Startling Stories for All Ages
The first Famous Feztoinian featured at Oddball Art Labs’s 2015 pop culture event ⎯ Fez Fest!
Elgin’s own Rich Wagner posing as singer, songwriter, and international drug merchant, Francois Anatole. Read his Feztonian bio below.
(Write-up by yours truly; design work by artist David Metzger.)
The next time you’re in downtown Elgin, be sure to stop by Rediscover Records and tell Rich, “hello!”
For several months I’ve been conducting a minor social experiment: salting conversation with neighbors and other villagers with doublespeak phrases, mostly “Un-____” or “doubleplus” (e.g., “Un-good,” “doubleplus hot”) — words that are easy to decode given their context and any non-verbal cues. The idea is to see if and when it catches on, and who says it back first, then find out if they’ve used it elsewhere. So far, no soap.
(And now that I’ve blabbed about it, the data will be tainted.That’s assuming anybody in town is reading this site. A bold assumption, indeed.)
As doubleplus weird as this experiment may seem, Americans are already conversant in Newspeak. They just don’t know it as such.
As detailed on the Newspeak Dictionary site, there are hundreds of examples of Newspeak and Doublespeak in our daily language, most of which we don’t recognize as obfuscating the very thing the words are supposed to identify. We pick up via the media some seemingly perfect word, reuse it until we think we know what we’re really saying though never considering the full meaning. Then again, the American school system long ago quit teaching students how to think for themselves, or to consider the deeper significance of our words and actions.
Take for example, “debt ceiling.”
Or , “The Patriot Act.”
Or, “Peacekeepers.”
See what I mean.
From the “Too Bad It’s April 14th” File:
The Daily Mail reports this rather odd juxtaposition of a billboard ad for the Channel 5 repeat of The Walking Dead on a Co-op Funeral Home in North East England.
Clear Channel has since removed the ad.
Too bad.
For those interested, here is the link to Co-Operative Funeralcare, the UK’s largest funeral director.
They couldn’t buy press like this.
(story courtesy of the fine folks at Bleeding Cool)
click here for full size image
Tinwerks is a Chicago-based company that does ground-up design and manufacture of metal boxes. Chances are that if your special edition DVD boxed set, candy, gum, food, toys, or cigars came in an uber-cool tin, these guys did it.
Now that I think about it, this is actually the fourth card design I sent them in 2009. The first one was this . . .
(click image for detail)
. . . but they weren’t feeling it, for some reason. So I sent them this . . .
(click image for detail)
. . . which they said was still a bit too corporate. They were looking for something that jumped off the page, something that would show they were a breed apart. Discussion still revolved around robots and snowmen and this and that . . . and then I came up with a giant snowman attacking Tokyo.
Instant love. Do it.
But before getting too far into this version, I sent the Big Bosses the following:
(click image for detail)
The idea being that the runners would be redrawn as a fleeing mob, include some 1950s jets flying around and a pair of insets with shocked citizens and scientist in the bottom corners. Go for a total movie poster look.
And they loved it! They said it was the best Iron Maiden Christmas card they’d ever seen, which I took as a high compliment. But the image was not quite, er, corporate enough — didn’t send the right message or something. So, back to the drawing tablet.
Some more ideas, more back-and-forth and I sent them this one:
It’s got the same basic elements as the final product but the chest design on this guy was a bit much. The final robot design has a nice Power Rangers feel to it that the big-wigs really dug. Actually, they went nuts over it. So much so that there was talk of having “Tinny” (as this guy’s now known throughout the company) at trade shows and printed on t-shirts, but it either never happened or I never got a shirt — which is a drag, because I would be wearing it with pride.
click here for full size image
More fine examples of my holiday handiwork coming soon.
Special thanks to Webmaster MIKE for helping me reset the filters on my email account, thus reducing my daily spam intake from 300+ down to a manageable 60-ish.
Most of it was junk — the usual trolling for suckers interested in Canadian pharmaceuticals, Russian mail-order brides, on-line casinos, Rolex knock-offs and virus-laced software.
Found deep within the trash was this little gem from somebody calling himself “Young Ostaba”. There’s no way to know what he was trying to sell as Firefox blocked the image that had all the pertinent information.
What was left was this weird and almost lyrical jib-jab. While the non-sentences and mis-matched fragments tell no story they appear, somehow, to create meaning. Or maybe it’s the human brain trying to overlay meaning on something that has none.
Either way, it’s interesting. Best read aloud and with conviction, especially in front of some co-workers.
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