VIP tent only, New Orleans, Halloween 2016. It was never sold, which is why you can’t find another one, and why nothing online will ever confirm it.
Let’s deal with the awkward part first, because it’s also the good part. You will not find this lighter in a catalogue, a resale listing or a brand archive. It was never retailed. It was handed out in a VIP tent at the Voodoo Music + Arts Experience in 2016 and that was the entire distribution.
That’s not a gap in the research. That’s the provenance.
Voodoo started in 1999, when Stephen Rehage put a festival in City Park in New Orleans, at Halloween, in a city that takes both music and the dead more seriously than anywhere else in America. It ran for two decades and booked genuinely strange bills, national rock and rap and electronic acts stacked against Louisiana players who’d been working those neighbourhoods for thirty years. It came back after Katrina, which mattered to that city a great deal.
It last happened in October 2019. Cancelled in 2020 and 2021 for the pandemic, then cancelled again in 2022 without much of an explanation. It has not returned.
A festival with no more editions leaves behind objects that can never be reissued.
So this is a relic of something finished, from the last few years it was properly running, given to somebody standing in a tent in City Park at the end of October.
The Zippo underneath the artwork is the other half of the story. George Blaisdell started the company in Bradford, Pennsylvania in 1932, and the first lighters came off the line in early 1933, adapted from an Austrian design he thought worked well and looked terrible. His guarantee has never changed and has never been qualified: it works, or they fix it free. Not for a year. Forever. Send a lighter to Bradford that your grandfather carried and they will repair it and send it back, and they will not charge you.
That policy is the reason a Zippo is a reasonable thing to engrave a memory onto. It’s an object designed on the assumption that it will outlive the person holding it.
The artwork here is an etched sugar skull with a feather and leaf spray to the left, the VOODOO mark, and 2016 in a box, all sitting on a textured stipple engraving. Sugar skulls are Day of the Dead, which lands within a few days of the festival and within a few miles of the most elaborate death rituals in the country. Somebody thought about this.
For Tobacco Use Only
VIP tent only, New Orleans, Halloween 2016. It was never sold, which is why you can’t find another one, and why nothing online will ever confirm it.
Let’s deal with the awkward part first, because it’s also the good part. You will not find this lighter in a catalogue, a resale listing or a brand archive. It was never retailed. It was handed out in a VIP tent at the Voodoo Music + Arts Experience in 2016 and that was the entire distribution.
That’s not a gap in the research. That’s the provenance.
Voodoo started in 1999, when Stephen Rehage put a festival in City Park in New Orleans, at Halloween, in a city that takes both music and the dead more seriously than anywhere else in America. It ran for two decades and booked genuinely strange bills, national rock and rap and electronic acts stacked against Louisiana players who’d been working those neighbourhoods for thirty years. It came back after Katrina, which mattered to that city a great deal.
It last happened in October 2019. Cancelled in 2020 and 2021 for the pandemic, then cancelled again in 2022 without much of an explanation. It has not returned.
A festival with no more editions leaves behind objects that can never be reissued.
So this is a relic of something finished, from the last few years it was properly running, given to somebody standing in a tent in City Park at the end of October.
The Zippo underneath the artwork is the other half of the story. George Blaisdell started the company in Bradford, Pennsylvania in 1932, and the first lighters came off the line in early 1933, adapted from an Austrian design he thought worked well and looked terrible. His guarantee has never changed and has never been qualified: it works, or they fix it free. Not for a year. Forever. Send a lighter to Bradford that your grandfather carried and they will repair it and send it back, and they will not charge you.
That policy is the reason a Zippo is a reasonable thing to engrave a memory onto. It’s an object designed on the assumption that it will outlive the person holding it.
The artwork here is an etched sugar skull with a feather and leaf spray to the left, the VOODOO mark, and 2016 in a box, all sitting on a textured stipple engraving. Sugar skulls are Day of the Dead, which lands within a few days of the festival and within a few miles of the most elaborate death rituals in the country. Somebody thought about this.
For Tobacco Use Only
