I had not hithertofore been aware of Raggedy Angels. I’m…dubious of the concept. They apparently have startling, wormlike hair. I’m not going to hold that against someone (it would chafe), and metal starlike protrusions embedded in their craniums. Really, I’m okay with that. But in the world of raggedy…creatures…is the strip of blue check meant to be a cute little collar, or a horrible toothy maw? The jury is still out. And that triangle–not so much a cute little fabric nose as the rude gash of a skull. Noses are smaller, and, well, substantially more noselike.

Someone, somewhere is making these things, these “raggedy angels.” Would they please stop? CAN they be stopped?

“It’s so easy,” she whispered, her grandmotherly facade slipping to reveal the face of an addict, or the sweaty mien of an insurance agent hellbent on a sale. It just takes…a little thread.”

Oh, wait, there’s more? I’m actually feeling a bit safer now. Anyone that would commit raggedy angel is clearly possessed of a heart devoid of warmth, love, and human feeling. They’re just going through the motions, really.

Incoming!!

You can question their sanity, but not their methods… The Third Biddy Brigade, the US Air Force’s oldest (on a per-capita basis) squadron flew over 200 sorties during the Gulf War and seriously weakened the enemy’s military infrastructure, all without dropping a single bomb. They went through a heck of a lot of thread though.

Raggedy angels: like a drop bear, but at Goodwill.

Goodwill on 183 and Metric. You can’t have the Goodwill on 183 and Metric, we’re going steady. It gave me its class ring.

I’ve watched the Wizard of Ozsubstantially more than once. I read the book a few times, and the Cowardly Lion has never struck me as particularly “gangster.” Even if you catch The Wiz, where the action starts in Harlem, the Emerald City is superimposed over the Big Apple, the lion appears outside a library, breaking free from a big concrete lion to menace the travellers. So…street, no. Mean, possibly, cowardly, definitely. Gangster? No sir.

But he can’t help trying.

It’s actually IMPOSSIBLE to look street when you’re sitting in a big pile of stuffed animals. Scientific tests have been done. Very respected members of the rap community, urban luminaries, were asked to hang, or possibly chill, while nestling ET-style in a pile of stuffed bunnies and amiable teddy bears. Results showed a startling loss of over 75% of street credibility, and most subjects experienced a strong desire to bury themselves further in the pile while making happy burbling noises.

It’s also VERY hard to display any real attitude or adopt an urban posture while being naked in a thrift store, or, alternatively, dressed in a lion costume. Can’t be done.

But we forgive him for trying.

Lion: “You don’t have any courage for me in that bag, do you?”
Wizard: “Many men, and indeed, some lions, go forth into the world with little more courage than you do. But they DO have street cred. Therefore, by the authority vested in me by the Street and Urban Development Society of Oz, or ‘SUDSO,’ I give you this bling.”
Hangs a large gold “OZ” logo around Lion’s neck.
Lion: “Shucks, folks, I’m speechless.”

Somewhere over the rainbow, Stassney and Manchaca, Austin

Can you smell what the Duck is cooking?!?

Okay, maybe not, but don’t let the satin dress and pink headband fool you–she’s the uncontested queen of Collectibles. Each one of those pearls she ripped from the neck of her enemies, that sash is a RIBBON OF HONOR and GLORY for her many victories.

Oh, I used the wrong picture.

There we go. Now you can see the bodies of the fallen in broken disarray around her. This is a powerful duck.

It’s also apparently a collectible duck? Is she part of a set? Maybe each one comes in a different color, and they fight the forces of the Clown Lord with a series of dramatic poses, and at the end of each episode his buffoonish minions grow to about 100 times their normal size and trample through Women’s Garments and the Electronics Section, scattering clothes and shattering house goods (that may be redundant–this is a thrift store, and the plates were pretty chipped to begin with, and the electronics really were a little dodgy anyway).

She and her five sisters together form a Super Mecha Battle Duck Bot, as strong as FIFTY stuffed ducks in dresses.

So, basically, the clowns probably don’t have that much to be afraid of.

Savers on Burnet near 2222, Austin

Tiny bundle of adorableness, or BASKET OF MURDER?? You be the judge.

Things made with real fur end up on the “horrors” shelf far, far too easily. This is not an ethical judgement on fur, though using scraps of bunny fur to make a basket of itty bitty tiny kittens does seem a little shady somehow. No, when bits and pieces of a living creature have seen heavy wear, ended up going through a washer, been savaged by spaniels or ruined by rugrats, they add a special sort of pathos to the final product. Then, when clerks slap a $1.99 sticker on it, they gain a new sense of tragedy, a context to their original owner’s death. Mmm, delicious tragedy.

So…kittens.

Faceless kittens.

Were their tiny little kitten noses gnawed off by mice? Is this the first of a race of eyeless cave-cats? Are they content?

The one in front at least doesn’t look very happy. It looks a bit like an extremely hairy elderly man trying to chew a Tootsie Roll with only his front three teeth. An elderly man who is so very old that his nose has been replaced by a piece of either flint or chert, because cosmetic surgery wasn’t as advanced in 1830 as it is now.

I’m still not sure how many kittens we’re facing off with. Poor wording there. There looks to be two little kittens, with three little bodies. Bad enough that we’ve lost our faces, someone’s completely lost its head. I tried to find it in the $.99 bin, but…no luck. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadfound it, an apology just doesn’t seem adequate.

Goodwill near Parmer and I35, Austin

It’s just like a scene out of Chariots of the Gods?, but with a LOT more glitter. Well, a little more glitter, the ancient Mayans actually knew things about foundations, shimmer eyeliner and sparkle makeup than we’ve yet uncovered with our puny 21st Century understanding of cosmetology, and we’re still learning from their secrets.

There is the SLIMMEST chance that this is Jesus.

Okay, granted, I said that about three stuffed teddy bears and the Assistant Manager at Savers on South Lamar, but I actually mean it. It’s got a sort of “Infant of Prague” thing happening, and the little gem clasp has a certain saint-like quality to it. I guess the real answer there would be “what is it holding in its other hand. Or is it judging the weight of our souls? If your sins amass to more than this Chalice, which is filled with Purity, then your soul will be lost forever among the Precious Moments statues on the third shelf. Woe unto you!

If it IS Jesus, then it is perfectly appropriate that angels and shepherdesses should dance beside it, singing its praises. If it’s merely a 30-foot-tall blank-eyed child holding the Holy Grail, light pulsing from its carbuncle, then really I’d expect to see a FEW more shepherdesses there. Have a sense of occasion!

One of my other friends is strongly supporting the sciapod theory, that is, that this is a member of an ancient race with only one foot who can use their prodigious extremity to shield themselves from the rain. I told him he was being silly. If that was the case, it wouldn’t need the overcoat. But this little guy…girl…entity…does have an unusual degree of bilateral symmetry.

And huge, pale, staring eyes. And lips pursed with contempt. And some sort of strange, horrid roll of flesh around its neck, possibly containing its lymphatic system, or strange mind-controlling organs, or its limited capacity for empathy.

So, maybe it’s Jesus, or maybe it’s a pale-skinned outsider from the Alphan Quadrant, holding a goblet of nanites that will soon remake us in its own image. Either way, make way for our new alien overlord!

Goodwill near Parmer and I35, Austin

On the plus side, I’m pretty sure this isn’t Obama. Not 100%, but like 70%. If it WAS Obama, I could start to deconstruct this properly. As it is, I do not know. The image did not come with an answer key, even if you tried to read it upside down.

So, free-associate with me. Are you seeing the Twin Towers and 9/11? Maybe. The image swirls off into whorls of nothing, like smoke rising from a disaster. The verticality of the fingers lends a tower-like aspect, but it’s NOT a building, but a guy with a big toothy smile, and terrorists have just flown two planes into his coiffure. So, that may just throw the tower idea out the window.

Then there’s the hand. His hand? A universal hand? A hand raised in patriotic fervor, willing to take a pledge to better the United States? A hand melting out of the haunting regularity of…uh…maybe a TV screen…holding patriotism in its palm like tinsel. The MEDIA! This is about the media, who are…on fire! No, no, that’s not it.

Um. I’ve got it. The NOTHING is coming to devour all of Fantasia, starting with its cheerfully insincere senator. And Atreyu has been sent to find a human child to make an unbiased vote so that President Moonchild can successfully pass an energy bill.

Really sorry about the image quality in this photograph, but there’s only so much Adobe Photoshop can do, and clearly, it’s done enough today.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

I really do think the overall quality of the heavenly host is slipping. Something about them seems tawdry, I don’t know what it is. It MIGHT be that they’re wearing Umbrella Hats, which weren’t really all that funny even in the 90′s when you could get a Sinbad movie greenlighted. 

No, it’s probably the way she’s holding her dress open for all takers, with a big “Come and GET it!” sign on there.

Unless she’s actually found a way to KEEP rainy days up her skirts. That would be impressive. And probably hygienic.  

The world of whimsical ceramic miniatures really has its work cut out for it in terms of audience suspension of disbelief. On the one hand, I might imagine that this was a small and whimsical novelty with no existence other than as a receptacle for spare change, despite its obviously anthropomorphic–angelopomorphic?–design.

On the other hand, I might imagine that this was a life-sized Seraphim hanging out on the celestial street corner with a sign saying “Bored? Sample the goods. They are QUITE wholesome.”

Seriously, gift designers, think of your audience! Give me clear guidelines for interpreting your creations, so I might appreciate them as they were intended! This one’s just kind of creeping me out. Plus, I think the Raggedy Andy miniature on the next shelf was getting ideas.

Goodwill on Metric and 183, Austin. The only Goodwill that sounds like Barry White when it sings.

If you’re just possibly looking for a picture of three bunny-gods with infinity-faces wearing dresses made from crazy-quilts walking into a driving wind that plasters giant butterflies to their faces, it is JUST possible that you could have been in luck at Goodwill.

Or maybe this is what anthropomorphic paisleys look like, once they escape from the neckties and vests that hold them prisoner. Maybe what we know as “paisley” is actually a projection of these infinitely complex, higher-dimensional beings, where they intersect this dimension, strange tangent-slices of an alien life form (with butterflies stuck to their faces by an unfortunately damp wind, with a wet splat).

Or maybe it’s a remarkably accurate attempt to depict the Monkey God drifting through time on his chariot cloud, but with really long, floppy ears. The real trick is getting a model for that one. Kind of like “Nude Falling Downstairs,” but with monkey-rabbits.

Gaze into the infinite aum of its face. Or faces. Experience infinity and peace. And a foot-wide soggy butterfly to the face.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

You could put cream in here. You could put flowers in this, or a small amount of tea. But you’d be fooling yourself. The only thing that belongs in here is salt water, plankton, the spent gruntings of Ouranus the father of gods and titans, or possibly tarballs.

For clarity, Ouranus is not the father of tarballs. That would be a completely different, if only slightly weirder, myth.

This is probably deeply symbolic of something. A massive urn of…well, probably coral. Some sort of strange blue tendril, it’s definitely got a wavelike quality, or maybe it’s the the dorsal fin of an astonishingly elongated and quite flexible fish. All of it mired in barnacles, anemones, shells, starfish, and assorted unidentified sea-floor strata. How benthic of it.

Or maybe they’re being crushed by its massive bulk, barely able to support this monstrous coral growth as you fill it to creaking with whatever decadent liquid you’ve picked out. It was probably given to Savers out of pure guilt. “I can hear the starfish weeping.”

Yes! Now I finally know where fake crab comes from! It’s obviously made from these things. Some sort of delicious meaty little ooze that naturally forms into tiny rolls of red-painted edibility. Chalk one mystery down!

Mockery aside, I really am impressed by the detail of this piece, it’s just surreal, dream-scapey. It captures the idea of “excised from the bottom of a pastoral sea” (“pastoral” is accurate more to mood than geology in this instance), in its essential state, without actually making any damned sense in any representational mode. So I’m willing to accept that the red lumps crawling up its side are probably more the idea of sea life rather than any actual sea life. It gives it a sort of mythological quality.

But that being said, there’s something about this angle that concerns me.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there, maybe I’m just high on the fumes from the 20-year-old potpourri a shelf over, but this looks a little…biological. It’s probably just the angle, but there’s something here that reminds me that the Greek sea-god really, really liked bulls. I’m just saying. The poor thing has got to be at least a bit troubled by the weird blue loach and starfish, I would be.

“We are not amused.”

Savers on South Lamar near 290, Austin

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this is at least somewhat representational.

Maybe it’s all a bit man-in-the-moon, but from at least one angle this really wants to be human. And thankfully fails. Or else the entire thing turns into a horrible version of Pinocchio (or worse, Pygmalion), where after the Blue Fairy gives him life, the poor thing limps and spasms around through 60 pages of terror-filled expressions and false pity. “Some day I’ll be a real boy! As soon as the Blue Fairy gives me properly attached arms, and a face. I’d really like a face. And maybe legs where they’d be useful. Oh, and maybe junk, but I’m guessing the ladies aren’t being a path to my door like this Thursday, so, whatever.”

You be the judge:

Beatrice the Human Sea Cucumber on a lunch break after her fourth show of the day?

Tantric Levitation for Dummies?

Capybara desperately climbing a tree to avoid being eaten by a boa constrictor?

The ultimate evolution of mankind, a creature formed of glistening black basalt, noble and distant and slightly microcephalic?

Maybe we’ll never know.

Savers on South Lamar near 290