Tonight's sticker is such an odd find in so many ways. It caught my eye for a couple of reasons when I was wandering through the Southside last year, at least I'm assuming I took this last year. The main aspect that caught my eye were the shadows cast upon the fire hydrant due to the setting sun. Admittedly this exposure probably takes these shadows to a bit of an extreme since I really have no background in it, but I wanted to capture that sense of a golden sunset. The second reason I paused to capture this sticker was the style of it. While illustrations are a terribly common sight among the stickers I find, the use of a comic panel is fairly unique. I would never claim to be an avid comic reader, I tend get too easily distracted by the various images to fully appreciate the story on the page, but I am certainly on the fringe. So my attention is typically grabbed whenever I see something like a comic panel. Not that this particular panel is telling a clear story. In the foreground you have a faceless Mr. Clean kind of man holding a cactus in the one hand and staring down at his other which is now covered in needles. The far background has a skull and a fairly traditional devil depiction, for no clear reason. And in the middle is a woman standing among some lizards, yelling "Cactus Jelly-Jive?" Now I can't say I fully get what the reasoning behind this collection of images is, but then again I don't know if there really is one.
Above this image is the word Generiks, which I figured was the best thing to search by. Looking into this, it turns out The Generiks is a punk band from Arizona. When you dig through the Facebook page, you will eventually come across this image which is always my way to verify I'm right. But you can actually find this image on YouTube as well. Apparently this image was actually the cover art for their album with the name "Cactus Jelly-Jive." Now I usually would be all for sharing the videos I find on here, however this video is almost 40 minutes long since it's the full album which is a bit much. They're a pretty typical punk sound and not a bad listen if you're intrigued. What makes this fairly common type of sticker find rather unique is the fact that from what I can tell this isn't an active band, actually doesn't look like they've played a gig since 2000. Looking through the Facebook page it seems like The Generiks were active from 1986 to 2000 with the "Cactus Jelly-Jive" album being from 1995. I also came across the interesting fact that the person behind the Facebook page isn't actually tied to the band in any way. The very first post from 2012 is the admin stating that they are just a big fan looking to share their love for this band, although they haven't made a new post to the page since 2015. Looking through the photos and the videos on the page is a fairly fascinating trip as well. When I first found the page I thought it was odd that all of the images had that feeling of the old photos of my youth, not quite catching that the reason for this is the fact that they are from that time period. And the biggest thing that gives me pause is just the curiosity over how long this sticker has been there. Clearly this sticker isn't something that is currently making the rounds in the band circuits and this isn't even their most recent album. In the end I rather doubt this has been sitting in the Southside for over 20 years but I would be rather impressed if it was.
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Maggie Ondrey
An amateur photographer and writer capturing a small portion of the city. Archives
August 2017
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