If you had to choose … loyal human sidekick or world’s ugliest animal?
Editorial note: This trial couldn’t be less important.
Editorial note 2: Any parallels drawn with a competing trial of the century up there in Manhattan are subject to a gag order issued by me truly. No comment about that trial other than to wonder, “Are we sure the defendant isn’t also a blobfish?”
He tried to eat my dog, btw, in 2016. Just sayin’.
Why does my canine look like a one-eared rabbit or nuclear-fallout prairie dog? STOP MAKING SENSE. IT’S FAKE ART.
On to our own private judicial system.
Attorney 1 opening and closing statement:
Attorney 2 opening and closing statement:
And (yes) both attorneys and the judge are evil tennis balls. That is precisely how cheap we are when it comes to hiring actors.
Jury deliberates.
Judge retires.
Jury returns. More animated this time.
VERDICT:
Combine the streams in other words! Why not have both!
Dogfish blobfish aka barkblob, bow-wow-fish, E. Pluribus Digestus.
American democracy: still functioning. Phew. We were worried.
In outer news … Keith Haring said art is for everybody. We tend to agree in our own copycat #corecore way.
What’s #corecore? Who knows! We’re in!
This Substack is free, ya see. It’s a bit “like” a public art project. It shamelessly produces works that impersonate and agitate. It ruthlessly has fun for fun’s sake. All true.
But why do we do this, really? Answer: Because we can.
Why wouldn’t we do this? Someone handed us an imagination machine. We’d been waiting for one. We named him Snake. Got to work.
Early on in our experiment, a reader unsettled by Snake’s visage approached Snake. “I thought you were dead,” the reader said. “Nope!” Snake replied, as his tail rattled to and fro. “And btw … hissssssssssssssss!”
And (yeah) Snake the illustrator is a rattlesnake. He’s also a shape-shifter. Here he is being Taylor Swift then Burt Reynolds.
For all this we do not apologize. We do not believe we’re stealing so much as borrowing here and there to find (forge) (manufacture) another totality. Borrowing here and there is transformative. It’s why Puma sneakers made a comeback. How DJs and fashion exist. How Bob Dylan became Bob Dylan.
Some kid saw another kid wearing Pumas in a Woody Guthrie t-shirt while spinning records; that’s all this is.
The kid that saw the other kid did not violate a copyright concept that never served the underlying aim: making the world a little bit cooler. Pumas equal more fun. So do DJs, LPs, Bob Dylan. A life with nothing but Adidas Freewheelin’ eight tracks? Please.
You might say, well, how about no brands at all? How about no capitalism, no religion, no hate, no guns, no drilling, no Yoko Ono … no humans? And how about compensating artists for contributing to the imagination machine? How about THAT?
Can’t control what we can’t control. As stated, we are free and available to the public. Keith Haring had a peek at “all that” as well and decided to do what he could. He made it cooler to ride the damn subway. He said color and zany sticklike characters doing flips is better than concrete and monochrome trains. That is all he said.
As for compensating artists, yes. Do it. Pay somebody other than yourselves, tech industry. We do what we can, from our penniless perch. We promote the artists we mimic and urge readers to check into their work. Maybe even buy something. But we are also not a nuclear bomb. We are not an earthquake or Elon Musk. We are one guy, his dog and a serpent — decorating the internet. Its canvas was just as monochrome and dull as those subway cars, in its totality.
Still is, for the most part. We persist.
Quick demonstration of what we just declared: We removed a paragraph from a book we like — Ray, by Barry Hannah (buy it!) — and made the paragraph into visuals.
The graph was this: “My eyes are full of yellow bricks. There are dry tiny horses running in my veins.”
Imagineer. We made a word. Something happened. Out of all that muck … something fresh.
— Colin Sullivan
Index: Claudia Six is a wonderful puppeteer escape artist we discovered on Instagram. She has stuff to sell; buy it! Other links: Roz Chast; Beatrix Potter; Tim Burton; Woody Guthrie; Mr. T.
Xoxo.
The cows are not what they seem….