Hillbilly, Please

The carnival is in town! I cruised around the perimeter taking photos yesterday while they ratcheted various things into place and inflated all manner of nightmare-inducing displays. At least one guy appeared to be trying to set some wires on fire with his lighter.

Author : Artist Liam
Comment:
Hey Hillbilly,

Thanks for the Toscano shout out! I think I need to give you the back story on Toscano.

The British Museum in the early 1800’s used Italian craftsmen to make plaster (the precursor of resin) copies of classic sculptures from museums all over the world. This was before the time of cameras. These pieces would be sold to rich gents, schools and other museums for display. As the market fell off for these kind of pieces the Italian families from Luca immigrated to America with the original molds of these classic historical pieces to find a new market. Toscano was the product on one of these families. Here is one of those pieces that made the voyage over…

Now times and tastes have changed and Design Toscano has had to make the switch to sculptures that grab the publics attention… so to say. In 1980 Toscano was one of the first catalogers to sell gargoyles. They even direct casted the most important gargoyle in the world, Notre Dame’s legendary icon Spitter! Take that Disney!

Design Toscano takes great pains in sculpting every piece with wonderful detail and quality materials (Yes, designer resin and hand painting). I should know because I am one of their staff sculptors. I am just not kissing Toscanos arse because they pay my check and buy me a Guinness at Hoiiday, I really believe in this company for the diversity of what they supply to the consumer. Niche marketing Hillbilly! Everyone cant be Wallmart. I specialize in dragons and mystic art. Design Toscano gives me a free reign to let my imagination flow and bring to life many mystical beings that inhabit my mind. Here is my favorite piece in my Design Toscano collection.

I am working on a new sculpt for Toscano as we speak. Its a giant black raven on a ball plinth, my take on paying homage to Edgar Allen Poe. Watch Toscano for it. I hope you like it.

Lighten up on the resin thing…its better than play doe brother!

Love your blog…
Cheers!

———————–

Dear Artist Liam-

Thank you for visiting my site and schooling me on Toscano. Thank you for doing the search for “design toscano dragon crap” that brought you here. Thank you for the best comment in the history of comments, forever and ever, amen. Thank you, in short, for caring so much about your craft.

I am sorry if I hurt your feelings. That’s the risk I take when I mock something, and I appreciate your good-natured approach to my hostility toward design toscano dragon crap the work you and your colleagues do. I know I don’t have the skills to create anything, much less a giant black raven on a ball plinth, in resin. In fact, I’m currently experiencing difficulty creating one in my mind.

Keep on keeping on, Liam. You rock. You really do.

-Jane (not anyone’s brother)

The post where I mocked Design Toscano back in 2005.

“Should a doctor at any point take a cross section of my brain, she will find patches of scarring and dead tissue, souvenirs of the time I pursued the mystery of magnetism across the 11-dimensional badlands of string theory.”

[via]

Any interaction I have with string theory also leaves scars.

As I pulled onto the exit ramp, I spotted the hitchhiker. He looked like the inexplicable love child of Flea and Ben Kingsley, wiry and tanned, with a large round head and very slightly crazed expression in his eyes. His mutton chops were as white as his shirt was blue. The cardboard sign he held up was disappointingly dull. Someone who looks like that should be holding up a sign rendered from aluminum cans and glitter, or maybe hub caps and antlers. If he carried anything else with him, I didn’t see it because I was concentrating on not flying off the ramp as I wound my way slowly around its poorly graded curve. I hope he made it to Baltimore, but he is probably cooling his heels in jail tonight. Maybe he’ll use this time to upgrade his sign.

“When you stand at a distance and survey this level of nitpicking idiocy, taking in the full landscape of stupidity and meaningless analysis, it’s hard not to conclude that 24-hour rolling news is the worst thing to befall humankind since the Manhattan Project. The focus on conjecture and analysis has reached such an insane degree that pundits are chasing some kind of meaning in the way a presidential candidate scratches his face. This is what lunatics do when they think people on television are sending them personalised messages.”

[via]

When I went to Whole Foods (shut up) at lunch today, a guy was standing at the entrance handing these out and explaining what they meant. He might as well have just read them to each and every one of us for all the time he took. I cut him off and said, “You want us to act like there isn’t a camera crew here, right?”

Right.

I think anyone who knows me or has read this site for any length of time knows that my response to a camera crew is to either retreat or ignore it. As I had important wholesome and organic purchasing to do, I just ignored the buzz in the store, a buzz I attribute to the taut, strained eye muscles of the majority of the people in there trying to simultaneously Act Natural! and spot the camera(s).

Telling people to Act Natural! is just like telling them not to look at something. They immediately do the opposite of what you ask, and so I was treated to a whole host of “natural” behaviors such and posing casually with organic cook books, looking around in a really unsubtle manner hoping to locate and then casually swarm the camera crew, and the most excellent standing in an awkward place in an awkward pose trying to look really casual and unassuming and innocent yet inviting. The last one made me think that’s what prostitutes would look like per Walt Disney.

As I was leaving a camera crew appeared outside the door and appeared to be filming the herb display, the front door, and perhaps the…pavement? I have no idea. It wasn’t until I was in my car that I spotted a gigantic black man in a suit and sunglasses looking a whole lot like a bodyguard, and that is when I knew Emeril was among us.

I saw him as I pulled out of the parking lot. I very briefly toyed with the idea of driving toward them to see what the bodyguard would do, but decided against it. In a battle between my car and this guy, my car would lose.

As I am largely indifferent to cooking shows, I will probably never see whatever is being filmed at my local (i.e., near work) Whole Foods, but you might. And if you do, I don’t want to hear about it, okay?

The slag bitch young lady sitting to my right at the Eddie Izzard show tonight punctured my eardrum with her WOOOOOOOOOOOs and YEAHs and HAHAHAHAHAHAs, and it was all very CAN YOU HEAR ME? I’M LAUGHING LOUDER THAN EVERYBODY ELSE BECAUSE I AM WAY COOLER (AND REALLY DRUNK). ALSO HI EDDIE! PLEASE NOTICE ME!

So I killed her.