Class

I don’t only draw chickens.

(c) 15/01/2005 Poulet Noir

Braise the Lord

I had a chaplin at school more memorable for his beard than his name. He was a Russian Orthodox priest, and was always on the lookout for blasphemy and Satanism among our posters and music. One particular bugbear was the playing of records backwards to find hidden (and therefore morally corrupt) words. It dawns on me only now, 14 years later, that his fears were almost certainly motivated by his guilty knowlege that Jesus is “sausage” in reverse.

Love is… trite

I detest the Love Is… series of posters almost as much as I hate Anne Geddes, the one-trick photographer whose pictures of infants in fruit costumes prey on the worst sentimental excesses of baby-fetishistic women. I don’t just despise them for their oozing schmaltziness, although that is reason enough. What really irks is the artist’s contrived naivety. If Kim Casali or her successor, Bill Asprey, had any wit, they could have turned their one-dimensional creations into something more human. Love is… nauseating, deceptive, a prerequisite for monogamy.

And surely the definitive poster would be this:

Amin Emin

I don’t like to scaremonger. It’s not responsible. Still, you can’t help but notice. Idi Amin and Tracey Emin. Never at the same parties, are they?

Alien queen

There is some speculation, midway through the film Aliens, as to whether the alien species of the title organises itself in a similar hierarchy to ants, with a queen at the top. “Yeah man,” says Hudson, insightfully. “The queen alien is gonna be really big.” A lucky guess, as it turns out, but not the only possibilty. The alien queen could so easily have looked like this:

(click to enlarge)