Monday, July 9, 2007

I had a vision of a cartoon octopus humping a cartoon bowl of spaghetti

emblazoned on a band flyer. This consumed my short sweet drive to my class this morning. It would be done all lurid Coop style, heavy line drawing with like a yellow background. Maybe for some forgotten loud-ish band, one you thought as not being cool enough or funny enough to deserve as good a flyer as that. Coop did the Boss Hogg flyer to the left, but really no flyer can top the actual album cover(NSFW).

I used to plaster my walls in college with flyers. They weren't necessarily for shows I attended, but I like the look of them. In fact as I look around the room in which I am sitting, I'm surrounded by flyers and posters for shows I have seen since living here. My favorite is a large pink Bonnie Prince Billy poster with a black skeleton wearing headphones, followed closely by the immaculately printed poster for a soul show case featuring J "Taxi" Blackfoot, singer of "Two Different People." The way it is designed, it looks like "Two Different People" is a description of Mr. Blackfoot, since the same lettering is used to designate Floyd Taylor as "son of the late great Johnnie Taylor"

This is actually my favorite thing hanging on my wall.It's a white cardboard sign that says "DUFF SOME NO GOOD" in blue crayon. I saw it when I passing through a less than savory neighborhood, taking Maya and her friend to the zoo, and i circled the block and then jumped the curb so I could run out and pull it off a telephone pole. They were both pretty sure I shouldn't be pulling down signs like that, and they were probably right, being more concerned with the immediacy of ethics than me, but I had to have it.

At first it seemd a little too precious, a touch too look-at-me hipster for my liking, but I've grown to love looking at it floating above the top of my laptop screen. In my younger, signifigance starved years, I would have appelated great meaning tothe word "custom" scrawled upside down on the sign, undoubtedly there from when this thing was part of a perfectly good and useful box. Now, it really doesn't say much, but I like the way it says it, which is something that I am discovering about writing as I go along. An octopus humping a bowl of spaghetti has no meaning beyond the obvious, but it's a good image worth exploring nonetheless.

1 comment:

  1. I love that Boss Hogg album cover. Oh pubic hair!! -traci

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