Chilly Most is at it again. He’s made it almost halfway around the world from Hawaii and landed in London so he could do a bit of slap-tagging the way they do it up there.
He’s got this great installation in Piccadilly Circus and I am delighted to have it there. It’s the perfect place. It might be his most important work yet.
It was also fun timing because Chilly Most’s report came in while I was having breakfast with a mutual friend of ours also named Scott, who was, himself, also traveling. To Tucson. It was a very pleasant confluence of events. I showed Scott the photos from Chilly Most.
Chilly Most also saw (and very thankfully and tastefully did not slap-tag) a memorial marker for George Fox, the founder of the funk band Parliament which is now Parliament-Funkadelic. He also saw the graves of Willem Dafoe, who I didn’t even know was dead and who I loved in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Lighthouse, and Daniel Day-Lewis, who I know for a fact is not dead but seems to have a grave in London anyway. He’s that good, I guess.
For Chilly Most’s installation he reached deep into his dwindling quiver and pulled out an Always Free Cheddar In The Mousetrap Baby sticker featuring the likeness of a non-specific googly-eyed plushie monster toy. This sticker is particularly significant to me because the image arose as a sort of ad-hoc logo for two friends of mine, one named Jess and one named Josh. On the left it’s got two interlocked instances of the letter J surrounding a lightning-bolt letter S and on the right there is the reflected figure of the number 21 which was the year I drew the sticker.
The lyric “always free cheddar in the mousetrap baby” is the most frequently-commented on feature of the shirt that I wear with this same graphic. That lyric comes from a song Josh shared with me and Jess, a Tom Waits song called “God’s Away on Business.” The video someone made of the song really captivated my attention.
It’s a great honor to have a proper installation in London. I hope someone in London wanders by and wonders what that sticker is all about just like I wonder about what the one above it is all about. I translated the German and everything and still couldn’t get to the bottom of it.
