Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Muffler Man

Muffler Man: A larger-than-life-size fiberglass statue used for commercial purposes, often by gas stations to promote muffler sales. Muffler Men are found throughout the United States in various guises; they stand between 18 and 25 feet tall and have hollow bodies, broad shoulders, “well-chiseled” facial features, and big, blocky shoes.

 

Muffler Man with muffler, Escondido (Southern California). From Weird California.

 

The definitive source for Muffler Man lore is the Roadside America website, which features photo galleries, a guide to subspecies (Noble Savage, Happy Half-Wit, etc.), and an interview with Steve Dashew, whose company, International Fiberglass in Venice, California, created hundreds of Muffler Men between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s, when Dashew retired. Dashew told Roadside America that the first Muffler Man was a Paul Bunyan figure built for the PB Café in Flagstaff, Arizona, in about 1962. After Dashew bought the company in 1963, he signed agreements with Texaco, Phillips, and Uniroyal, as well as with restaurants and retail stores, to make branded versions of the original mold.

 

Muffler Man with hot dog. (Wikipedia.)

 

How to identify a Muffler Man. (Roadside America.)

 

The Uniroyal Gal, rumored to be modeled after Jacqueline Kennedy, came in two versions: bikinied or beskirted.

 

Beskirted Uniroyal Gal in Peoria, Illinois. (Roadside America)

I’ve seen Muffler Men from time to time over the years and never given them much thought. (Disclaimer: I grew up in Los Angeles, where early and frequent exposure to restaurants shaped like hats, doughnuts, and owls no doubt made me a jaded observer of surreal real estate.) It wasn’t until I read a recent post in Brave New Malden—a British blog, I am chagrined to report—that I learned the term “Muffler Men” and realized that the big statues I’d been blithely disregarding all this time were a recognized folk-art medium.

One of the oddest and most endearing subspecies of Muffler Man is Chicken Boy, who loomed for many years over an eponymous restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. (Broadway between Fourth and Fifth streets, for those who know the territory.) Chicken Boy—a chicken-headed man holding a symbolic bucket of deep-fried chicken parts, something you probably don’t want to think about too deeply—was customized from an International Fiberglass mold in the late 1960s. When Amy Inouye moved to L.A. in the mid-1970s, she took an immediate shine to Chicken Boy; as she writes on the Chicken Boy website, “he communicated to me that if he could be okay living in LA, I could be okay living in LA.”

Cover of an early Chicken Boy catalog, featuring the Boy himself.

The restaurant closed in 1984, and Amy Inouye set about saving the statue, which she calls “the Statue of Liberty of Los Angeles.” It took 23 years, but Chicken Boy at last found a new home atop Inouye’s design studio in Highland Park, just north of downtown L.A. In the interim, Inouye published the Chicken Boy Catalog for a Better World, “a catalog of gift items including Chicken Boy logo merchandise and things Chicken Boy would be proud to have in his home or give as a lovely hostess gift.” (I was an early subscriber to the catalog, and I’m happy to say you can still buy many CB items here.)

 

One more digression: In addition to the beefy, humanoid Muffler Men, there’s a different species of muffler men that are actually crafted from mufflers and other auto parts. Muffler Men, published by the University of Mississippi Press in 2000, is a scholarly examination by folklorists Timothy Corrigan Correll and Patrick Arthur Polk of the handmade muffler sculptures that take the form of “cowboys, dogs, robots, space aliens, and a host of other creatures.” This breed of muffler men is not exclusive to the United States; Correll and Polk report that they’ve heard of sightings in Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Holland, and elsewhere.

How to Save a Lot of Money on Name Development

Frustrated by the challenge of creating a fresh, appealing, and memorable name for your business?

Why not just give up?

That’s what the Whitney Museum is doing, according to a post this week in the New York Times’s Diner’s Journal blog:

Fitting its locale, the restaurant that Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group is to open next month in the lower level of the Whitney Museum of American Art will be called Untitled. The museum’s director, Adam Weinberg, came up with the name. Its chef will be Chris Bradley, who was the executive sous chef at Gramercy Tavern. It will serve breakfast and lunch on days when the museum is open, as well as dinner, with a set menu, on Saturdays and Sundays.

(Hat tip: Laura Scheflow.)

“Fitting its locale,” indeed. Very meta, Mr. Weinberg! Very referential, as they say in art criticism, to give a shout-out to all those untitled works of art hanging on the walls.

Also, alas, derivative. Or as regular folks would say, unoriginal.

Once upon a very recent time, a Seattle social-media startup faced a similar naming dilemma and came up with the identical solution. Things did not work out well for “Untitled Startup,” explains co-founder Adam Schoenfeld:

This is the kind of call we’ve had from accounting departments at a few large customers recently:

Me: “Hello. This is Adam.”

Caller: “Hi. [Awkward Pause] I have a $500 charge on my credit card from ‘Untitled.’ This number was listed. What the hell is going on here?”

Me: “Let me explain...”

(Via Name Inspector.)

It’s a relief to learn that Mr. Schoenfeld has renamed his company Simply Measured, a much more meaningful, positive, and sensible name.

It’s possible that the Whitney’s Untitled will prove to be a more effective name than Untitled Startup; after all, art patrons are a different market than social-media customers, and maybe “too clever by half” is exactly what thrills the museum’s visitors. Let’s just hope the menu turns out to have more flavor than the sign on the door.

__

Read my other posts about restaurant names.

Read my 2008 post about an Oakland nonprofit called The Nameless.

The Fritinancy Giftapalooza!

Wordy, worldly gifts suitable for any wintertide occasion, including Hanukkah (this year: sunset Dec. 1 through sunset Dec. 8).

1. Postcard telegrams. “Designed to resemble cable-service telegrams—complete with class of service designations, an area to fill in the charge amount, and an official-looking office-of-origin stamp (your messages will appear to be sent from Portland, Oregon)—these letterpress-printed cards have an authentically vintage feel.”

Especially nice if you actually reside in Portland, Oregon. From Bas Bleu. Six cards plus envelopes, $16.95.

2. Library candles and scent diffusers. “Pairing favorite quotes with exquisite fragrances, we pay homage to the literary greats.” In Dickens, Whitman, Austen, Thoreau, and Poe. Shown below: the Dickens (a blend of tangerine, juniper, and clove); the quote reads, “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

 

From Paddywax (excellent name!). The 60-hour soy candle is $25; the library travel tin is $9.95.

 

3. QWERTY keyboard carryall bag.

I confess I got a little swoony with desire when I saw this whimsical-yet-practical bag at Kate Spade. It’s made of “Italian smooth shiny cowhide” with 14k gold-plated hardware—which I would forgo if it meant reducing the $495 price. On the other hand, if each of you readers chipped in 50 cents . . .

4. OK, by Allan Metcalf.

A whole book about “OK”? Oh, yes. Because as author Allan Metcalf says, “It’s OK the Great: the most successful and influential word ever invented in America.” His recently published book is a dandy gift that enables the reader to win bets (no, “OK” doesn’t derive from Choctaw), learn about American history (Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson figure into the narrative), and gain insights into literary classics (Louisa May Alcott used “okay” in the first edition of Little Women). And there’s brand history, too (I wrote about that angle last month in a post about OK Soda). Bonus gift: an interview with Allan Metcalf on the Oxford University press blog.

Culture Break: Oakland Museum of California

The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) reopens to the public this weekend after an eight-month, $58 million renovation that includes a new logo, a new website, an expansion of the galleries, and newly integrated collections. I attended the members' preview on April 29 and had a grand time. I'll leave the serious critiques of the new art and history galleries to more qualified observers—and won't say anything about the new restaurant, Blue Oak, which won't open for another month, except that it's sure to be an improvement over its school-cafeteria-style predecessor.

In the meantime, here's some fun stuff  from the preview party you probably won't read about elsewhere.

Logo Trend: Tall and Skinny

North Americans may be getting wider, but our logos are headed in the opposite direction: narrow and vertical. The trend is especially evident among cultural institutions.

Here's a moderate example from L.A.'s Getty Museum:

Note the squished-up GETTY against the black background.

Here in my own area code, the Oakland Museum redesigned its logo in conjunction with a major overhaul of the galleries. (The museum has been closed since late August and will reopen May 1.)
See the former identity here. From even further back, I remember a pre-CA Oakland Museum; I still own an "OM" T-shirt from that era.

Museums aren't the only organizations opting for an anorexic image. Below right is the new logo of the public-radio show This American Life, juxtaposed with the old logo.

Those images come from Brand New, which asks: "For a show that focuses on the commonalities of American lives, why divide ‘American’ into two words?"

Here's a tall-and-skinny logo that appears to have undergone liposuction:

 

Does anyone else read "budget cuts" in the Indianapolis Museum of Art's new logo? (See before-and-after images at Brand New.) By the way, the Indianapolis Museum's URL is imamuseum.org, as in "I'm a museum—what are you?"

The Philadelphia History Museum also seems pressed for space. Compare with the previous logo here (Brand New again).

An extreme example of the compression trend, from Griffin Theater Company, Sydney.

Before-and-after images from Brand New, which points out that the new typeface is a monospace font: each character is given the same amount of space.

Tempting as it is to put a sociocultural gloss on this trend—recessionary squeeze? do more with less?— Tall and Skinny is probably just one of those fads that sweep the design community every decade or so. Back in the early 2000s, every third logo seemed to feature a tilted ellipse. (See, for example, the Gore-Lieberman campaign logo.) This time around, is it reaching too much to speculate that the King Tut exhibit, currently on tour, has inspired a revival of interest in Egyptian cartouches?

Cartouche image from here.

Word of the Week: Yarn Bombing

Yarn bombing: "The surreptitious or unauthorized placement of knitted objects on statues, posts, and other public structures." — Word Spy

Word Spy's earliest citation for yarn bombing (sometimes spelled yarnbombing) comes from the Ottawa Citizen, March 11, 2006:

There's a subversive group of knitters in Montrose, Texas, for example, calling themselves Knitta, that say they "yarn bomb" neighbourhoods with knitting graffiti — colourful knitted objects they leave in unexpected places — to help bring a warm, fuzzy feeling to their communities.

The Knitta group was started in 2005 by pseudonymous knitters AKrylik and PolyCotN; their first project was a doorknob cozy. Group members styled themeselves after rap artists and assumed names such as Knitorious N.I.T., SonOfAStitch, and P-Knitty. The practice spread throughout North America and the United Kingdom. 

Some yarn bombers publish their work in blogs. KnittaPlease (motto: "We knit graffiti") is a tongue-in-cheek allusion to "nigga, please," street slang for "give me a break." Yarnbombing.com ("Improving the urban landscape one stitch at a time") cast off the cloak of anonymity when its authors, Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain, published a book.

The bomb in yarn bombing is an older slang term from the lexicon of spray-can graffiti. To bomb (or hit) is to spray many surfaces in an area. A bomb can also be a spectacular failure (chiefly U.S.) or a spectacular success (chiefly U.K., but appropriated in U.S. slang as "the bomb").

Yarn bomb is just one of many -bomb compounds invented in recent years. See, for example, photobomb (to hijack a photo by suddenly entering the frame; watch video of Oscar-nominated actress Gabourey Sidoube describing to TV host Jimmy Kimmel her photobombing of Jake Gyllenhaal); Google bomb (the practice of using anchor text to manipulate search engine results, often for malicious purposes); meat-bomb (a parachutist); and, in the world of product trademarks, Flowerbomb, a fragrance by Viktor & Rolf. See other bomb compounds and definitions at Double-Tongued Dictionary.

__

Bus photo from Yarn Bombing.

Those Does, Revisited

Lawrence Yang, "information architecture nerd by day, art nerd by night," read my post on the Droid phone's "bucket of does" and decided to illustrate it. The result is exactly what I would have created if I had art skillz. Go take a look.

The Annunciation

I got a flu shot at Kaiser last month and noticed this sign in a hallway:

I couldn't remember previously seeing an "Annunciator" anywhere. I assumed it was a brand name like the fondly remembered Ticket Spitter. But no: it's a generic term. Merriam-Webster says an "annunciator" is "a usually electrically controlled signal board or indicator."

Still, can you blame me for expecting to hear a chorus of hosannas?

Botticelli, The Cestello Annunciation, 1489-1490

NEA's New Slogan

The National Endowment for the Arts has a new director, New York theater producer Rocco Landesman, who received Senate confirmation last week. Landesman has already indicated that his tenure will be different in at least one way from that of his predecessor, poet Dana Gioia. From an interview with Landesman published last Saturday in the New York Times:

The new chairman said he already has a new slogan for his agency: “Art Works.” It’s “something muscular that says, ‘We matter.’ ” The words are meant to highlight both art’s role as an economic driver and the fact that people who work in the arts are themselves a critical part of the economy. ...

“Someone who works in the arts is every bit as gainfully employed as someone who works in an auto plant or a steel mill,” Mr. Landesman said. “We’re going to make the point till people are tired of hearing it.”

As for the former agency slogan, “A Great Nation Deserves Great Art,” he said, “We might as well just apologize right off the bat.”

The old slogan had long been unpopular with some prominent critics. Here's what the Los Angeles Times arts blog, Culture Monster, said about it in May:

Wince. That imperial bit of provincial pomposity has things exactly backward.

Culture Monster proposed, instead: "Great Art Makes a Great Nation."

"Ms. Cosmopolite," the blog written by the executive director of L.A.'s Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM), had this to say in March, in a post titled "If I Ran the NEA":

First, I would do away with the current NEA slogan, “Because a great nation deserves great art.” This line gives me the hives from start to finish and raises many questions. Does a great nation come before great art or the other way around? Based on what criteria does one define greatness? I also don’t get the deserve part. Is there a nation on the planet that doesn’t merit culture? In my mind, the creation of art does not occur in a parallel universe, but is a naturally occurring byproduct of society. Instead of this rather empty line, I would borrow the slogan of a colleague of mine from the Festival of Philippine Arts & Culture that captures my sentiment perfectly: Art=Culture=Community

To my own ear, "Art Works" is the best solution of all. It's succinct, it's positive, it puts "art" in the first position, and it includes an active verb. It plays on artworks, the noun, and has a roll-up-your-sleeves, WPA* flavor that suits the current era of cutbacks and belt tightening.

I'm looking forward to seeing whether Landesman's innovations go beyond slogans. He certainly represents a stylistic change from the mild, conciliatory Gioia, a published poet. In the Times story, a colleague described Landesman as "mercurial," "unpredictable," and "an extraordinarily hardheaded businessman."

He's also a guy who doesn't shrink from making controversial statements on the record:

In American politics generally, [Landesman] added: “The arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.” 

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

__

* Works Progress Administration, 1935-1943.

The Hub: My Guest Post at InBerkeley.com

I'm a border-crossing guest contributor today at InBerkeley.com, the local-journalism blog started by Lance Knobel and Dave Winer. I don't live in Berkeley, but I did attend last night's "Money, Mobs, and Media" panel discussion at the new David Brower Center near the UC campus*, and I somehow sorta found myself volunteering to file a report.

The event was sponsored by The Hub Bay Area, the first U.S. location of an international network of collaborative workspaces for social innovators. The actual office won't open for a couple of weeks, but the renderings look appealing and the Brower Center is a beautiful and inspirational addition to downtown Berkeley.

A handful of observations I didn't include in my InBerkeley story but thought you'd enjoy:

• One of the group workspaces at The Hub is called The Hubble, which appears to be a portmanteau of hub and huddle. (It does not appear to be connected to the Hubble Telescope, which was named for astronomer Edwin P. Hubble.) Love the name. It has room for eight people and is surrounded by frosted glass walls that form a writeable surface. Love the concept.
• The home page of the Bay Area Hub website includes this phrase: "During the day, The Hub is a dynamic, collision-rich workspace..." Collision-rich? Ow! I hope they have really good liability insurance.
• Last night's panel featured the founders of three prominent social-innovation organizations: Kiva, Virgance, and Change.org. Not only do the three companies represent different approaches to social change, but their names represent three distinct name styles. I'm working on a post comparing the three names.
• Filing my report on InBerkeley.com required my learning the rudiments of WordPress. I'm told it's a vastly superior blogging platform to TypePad (which hosts my own blog), but naturally I felt like a complete oaf. Learning stuff is hard!
• If you find yourself in downtown Berkeley, do check out the Brower Center, which was designed by prominent Bay Area architect Daniel Solomon to the most rigorous "green" standards. (Example: recycled rainwater in the toilets.) Through Jan. 31, 2010, there's a stunning exhibit in the  main-floor Hazel Wolf Gallery of the large-format black-and-white photographs of Sebastião Salgado, which span 30 years and several continents. Born in Brazil, Salgado began his career as an economist and taught himself photography in order to document the lives of the world's poor, displaced, and oppressed people. Despite what may seem to be depressing subject matter, the photographs are breathtakingly beautiful. Definitely worth a visit.

___

* I included the Brower Center's address in the InBerkeley post but neglected to do so here: 2150 Allston Way. Thanks, Jon Carroll, for the reminder.