This would be the last of my four-issue $3000 subscription to this magazine of outsider art, and they attempted to lure me back in with an awesome pictorial of these wacky Ghanaian movie posters. You see, theaters in Ghana couldn’t afford projectors, so with the rise of VCRs, folks would set up theaters with old school desks in a room with a mounted TV that played videocassettes. That format, of course, led to a great selection of oddball cinema back at that time, but since there were no promotional posters to go with it, the local movie houses would just pay local painters to use old housepaint and empty sacks to make posters advertising the flicks, usually with nothing more than the box the tape came in as a reference to what the movie was about. Combining backwoods African voodoo creativity with Hollywood stereotypes and stuff shockingly colored enough to draw a passing eyeball, Ghana movie posters came about. Some French froufrou collected a whole ton of them and made a book out of it, and now they’re all gone because everybody has satellite TV all over the earth. In other words, it’s a dead weird-ass self-taught art thing. So of course, now it’s in some fancy art magazine and some French dude has a picture book of the shit he collected, not did but collected. On one hand, it makes me stoked and caused me to think I could use the 45 gallons of unused paint I’ve accumulated underneath the camper behind my house from being a self-employed housepainter to good use making giant disturbing paintings on old goat feed sacks stapled to frames made with furring strips. Then again, that wouldn’t really be my own brand of self-discovered art. But what is? Blogging? Fuck, someone shoot me up with death right quick, please.
Anyways, this issue left me borderline on whether to waste money (meaning asking for it for Christmas) on another year’s subscription. $46 for four issues is ridiculous, but fuck, I can blow $46 on the way home from work on a good day, and there’s nothing even half as cool as Ghana movie posters involved in that type of money waste. Hard to say what to do. I know I don’t want to see no black dude snake man slithering at me with his fanged teeth though.
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