Mr Bucket takes his bucket off (if he could) to all the great young designers that are featured in the Melbourne Museum Top Designs “Season of Excellence” for VCE Year 12 students.
Mr Bucket is looking forward to giving presentations as an industry speaker on Tuesday 1st May, Tuesday 8th May and Thursday 10th May.
The whole bucket crew had a blast at Port Fairy March 9-12th this year. Saturday night we where blown away by the “The Bamboos” and left on high thinking what could top that?… the answer the Watussi’s, Columbian latin band from Bondi, led by the sensational Oscar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKrqWJHmloU&feature=related
Oscar swung by to say hello to Mr Bucket the next day.
Then over the Easter weekend we went to the National Folk Music Festival, Mr Bucket took it up a notch by inserting a harmonica into his bucket!! and walked around playing the ukuelele. He got a few strange looks in the Session Bar and then settled down with his Folkie Stine filled with Scrumpy and he was fine after that.
Thankyou to all the wonderful people that brought tshirts and came to say hello.
Thankyou to everyone who came up and said hello to Mr Bucket at this years Port Fairy Folk Festival.
Mr Bucket is just going to put in a shameless plug for all the great people and stuff he got introduced to that weekend… Jo Pug, awesome, Casey Chambers, sweeet, Fiona Boyes, phenomenal… and Fox How?
One of their illustrious members, and none too fond of buckets, Becky, used her baggy sassy-ness to shimmy up to Mr Bucket for a photo.
The thing we love about Foxhow, is they actually come from Foxhow, and they are a really beautiful sounding band, they are just recording at the moment but already have four great songs on myspace including Mr Bucket’s favourite “Light the Way”.
And the New Zealand couple who ordered tshirts for their friend who is the “King of Haumoana” and he actually comes from Haumoana “Nearly first to see the sun” and home of the Haumoana Men’s Knitting Club.
& thankyou to all the great organisers (actually that was just a shameless plug so we get invited back next year).
My Music afficinado and travellin companion has her own blog and has written a fabulous account of those three days .
This is an account of 4 days spent selling tshirts at Rainbow Serpent Festival in Beaufort this year and how this challenging and confronting experience was ultimately rewarding in ways I never expected.
From the moment I step out of my car, I’ve been offered wild turkey bourbons, joints, beers and nags and it’s not even evening.
It’s late afternoon when I arrive, greeted by a gentle breeze under a full sun. Told to park my van and walk, it’s like walking onto the set of a Peter Jackson movie, or perhaps Mad Max or Gladiator – frantic activity everywhere. Yellow Tonka trucks rumble through the dust. I’m escorted by a brown limbed beauty wearing strips of suede, brass bangles and a bright orange safety vest.
I set up my marquee beside a tribe of Israeli boys, all beaming smiles and dreadlocks, with their amazing bamboo and lycra stars already in place. They are selling tshirts, sunnies and sandals. They share their cucumber and cheese sandwiches with me.
Deano and Jayne, the straightest looking couple and my neighbours on the other side, arrive with blotter prints. Deano is a techno nerd, they have their tubular mood setting lights and a chill area covered with cushions and drapes. I get used to the flow of people travelling through my tent on the way to theirs and the gush of the soda bottle as they waft into oblivion. This is where they lie quietly dozing while I write.
On my first circuit of the stalls I discover two sisters arguing as they struggle with tangled leads and burning light bulbs. I try to help before returning with one of the young Israeli gods, cable ties and a torch.
I choose the floor of the marquee over the smelly van. My accommodation leaves a lot to be desired.
The night passes quietly with the boys next door softly chanting in Hebrew.
There are patches of paddock which actually vibrate under the weight of compacted soil and sawdust thrown over the sodden ground. The festival takes shape all around me. We are now in a weird hiatus before the sun goes down and the music starts up. Somnambulant, relaxed people wander into my stall. A few buy tshirts, most just take it in.
It is now dusk. I am listening to a mad gypsy band. I struggle to remember names as I meet new friends. A young goddess called “More”- I won’t forget her name - or “Bucket arse”, who proudly showed me the “Thai bucket” tattooed on his bum, each straw represents one of his mates. Kate, a security women from Port Fairy who still remembers me, gangs of the excitable and the youthful. A women called Annie who falls in love with Mr Bucket. Huge Mick and his psycho mate walk in as I close, they want to stay, I kick them out. and sleep like a baby who’s overdosed on phenergan.
Mr Bucket looks lonely as he sits on platform 4 at Parliament Station perhaps he should checkout the “Looking at You” column in MX and he may find his Ms Bucket.
Matt Cleaves and George Clipp have created a video webseries based on the column and Mr Bucket is mentioned several times in the first episode.
www.lookingatyou.com.au
Ms Bucket pulls on her speed boots and goes jammin down at the Showgrounds this weekend for the Victorian Roller Derby League Grand Final - see the Dead Ringer Rosies take on Geelongs Bloody Marys, followed by the Dolls Au-Go-Go versus the Toxic Avengers. The Ms Bucket tshirt will be available at the venue and online soon (or email Mr Bucket).
The day started quietly for Mr Bucket, just a typical Tuesday, when suddenly the texts started rolling in – “What’s Mr Bucket doing on a Rivers Catalogue? people were asking. So we tracked down the latest catalogue from Rivers and were a little surprised to see this image on the front cover.
The catalogue went out as an insert in the Herald Sun (9/6/2010). At first we were just mildly shocked by the notion that Rivers would even be interested in Mr Bucket. The two brands are poles apart – one a fledgling local-designer based brand which promotes itself as a unique Australian-made product, the other a national retailer which I believe imports many of its products from overseas. Maybe it was Mr Bucket’s indie appeal or perhaps they needed an image that related to the word WHY that starts off their company slogan.
A little research found the image on a Stock photo library. We could’ve left it at that, however, to our eyes, the image was clearly Mr Bucket from behind. We realised we couldn’t just let it slide – it was all too co-incidental. Mr Bucket had just featured in the May issue of “Desktop”, distributed widely through the advertising industry, along with the AGE, Coxy’s Big Break and the sales in Daylesford – we could not see how Rivers or their advertising agency could have been unaware of Mr Bucket.
They employ an advertising agency to come up with ideas to sell their products – this clearly wasn’t their original idea – we were concerned about the potential for damage to our reputation, and we knew that if it continued it would cause further damage. We fired off a “Letter of Demand” through our solicitors asking that they destroy all copies of the catalogue and not use Mr Bucket again.
They came back with the obligatory denial that any of our rights had been infringed or that we had suffered any damage, but they confirmed that they had no future intention of using this or any similar image and confirmed all copies of the catalogue had been distributed by the Herald-Sun.
End of story, hopefully…
Mr Bucket will be part of the Infuse 2010 Conference held this weekend for VisCom teachers who are members of the Visual Communication Victoria Association.
Mr Bucket will be running several workshops on Saturday … “I feel honoured to be part of this, the teachers support and inspire students who through their talent and imagination will visually change the world - they will communicate their generations vision for the future.”
We look forward to saying hello to as many people as we can.
A few months ago it was a pretty typical day at Rose Street for Mr Bucket, apart from everyone looking ever so slightly more beautiful, there was a weird sense of anticipation in the air as the sound of fiddles mingled with the smell of coffee and the market did its usual trick of springing to life. All of sudden their was a TV presenter and a camera, Mr Bucket sprang to life and grabbed his 15 seconds of fame with both hands. The footage was screened on Saturday June 12th - Channel 7’s “Coxy’s Big Break” travel show. Many thanks to Christian and Adam Ferrante for providing and nurturing such a truly unique hub of creativity and design in Fitzroy’s Rose Street Market. (MrB is usually there on a Saturday).
As Ostin Milbarge a columnist from “Desktop” magazine tells it, he was simply strolling through a small town music festival when…
“while perusing through the stalls, and peering past a hat stand, that I saw him: Mr Bucket. I think I’ve banged on before about simplicity of design and, possibly somewhere in the ether, I’ve also delivered a diatribe on the joy I take in t-shirt design… but this knocked my socks off. And it did so for a
couple of reasons. First, Mr Bucket’s stall featured a full-length statue of the man himself, bucket and all, while one of his minions manned the merchandise aspect. Second, the idea that the entire life of a man
with a bucket on his head can be created to support a clothing range is beyond belief – that its simplicity had me so engrossed that I looked through just about every shirt available, agonised over which one I wanted, then purchased it greedily goes to show the power of a simple idea.”
but it didn’t stop there…
“I found that I’m not alone, and I’ve often been stopped in the street by people professing that they too
have fallen for Mr Bucket. Before long I was harassed by a friend to look up the website, where I witnessed that the bucket man was an international phenomenom.”
Ostin point out he wasn’t paid in lights and pyschedelia, we hope he is enjoying his “Mr Bucket Mows”.