"Look at the thing"

October 15, 2024 3:44 PM

Talking about something completely different, Cabel Sasser wants you to look at this thing. Look at it I did, and I am still having the warm and fuzzy feelings.

Video starts at the point of something completely different. Start at the start for the conference background.

Cabel did a talk at XOXO in 2013 that he is not talking about. Cabel co-founded Panic (previously).

And he is giving Wes Cook's life work its due. The thing and more of Wes Cook's things can be viewed here.

posted by weft (33 comments total)

Thank you for posting this! I saw the video over the weekend and was hoping someone would post it to MetaFilter.

Thank you for doing such a great job of inviting people to watch it without giving away all the bits that make it so good.

I highly recommend this to all my fellow MeFites. I am so glad I saw this.

Thank you for sharing this, weft!
posted by kristi at 3:55 PM on October 15 [5 favorites]

OMG, that triptych...
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 5:16 PM on October 15 [20 favorites]

I want to send this to everybody I know! Thanks for posting :)
posted by Toecutter at 6:03 PM on October 15 [2 favorites]

What an incredible body of work by Wes Cook. Thanks for sharing the link!

In the spirit of the "Look at the thing" request, and fast food related: sometime in the early 1980's, a friend and I stopped at a burger king. On the wall behind the counter was a framed, colored, pen and ink drawing depicting the Burger King character, muscled like a bodybuilder, with a torn tunic and bulging veins, holding an equally buff Ronald McDonald, with ripped yellow coveralls, in an arm bar. Poor Ronald was defiant, but definitely losing.

It was clearly not an official /approved artwork. The worker behind the counter noticed us looking and said the franchise owner commissioned a friend to make the piece.
posted by coppertop at 6:08 PM on October 15 [11 favorites]

Oh my goodness. I did not expect this to make me weep, the kind of crying that leaves you with a headache, which I guess I've needed to do for a while. Thank you so much for sharing this!
posted by Sweetie Darling at 6:11 PM on October 15 [7 favorites]

My partner upon us completing this video: “Well, I’ve now named this little thing Wes Cook.” He shall live on as long as Niantic maintains the Peridot servers. What a beautiful video, thank you for sharing.
posted by brook horse at 7:40 PM on October 15 [2 favorites]

That presenter is certainly animated.
posted by Czjewel at 8:18 PM on October 15 [2 favorites]

It's certainly not Wes Cook's design, but they finally did build a Ren and Stimpy Space Madness ride (it's in a doomed mall in New Jersey).
posted by phooky at 8:24 PM on October 15 [3 favorites]

That was beautiful, and I imagine I'm going to think about the message a lot.
posted by Ickster at 8:54 PM on October 15 [3 favorites]

That was so special! Thank you weft and Wes Cook.

Long ago my mother in law, who was a semi-famous artist, painted a large mural of Flora scattering spring flowers in our house, a big house so the mural was about 8 ft high and 20 ft long. A couple of years later when we went bust and had to sell the house, we took the entire wall out so we could keep the mural. It's still stored away, probably disintegrating from damp and neglect, in an abandoned chapel in a remote part of Scotland; I haven't seen it for over thirty years. Maybe one day it will be rescued by someone like Cabel Sasser.
posted by anadem at 9:23 PM on October 15 [10 favorites]

I cannot overstate the magic in the room during this talk. There was a lot of incredible work at XOXO, but "delicious burger" may have become the year's theme because of this.
posted by foxtongue at 9:29 PM on October 15 [8 favorites]

Not to be confused with Look at Your Fish but maybe even more urgent an imperative.
posted by obsoletefuture at 10:01 PM on October 15 [1 favorite]

Well, that was a helluvvva thing.

I really, really, really want to see The Ascension of Ronald.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 10:01 PM on October 15 [4 favorites]

A somewhat similar tale, of finding something by happenstance and following a rabbit-hole, was told by Jason Webley at Webstock '15. The Pyramid at the Bottom of a Garbage Bin
posted by maupuia at 10:22 PM on October 15 [5 favorites]

Being a wanna-be independent Mac developer for about as long as there's been Macs, I am of course a massive Cabel fan. Back in 2007, Cabel blogged about turning down being acquihired by Apple in early 2001 because he and his business partner were committed to putting their efforts into Panic, Inc.

In 2013 they got successful enough to get their own office, with its hidden Founders Room . . .
posted by torokunai at 10:35 PM on October 15 [3 favorites]

There's a design for a Dr.Seuss theme park ride! This is wonderful, top notch work.
posted by CCBC at 10:42 PM on October 15

Best of the web. Thank you for sharing.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:48 PM on October 15 [6 favorites]

Cabel is a Mefite. I'm sad that he never seems to come around here any more. He did yearly fireworks posts on his blog that I miss a lot, and back in 2006 made Buggy Saints Row: The Musical.
posted by JHarris at 10:53 PM on October 15 [7 favorites]

I'm fairly certain I've sat in a room with Wes back in my Disney days. I know it's extraordinarily
popular to crap on Disney as LCD pablum, but damn the artists and designers are so talented and passionate. (and a good many of them with absolutely filthy senses of humor as well)
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:08 PM on October 15 [9 favorites]

That was wonderful. Gotta say I hate the new look McDonalds...looks like something a group of MBAs would come up with.
posted by maxwelton at 11:35 PM on October 15 [2 favorites]

(Also, if you're dropping off of I-5 in Centralia to eat, surely you must go to the Country Cousin, which is right there by the highway? Stopping there to clog your arteries is only thing which makes it possible to endure the gods-forsaken stretch of freeway between Portland and Olympia.)
posted by maxwelton at 11:39 PM on October 15 [3 favorites]

It feels like McDonalds works hard to obliterate any trace of personality in their stores. The restaurant shown in the video, before the remodel, was terrific. Afterward it looked exactly like a bog standard McDonalds like you could find in any town, like you can find in my town. It's awful. How could someone destroy that place for the sake of looking like thousands of other stores?
posted by JHarris at 1:37 AM on October 16 [1 favorite]

So they actually made a musical adaptation of Studs Terkel's book "Working" - it's a whole bunch of monologues and solo songs with people talking about what their jobs are like. This reminded me of the closing number, "Something to Point To" -

Everyone should have something to point to
Something to be proud of
Look what I did, see what I've done
I did the job, I was the one

Cabel is making sure everyone notices Wes Cook has something to point to.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:37 AM on October 16 [10 favorites]

just saying thanks to weft for making my day. maybe a lot of days.
posted by martin q blank at 8:59 AM on October 16 [5 favorites]

Enjoyed that! He crafts a story well. Surprised that I got a bit emotional at the end.
Hilarious about the triptych…in first year art school (1987-ish?) painting class I did this bad painting with a similar idea.
(I was/am not a great artist but totally a smartass. I would always get "Come talk to me" notes from profs.)
Thanks for posting!
posted by chococat at 9:50 AM on October 16 [6 favorites]

There was an "art" McDonald's here in Austin, in that they had a few replicas of semi-famous paintings hanging in a few places. Not many, mind you, but more than the average McDonald's (zero). That particular store has been remodeled to be as soulless, flavorless and bland as the rest of the chain.

While I didn't eat there for the artwork, it was a slightly refreshing change from the norm and I felt like I was eating at a secret McDonald's.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 3:32 PM on October 16 [1 favorite]

They paved Paradise and put up DELICIOUS BURGERS.
posted by 1adam12 at 5:17 PM on October 16 [8 favorites]

I say this as a person who has lived as a commercial artist for 30 years: commercial art may require actual talent, but it is also a total waste of it. Your great work that you did for McDonald's is junk. It's in the same category as Muscular Trump paintings; it's advertising for something horrific that is trying to hide its true nature. Nobody cares about the sensitive brushwork in your painting of the Hamburglar because they fucking shouldn't. It's your artistic talent in the service of the destruction of the world, and it deserves to be forgotten.

And 'put up a portfolio'? I've got a portfolio, you've got a portfolio. There are eight billion people on the face of the earth, and seven and three-quarters billion of them have put up a portfolio. If you can find a way to get people to look at what you did and care about it, good on ya. But if you're going to live as an artist, you better figure out a way to be okay with it if that doesn't happen.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 7:16 PM on October 16 [2 favorites]

Clearly many people do care, and that pisses you off, but that doesn’t make you correct or superior, lol.

Also I’m preeeeetty sure the crucifixion triptych was not, in fact, commissioned by McDonald’s.
posted by brook horse at 5:54 AM on October 17 [7 favorites]

Mod note: What a fantastic discovery and journey to the story of Wes Cook, we've added it to the sidebar and Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:34 AM on October 17 [4 favorites]

That. Was fucking awesome. Thank you.
posted by Oh_Bobloblaw at 11:05 AM on October 17 [1 favorite]

In retrospect, it perhaps shouldn't be that surprising that Wes worked on both McDonaldland and HR Puffenstuff. But it's still quite astonishing when you consider that Sid and Marty Krofft took McDonald's to court over the similarities, when I was a child.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:55 AM on October 18 [2 favorites]

Just saw this video somewhere else and rushed here knowing there would already be a post about it. What a great talk, and Ronald McDonald milking a cow was not something I was expecting to see today (or ever, for that matter).
posted by Literaryhero at 9:11 PM on October 20 [2 favorites]