also other specification that is part of micro profile effort even if it is not yet part of the umbrella it will be part of the umbrella of the standard. So you can declare to be micro profile compatible just implementing the umbrella part but the other part is interesting too because as a reactive part and not only reactive there is more than those three, I put just three but there is more than those three. Why I am mentioning that because this demonstrates that innovation is always the key point and the driving idea of micro profile effort as standard.  Basically is almost the same company, a few more for Jakarta EE but everyone in Java enterprise world is participating the committee. Even if there is a few people in the community more active than others but that's quite normal in any community. I'm saying that just to underline that micro profile has strong support from the market and from the community is not to be considered something less supported than Jakarta EE. Is as almost the same support both are on eclipse foundation but they aims to solve different problem. A question that a lot of people ask me when I talk about them Jakarta EE and micro profile is if and when they will join again because micro profile born as a spin-off of Jakarta EE or Java EE and then there is a lot of discussion around rejoining the effort and bring into Jakarta EE 10, 12, I don't know, almost the same concept. The moment is a discussion that is going on time to time in the community. My personal belief is that will not make much sense to bring them together again because they solve different problem or better they solve the same problem in a different way so make sense to have two different standard even if collaboration and commons specification is right and there. And now and announce because micro profile beta 1 released last week support micro profile 3.2. That is the first release of Wildfly beta but that still release for the community with a full support for micro profile and when it's a success for us but more important it's something that is perceived as needed by the community. This is a comment that I've got back in micro profile community when I announced this and well can be read in a different way but I wanted to read it in the most positive one and well, we covered the gap and we are one of the most used Jakarta EE, Java EE application server and now we support also micro profile and I want to underline also because there is a lot of implementation of pure micro profile or pure Jakarta EE or maybe something in the middle so Jakarta EE just a web profile so a reduced set of specification of Jakarta EE and micro profile. Wildfly support Jakarta EE full profile so all the specification of Jakarta EE and also micro profile and why it's important because architecture evolve in time well, I'm Italian and I love cooking too so this slide is when I see this example I can't resist to put in a slide this slide basically say that in the 90s we wrote spaghetti code spaghetti, well you know what is spaghetti code probably is something that growing up and up and up and become difficult to follow follow the code or interact with the code or even understand the code then so we move to a growing monolater and it's called lasagna architecture lasagna because is layer one up the other so something that separated layer that should be fine but if you are Italian or if you have ever visited just an Italian restaurant and you get a lasagna you easily understand that those layer is not so well separated and should not to have a good lasagna but not a good software so we move to microservice era and the Italian dish that we select is tortellini tortellini basically is pasta with something inside typical is meat but every tortellini every tortellino is separated from the other but the sauce make one dish together and you can have just one tortellini of course you need a dish of tortellini and this is the idea of microservice microservice is single single service doing something but to have a good dish you need a lot of tortellini working together in your dish so what concept do you have in common? reuse or try to reuse? yes spaghetti code spaghetti code born in 90s and is not bad at all is basically what we call a double jet oriented programming that became a spaghetti code but it's object oriented programming so reuse inside the same application or team libraries or team so basically classes and libraries born to use from third party a library what is just a set of object oriented code that you can use from third party and libraries and libraries and inheritance and all the object oriented stuff and become a spaghetti code basically because you lose the control so let's move to layered product and so we want to reuse on different layered team so any team is responsible for a layer so I have the presentation layer the classical MVC model view controller there is someone that is responsible of the model someone of the view and someone of the controller and each team need to reuse what the other team does and component born for reuse from third party that's not be a great success we will see in the next slide so let's switch to microservice reusing different system even geographically distributed so basically is almost the same idea totally different implementation but almost the same idea to reuse something and this time we reuse a component that is maybe geographically distributed and API subscription is born to reuse third party software so why I say try to reuse because of this oriented born to reuse code inheritance and polymorphism defines the boundaries private and public copy define the decoupling and always violated always always in every in every manner that you can imagine and and reuse is violated in any object oriented spaghetti code so layered product born to reuse libraries and layers public code API define boundaries and decoupling and then we invented SPI reflection security stuff and to violate the boundaries and the decoupling that we invented and finally nowadays microservice rest API define boundaries and decoupling we are still working on how creatively violated them but I think we are working on it and we will invent something else in 10 years but today we have microservice so the difference in a slide is quite easy to understand a monolith as a user interface a business layer that interface and a single database this is the classical implementation or definition of it microservice architecture a set of microservice that is distributed and have its own database and the only communication is between microservice and microservice could be geographically distributed there is a lot of definition around there about what is a microservice someone tell you that should be less than 100 line of code I think line of code is always a bad measurement for everything from productivity of people to what is a microservice or not basically is something that define a remote API and is stateless should be stateless defining a remote API not necessary rest but most use this rest and have its own data that could be a database or not but has its own data that is not exposed or is exposed only throughout well defined API so is the microservice the solution for everything well I think the solution for everything is to write good code in general because you can creatively and easily create a sorry well for two reason sorry I forgot this slide for two reason first of all you can throw away everything today and the same the same system working tomorrow there is a lot of investment in a building and you can you can explode some bomb and destruction it but probably is not a good idea because there is a lot of investment maybe it's better to reuse the same and have more beautiful apartment just with less but what I was saying is that you can easily get the microservice spaghetti if you don't write a good code because you can write a lot of microservice every microservice needed to communicate with other microservice well and what I'm saying exactly what we use to do with classes we just moved to the network the same problem and it's not necessary easier to get problem on the network instead of in the code we moved probably responsibility from developer to DevOps that could be good if you are a developer probably not good for people who have to pay DevOps because today DevOps is paid a lot so what you need to do to redesign and monolate to a microservice I identified three steps and they are not the only three steps but probably the most important in my opinion and all of them is not easy step first of all you have to identify services and it's not a joke it's the hardest part probably because when you look at your monolite you have basically two different problem looking in a monolite you have to understand it because again it has become years by years like a monster I perfectly remember my previous job is 10 years ago now but I have a lot of contact with my former colleagues and I started 20 years ago more or less on the first G Boss AS a big monolite producing document and financial document basically and they evolve and evolve and evolve it and they are on the latest version of our product by the way but still is incredible big system and no one really no one of my former colleagues is able to define boundaries boundaries of each layer and so when I asked them I had dinner with them last week and I asked why don't move everything to microservice the funny but real answer is because we don't know where service begin and where service end but they are very good engineers I'm not saying that they are bad they just manage a 20 years old big monolite and so they know that they should move to microservice and we discuss a bit and identify service is the first step and it's something that they have to do then define the API and this is not a joke too because you have to define clear API and clear boundaries with the API and divide things throughout API is not easy is not easy whatever you develop your system you can develop your system as spaghetti code or as layered code but defining API is always the hardest thing and then that was my suggestion in that dinner look at progressive migration is not all or nothing is not like that never in IT at least in serious IT if you have just a quick start or an example you can rewrite it in an hour fine throw away and rewrite it but if you have 20 years old big system moving of million euros you can do that never and so the question is why is important to have a server where jacarta e and micro profile coexist exactly for the reason I mentioned for a progressive migration and to be able to refactor to micro profile migrate step by step is very important but also adding micro profile feature to a monolith is very very important is two different things at first look it seems the same things but progressive migration means splitting a monolith in micro service is one job and the other one is to add cloud native feature to the monolith adding cloud native feature to the monolith micro profile is possible and should be done probably as first step of enemy migration because it will permit you to monitor your monolith and understand better your monolith so I've tried to define ER for use case the first one is the one I was mentioning and is about adding observability adding observability what does it mean basically means to add some cloud native feature to your monolith that will permit you to monitor it those are called metrics alt check tracing we will see what I mean there is a second use case that is adding fault tolerance one of the worst problem that a monolith could suffer is implementing fault tolerance because big monolith built their fault tolerance basically on cluster and cluster is today the easy selection in a cloud native world but if you move your monolith to the cloud you need to have some fault tolerance mechanism because whenever you split monolith into microservice one of the first behavior that you have is that there is much more communication in the network monolith everything is in the same server and if you don't use if you didn't use some strange things like eJB remoting or IOP and everyone has used it but anyway if you refactor it to stay inside the monolith so communicate only between layers all the communication is internal to the server and is easier to track so is all or nothing if the service doesn't work because the monolith is not working when you split in different service there is a lot of communication on the network and each service could fail fail for good reason because you are using a new version of that service but of course if you are in 247 system so you can't stop it and you are moving to the cloud exactly because you don't want to stop it never you need a fault tolerance mechanism whenever a service go down third use case is using other service with REST client when you split everything in service you need some mechanism to invoke easily other services or third party service and REST client and other API in micro profile could be used inside the Jakarta monolith to invoke external service that is very important step because we was talking about a progressive migration but to make a progressive migration you need a clear and easy mechanism to invoke new service or split service from the monolith otherwise everything is too much hard and last but not least use old code as a service what I mean we will use old code as service there is part of code that have been developed years ago and or layer by layer in the last years that you should not throw away and maybe you can't throw away a quick example from my background as engineer I am used to manage the JCA project inside the world fly JCA what is basically JCA is a specification to connect to external system inbound or outbound there is a lot of development around the JCA to connect proprietary external system we have a lot of customer who has written their own resource adapter who has written their own resource adapter and use it to communicate inbound or outbound with the application server and those investment are in a lot of case close the source from some provider that maybe is no more active in the market and so on and so you can't throw away everything but you can isolate this piece of code this JCA part so connection with external system and make it a service and so you keep a little piece of jacarta and you will make service on top of it this is the reason because line of code definition because for sure those kind of service could not be 100 line of code but is very useful in progressive migration because again you can destroy your your building in one bomb so time is always a problem so anyway let talk about those use case if you will join me tomorrow in the workshop we will try to implement those for use case today I will give you just an idea of what does it mean adding observability is very very easy basically you can use trial to adding some feature to any code that you can access also in monolith matrix to measure or count access to air source to to check the old state of service but this old state of service could be better or even a connection to database or whatever you want because is something that you wrote as code and use open tracing to see where the call and where the network API as called and the adding matrix for example is just matter of is a point or no matter of adding a few annotation and adding this annotation this is classical rest API deployed on web fly and deploying this you get you get matrix count for this call and you can use standard tools in cloud native to monitor it, I mean Prometheus or Grafana or both and measure how much time this has been invocated and so on and so adding this is the first step because okay this is a new world application but if it would be some complex stuff in monolith you can adding various step of matrix and understand how much calls are going on in various branch of your code and trying to reverse engineering at some extent your monolith and understand how to split service because remember that one of the hardest things is to understand where you have to split to understand where you have to split sometimes you have to reverse engineer your system because probably you didn't write it a lot of you are too much young to have written a monolith but also because my colleague had lost control of the monolith because too big and the same is about adding full tolerance full tolerance is single specification in micro profile that permit to do something like that for example this is again in a low world with a random a random fail if you invoke it without those two annotation or retry and fall back what happens is that time to time you get a failure and this is not acceptable of course in a distributed micro service application because if you stop your service again what I already told you if you stop your service you need to access it but you can add or wild fly jacarta e application those retry and or fall back annotation that basically retry for three times but is configurable number of times the same method before throwing an exception and fall back in case of exception call another fall back method that is for turning a managed error using other service with rest client using rest client and open api you can add more and more external call to rest api and to many and manage your rest api documenting your api usually called as a service you started to using much more specification and again my example is to reuse a gca or slapter code but adding matrix adding fault tolerance adding some call to rest client and of course is using jaxrs, json b and so on is a bit more complicated example doesn't make sense to show you in a single slide we will try to do that during the workshop tomorrow let me remark again that sometimes throw away old code idea is understandable but company made big investment integrating proprietary external system maybe implementing jca we want to refactor to microservice and make it scalable so what we can do we encapsulate this piece of code that is pure jacarta using a very old specification because jca is one of the oldest specification but providing fault tolerance providing matrix providing all the stuff that make it cloud native hybrid cloud native of course because jca piece of code most probably can't run on open shift or doesn't make sense to run on open shift it will run on a local or set of local machine connecting to the external system but building an hybrid cloud with your local code written in jacarta e but ready for the cloud so we have 10 minutes so maybe for a few questions if you have but just today take away you can use jacarta e in the micro profile together is the first take away is not all or nothing and is even if I would strongly suggest you to use wildfly for that is not mandatory even to use only wildfly you can use wildfly for jacarta e and interacting part but all the other service that you call could be written in corcus if you want to use java but also Node.js whatever the composer monolith is more than using a she source you can take a monolith and try to the composer without thinking you need to identify service boundaries and avoid distributed spaghetti code because distributed spaghetti code is even worse than spaghetti code itself micro service require design Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system ok but asteroid are not planets design your micro service for being complete for itself at least again 100 line of code is something that I don't like as definition because splitting too much is like using too much inheritance in object oriented to get back to spaghetti code don't overuse any feature that new technology give you never think about that design also code can be cloud ready you can use micro profile to add jacarta code cloud feature like observability and fault tolerance complex system are built on different bricks there is not absolutely right or wrong solution just use the solution that fit your problem design on your problem not on your technology technology is a tool a tool to solve problem do not throw away everything there is case when integrate old code is a good idea because old code is maybe old not elegant or you don't perceive it elegant but maybe if you ask someone from the 60 perceive it elegant but anyway old code is not always the bad could be reused should be reused should be integrated in a more modern architecture and existing jacarta e and micro profile inside wildfly give you all the tool set to make it thank you and see you tomorrow any question we have 5 minutes for the million size what is the challenge well it's yes sure so we will see if I understood the question the question basically is how much effort you need to migrate mid size jacarta e project to a micro profile one the question is in general monolith written in java at least whatever that could be just based on servlet or jacarta e or whatever migrate to a modern system micro profile based well it's almost an impossible answer how much effort depending on the system itself how much is already defined in boundaries a general answer is that progressive migration give you the opportunity to migrate step by step and you decide how much effort to put in this phase of the project because a project that work a project that stay around for 20 years like the one I mentioned of my former colleagues that is a real year from 20 years is continuously evolving and so you decide how much effort you need and you want to spend to evolve your system and how much you want to evolve it that is the reason because something that support hybrid pure java e or pure servlet like wildfly and micro profile together permit you to decide where to cut off you decide when you start and when you finish to have an agile approach so decided to have a few sprints on refactoring it and you see how much you are able to refactor the good news is that if you work well the system continue to work because on a wildfly supporting micro profile from a wildfly 19 beta 1 you have the opportunity to have hybrid things and so mix and match between old and new style and so you can decide just to refactor 20% of your system because you have time for 20% and then you have 80% on a monolith and 20% on micro service and next step is to become 60-40 and the next step is 50-50 ok, again I understand your question but really depends on your system is really tailored on what you have and what you want to get is not about API basically API are just a set of tools maybe I'm not fully understanding if you want we can discuss offline we are out of time so thank you very much for joining


Threads came through with another idea. This one was much more challenging. A frosty window with a view from the inside and a window from the inside is going to be darker than the color outside, even if it's a white window sill. So don't shame me for that. I started off with some very soft colors for the forest or trees or whatever's out there, very mushy color, dried it all and then started painting in shapes. These are drips on the window, so sometimes frost is frozen and crystallized, other times it's more drippy. There's times when it's bigger shapes that show through because the frost hasn't covered that whole part of the window. At first, I wasn't sure about this and I walked away and I came back into my studio and I thought, yeah, that looks like a frosty window, I think. What do you think? What else should I paint?


This is an old American lock. I don't know how old it is but it was in pretty tough shape. I got it in a lot from eBay. I'm in a bag kind of like that. You can just imagine what was in there. This is really sort of an experimental review of this product which is related to this product which I know Bosnian Bill recommended for lubricating your locks and so forth. This is supposedly a penetrating oil type of substance that doesn't leave a lot of crap behind and so I put a good bound in here, scritched it around, let it sit. It's probably been close to 24 hours. It's probably well more than the product needs but you can hear it's still a little crunchy inside but if I can decide how I want to tension it I don't think I want to do it that way. We'll see if it's more cooperative. I haven't really tried to pick it and actually I can still see some of that lube in there so we'll see what happens. This is a wafer tumbler lock and these typically are pretty susceptible to the old Bogota but it depends on how good the springs are. I'm not getting any sets so let's come in with something a little more precise and just sort of feel each. That was a set. That's promising. One thing with these locks is they, at least these Americans, but a lot of wafer locks give really pretty good feedback. There it is. So this old lock is now unlocked and open. So it's a QHF Quebec Hotel Foxtrot. Whatever you know that is. Series 10 American review. It's a keyway. Actually whatever is in there did dissolve some of the surface corrosion on this. It's old enough I'm not going to try to really restore it. It has this chain attached. It's kind of neat. I may put a little bit of rust remover on it just to clean it up a little bit. Maybe clean out the inside. I'll have it open. But yeah. So with my whopping one data point this stuff seems to work okay and I can tell you that I've used this stuff a good bit and it seems to work all right. I think WD-40 is still a better overall lubricant.  It's like alcohol based. So looks like it really wants to be stirred a little bit. So there you go. American Series 10 Wafer Lock SPP and a little information about this DuPont Teflon penetrant which you can find at the US at Lowe's at least probably at your local hardware store. So anyway thanks for watching. This is Alex. As always have fun and keep it legal. Cheers.


Real quickly, I wanted to go over the top five most blueberry scented and flavored lines that you can get from me at riotseeds.com. So first we have the blueberry in cross. I'm not sure if I still have this in stock or not. It's the most traditional two DJ shorts blueberry with the blueberry scents and flavors breeding true. Very purple, short squat, fast flowering. We have the blue bonnet F2s, which are very true to the blue bonnet generation. There's a reason I used it in all of the blue lines. It's extremely true to blue. Ryeberry V2, which is a blue satellite blue bonnet cross. Blue satellite one. We have blue resin kush, which tests between five to seven percent mercy. It's insane and lends itself heavily to pushing those turps. And punchy bluester at the end with the purple punch banana OG blue bonnet with the great blueberry explosion. Yeah, riotseeds.com. Check them out.


If I could just give some very brief background. You know, in 1968, there was a Flux's associated artist, Robert Filu, who concepted the idea of an eternal network. And he was working that summer with another artist in collaboration with George Brecht, another Flux's artist. And he came up with this idea of an eternal network of artists, a community of artists. Some would be coming into it. Some were there for a long time. Some were just coming in. But there was always someone there to kind of impart the knowledge of the network. And this gathering, this weekend, is so emblematic of that, because we've got these old school artists here that have been involved since the early 70s, late 60s, and a lot of new people who were just coming into the field. So this is truly an eternal network of male art that continues to go on and on and on. And I'm just so happy about that and everything. And the foundation for the eternal network, this community of artists, was built upon the foundation of Ray Johnson, an artist from Detroit, Michigan, who went to Black Mountain College. And instead of becoming famous, like his schoolmates, Robert Rauscherberg, Sy Twomley, started sending art through the mail for free. And then after some time, started putting Ed and Pass on his letters. And this is the way the network kind of rippled out and spread. And one of the first places it spread to was the West Coast. And that's what we're going to be discussing today, the evolution of male art on the West Coast. And we're so lucky to have Anna Banana here, who is active in San Francisco, as well as Vancouver. And she'll be talking about that aspect. Carl Chu, who's from Seattle. And he'll be talking about the Seattle scene. Leslie Caldera, or Creative Thing. He'll be talking about Los Angeles. And we're very pleased to have Lowell Darling here, who is a conceptual artist in the early 70s, also active in male art and the organizer of Decadence, which was the first real big gathering of male artists, which happened here on the West Coast. And he'll be imparting the history of that. So without further ado, Anna Banana. Thanks, John. I think you've given them several of the items that I had in my introduction. However, I did want to say about this weekend that this has been one of the most upbeat and enthusiastic gatherings and demonstrations of this networking process that Ray Johnson started. Because really what I see is the product of his work, aside from the postcards and the mailings and all the little things that we send back and forth to each other, it's the creation of this network, which is a community of creative people who believe in being creative without saying, well, it's going to cost you $500, or it's going to cost you thousands, or that there's none of that economic aspect to male art. You send out as much as you can afford to, and you get back.  I don't know what to do with it all. I've got so much, and people have given me banana items, not just banana stories and clippings. I have the history from the early 1970s. Anyway, I wanted to acknowledge and thank the organizers and John and everybody who contributed their energy to putting this weekend together, because it was truly an amazing get-together. So I'm going to start now with a 1968 issue of Art Forum, in which Michael Morris, who was the person, artist, in Vancouver, who started Image Bank, had a review. And they reproduced a painting of his called The Problem of Nothing. And Ray Johnson, he wrote Michael Morris, a letter, care of the Vancouver Art Gallery. And he said, well, nothing is what I've been doing during the time that every other avant-garde artist is doing happenings. He's been doing nothing. And so Michael Morris, and he conversed, Michael invited him to Vancouver for a show of concrete poetry that he had organized at University of British Columbia. Ray went, and they got together. And I guess there was a lot of exchanging of addresses. So soon after that came out the Image Bank request list, 1969, in which the artists that had been in this network had put out what things that they would like to receive. And there were things like clouds or 60s cars and so on. And that's how I got involved in the network. But I'm going to talk about a couple of other people first. What happened with the Image Bank request list was that File Magazine started publishing in Toronto. And that was a group called General Idea. There were three men. And File was in the format of a Life Magazine, but totally ironic and amusing. And what's the word? I want something like undermining a parody. A parody, sure. That wasn't quite. I wanted something that was like attacking the way that Life Magazine presents the world. Depressive. Depressive. What? It's aversive. It's aversive. Thank you. That's the word. OK, so then I'm just going to cover the Vancouver scene, because at the same time as these things were happening with Michael Morris and so on, Ed Varney, who was a conceptual poet, he participated in an exhibition in the Stedlick Museum in Amsterdam. And he got the contact lists of artists that were interested in doing that kind of thing. And then he saw the Image Bank postcard show at UBC in 1969. And so he got linked up both through the, and he started putting out the Intermedia newsletter. And in 1973, he got a pinhole perforator. Every male artist's dream come true. And of course, he began making stamp editions. And his first editions came out of Intermedia Press, which became a commercial enterprise. And it was a collaborative sheet of stamps with the artists that he knew in the network. So that was Ed. He's also been very active all through the years in organizing exhibitions and male art shows. He's done one on Elvis. He did a Mona Lisa show. And the more recent years, he's done a series of exhibitions on works, which is a labor movement thing. So that is Ed's early participation in the network. And then, of course, we have in 1968, Lowell Darling here was nailing cities down and doing urban architecture. And he connected with the network through Dana Ashley, who had taught at University of Victoria and became friends with Eric Medcalf, who became part of Image Bank in Vancouver. I mean, it's all just like these connections going on. And Dana actually, after his, I think he had a row with University of Victoria, and he quit. But then he had a van. And he went around to various university circuits. And he was presenting his assembly magazines.  Is there anybody who doesn't? OK. An assembling magazine is one where, say, I decide I'm going to do one. I send out, I want 50 sheets of your work at a certain size. And you send me the 50 sheets. I collate them with everybody else's 50 sheets. Bind them. You get a copy. Everyone that's in it gets a copy. And then it goes out through whoever is in my network that I want to bless with that particular publication. So that was Dana Ashley's things. It was called Spates Atlas. And he traveled around in his van. And then in 1971, we had Ken Friedman, who was a young upstarter, so to speak, in the flexes movement. And he came to Vancouver to do an installation at the Vancouver Public Art Gallery. And he also started a little publication called The Weekly Breeder. And I received a copy of that early on. It's a Sock of the Month Club, sort of a pun on the Book of the Month Club. And it was a sock with an announcement that this was the Sock of the Month Club. So here's Ken Friedman. In 71, 72, I had declared myself the town fool of Victoria. And I got a mailing of the Image Bank request list from friends in Vancouver. And I had started publishing the banana rag to sort of try to clue the Victoria audience into what the heck the town fool was up to, which was always mysterious to them. Anyway, so I get the Image Bank request list. I thought, well, this is fantastic, because Victoria was a real uphill climb. I can tell you, if I did what I was doing in Victoria in San Francisco, I'd have been, oh, yes, of course. Come on, yeah, let's do it. In Victoria, it was like, what? You want to do what? Anyway, so I connected with the Image Bank request list. I took it and said, oh, this sounds interesting. I sent everything to everyone that they wanted and said, I am interested in anything and everything about bananas. And believe me, it has not stopped. I have a basement full of it. And it's just amazing the generosity of this network. I mean, it's just mind blowing. So anyway, I came to San Francisco in 73 after touring around, visiting a number of my correspondents, including Lowell Darling at one point. I was looking, where am I going to go next? And it became very apparent very quickly that San Francisco was the place. And this is where I met the Bay Area Datists, which was Bill Gaglioni, Tim Mancusi, and Charles Ciccadelli. And at that time, they had taken over the weekly breeder as a publication. And that became sort of Tim's baby, although the three of them collaborated on it. But there were other publications called Quo's, the West Bay Datist, and then Tim and Bill and the Banana Olympics made the data brothers' costumes for the Banana Olympics. Now, that was an event I staged in Embarcadero Plaza. But I also received race suggestions, because it was a parody of the Olympics, race suggestions from the network. And I also had three people from the network came to San Francisco, Klaus Groh from Germany, Merak Konewski from Poland, who sadly missed the event by about five hours, because he didn't speak much English. And he got a bus from New York, and he arrived in town after the event was over, which was sort of the Polish joke of the Banana Olympics. Anyway, how are we doing for time? I got five minutes. OK, we're going fast here. Take my time. No, I won't take your time. Never take your time, Lowell. Let's see. Oh, and Tim also was into rubber stamps. From having seen Ray Johnson's work, his actually, I missed something about Tim. He was told by his teacher at art school when he was 18 years old, find out about Ray Johnson and get involved with his work. And so Tim went and looked up Johnson's gallery. And, low and behold, he just fell in love with the collage techniques that Ray was having and began corresponding and probably continued until Ray's death. So that was a big influence on Tim. And then the rubber stamps became a thing that he liked. He had some of his illustrations made into rubber stamps. And then later on, he became an illustrator for Stamp Front, no, it wasn't Stamp Francisco. It was personal exchange stamps. And he worked for them for a number of years, designing stamps. And so Tim has been very much involved in the network. And we had Gaglione, who was my then partner for a while. And I had started Vile Magazine when I first came to San Francisco and put out my first issue in 1974 as a parody of Vile, which was a parody of life.  It was so lame, it couldn't hardly limp into the waist basket. And so I thought, well, I happen to think this is a wonderful network and process. And so that was the origin of Vile. And I published four issues myself. And I allowed Gaglione to edit three. And he changed the format each time, and I got worse and worse. But anyway, not the magazine, the relationship. Anyway, we did finally part ways. But we did do a tour of Europe in 78 that took us to 29 different cities around Europe on the basis of our male art connections. And it was me who set that trip up, not Bill. I couldn't write this way out of a paper bag. I shouldn't be belating my ex on the stage. But anyway, in 1974, Esquire Magazine wrote, it was a photo story on called Their Arts Belong to Data. And there was a huge number of photographs of a number of us. Lowell Darling was one of them. Irene Dogmatic was one. I had a list that doesn't really matter. There was probably about a dozen of us, Dr. Brute and so on, in our various ridiculous, well, some are more ridiculous than others. I was in a banana costume. My first banana costume was hard to recognize as a banana. Just on my winding down here. The other thing I really must mention, a couple of things. Lama Mel in 1980 was involved in organizing the Interdata 80 Festival. And they also published the first anthology on correspondence art, called correspondence art in 1984. It was eaten as a part of the dinner of the Interdata 84 festivities by Buster Cleveland, who went off to New York after that. And the last person I really would like to mention, because she's going to show up, I believe, this afternoon in Skype, Ginny Lloyd, who first learned about mail art by looking after Mayan Bill's mail while we did a cross-canada tour in 1980. But she got into it big time and she published. She also organized Interdata 84, which was a major thing, sort of something like what Ginny's doing for this, except on diverse locations. She also published a copy edit, copy art exhibition, Blitz Kunst, and she had a storefront down on something like 7th or 6th Avenue. And she called it a storefront exhibition. I slept there one night downstairs in the basement, and I was like, we were on the floor. And I'm going, is this really OK? Anyway, Ginny isn't able to come here to San Francisco, but she did want to be present. And I wanted to make sure that you knew about her. She now has an artist stamp museum in Florida. If you ever are heading that way, you should check it out. So I shall hand this over now to whoever's going to be next. I guess you'll do an introduction. Thank you, John. Thank you, Anna. Next up, Leslie Caldera, also known as Creative Thing from Los Angeles. We'll give us a bit of history of Los Angeles, male art. OK. Leslie. OK, so I discovered male art in 1976. I was attending Cal State Fullerton, and somebody had put a display of male art in one of the kind of a bulletin board behind glass display windows. And I was just absolutely taken with that idea. And I started making things right away. I was already a collage assemblage artist, so that connected with me on a number of levels that I really liked. But it wasn't until about 1978 that I actually figured out there were other people I could send this stuff to. And I started entering male art shows in 78, I think. And by 1982, I organized my first male art show, Paper Ambassadors at Whittier College, which is where I was living at the time. And shortly after that, I started corresponding with other Los Angeles male artists, such as Michael Millett and Lon Spiegelman primarily. And it didn't take long to get invited to a male art gathering at Lon Spiegelman's house. Lon was kind of the hub of Los Angeles male art. He was very outgoing, very open and welcoming of everybody. I felt totally kindred-ship with him immediately. And most of the activities in Los Angeles happened around him, and it his home. He had a really glorious, large, old craftsman house in Silver Lake. So central location, big space, and a willing host. So that was kind of the center of Los Angeles activities. And everything that went on in Los Angeles from the very early 80s when I started getting involved with them to at least 1987 was centered around Silver Lake and Lon's home. I guess I just saw my opening remarks here, which I completely skipped over. I guess I knew even back then that if you stuck with something long enough, you'd become some kind of authority or historical figure in the activity. And definitely if you live long enough. And I think that that's just starting to happen for me as far as male art. At that time in all these years, I felt like I was a willing participant. I entered as many male art shows as I found out about. I was very active and corresponded with a lot of male artists all around the world. But now it's become history. And it's taken to another level. Lon Spiegelman experienced some personal issues that forced him to withdraw or step back from male art in the late, in the early 90s, I guess. And sadly, he passed away in 2002 at the age of 61. And as soon as Lon stepped back from his activities, all the air seemed to be taken out of the Los Angeles male art community. Some of us, like myself and Scooter and John Tostado and others, continue to correspond and do exhibitions and activities. But we didn't have that hub anymore. And that's something that I think I still miss to today. Lots of good memories and great times with all kinds of different people. Whenever a male artist came to Los Angeles from someplace else, they would invariably stay with Lon. And Lon would throw a big party for them. I remember going to Lon's house for gatherings for Wally Darnell, Al Lackerman, Peter Kusterman, John Hale Jr. from Dallas, Texas, among others. But as I said, we become part of history because time has gone by now. And unfortunately, part of that time going by is us losing some of the people who are very involved, are very integral to the Los Angeles male art community. Another person that we've lost recently about five years ago was Judith Hoffberg. And her focus was artist books. And her magazine, Umbrella, was pretty much dedicated to that. But she always had space for male art in Umbrella magazine. I know that myself and a lot of other male artists subscribe to it just for the male art exhibit listings. In a time before the internet and the digital technology that runs our lives these days, that was a vital link for male artists to the outside world and who was doing what and where to send work for exhibitions that were coming up. And I think that Judith, all the time, despite what she might have told you, she had a real sincere love for male art and even for male artists. And that came through very clearly in her including male art in Umbrella and the parties and activities that she participated in and organized for us in Los Angeles. I wanted to mention a couple of other artists who we've lost over the years. Rudolph and Jimmy Evans were very active in the 1980s. Unfortunately, they succumbed at a time when there was very little that could be done for AIDS. And they did not survive that. And more recently, another artist who was very active in the 80s, Menoie, passed away a few years ago from just getting old like the rest of us. So in retrospect, it seems like it was a short period of time, even though I've continued doing male art and other Los Angeles artists have continued producing male art and participating. But a very short time that's now kind of sealed in the amber of history that I'll never forget and I suppose in the future it'll be talked about and recorded. But as Anna said, the eternal network goes on and more people come in as others exit. And it's something that I hope that will continue for us as long as we can see into the future. Thank you, Leslie. I might add that after Alon's death, his family contacted me to do something with his correspondence. And I was able to place it in the Getty Research Library. So I was very happy to do that as a tribute to Alon who was an inspiration to me. Could I add something? Sure. I'm sorry to butt in. I was at the Getty recently and those papers and that collection is available for viewing. You just have to call ahead and make a reservation. But any weekday, anybody can go there and look through the Spiegelman collection. Yeah, and I think these new archives are going into libraries and museums are making a big evolution in male art because now academics have places to go to research the field and it's becoming more and more mainstream, talked about, whatever. It's become like a social practice aspect of contemporary art. So it's getting more and more attention. Next up, Carl Chu, probably the Dean of the Seattle Artist Amp School. All right, a few of you have these posters so I'm gonna just encourage you to unroll them and follow along with me. I think if you roll them down from the top and then you can kind of roll them up from the bottom as we go along. But I wonder, this poster right here is called an Evolutionary Bow Bob of Artist Amp Correspondents. And it really is an example of what everybody at this table has said that the network starts in a place and expands outward. And that's been the total story of my involvement in male art. So I'm gonna sit down now and go ahead and talk a little bit. And so if you're following along, I made stamps as a child. I used to paint tickets and I'd made little things. I love, I thought of myself as a counterfeiter. And I was fascinated by counterfeiting.  I could not imagine how that was possible. So I began trying it myself. And I did all kinds of things all the way through high school. Once a postal inspector came to my middle school science class and hauled me up because I had made a United States stamp. I'd actually drawn it on the paper. I had tried perforating with my mom's sewing machine, but it made these squiggly little lines and they weren't very satisfying. So I learned that to actually do the perforations right, I had to draw them perfectly. So I drew the stamps, made all the little shadows just right, made all the little perforations just right. And this was a particular stamp that was a worm commemorative. And U.S. worm commemorative. And the worm actually came out of the stamp and went into the envelope. And I mailed it to my dad, but the postal service got it because it said U.S. postage on it. And so they came to my school and the guy was really nice. He was really tall. He had very shiny black shoes. And they sat me down in the boy's dean's office and he just said, he had the envelope. And he said, did you do this? And I said, yeah. And he said, well, we really want to encourage you to design stamps, but you always have to not put U.S. postage on them. So they were very, very sweet to me, you know? Like, it was cool, okay? When I was in college, I was a zoology major. I had no idea about art. I didn't ever even think about art until I was a senior. And then I met a professor at UW in the art school. I'd wanted to be a marine biologist, but I started hanging out with him. And the reason I hung out with him, his name was Bill Ritchie, was because I went to a gallery and saw his work and he was making etchings of stamps, his own stamps. He was actually making a little beautiful little prints. And he inspired me to get back in school in the art department, not become a zoologist, and actually pursue a career in printmaking and video. And the minute the color Xerox machine was invented, the little wheels in my head just spun like crazy. And I said, color stamps. And I heard there was one in New York. It's probably one that Ed Higgins used, Todd Jorgensen's, I don't know, but I sent my friend there to New York. She was going to New York with my first chicken issue and she couldn't find it and came back and gave it to me. And I was very disappointed. But a week later, a color Xerox machine ended up in Seattle and somehow they called me. They knew I was looking for it when they called me on the phone, invited me to come over and use it. And that was my first sheet of stamps and it was the beginning of, right at the beginning of 1975. So immediately I knew that I had, I also get a perforating machine and I called a use printing equipment company and a half hour later they called back and they had located one in a guy's garage and it was $75 and I was like, oh, well imagine me, that was so much money. I was like, I don't know.   It's a lathe of manufacturing perforator. It's called the monitor. I think it's named after the like the Merrimack and the monitor, you know these things. They're like made of steel or pig iron. They are so heavy and I've perforated a million things and have a million other people perforate things on it. Okay, so I'm making stamps in my studio in Seattle. I enter an art show in Seattle called Footprint and I win a prize. Wow, I won a prize in an art show. And so about a day before the opening of the show, I'm in my studio and there's this huge smashing on the door and I hear this voice that says, Carl Chew, I'm Ed Higgins. I'm from New York and I make stamps too. And hold your hand up, it's over here. And now this was news to me because in Seattle, no one had ever heard, I'm serious. You talk about anybody in Seattle, any curator, gal, no one had ever heard of anybody making stamps before. And here was this upstart kid making his own postage stamp. But then I met Ed and Ed was like, you make stamps and you don't know who Ray Johnson is and you don't know all these people. He's like, he couldn't hardly believe his eyes. And because of Ed, I was like, all of my correspondence just took off. So like the big bang, it went like that. And if you look at this poster, you can start seeing right away, I was corresponding with Buster Cleveland. Ed turned out there was another person in Seattle who very quickly started making stamps. His name was Robert Rudine and some of you know him as Dogfish. And my friend Bill Ritchie started making stamps. So Bill and I were making stamps and then I began corresponding with people. The first big people I corresponded with were Harley. He was here, that was in the late 70s. Cavalini started sending me round trips. I didn't know who this guy was. And George Matunas actually came to my studio and spent a week at my studio making fluxes things like ping pong tables with holes in the paddles and a bathroom where if you wanted to pee, you had to climb up eight feet and try to aim down through this long thing. That really was mind boggling because George had made stamps. And so he traded stamps and we did a little collaborative piece together. Then a lot of people were starting to mention to me, there was somebody up in Vancouver named Jazz Felter and you're gonna get to see him later. Oh, you make stamps? Well, you should contact Jazz Felter. He's already had a show of artist stamps up in Vancouver. So then I had to get to know Jazz. And through Jazz I met Anna Banana, Ed Varney and it just took off. So then what happened in Seattle? Because I was making stamps and Dogfish was making stamps. Anything like that spawns a whole bunch of other people wanting to make stamps. And pretty quickly a whole little group of Seattle artist stamp makers formed. And if you look on the poster, Dominic is over on the left side with his number 70 tax paid stamp. And he's also known as Bugpost and he was exceptionally active in the 80s and 90s. The neatest thing about Bugpost is many of us have tried sewing machines as a perforator. Bugpost is a genius. So Bugpost said, I don't need to spend $3,000 on a perforator or 1,000, whatever it was back then. I'm gonna turn a sewing machine into a real perforator. And he redid his sewing machine so it had places to feed the stamps. He shaved off the needle so that it was a flat and he made a little template for it to go through. So it punched one hole at a time perfectly through this. You couldn't move the sheet sideways. So the perforations were perfectly straight and he got very good at putting it through. And the thing I liked about his stamps were the perforations were actually a little bit bigger than normal perforations. And I kind of always have liked bigger perforations rather than smaller ones. Then over on the right hand side, there was a Exotica post, Sheba de Kitty. And she tended to make stamps with people in very compromising positions. Bugpost introduced me to Francis Hall. Francis was a kite enthusiast but he made his post office was kite post. And so he made all these hundreds of beautiful stamps about kites and he would go to all the kite conventions and have his stamps at the conventions. Sadly Francis took his own life in about 1990 or a little bit before and so he's not with us. Over on the left hand side, the love stamp, the take-off on the love stamp is Jeff Dixon. And he's still active in Seattle, makes a sheet of stamps every once in a while. Then going up a little farther, there's some other people who are here. There's Eleanor Kent. I've got one of her fractal crochet pieces. And Eleanor, are you here Eleanor? Yeah, there she is back in the back. Yeah. I met Eleanor when I came to Interdata 84 and met Ginny Lloyd and a bunch of other people. Met Mike Millett. Scooter, who is here. Scooter, raise your hand. Scooter was already a stamp artist and he and I had already been corresponding. So, but that was an event here in San Francisco just like this event where people come and you meet people that you may have never met but you may have corresponded a few times with.  It's really great to come to something like this and meet people for the first time. Up in the upper right-hand corner, I'm sure I'm just about out of time, there's a whole group of people that then started making stamps and they all came to my studio to use my perforator. So, there was never a day at my studio where there weren't one or two people perforating like hundreds of sheets of stamps. Tisha, who is still very active but she's really more of a book artist now. Beth Sellers was the curator at a local museum. Sandy Jackson, Bimbolonia Post, is still lives in Seattle and Tim Lord actually came over from Spokane to perforate his stamps. Elizabeth Zoz, Zoz, Z-O-I-S, now lives in New York.  And I was so glad when he started making his own stamps. Because then I could like be on a more level playing field with him.  And the last person, there's two more people I'm gonna recognize here on this. Jerry Smith, another commercial artist in Seattle, began making stamps. But then in about 2009, I met Jack Latiman who is Cascadia Art Post and Jack's here too. He was here yesterday. So that's a brief history of artist stamps in Seattle and the stamp art scene in Seattle. And well, it's still incredibly rich. I enjoy now, for many of the first years, I actually thought I could make my living off of selling artist stamps. And I did actually sell a lot of them back in the 80s. I think the price eventually went up in a gallery to $125 a sheet. Then the tech bubble burst. Galleries all went out of business in Seattle and I stopped being able to sell anything. And it's actually led to a much healthier attitude. I went back to school, became a teacher. So now I'm a teacher, I earn my money from that and I can make all the mail art I want and send it out and I don't even have to worry about it. And as I told John, I am so much happier. Paul Chu. You know, Anna mentioned previously that a Tim Mancusi of the Bay Area, Dada's found out about a mail art in New York from his teacher who told him to go visit Ray Johnson. And that teacher was Stephen Caltonback who's a noted California conceptual artist who left New York and went to Sacramento for a long time. And it was instrumental bringing Ray Johnson to Sacramento. Another conceptual artist of that period was Lowell Darling. And he's our next panelist, Lowell Darling. I'd actually rather listen. You know, I didn't realize that since the topic I'm supposed to talk about, the Deca Dance, which was for myself and a lot of artists that I was involved with, a sort of end of correspondence art. And I realized that it was also like everybody calls themselves mail artists. And as I recall, before the Deca Dance, it was correspondence art, you know. And I think that the mail artists seem to have had more fun than the correspondence artists. But I think that the reason is that mail art grew out of correspondence art. And correspondence art grew out of far too serious an art world for them, and which is why they turned to creating their own networks and systems and taking charge of essentially what they did with their work. And so anyway, I made a note here, something, oh, my introduction to the mail. I thought I'd add that quickly. I was 14 years old and I had heard that Norman Rockwell didn't do commercials. And then the Rock Island Argus, I grew up in Rock Island, Illinois. I saw a Norman Rockwell drawing on a four roses or three roses, a whiskey ad. And so I knew that he lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. So I wrote to him and asked him, you know, what is this? And he wrote me back and said that when he was young, before he had a name, when he sold something, he couldn't control what the person did with it once they bought it because artists didn't have copyright laws like artists and musicians, I mean writers and musicians. And so this is 1956, I'm 14, and I was determined to become famous before I ever tried to sell any art. And I'm now 72 years old and pretty much stuck to that plan, which really being a pro bono public performance artist, which is actually what I call myself, is not a really wise business plan. And I was the decadence was one of several large events that I created primarily through the mail. And another one was called the artist and lawyers ball. And in 1968, because I wasn't making any money as an artist, the IRS declined to accept my deductions and said that I was not an artist. So I set out to prove that I was an artist without making, selling or showing art. And at the same time, I was sweeping the floors in Buckminster Fuller's office as my student job. And he was working on population crisis statistics and all the world resources inventory. And I decided that I would nail down Carbondale, Illinois, where Bucky was and I was, and to keep it from falling off the planet due to the excess weight of overpopulation coupled with the centrifugal force of the earth. And another student from the campus newspaper put it on the UP wire services. And the next morning, I was a caricature of an artist looking very much like Salvador Dolly, you know, with a great big hammer and a great big nail on a little teeny world on the front page of the Chicago Daily News or the Tribune I can't remember.  And I continued to do this practice from that point on. And so my mail was primarily the art of crank letters beginning in 1956 with Norman. And a lawyer, Monroe Price, was trying to start an organization called the Advocates for the Arts, which was the first pro bono public, you know, or pro bono legal service for artists. And he couldn't find any artists with, you know, that would come to lawyers to talk to them about their problem. You know, we like to solve our own problems our way, like driving the bureaucrats crazy. So anyway, he took my case and he did in, you know, five minutes, what it had taken me years to do. But during these years, I became kind of quasi famous because I made an enormous amount of news, nailing cities to the ground all over Europe, you know, in America, very hit and run. And so anyway, he had, you know, I'd gotten a teaching job at Otis Art Institute, which was next door to the Elks building where the decadence, now it's a connection finally. Anyway, I've been three years by myself. I'm no good at talking, you know, with any kind of logic. So anyway, this lawyer proved I was an artist and, but I'd been teaching, I was on a panel at the College Art Association with Bruce Nauman and Bruce had been offered this teaching job, teach video at Otis Art Institute. He already had Leo Castelli, he didn't really need the job. I needed the job, so I took it. They didn't have video equipment at Otis. So I was teaching video without video. So the first day of class, I asked my students what grade they wanted, they all said they wanted A's except one woman that said she wanted a B and I said, won't you take an A? And she said, I don't think I'm an A artist. At this point, they didn't know I was a teacher. We were sitting around waiting for the teacher. And I pulled my grade book out and I said, A, A, A, A, A, you sure you don't want a B? I said, I'm the teacher, you could have an A, no. Okay, all right, B. And I said, now we don't have video equipment, so let's turn this into a male art, correspondence art entity. So they decided to call themselves General Otis and I decided that I said I made them a promise to get them in art in America. As a teacher, it was the least I could do. So David Zach, the Canadian art writer and a friend of a lot of male artists and stuff, who absolutely went mad. He was the craziest human on earth. Anyway, David had written an article that a lot of the early correspondence artists hated and it was called male art, blah, blah, I don't know what all. But it was mainly about artists who were worked in clay like Clayton Bailey and people like this that were using the mail as well. So all the correspondence artists, the intermage bankers and everybody, they thought this was not the company they wanted to be in. But my students were very happy because the cover was a big mail of a bag of, postal canvas bag of mail with all the mail pouring out and there were a couple of them that were General Otis. So anyway, I quit teaching because of data actually, another correspondence artist in a space company were doing very well traveling around the country. Me is the Fat City School of Fine's Art and with the pseudonym Dudley Fines and he was a space and Dana would connect one artist with other artists and he was part of this network and I would give a master's degree to anybody that wanted one. Now when I got my MFA, they realized that I didn't have a bachelor's degree at the time but I was also more famous than anybody else in the faculty. And so they sent me the degree in abstention when I was in London nailing it down. So I got both of my degrees in the mail at the same time and there was a woman down the corner who was insane and she lost her legs but they were under her but she didn't know it. And every day she'd asked me if I'd seen her legs and I said there they are and she'd say thank you and go on her way. So one day she asked me where her legs at the time. Oh, the decadence, we haven't got to the decadence. What was the great big party? This woman, I gave her my bachelor's degree and then we had the decadence and we lived happily ever after. And well I had so many funny little stories. I know, we'll do a next panel. Next time, next time in Israel. Yeah, maybe we can have like five minutes. Oh Jerusalem. Questions and answers. Thanks, I'm on the court of Jewish. Yeah. Jenny, do we have time for questions? Okay, yeah. Anybody want to take it? I don't see the demise of the Postal Service to tell you the truth. The thing about the Postal Service do the only people that go around to every house in the fricking country. So I mean, why can't they take some social service action to look in on the elderly or this or that? I think the Postal Service just has to change a little bit and draw upon what it's so good at, which is communicating with people and everything like that. A lot of people also say that male art is dead. It was a force for social connection in the old days and now the internet does that. So who needs the Postal Service or male art? And I always say, have you seen the work that Carl Chew is doing? It's about the best male art I've seen in 30 years.  I want to say something. In the back? Yes? Yeah, well fortunately not. Go ahead, Annie. It isn't easy to explain male art to people who aren't involved. I mean, it's almost inconceivable. Many people never even use the Postal System at this point and a letter writing, I mean, why would you write a letter? You can send an email or you can connect on Facebook or any of these other things. So I would suggest sending them to a website. Do you have a website that explains male art? Somebody have a, anybody? It's out there. What?  I mean, this used to be an underground art form that you could, yeah, but. Yeah, yeah. I-U-O-M-A. Yeah, and it's online. If I could just mention one thing that I'll turn it over to other people. You can actually find a lot of correspondence art there. Male art's like this pool. Whatever you say about male art, it reflects more on you than it does on male art.  Well, it's communication and it's using the Postal Service to communicate with other people who have like minds or not like minds who wanna share information, object, whatever you like. Sometimes they put together publications, sometimes they do their own work that they wanna get to you through the mail. Sometimes they wanna come to your town and just hang out. It's like, it's just a network. Like Anna said earlier. I wanna give everybody my address. I'd like to give back in the mail art movement. So, before you leave, take your pencils out. And the last thing we'll do is I'll give you my address. And I'll send you all an MFA. I don't know if this is on or not. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that this male art is so sophisticated. I think of Connie Wang, who we both used to work for Bard at one time and she had this wonderful, where she would cancel her stamp that she had made. And I remember this one time it was used in Marilyn Monroe also and then she had her address on it. And just that simple, humble statement, I still cherish it. And this was from the late 80s. But also I wanted to comment that since the 50s, I have kept in touch with my, we keep in touch my Japanese pen pal and I, I still have all the times we'd put on all these commemorative stamps and add to it. And that's just a humble form between two people. And I'm thinking, and really for quite a few years now, we'll aid that with youth today to encourage them to write a letter whether it's doing the teachers like how they have pen pals. But just to start writing and actually go to the post office and get a stamp and put on it that we can keep this going. And also I was just reading in the Daily Cal yesterday, somebody had written a column stating that we're soon gonna forget how to do cursive. And it's becoming a lost art. So I think just in our humble ways and spreading a buzz around besides here and the networking within to open it up. And I know I'm doing what I can in all sorts of classrooms as a substitute teacher, K through 12. So I encourage us all to do what we can besides here. And I'm just grateful for the examiner having that little blurb there to know it was here today. So thank you very much. Thank you. How about one more in the back? Or it's huge in it. Go ahead. I wanna know, you talked about that worm stamp. Did they give it back to you? Yes. And do you still have it? I think my dad has it somewhere. Yes, joking. And this is for Mr. Garland. I've actually been studying your work since I was in college. I was very inspired by your take on politics, combining not just art with politics, but human. And I've extended it into my ball, but the San Francisco Pride and the Magical Fairies. Much to some people's great annoyance. I never stop, I never stop talking. It goes on forever. Oh, thank you, thank you very much, appreciate it. Wait a minute. I was gonna give you my address. Instead, you can find it. Okay, 101 Rodeo Avenue, Rodeo, California, 94572.