I am one of the few humans you will meet on the Internet who has not yet seen Tiger king. The new Netflix docuseries are, according to Google, “an exploration of the breeding of big cats and its strange world, populated by eccentric characters”. And according to everyone I spoke to last week, this is an incredible and horrible must-have.
If there is a tiger king on this show, I guess that person is Joe Exotic, the garishly dressed mule of a human who keeps popping up on my social media. Exotic, whose real name is Maldonado-Passage, is currently being held at Fort Worth Federal Medical Center, and he just filed a $ 93 million lawsuit against a multitude of federal agencies that have investigated his alleged hiring of a hitman to kill a rival. Other than that, I don’t know anything about him, but I respect his absurdity, and he seems to have appeared as the sympathetic anti-hero of the saga. Someone even turned it into a Lisa Frank style illustration, a picture that the brand shared on their Instagram page. What a time to live.
Exotic has also been immortalized in a new giant fresco in the Design District. Here, the style icon puts on a rainbow and animal print shirt, big gold jewelry and a gnarled handlebar mustache while kissing one of his majestic tigers.
The mural was designed by Daniel Driensky of the creative duo Exploredinary. Driensky and his partner Sarah Reyes painted the play with Lesli Marshall, Chad Puchalski and Zarina Karapetyan.
The painting is one of five new murals at 1313 N Riverfront Blvd. in the Design District commissioned by Ewing Properties and organized by Marshall, whose company, Articulation Art, has equipped trendy places like the Virgin Hotel in Dallas. The murals to come are all interactive – one is specially designed for Instagram’s Boomerang mode – and all are quite light. One will be dedicated to Chuck Norris, we simply say “Hay Girl, Hay” with grass balls on which to pose, we have a UFO with a functional light beam. Most of them are still ongoing, but Tiger king pop-up mural is ready to debut.
To conclude, I would like to share an image sent by the home office of the editor of SideDish Rosin Saez, whose neighbor is passionately in agreement with popular fan theory that Carole Baskin killed her husband. Saez said at least three passers-by took a moment to shout their response. 2020 is wild, all of you.