My Dream Date With The ULINE Shipping Catalog

It’s been really hot here in San Francisco this week. I came home early today to an empty house and found the latest ULINE Shipping Supply Specialists catalog waiting for me in my mailbox. It’s got a seductive cover, enticing me with HOT, DO NOT DOUBLE STACK , RECEIVED, THIS END UP, and EXPLOSIVE stickers receding into space just like the opening text crawl from Star Wars.

I casually flip open the booklet to page 209 where I find this thing. For a mere $595 I can order the “ORGAPACK” Combo Tool. I have no idea what it feels like to use this thing but I will have to get together with some GRIPPER SEALS to find out.

Page 17- 10′ Telescoping Boxes. Page 120 – Shrink Tunnel (superior Italian design!) Page 261- Vinyl Strip Door Kits. Page 211- Poly Strapping Kits. Page 276 – Latex Finger Cots!

This catalog reads like a fantasy play dungeon for the shipping supply enthusiast. Besides all the wacky industrial items it has been the cheapest and speediest resource for packaging and shipping supplies for nearly every project I have encountered recently. They have same day shipping so your purchase arrives within days.

This is a great family owned company based in Chicago and run by by Dick and Liz Uihlein.

THE THING

NoonaCo has a new awesome shipping fulfillment client. Bay Area artist/editors Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan started a fake real business/art project/quarterly subscription called THE THING. I had a sneak peek at the first object by Miranda July during the silk-screening process at Ape Do Good a few days ago and I can’t reveal what THE THING #1 is, but – go buy a subscription. You will NOT be disappointed. This is exactly the type of project I love working on.

THE THING is a quarterly periodical in the form of an object. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors to create an everyday object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped in brown paper packaging by the editors and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers with the help of the United States Postal Service (and now NoonaCo)
THE THING’s current year of subscriptions ( issues 1-4 ) will begin in August with a project by the performance artist and filmmaker Miranda July, whose first feature length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d’Or. The subscription year will continue with projects by visual artists Anne Walsh, Kota Ezawa, and Trisha Donnelly.

Porn for women?

At first I thought this was a really funny idea, but on on further browsing I started to think the Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative has women all wrong. Yawn.