Ive got a passion for the subtly mangled english which thrives in southeast asia- in signage, on menus, on bootleged clothes and cds. Really, its what keeps going on some days. Like when youre fighting to get through a throng of people, almost at wit's end and you see a girl with a pink baby tee that reads "HIB HIP FOREVER"... it kind of makes it all worthwhile. Ive developed a taste for these things. Simple misspelled words or botched syntax are child's play- it's when you see a menu advertising "Roast Fork" that the magic happens. Yesterday I bought genevieve a nylon packpack with a graphic of two bunnies gently chewing grass with the inscription, written in a wavering, romantic font "Will Always To". Sometime the graphics and words are amusing not for their mistakes, but just for sheer strangeness. In one hotel room we had a trash can that read "CHALLENGE" with a picture of an old-time race horse below then "WASTE BASKET" in even larger letters and finally, as a small afterthought "happiness to everybody". We weren't sure what the designers over at Challenge Waste Basket were trying to say with all this- were they challenging us to use the wastebasket? Did the horse represent to basket, or the user, or perhaps the waste itself? and was "happiness to everybody" a simple positive message, or were they claiming that the waste basket would bring this about, or maybe this was another part of their challenge to us... mindboggling.
Opening the bootleg CDs i buy is always a treat because they print what they make out to be the title from the muddled, photocopied covers. I bought a CD called "Dread Meets Punk Rocker"- a collection of 77 punk band's attempts at dub songs. The Cd inside read "Bread meets Punk Rocker" and attributed it to "death", because that word appeared in the graphic on the cover. A copy of DJ Shadow "Brainfreeze" became "Dj Shadow HIM RAZOO" for a reason I can't imagine.
And the text on the DVDs weve been buying here are worth the dollar you pay for them alone. I found a copy of the Godfather trilogy where the jacket text began "He's a big blue monster.." -it was from the box of "Monsters Inc" (i tried to get my head around that one "Mobsters" to "Monsters'... but no). Often the jacket copyseems to be there just to look like a real DVD sleeve, often it's just tangentially related to the movie inside. The blurb from the copy of "The Life Aquatic" we got here reads like beat poetry: something like "Him have best habit of return to ocean floor going. Without there fishes once a bad experience: eating of number one partner." and so on. Plus, they always include quotations from reviews on the cover, but seem blissfully unaware that it's the good reveiws which usually get that distinction. Their quotes, probably taken at random from the internet are not good advertisment. Covers will sometimes feature bold quotes like "BARELY TOLERABLE!"- roger ebert, or "derivitive and boring.. with some good peformances"-new york times. This all brings me great delight and joy when all else fails. Does anyone else have any good examples of this action? "It give GOOD FEELING!" i think.