i definitely feel like i've already provided an example of the willingness of chilenos and chilenas to don absurdly banal t-shirts in the name of being funny in english, but there is another, perhaps more unsettling/kinda rad t-shirt phenom taking place in this country, one that must be addressed posthaste.
as far as i can tell, chileans will buy/fight/kill indiscriminately for shirts with ANY english typography, logos, or fonts. i can hardly articulate how vast this infatuation is, but i can easily state that i noticed it immediately. the second we walked into our hostel in the wee hours of friday, february 8th, the young man at the reception desk provided me with an example of the hysteria. guillermo (now willy g. {guillermo = will in english}) was sporting a mcdonald's employee of the month shirt with pride.
sure, ha, kinda funny. why not. but this was just the beginning of gradual recognition of a rather pervasive epidemic. it ends (or does it?) with the included picture. i took this shot outside the mueso de bellas artes (art museum in santiago) where a bunch of bohemian trend setters and fledgling drug dealers kick it and sell their sometimes awesome sundries. there is also a major pressence of cats selling an incredibly random assortment of used american t-shirts with an inexplicable range of random statements, labels, and logos. we've actually joked about returning to this spot come the end of our stay in chile to sell our clothes if we need the luggage space. we've joked, but it's hardly a ruse. these people would literally buy our clothes.
but i digress, the gentleman pictured (let's call him edison for simplicity's sake) is sporting an "uh-oh" shirt. i could not gaurantee it, but i'm almost positive edison and his fellow countrymen have no idea what "uh-oh" is. heck, i'd venture a guess that there are maybe 47 americans that even know what it is. those 47 americans probably spent some time in canada at some point.
"uh-oh" is a canadian children's game-show that, as far as wikipedia knows, ceased to exist back in 2003 after a 6 year run of exploiting, quizzing, rewarding, and covering kids in gooey, sugary slime. i'm sure nickelodeon ran some comparable television programming, but over on Canada's YTV back in the day, "uh-oh" may have just been the cat's pajamas.
so yeah, whatever, blah blah, what astounded me was that i had actually been on this show, in a way. my 8th grade class was selected (as many were) to take part in a taping as the audience and contestants. i didn't have the cajones to go up in front of everyone and try to be funny (strange, yes) so i defaulted myself to the audience while 6 of the kookiest acting folks were selected as contestants. of course, everyone on the show is given a "uh-oh" shirt, red for the red team, green for the green. i guess our man here was on the green team. i hope he made it home with a super nintendo or a tv/vcr combo or something of the sort.
a day later i saw a dude with a "white rose" t-shirt. white rose was (r.i.p.) a home and garden store in canada that went bankrupt in 2000 according the the blurb on wikipedia. unfortunately, the life and death of white rose has not been deemed significant enough to warrant an actual wikipage. ah well, its spirit lives on in the southern hemisphere.
when i was in the college, i read an article on the auxiliary markets of retired american clothes in africa. every dialect on the continent has its own term to refer to the phenom. it even said something about how in africa, you can find the shirts for the losing teams of world series and superbowls, declaring them winners. as in, right now, some crate is being unloaded and it's filled with "NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS, SUPERBOWL 2008 CHAMPIONS" shirts. but it's a different reality in chile. here, many people are just super down with all that is american culture. it's kinda endearing really. instead of being shunned as we (that's right, WE) do in parts of europe and elsewhere, a lot of chile and latin america dig on the america. it's pervasive in the music, the food, the movies, but that can be said of a lot of places. the fact that some cat will sport an "uh-oh" shirt, just because he thinks that somewhere in america, that shit is rad, is indicative of a whole chilean subculture that is infatuated with all the beautiful things produced up in that northern hemi. at least someone is focusing on the good we've done. palabra.
*I* would not have even remembered what Uh-Oh was if not for this post. I remember the show, and the red vs. green... but I would not have made the connection to the name. Then again, my 8th grade class didn't do shit.
ReplyDeleteAnd even though I think I already knew it, the demise of White Rose makes me a little sad inside. Where do kids go to buy the really nice markers now, while their parents look at far less interesting things? Except for Christmas time, when not being in the marker section could still potentially be fun.
Knowing that White Rose lives on in the hearts and minds of Chileans does ease the sadness, though.
palabra bro
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