Today, the Tie, Tomorrow, the Cufflink!
Ties are cheap. We’ve seen moving guys and bike messengers all wearing them on the clock. It’s getting to be like the 1855, when you had factories full of workingmen wearing ties while they tended furnaces and nailed shoes onto the hooves of horses and got their formalwear covered in soot and dung. What did guys do back then when a tie wasn’t a sufficient formalizer? They wore cufflinks: big, bright and golden, like dabs of honey on their wrists. They wore them for the same reason that goodfellas like pinky rings, that the wristwatch has survived the cell phone, and that some graying male Philly lawyers fight back the February chill in full-length mink coats. All men secretly believe themselves to be ancient kings, draped in precious furs and stones. And yet they fear that other men will call them fairies if they act on these fantasies. So the jewelry needs some kind of excuse for being there. It needs a job to do, no matter how farfetched, such as holding a cuff together like a glorified button. Thus, the cufflink. We can count down the hours until its inevitable return.
Cuff Daddy
Paper Rad Doodles for Dollars
Let’s talk about art school. You may have gone there. We may have gone there. The Paper Rad collective went there, paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn how to draw naked ladies and pears in bowls. Big fucking whoop. So after graduation, they went back to doodling the same old retarded doodles they drew in elementary school, except now their retardness was a studied and self-conscious one. For icons, they chose Alf, the California Raisins, and Garfield, who spawned shimmering black-lit worlds of aliens, wizards, melting Fraggle Rock creatures. They made videos of dogs rendered so crudely they appear to have been drawn by the Logo turtle. Is Paper Rad breaking down perception’s doors and turning back time’s clock? Or are they Cheech and Chong, wringing easy laughs from their fellow stoners? The answer to this question no longer matters, because Beck (that Beck) likes them. Rumor has it Paper Rad will be doing a few of his future music videos, which means art directors will be ripping these ingenious Game Genies off for years to come. So even if you don’t like the new retardedness, the Vulture advises that you get used to it.
Paper Rad
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