You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘weird’ tag.
It really is impossible to tell what direction a soul will take in this world of crossroads and unexpected pathways. Back in 2018, Ferrebeekeeper featured a short flippant essay about Gritty, the hirsute maniacal entity who (which?) is the mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers, a gang of icebound stick fighters. How were any of us to know what Gritty would become?
I have very mixed memories concerning my time in the Philadelphia suburbs (my family lived there from when I was 13 to 15). Moving from a very rural part of America to a toffee-nosed suburb during the 1980s felt like being trapped in a John Hughes movie. Perhaps I have always subconsciously held the awkwardness of that time against Philadelphia and the bedraggled ball of psych(opathic)adelic fur which they have chosen as their mascot. But it turns out I was wrong about Gritty…
Back in 2018, when I wrote my essay, Gritty was the object of much good-natured derision and mockery. It can be hard to write comic pieces, but Gritty’s deranged countenance & straggly fluorescent orange fur (and his weird backstory) seemed sure to get a cheap laugh. Frankly I assumed the mascot would quickly be retired. But Gritty was not who I thought and he (it?) has made good!
First of all Gritty quickly beat all the charges against him (In January he was accused of punching a little boy at a photo shoot, however the authorities were unimpressed by the accusations and Gritty walked away scot-free). Then Gritty became a beloved figure representing the casual insouciance and low grade threat of violence which pervade Philadelphia. Finally he became ubiquitous as a left-wing political symbol and a dull-fledged symbol of what Philadelphia really is.
When soon-to-be ex President Trump disrespected Philadelphia by making them the subject of the only honest declaration he has been known to utter (“Bad things happen in Philadelphia”), Gritty leapt into action. Countless Philadelphia themed memes depicted the strange orange miscreant taking revenge or bringing down the president. Then the memes became true when Philadelphia’s slowly tallied mail-in votes put Joe Biden over the top in the national electoral college tally.
Now Gritty has risen high in the world of mascots. Papers around the world are analyzing him with perplexed respect. The French daily newspaper Le Monde even proclaimed him to be “la coqueluche du mouvement antifasciste” the face of the antifascist movement! Apparently Gritty now represents the world’s disgust with the malevolent demagogues who have been proliferating around the globe!
This will be a hard act to follow. Hopefully citizens will soon regain their political sense and vote out the treacherous far right-wing legislators who have enabled Trump and suchlike despicable demogogues to flourish. However until then we will need Gritty. Go forward in glory, Gritty, you are now America’s foremost crazy-haired orange nightmare!
So…apparently I kind of dropped the ball last year and missed one of the big eye makeup trends of the spring of 2018—crown-themed eye makeup which is designed to make the wearer seem regal! I guess the theory is that by gluing rhinestones in your eyes, you will resemble the monarchs of yore. Apparently the trend was first popularized by beauty blogger Marissa Melhorn. With the right stencil, airbrush, and costume jewelry, anyone can feel like a princess! I guess princesses don’t wearily rub their eyes as much as I do.
I feel like this might be one of the things people of the future point out as they sadly shake their heads and point out the undersea ruins of Sephora (assuming there are people of the future and they still utilize heads), but you never know; this is a pretty strange era we are in and I can also imagine this trend catching on (for example if America got pushed into imbecilic monarchy somehow).
Anyway, enjoy the lustrous glittering royal eyes we have featured here, but if you decide to try this at home and it goes wrong, don’t come crying to me. Or, if you do that, make sure to capture it on video. It will look like Vogue anime “Hamlet.”
I completely ran out of time today, so here is a picture of a sculpture which I made at the end of last year. It is a Romanesque Flounder with strange Babylonian parasites embedded in the various arched niches. The fish is made of wood and the smaller sculptures within are sculpted of sculpey polymer. As you can see, my “studio assistant” Sumi Cat is reviewing it carefully to see if there is anything which needs to be altered by being clawed off and knocked into a forgotten corner.
It is a bit harder to say what this sculpture represents, but the flatfish is my avatar of Earth life (and a sometimes a sort of psychopomp/spirit guide sent by the dark gods below). The dark tree is a cruel parody of the tree of life and the parasites are clearly beings of pure appetite (albeit with a certain ecclesiastic flair). This must be a sculpture about the appetites which religion is meant to satisfy…but what the nature of those appetites is and how we can avoid being controlled by them is a question which resists facile answers.
I have been getting ready for my solo flounder show in the Lower East Side on August 17th…another stepping stone on my life quest to become the world’s foremost flounderist. Because of this, I failed to write a blog entry today…but that’s ok, right? You must surely be sick of reading about current events. Here is a teaser flounder to get everyone excited.
We’ll get back to our regularly scheduled mollusks, goths, and crowns on Friday (give or take).
In my art career I have been on an enormous flatfish binge. People have asked me what on earth this means, but unfortunately, it is hard to write about one’s own art. Therefore I am “crowd sourcing” my artist’s statement to the smartest and most sympathetic crowd I can find. Please, please let me know how you think I could phrase this better (and enjoy the fish!).
Asymmetry betokens a lack of equality or balance between the parts or aspects of a greater whole. Outwardly, the most asymmetric vertebrates are the flatfish, an order of carnivorous marine fish which are extensively fished for food and sport. In his art, Wayne Ferrebee adopts the flounder as a symbolic proxy to explore the growing asymmetry between the natural world and artifical manmade ecosystems. Simultaneously a lurking predator and a hapless victim of fishermen’s guile (and the shark’s ravenous gullet) the flounder is a tragicomic google-eyed mirror for humankind’s march towards ascendancy and disaster.
With a background in biology, history, toymaking and painting, Ferrebee utlilizes symbols and narratives to contextualize the role which organisms have in the context of larger life cycles. Thus a wheeled toy flatfish with a rotating musical painting becomes an oracular mirror for to seeing into the near future. A pleasure garden of glowing sphinxes, topiary, and musicians is revealed to be a disguised fish monster, waiting for the unwary aesthete. Beasts of the watery realm join with mythological beings from antiquity to show how our cherished aspirations contain poisonous hooks. Each of us thinks we are a heroic individual, yet we are also a tiny part of a billion-headed hydra. So too each artwork of dynamically intertwined symbols glows with hidden meaning. By represents the cycles within life, history, and paleontology, Ferrebee highlights patterns of creation and destruction not readily discernible from the perspective of a single lifetime.
Mascots are fascinating. They have many of the biographic features of actual people (or at least of celebrities) glommed together with some of the endearing qualities of animals or natural entities…and yet they are completely ersatz. Teams of marketers, advertising executives, and other suchlike sharkish folk invent mascots as tools to manipulate us for their own ends. The results of this unholy nexus can often result in a bizarre plunge into the uncanny. As an example, let’s look at the deeply disconcerting career of “Mac Tonight” the crooning moon from the late eighties who (which?) attempted to sell McDonald’s to baby boomers as a good option for a dinner restaurant.
Mac Tonight was made to cash in on 50s music nostalgia among Baby Boomers. He had a human body with a stylized moon head (with an elongated chin and overhanging forehead). A glasses-wearing musician, Mac sat at a piano on a cloud and played a bowdlerized version of “Mack the Knife” in which the original murder-themed lyrics were replaced with lyrics about, um, going to dinner at a fast food restaurant previously targeted mainly at children. Mac’s appearance was meant to distance him from Ronald, Grimace, Hamburgler, et al. and yet he also shared an obvious leitmotif with them. Because of a branding crossover, Mac somehow got tied to Nascar. Yet in 1989, Mac’s career was nipped in the bud by a lawsuit from the estate of Bobby Darin, the original composer of “Mack the Knife.” Although Bobby Darin himself originally took the concept and the music from a Brecht play about a footpad that raped and murdered people, Darin somehow toned down the dark gestic drama into smooth uptempo jazz. His heirs convincingly made this argument to a court and McDonald’s didn’t want to pay royalties.
This should have been the end of Mac Tonight: he was obviously crafted wrongly from the very beginning (just look at his nightmarish features which evoke some sort of doofy demon from a Fred Savage movie) and yet Mac crawled back from corporate America’s dustbin. In 2007, a white supremacist named “farkle” used an online meme site to relaunch Mac as “Moon Man” a racist figurehead who rapped and danced and gave hate-speeches crafted with that creepy robotic text-to-speech software. In today’s increasingly debased political culture, Moon Man now has a steady gig endorsing the Ku Klux Klan, the president, police brutality, and violence against the LGBT community. He would probably easily win a house seat in Montana if he decided to run (or if he were, you know, real, in any way whatsoever).
I am a space enthusiast and my middle name is “Mack”. Plus I like McDonald’s and came of age in the 80s, however Mac Tonight has always been distasteful to me (even before his off-brand second career as a goddamned white supremacist icon). Somehow the cartoonish fixed grin does not capture the beauty of the moon or the glamor of the post-war era in my heart. Yet equally obviously, Mac Tonight has something…some element that appeals to all sorts of people. After Mac’s launch “a 1987 survey by Ad Watch found that the number of consumers who recalled McDonald’s advertising before any other doubled from the previous month, and was higher than any company since the New Coke launch in 1985.” Was it Darin’s song? Was it love of astronomy or burgers? Were there elements of his sinister later career already present? I have no idea. Can anybody explain this or is the sheer randomness of this story the true source of Mac’s nocturnal power?
The whimsical names which paint companies give various designer shades and hues are a big part (well…at least a part) of the fun of painting. It has always made me happy to go into a Home Depot and peruse the rainbow arrays of eye-popping paint chips and look at the weird names. Imagine the thought process that lead to “Peppermint Penguin,” “Rutebaga Parade,” “Clontarf,” “Curlicue,” or “Bitter Gravy” (indeed my friend’s Arastu’s house is this last color, for some reason).
But now, in an attempt to steal this joy from broke poets and stoned marketers, computer scientist (?) Janelle Shane has created a rudimentary algorithm to design colors and name them. Looking at the experiment as described on Ars Technica makes me think that either Ms. Shane is a poor computer scientist, there are aspects of the “experiment” which were not described, or this was a publicity stunt (or maybe all of the above).
But who cares? Even if the computer made a lot of boring gray and beige colors and did not seem to learn anything, it produced some amazingly poetic and hilarious names like “Stargoon,” Dorkwood, “Gray Pubic,” and Burble Simp *which is actually an ok color—if you are a crustacean living in 1978. Maybe Ms. Shane was asking the wrong questions. Perhaps her experiment did not determine if machines can be aesthetes (the results are uncertain unless you are an empty souled entity designing a new ecru for cubicles). The real question is whether machines can be hilarious and the answer is a definite yes. It’s even better if they don’t get the joke, but just sit there in their “Snowbonk” colored housing wondering why everyone is laughing.
I had a spring cold yesterday and I didn’t post. I’m feeling much better, but I would still like to finish this wonton soup and go to bed…maybe we’ll talk about politics another day when I am feeling stronger. To tide you over though, here are some more little flounder drawings that I have been making. You may think that because I have not posted any lately, I have stopped floundering, but that is not true…not true at all. I have been floundering at a much greater level.
So I will let you look these over and see what you think, The one at the top is a psychedelic seventies flounder with sundry luscious fruit. The second flounder is apparently a flounder stealing into the alien undersea garden of love. Is Cupid aiming love’s arrow at the poor fish or is it a fishing spear? His back is studded with radiant jewels, so perhaps he is being hunted for cupidity.
Finally the last of these three was a Christmas present for my roommate who likes heavy metal. he asked for a black metal flounder–so I obliged him with pirate ships and demon babes and a jet black black ocean where this poor ghost flounder is free to rock out to his heart’s content. Let me know what you think and I’ll feature some more flatfish in the near future!
Happy April Fools Day—or Happy April Fish! (as it is known in France). This is a special day for several reasons.
Most importantly today is the anniversary of Ferrebeekeeper which came into existence 7 years ago today! Since then, there have been lots of snakes, Goths, catfish, and colorful stories. I have gotten some things completely and utterly wrong, but I have always tried to do my best and be honest and keep the content coming, even when I was tired or sick or sad at heart. This is the one thousand five hundred and twelfth post! That’s a lot of clams and crowns! To celebrate, I am putting up three flounder-themed artworks (literal poissons d’Avril) and I am also announcing the rollout of a bizarre and compelling new online toy to appear here soon. I won’t tell you what it is (although I guess a prophet could tell you) but I will drop hints during next week’s blog posts.
Unless you are a Dagon-worshiper or a Micronesian, April Fish is one of the few fish-themed holidays on the calendar and so it is very precious for me, as a fish-themed artist. Additionally, today celebrates being careful in the face of obviously fake news stories. Now lately there have been lots of weird propaganda statements and transparent lies issuing from certain albescent domiciles in Washington DC, so the waters are even more muddied than usual (almost as if antagonists to the east are deliberately throwing up lots of lies and fake stories to make the real news seem suspect to people who are not very good at reading), but it is wise to be eternally on guard. Getting to the bottom of things is difficult, but a good rule of thumb is that real news is messy and complicated and offers more questions than answers (and lots of seeming contradictions), whereas self-serving puffery is generally gloriously simple and shifts all blame onto some third party (like Freemasons, foreigners, witches, or journalists).
Thank you all so much for reading. I treasure your attention and your patience. Forgive me for being so tardy in responding to comments and kindly pardon my errors or mistakes in judgement. Keep reading and looking and I will keep on writing, drawing, and floundering. There are glorious things ahead for all of us.
For years my most popular blog post was about leprechauns…so I need to make some Saint Patrick’s art pronto! However before we get there, here are some weird green flounder artworks to lead up to the holiday. Spring is almost here, even if the thermometer says otherwise. Some kelly green artwork should remind us of that fact (even if flatfish are not traditionally spring green).
ferrebeekeeper 