Corel Gallery Clipart

A grayscale caricature of Clark Gable, whose Hollywood career as a leading man spanned decades. Charming, dapper, manly—this is how Ann’s mom always described him. Her crush on Gable went all the way back to his 1939 portrayal of Rhett Butler in “Gone with the Wind.” Ann’s mom must have been around 20 at the time. Ann herself watched the movie late one night while she was home alone. Or tried to. When Rhett turned drunk and rapey, she stopped the VHS. She didn’t need to see anymore. Ann knows how that story goes.

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An amateurish line drawing of George Washington, the Stars and Stripes in the background. The file is called GEORGE, and indeed it was this specific clipart that John F. Kennedy, Jr. stumbled upon one late night in 1994. John-John had a flash of brilliance and realized that George was the perfect name for the new glossy political magazine he was founding. The first issue of George came out in September 1995, with supermodel Cindy Crawford on the cover. She was dressed as George Washington, in a pose inspired by this clipart.

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A color portrait of Deidre Hall, best known for her long-running role as Marlena Evans on “Days of Our Lives.” Over the course of her 45 years as Marlena, the character has been possessed by the devil (twice), flung out a 30-story-window, and mind-controlled. Not to mention kidnapped countless times. Even more than “The X-Files,” it was the seedy goings-on in the sleepy city of Salem that convinced Samantha there is always more happening than meets the eye.

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A color portrait of Leontyne Price, the groundbreaking African-American opera singer renowned for her lush, velvety voice. The soprano made her mark in the 1960s in the title role of Verdi’s Aida. After her final performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1985, the audience applauded for 25 minutes, and Price appeared the next day on the front page of the New York Times. Jack was there that night, the escort of a much older man. The rest of the evening was a disaster, but Jack will never forget Price’s soaring voice, supple and commanding, like a promise hanging in the air between lovers.

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This is sweet. Gabriel stands there with a heart-shaped box of chocolates. A gift. There’s no one else around. The chocolates can only be for you. Gabriel seems to have changed his tune. He’s no longer fighting the forces that weigh down upon him (for example, the large HEART035 shimmering over his head). Instead he seems to be making an offering to them. To you. To us.

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A delicate stalk of dill in bloom with yellow flowers. You remember we have plans for brunch on Sunday, don’t you?

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A hard-hatted worker balancing on a girder high above a construction site. On the ground, many stories below, the architect looks up. Her cathedral is rising from the earth, a holy monument of glass, steel, silicon, and plastic. She intends on finishing the cathedral before she dies, but she’s well aware that every architect doing God’s work intends the same. Intentions are not the same as actions, and actions are not the same as faith.

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A cartoon of a donkey and elephant butting heads. The donkey, of course, stands for the Democratic Party in the United States. The elephant represents the Republican Party. The great American political cartoonist Thomas Nast pioneered the use of the donkey and elephant as political symbols in the 1870s. Nast also invented the modern rendition of Santa Claus. One of Nast’s most famous satirical cartoons incorporates all three symbols, showing a donkey attacking Santa, with an elephant coming to Santa’s rescue.

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A color portrait of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, colloquially known as King Tut. He wears a golden headdress in the form of a striking cobra and a turquoise, blue, and gold collar. America was in the throes of King Tut mania in the late 1970s, when an elaborate exhibition called “Treasures of Tutankhamen” toured six American cities—Washington, D.C., Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York. Steve Martin capitalized on the Egyptology craze by releasing his novelty song “King Tut” in 1978. The song slyly doubled as a critique of the crass commercialization of Tut, and you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing the song that year. Mark’s third grade teacher Mrs. Lawley entered the classroom one day in May that year doing the Egyptian “walk” and singing the lyrics. Nobody knew it at the time, but Mrs. Lawley and the fifth grade teacher Mr. Woods were sleeping with each other.

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The silhouette of a man about to serve a volleyball underhanded. In a basement workshop at Corel’s Ottawa headquarters sits Adele, the company psychic, on a thick Turkish rug. The clipart comes to her in a vision so powerful she spills her patchouli tea. She must tell her manager, this particular clipart is doomed. For in the not too distant future, it will be useless. She senses that volleyball will soon be an all but archaic, forgotten sport. In her vision she sees a new sport taking the world by storm. It is this sport that must be depicted in clipart form, if Corel Gallery is to have a life in the new millennium. The name of this new sport comes to Adele as she rides the Delphic slipstream. It is a sport called….pickleball.

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An illustration of two pea pods on a vine, each pod having at least five peas. The sight forces you to reckon with the idiom “like two peas in a pod.” Yes, you know the phrase means two people who are so alike and get along so well you almost can’t tell them apart. But what happens when there are more than two peas in a pod? What would “like five peas in a pod” mean? Or, “like ten peas in two pods.” It sounds like an alien invasion. Or, were you to add mattresses to the equation, a fairy tale. The matter is further complicated when you consider these are not pea pods, merely pictures of pea pods. What does “like a picture of five peas in a pod” mean? This is a question neither botanists nor philosophers are prepared to answer. In this way, you suddenly realize, the whole structure of knowledge upon which you have based your comparison of any two similar objects is deeply flawed. Should anything, ever, be compared to something else? You walk away from this clipart knowing in the recesses of your heart that all metaphors are ontological disasters.

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The hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union, flown in the U.S.S.R. from 1922 through 1991. Михаил remembers his older brother, Питер, buying scores of poorly made knockoffs of the flag and then trading them on the black market with American tourists for Marlboros and Levis. Питер laughed his head off one time at the absurdity of an American college student who insisted his Wranglers were worth as much in a trade as Levis. They’re the same, he said in his broken Russian. Равны, равны! All jeans are equal, Питер told the confused American, but some are more equal than others.

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A color illustration of a giraffe in a three-quarters profile. Samantha knows that in medieval bestiaries giraffes were imagined as a mix between camels and leopards, a Camelopardalis. In Jacob van Maerlant’s 14th century masterpiece, Der Naturen Bloeme, a giraffe is shown kneeling before a knight with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. It is a questing beast and it has been found. It’s a lesson Samantha knows well. Wherever there is magic, men will track it down. They call it a quest, but it’s really a hunt.

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A sleek black high-end dual cassette tape player/recorder. Phil spends hours making dubs and mixtapes, which he distributes to family, friends, and co-workers. He’s made a mixtape for every occasion. Road trips, birthdays, weddings, even a funeral once. Phil’s secret pleasure—and his secret power—is timing the compilation of songs from dozens of different sources perfectly, so that the final song ends just seconds before the tape ends. He doesn’t make calculations or plan it out. It’s his own innate sense of timing that does it. He can’t explain. It’s magic.

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A dark-haired woman in a vibrant pink handkerchief hemline dress inspired by both Persian and Flamenco designs. The woman would be tall even without her black heels. She cuts a striking figure crossing the street, utterly out of place and utterly unaware that she’s out of place. Rose sees her from the window of the coffee shop where she’s reading “The Vampire Lestat.” It’s a dreary Saturday afternoon. The coffee is good, the book is trashy. Rose tracks the woman as she reaches the other side of the street, where, to Rose’s astonishment, the woman bends down to the sidewalk and pries open a manhole cover. The woman in the pink dress steps into the hole, disappearing like a glass vial in a pneumatic tube.

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An anatomical illustration of a female human breast, presented from the side. Unlike the illustrations in a medical textbook, this illustration has no labels, no legend. @evansezwut is tempted to write in with a list of muscles, nerves, and tissues that should be labeled on the image. However, some phantom instinct deep inside him encourages restraint. Whether that’s because @evansezwut dimly perceives it would be creepy or because he’s in the waiting room at the clinic while his mother receives another treatment of paclitaxel and gemcitabine, he cannot really say. The prognosis is not good. He stares at his phone, wishing there was an explanation for everything.

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A yellow warning sign that reads: CAUTION: CHEMICAL STORAGE. But at least the chemicals are being stored, and there’s a sign about it. Far more disturbing would be a yellow warning sign that reads: CAUTION: FREE FLOWING CHEMICALS. If such signs existed, you’d probably see them everywhere.

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A sunflower in full bloom, one of Christine’s pieces from when she worked at TechPool Studios in the nineties. If Christine were to see the clipart today, she’d rate it 6/10. Not her best work, but not her worst. Christine avoids sunflowers these days. And sunflower oil? Never. Christine does her research. It’s toxic. Any seed oil is. The solvents, the bleach, the forever chemicals, it’s changing our body chemistry. Endocrine disruption. Why else is every turning trans? And autistic? People who eat that garbage, well, Christine thinks, they deserve what they get. Let ‘em die. The real Americans, we’ll be the ones standing at the end, God bless us.

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A silkscreen of Saddam Hussein and George H.W. Bush. On campus Samantha handed out pamphlets with this image, followed by a list of fake demands from the performance art/improv troupe she belonged to, STUDENTS MAD ABOUT EVERYTHONG. Yes, there was a typo. Yes, it was deliberate.

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An adjustable crescent wrench. When Samantha was a kid, helping her dad on a project, he called this a monkey wrench. Samantha would giggle and hand the wrench to him like a surgical assistant. Imagine Samantha’s surprise years later when (1) she learned that the monkey wrench was a real tool and not just a goofy name her dad had made up; and (2) that the crescent wrench is NOT the same as a monkey wrench and that her dad, who seemed to know everything, was in fact wrong about something. Well, monkey wrench, crescent wrench, whatever, Samantha has taken a liking to throwing wrenches into things. Literally.

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A grayscale drawing of a water pail exuding such pail-ness that a structuralist cannot help but consider this to be the pail in its Platonic form. But for the post-structuralist, the pail gathers and enfolds the world, an ontological liminal space that is neither inside nor outside. Derrida says the pail is haunted.

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A color portrait of John Walsh, the creator and host of the long-running true crime series America’s Most Wanted. Walsh’s fairy doppelgänger (we all have at least one) generally ignores This World (just as most of us ignore There), but occasionally the membrane between worlds thins and the doppelgänger sees the faces of changelings he once knew. In This World they appear on a screen, held by a sobbing mother telling the world that this isn’t their child and why won’t anyone listen, as Walsh’s stentorian voice cuts in. In Faerie, the changeling appears in a dream and the doppelgänger wakes up, his delicate face wet with tears, as he remembers the cost of collecting all those human children.

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A full colour illustration of a suit of medieval armour, the silver breastplates shimmering like they were forged yesterday. The suit looks to Dianne exactly like the armour inside the door at Medieval Times. She and Lou went there on their first date, and it was as awkward as you might imagine. Fighting LA traffic to arrive at the Buena Park Castle, watching a pre-show knighting ceremony and wondering whether that’s something you hold hands for, the dinner and show, an awkward kiss at the end. It was crass, it was commercial, it was phony, it was sweet.

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A grayscale illustration of a cowboy hat that looks more like a severed tongue on a sidewalk, bleeding out. (1/10, wouldn’t use even on a grade school book report)

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“Tech Tips” in all caps, a pair of yellow and black checkered racing flags in between the words. In one of Samantha’s many temp jobs that summer—yes, THAT summer—she worked in the IT department of mid-sized yet middling ad agency. She was responsible for putting together the biweekly IT newsletter for employees. In her first newsletter she included tech tips she thought surely her coworkers would like to know. Like: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start; and, you gotta give the thief the jeweled egg; and, leaving a ring of salt around your dot matrix printer prevents jamming; and, 3.5-inch floppy disks are edible, but only if you peel them first; and, if you repeat the phrase “Overflow Trap” three times while staring at the Blue Screen of Death, you will be cursed. The ad firm fired Samantha shortly after one of the employees went to the hospital with a perforated stomach caused by the metal shutter of a floppy disk.

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A red Isuzu Piazza, a sporty coupe sold in North America in the 1980s as the Isuzu Impulse. The Japanese car was produced in low numbers—just over 13,000 were made over the Piazza’s entire history. It was rare to spot a Piazza in its heyday. Now, it’s simply miraculous. Cindy keeps her Piazza in working condition, though it’s “hers” only in the sense that there is no one else around to claim it. She drives it on the empty backroads in the Chicago suburbs, since the highways are clogged with abandoned vehicles. Cindy doesn’t talk much these days. What would she say? Who would she say it to?

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A blocky illustration of a male RS-232C serial port plug. Mattie eyes the nine pins, thinking it ludicrous that we call our ports and plugs male or female depending on prongs or holes. She decides then and there that this connector is a “they.” She gets back to work rebuilding this 30-year-old Pentium desktop.

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A map of Colorado. The state is more or less a perfect rectangle. Straight lines to make up for the jagged elevation, like an EKG gone haywire. At least that’s what the architect imagines as she flies into Denver. She’ll spend a brilliantly sunny week in the state, scouting locations for her project. In the end, she crosses Colorado off her list. She can’t explain except to say that it’s too brilliant. The air too crisp. She’s looking for someplace—how to describe it?—someplace heavier.

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A color portrait of American composer and jazz musician Herbie Hancock. In the 1960s Hancock played piano in the Miles Davis Quintet. By the 1970s Hancock had branched out to funk, soul, and electronica. In the 1980s Hancock had an underground dance hit with “Rockit.” The song featured DJ record scratches, and the video, with its unsettling animatronic mannequins, entered heavy rotation on MTV. Mattie saw the video more than once. It was inescapable at the time. Even today, all these years later, Mattie can’t say if she was traumatized by the creepy mannequins or excited by them.

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A portrait of Japanese banker Sumio Abekawa, former chairperson of Daiwa Bank. Portrayed here as a late middle-aged man wearing glasses and suit and tie, Abekawa resigned in disgrace in 1996 after an investigation revealed Daiwa had knowingly engaged in $1.1 billion in falsified bond trades. The banker behind the scandal—Toshihide Iguchi—served several years in the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex, the same prison that years later would house weev, Martin Shkreli, and myself.

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