THUMBMONKEY: 10/24/2004

The Trouble With Halloween
Don't get me wrong- Halloween is still my favorite holiday...but I can't get "into" it anymore. When I was a kid a month prior to Halloween I'd start plotting my costume, and would read books about witches (ok so I did that all the time), and draw Halloween comics starring my deceased pets, Buela (a German Shepard), Gunther (a fluffy beige persian) and Anne (a sleeker orange cat) who'd go on Scooby Doo like adventures in graveyards and haunted houses. Uh..I never thought until just now how wierd it might be that I was making comic characters out of my (naturally) deceased pets...but anyhoo....
Yeah- so Halloween- was there anything better than dressing up like a freak and terrorizing your neighborhood, and getting CANDY as well? What a scam! Plus- there was an element of real scaryness- because you never knew what the local teenagers were up to- and there were always rumors that they had big plans to freak the little kids out. It was the best!
But then it got ruined...and now trick or treating is confined to malls or neighborhood business on a Saturday afternoon, decorated with cutesy pumpkins and friendly skeletons and witches. Plus, when I got older I got all my dress up ya ya's out when I went goth in high school. So dressing up in black with black hair and spooky makeup just doesn't seem special or unusual. Parties don't thrill me because my house has more monstery elements than most Halloween parties (but more tasteful of course). Plus I'm really over the whole "I'm a sexy witch/cat/vampire" costume every freaking chick has to wear these days. If I do actually go to a party I'm going as a fetid rotting corpse! Yeah!
So anyway, I love Halloween but I'm kinda over it. Though it seems that Halloween is slowly transmogrifying into Dead Of The Dead parties. Bringing the underworld, it's myths and sense of the unknown, back to the holiday...I'm all for it.

I just got asked by The Frye Art Museum to give a lecture about Mark Ryden's work during his opening Nov 18th. So that's fancy. Strangely I'm not nervous at all, and pretty excited about it. I really love working on museum type stuff.

Aw. Lookit this little guy. This is a Fat Tailed Dwarf Lemur. One of the more horrified moments I've ever experienced was in the company of one of these little guys (they are about the size of your hand and super fuzzy)...I was at the zoo and thrilled to be hand feeding the residents of the Nocturnal House thier fruit treats. I had a large grape that I was supposed to rip in half as I was told to and give to the lemur- but he grabbed the whole thing and started trying to shove it down his throat- where it looked like it got STUCK. So I had a moment where I thought I had inadvertantly murdered it and was trying to figure out how I was going to cope...fortunately the lemur burst the grapeskin with it's teeth and ate the thing in pieces, and I slunk back into the kitchen and quietly chopped fruit for the rest of the day. Amazingly I did not wet my pants.

Congo Workshop
A little tidbit of proof that the world is not TOTALLY fucked yet. (Though I guess we will know for sure after next Tuesday.)

Since it's almost Halloween I dug back into the Thumbmonkey archives and found this great site about Shrunken Heads for your amusement.

Yes Precious, "Scientists have found fossil skeletons of a hobbit-like species of human that grew no larger than a three-year-old modern child . The tiny humans, who had skulls about the size of grapefruits, lived with pygmy elephants and Komodo dragons on a remote island in Indonesia as recently as 13,000 years ago."
That is so cool.
Thanks Josh!

So- Kenny and I just got back from LA and the Pop Surrealism book signing. It was great...really fun. Seven artists showed up, Mark Ryden, Marion Peck, The Pizz, Anthony Ausgang, Todd Schorr, Camille Rose Garcia, and Lisa Petrucci, who were all troopers for enduring a 4 hour signing! It was held at La Luz de Jesus- which was really great for me as it was the main inspiration behind Roq la Rue. Also- I didn't really have to do much so I just flitted around. I met up with Nash of Japanese hot rod mag Burnout who was in town for a car show- and he dragged over Mr. G, Makoto, and Rockin' Jellybean to meet me and discuss our Feb show at the Roq- which is all Japanese Kustom Kulture artists. Other artists who came were Andrew Brandou, Joshua Petker, and Miles Thompson. I was going to write alot more about the event but I suppose pictures are more fun.

From right to left: Todd Schorr, Camille Rose Garcia, Pizz, Mark Ryden, Marion Peck, and Anthony Ausgang. Painter Van Arno is standing in the backround.