The Revenge of the Lobster!
Image, Cristian Caccavelli, Jun 15, 2007
 Click here for an expanded version of this image.
"The beautiful thing about proclaiming myself an artist is that it gives me license to do whatever the hell I please … and do so with impunity."
If you are reading this it is probably a good idea to warn you that you are on the verge of ruining the little, if any, magic inherent to the image that brought you to these lines. This is really just a little joke: in the old days mothers tried to teach their daughters that they had to marry a man with money in order to be happy, and so if they were invited out to dinner they should order the lobster (since it is usually the most expensive dish and a kind of status symbol). Well, one time I was listening to a song (Japanese, Ride on a Shooting Star, note the poor English of the title) and one line of its lyrics engraved itself on my brain, "revenge no lobster" (a line that might be badly translated into Spanish as 'la venganza de la langosta").
So one night I was trying to fall asleep, while in my head a krakatoa of ideas came and went, and suddenly a voice in my head said—"OF COURSE! THE REVENGE OF THE LOBSTER! BECAUSE WHAT IS CHEAP ALSO HAS STATUS QUO!!!" and at that moment the joke seemed so funny to me, as did the image of a lobster with its eyes bulging out and dilated as if it had just ingested 20 bags of cocaine, that I could not keep myself from rising out of bed at dawn, opening the blessed Photoshop and putting my hands to work.
As I said, the explanation behind this image/concept ruins the magic that it might have. And here I'm also making reference to something I noticed: the different reactions that the image triggered in the general public. Many laughed at the dog, or at the phrase, and someone even said to me, "I'm starting to worry about you …" And if at first it irritated me that almost no one (if not "no one at all") got the joke and the punch line, I remembered the wise words of my favorite Hawaiian girl: "the nice thing about these things is to give them to the world and see how people interpret them in their own way and in that way the idea grows and is transformed infinitely."
The image did not go unnoticed, and that tells you something. It morphed and grew considerably, and that also tells you something. The truth is that today I look at it again and I can't keep from smiling as I realize that despite its simplicity and few pretensions, besides making me laugh a while, it succeeded in carving a space for itself in existence and received the honor of being "reinterpreted" by more than one person and grew considerably …
Modesty aside, then, I think its my place to say it was a resounding success.
As I said, these lines ruin its scant magic, since they attempt to explain something that for better or worse exists to be reinterpreted and reinvent itself constantly.
Page
1 of 1
|
