Money, It's Gotta Be The Shirt

I’m a sucker for many things and I’ll cop to guffawing at a good t-shirt cross-cultural malapropism from time to time. As an American I feel fortunate because the United States and U.K. dominate this market; so t-shirt absurdity, intentional or not, is readily available to me and quickly absorbed at a glance, even in the chaos of a throng. Today, for the first time, one of these t-shirts stopped me in my tracks, literally, in traditional Thai life-is-for-stopping-on-a-busy-sidewalk-with-no-room-for-people-to-pass fashion:

Fans of early '90's professional basketball and/or break-through independent film will recognize the combination of brim upturned hat, over-sized black spectacles, and basketball jersey as Mars Blackmon, Spike Lee's alter-ego. Mars was a prominent character in Mr. Lee's debut film, She's Gotta Have It, but is radically better known for costarring in a series of Nike commercials with Michael Jordan. These were massively famous commercials (but if you enjoy halcyon recollections of them I'd suggest avoiding a stroll down video-memory-lane), and considering basketball is the world's #2 sport, I can see Mars popping up on shirts Thailand.

But for some reason Mars is a skeleton and his hat, which always said "Brooklyn," says MARCHZ. Why is Mars dead? What is Marchz? Is it a coincidence that "Marchz" sounds a bit like "Mars"? Five minutes with the internet failed to answer these questions, although I found other images of skeleton Mars Blackmon because humans love skeletons.

Had that been all there was to this shirt I probably would have pondered it for a long moment, assumed Marchz refers to something Thai that I'm not familiar with, and walked away bemused. But there was more. What really sets this shirt apart is the new-age aphorism at the bottom:

Live as if you were to die tomorrow

Learn as if you were to live forever

I've never seen that specific permutation before, but I've certainly seen it's intellectual siblings. As far as pithy advice goes, it's a rather nifty juxtaposition and paints a more-complicated-than-at-first-glance ideal to strive for, AND gets bonus points for nailing the subjunctive verb tense. Fair play to it, but for the life of me I can not fathom what it has to do with Mars Blackmon.

I idolized Spike Lee back in the Mars Blackmon days and still hold him in such massive regard that I proudly have a personal Quinton Tarantino ban as a sympathy vote for Mr. Lee in their feud. So I feel comfortable saying that quote isn't remotely Mars Blackmon-like. Nor can I say it's antithetical to Mars Blackmon because he'd certainly agree with the hedonistic half of it. As such it appears to be an utterly random quote attached to a randomized utterly random image.

I'd been standing there for a solid, real world minute gazing at the shirt before the proprietress stepped toward me to see if she could help. She never told me her name but I'm going to call her Jolie. I took the opportunity to grill her about the shirt. Jolie has no idea who Mars Blackmon is and had a vague, perhaps feigned for my benefit, notion of who Spike Lee is. In other words the shirt meant nothing to her beyond "it's interesting."

Jolie's shop had many cross-cultural mash-up t-shirts (if that's what you'd call "Inspirational Dead Mars"). Another was a silhouette of Kiki and her cat, from Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Special Delivery Service, flying on a broom before a full moon with a smattering of trees below. I'm reasonably certain it's supposed to evoke ET and Elliot's famous bike flight, which served as the logo for whatever Steven Spielberg's production company used to be called (Amblin?). Jolie didn't even feign getting any of those references. It was just another interesting shirt.

We talked through the images and mixed up connotations of several shirts in her store. I should add these were properly branded "art t-shirts" at properly branded "art t-shirt" prices so I feel safe in assuming they'd qualify as satire, and thus protected speech, rather than piracy. I should also add that Jolie was a pretty lady in a frilly outfit and gamely engaged in my "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" style repartee.

Naturally I left her shop with a pair of shorts--which is what I was looking for in the first place--in addition to two the Mars and Kiki t-shirts; plus I made a solemn promise to return so she can beguile me out of more money in exchange for things I vowed not to buy any more (so... many... T-SHIRTS!). Remember when I said I'm sucker for many things? Very high on that list is flattery from a pretty lady. Here's the Kiki/ET shirt:

That's an inspired but understandable combination. It took me a fraction of a second to get the Kiki/ET connection, and it took noted non-film buff a full second. Kiki's even got an adorable little creature in front of her on the broom, a cat in place of ET. You can see how someone would put these together and now that they have you can see additional permutations: Eve and Wall-E, the Enterprise, Iron Giant, and so on.

Inspirational Mars Blackmon is not readily understandable to me. I might be over thinking it, or it might be the kind of genius produced by a thousand monkeys on a thousand computers with Photoshop. While the monkey thing would cool, provided the monkeys are happy, that's not what I hope it is. I want it to be work of a is it/isn't it artificially intelligent web based application reaching out to we humans (Last Starfighter-style, if you will) through the most powerful and beloved medium on the face of the Earth: the humble t-shirt.

I'm listening to you, computer/monkey/self. I don't understand yet, but I am listening.