Yes, I know this isn't the most important thing going on in the world right now, but maybe that's why we've got Goblincore. I remember a similar enthusiasm for mushroom and frog motifs in the early 1970s.
[Goblincore] “romanticizes the ugly, lesser appreciated parts of the natural world.” Its trappings include animal skulls and earthworms... [I]t is about “chaos, dirt and mud.”... “I’ve been tagging some of my pieces as goblincore for over 18 months but recently it seems anything frog, snail, moss or mushroom related has exploded,” says Jane Geloso, owner of the Palm Tree Etsy store....
[I]t can be tied to queerness and anti-capitalism. In relation to queerness in particular, she says, “there’s something incredibly freeing about goblincore. Mushrooms are huge in the community and some species of fungi have thousands of sexes – it’s just about vibing and existing, not fitting into a mould.”...
A close but more feral cousin to cottagecore, a trend for a stylised, agrarian way of life and its aesthetic – prairie dresses, jam tarts, thatched cottages and strawberry motifs – that was big last year, goblincore is... more “rough around the edges.”
“Wildflowers and white linen dresses are wonderful but goblincore is staining that same dress with mud and moss and watching snails and slugs eat the wildflowers”....
Isn't it just hippies all over again? And then it's just a question of how much of a "dirty hippie" you are — either really, because you're poor or you've lost track of hygiene, or as a matter of style, a funky aesthetic.
Now, please gaze upon these vintage cannisters (from 1976). Maybe you remember the strange era in America where people put stuff like this in their kitchen:
I believe if you stare at that image for 60 seconds, thoughts of the actual important news stories of the day will rise up within your brain and dance about to the maddening music of tinkly harps and flutes:
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I would be impressed if it were real mud, worms, and mushrooms that people were wearing.
My mother had those canisters....and everything else Mushroom. And she collected Owls which were a popular item to collect back in those days. We had the avocado colored kitchen appliances to go with it all.
This is the manifestation of a culture that is so rich, fat, dumb, and happy that there is nothing left to do but obsess over idiotic things.
There is no Goblincore in Kabul...
For a number of the most important things going on in the world we have discussed them beyond the point of originality and are just repeating the same points each thread. Last night I saw a frog jumping across my newly laid flagstone walk. The blogger spouse got a great shot of a tree frog balancing on a branch in the back yard. The world is amazing and beautiful, and we have people doing and saying awful things rather than enjoying it. The frogs and mushrooms don't care.
I prefer the hippy-nature stuff to the puffy-shoulder puffy-cap-sleeve, hideous, obnoxiously dyed made in China clown-blouse - the fashion industry hath decided is for your own good.
real world events are mushrooming in most unaesthetic way despite the delightful distraction of seventies era shrooms.
I'm not sure the cute mushroom stuff is so far from the cottagecore - goblincore should be more ugly.
There's a good amount of Real Life that is ugly, and lots of vapid lies [no strikethru "s"] disinformation that covers up ugly truth. Punk rock was a musical sort of goblincore with the Sex Pistols and the Ramones (now called "power pop").
My mother collected frogs - things like frog ashtrays, frog knick knacks/ paperweights, a froggy-bank (for coins), etc. More cute 60s & 70s & 80s & 90s than ugly, tho some of her frog stuff was quite unattractive.
My wife wants me to dress "more properly", and look good. I used to say "I don't care about what I'm wearing". Then I realized I prefer the grungy, dirty look - which my wife doesn't like. Part of the casual look from Silicon Valley is the ideal that "what you know, what you can do" is more important than how you look. Steve Jobs seldom wore a tie ...
So now I dress better, because it's far easier to wear what wife likes and I don't care as much as she cares.
I suspect goblincore ethos includes a "not care" about what others find ugly; even a desire to wear stuff that others find ugly in order to push them towards "not liking ugly". But I don't like ugly so much, now, either.
Shrooms are making a comeback thanks to Joe Rogan Podcast and his Merry Band of psychodellic tourists.
An encouraging sign.
Maybe a few hippies will dispose of themselves by means of colorful frogs and amenitas.
Macrame is next?
Those Mushroom Canisters would have looked great in my dark paneled kitchen with the Avocado appliances back in the day.
'Macrame is next?'
Wicker lamp shades? Shag rugs? Terrariums? Dessert boots? Conversation pits?
April 13 was the publication date of Merlin Sheldrake's very good Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.
My mother did mushrooms, her best friend (my honorary aunt) did owls, my mother’s second closest friend did snails.
My mother was very artistic but it was my aunt who sat my sister and me down every Christmas for a craft project to give to my mother. My mom’s favorite year was the mushroom year. My aunt had us use bakers clay and her daughter (an original hippie) taught us to shape mushrooms, snails, worms, and grass (garlic press). After everything was baked, painted, and shellacked we glued it to scrap wood.
This was the Sandra Lee approach to trendy decorating.
I’ve seen those mushroom jars in kitchens, but not recently. Goblins are a staple in fantasy literature like Harry Potter and LOTR. I wonder if fascination with gnomes is a part of this too. I see a lot of garden gnomes.
After the mushrooms comes the greens and earnest singer songwriters and then the purple crocus and glam/heavy metal spectacle and then the red red roses and the punk simple blood splatter and then the bright yellow and orange neons of the pointer sisters dancing and then, god willing, it’s back to the black and white mod scene and we can all dance to the high numbers.
My aunt made me some ceramic canisters somewhat like that — different colors for the mushrooms, among other things — back when I went off to graduate school on the GI bill. Also a toothpick holder shaped like a mushroom with a hole in it that we stopped using a bunch of years ago. Fifty years later the wife and I are still using two ceramic frogs. One holds a bar of soap by the bathroom tub, and the other holds Brillo pads by the kitchen sink.
Just happened to be reading George & Weedon Grossmith's "The Diary of a Nobody" originally serialized in Punch in 1888 to 1889 and issued in book form in 1890. To quote a description of his wife's decorating "She and Carrie draped the mantelpiece in the drawing room and put little toy spiders, frogs and beetles all over it, as Mrs. James says it's quite the fashion." Odd how things on a topic pop up.
>>the Avocado appliances back in the day.
When I bought my vacation house just outside of North Conway, NH (built, I think, in the early 60s), in 1984, it still had a fair amount of the avocado stuff. All that's left now is the bathtub/shower stall in the main bathroom, carefully hidden behind a garish shower curtain, which is too much trouble to replace. Back then, though, it included the bathroom sink, maybe the toilet, and the cook top and oven in the kitchen. I think the fridge had already gone to white and the avocado hadn't made it into the small guest bathroom.
Don't get me started on the hideous shag carpeting. Several shades of green in the stairway and living room. Even more hideous shades of orange in the two guest bedrooms. Now all long gone, along with the over-the-top flowery wallpaper and drapes in the living room and the hideous kitchen and bathroom wallpaper (though I think I still have samples of most of them); one guest said the weird flowery wallpaper in the bathroom was enough to make you sick, if you weren't already. The crazy 60s wallpaper in the guest bedrooms is still there. As is the more subdued, if slightly femme, flowery wallpaper in the master [sic] bedroom.
--gpm
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