finitor

Genius designer Leigh Okies was the first to suggest that it would be fun to work up a branding suite for the Ranch egg operation, to de-anonymize somewhat the cartons of product that have been dribbling out to friends and colleagues in San Francisco, Berkeley, and the Valley. Mischievously, I thought it would be fun to mock the overwrought vernacular and processes of the corporate identity industry for which the Bay Area is the tragic epicenter.

We arrived at the Decadent Hen name without so much as a whiff of focus group or facilitation session. Fact is, the moniker fits to a tee my highfalutin overentitled birds. “Productions” was a later nod to Hollywood glam, and an evocation of the general fake earnestness of the endeavor (”Watch out, here be real Entrepreneurs!“)

Leigh ended up too busy playing with some kids named Crispin, Porter, and Bogusky to do my graphic design, so I enlisted Dennis Culver, the gifted Portland comic artist with whom I had worked recently on some off-center but well-received technology ad campaigns. My creative brief was something along the lines of “very female, upper crust socialite, slightly debauched.”

I contributed the typography - hey, and I haven’t even seen Helvetica: The Movie! - and after some considerable flailing in Adobe Illustrator, this popped out:

What criticisms I have collected, so far, relate mostly to the objectified bosominess of the bird [ed: So they never heard of chicken breasts?] and the potential unsavoriness of eggs tainted by alcohol and cigarettes. Sorry people, but the latter iconography is how I insulate my superficially wholesome backyard agriproject from association with tedious pure-food faddism. The messaging is all about unselfconscious joy in the pursuit of pleasure. About deliciousness trumping danger. About raw and uplifting decadence.

Clockwise from foreground: Cleo, Holly, unidentified feed company spokesbird.

I did the run of holiday parties around the Bay Area this winter, and it kept coming up that I have chickens. Sometimes this was by dint of reputation, because really isn’t it a bit funny when Silicon Valley tech product managers manifest eccentricities beyond kernel hacking, extreme sports, or Burning Man attendance, and hey, people do talk. Though more often it was the case that I let the theme creep in to rescue myself from the cocktail-banter social paralysis I suffer with my professional cohort. Name? Occupation? Any shared pop-cultural references we can riff on ironically? Not that I’m proud of the gambit, but chickens have always been good for upending that tired old kabuki ritual.

The thing that surprised me was the number of people who related experiences with poultry beyond breast meat on the end of a fork. It seems to have been pretty common in the 4H American heartland of the 70s and 80s for teenagers to work the odd job at a commercial broiler or layer op. Invariably a curl of disdain would cross my counterparty’s lips as they remembered the pale, shit-covered, de-beaked clones packed four-up into tiny cages so they could not walk or even spread their wings. No wonder the popular conception of chickens is that they are pitiable, savage, stupid, or all three.

My birds buck those stereotypes. Well, they can be mean to one another, in the way of ambitious executives, and every now and then they can be real doofuses, like when in the twilight somebody gets on the wrong perch right next to their bully-nemesis. But mostly they are highly individuated, socially nuanced, Dionysian about their pleasures, and cracklingly intelligent about the sorts of things that a mid-sized ground-dwelling jungle fowl ought to need to care about.

Please meet the chickens of Myrtle Canyon Ranch.

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Name: Cleo
Breed: Buff Orpington
Peck order: A1

Cleo overcame a fraught childhood of bottom-rung status and a string of hideous maulings - bitten by a rattlesnake, scalped by a skunk - to take her current place as the flock’s social leader and egg-onomic powerhouse. We used to be troubled by how quick she was to peck the younger birds that came near the feeder, but when she emerged as the the only reliable off-season layer, it was clear that her aggressive sense of entitlement was all about rightly securing the resources she needed to manufacture a big egg every day through the dark chilly Santa Cruz Mountain wintertime.

Cleo has endeared herself to us with her stern, no-nonsene, all-business approach to feeding and laying but lately there has been evidence of other stirrings in her. The eggs piled up while I was away in Montreal for a week recently; when I got back she had abandoned her customary roost and taken to sleeping on the nest. When a hen goes decisively broody she stops laying, so if you care about your omelet supply, you have to remove her by force from the clutch. Cleo squalled at me for this interference with her maternal program, but she has been back on the roost every night since, so her broodiness seems broken for now. I expect it will rear up again though as the days get longer.

The other deviation from Cleo’s brisk efficiency has been a certain omnivorous sexual receptivity. I used to assume that the daily rapes by our late rooster were wholly unwelcome, but since his death I have caught her assuming the characteristic pre-coital crouch for Lola, our mid-social-tier Ameraucana hen, to which Lola responds with a series of firm but tender pecks about the head (though no mounting that I have witnessed, so far). I could get comfortable with my birds acting out prison lesbian camp but lately Cleo has started to do the crouch for me so I reckon she’ll get it on with any gender or species that’s offering.

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Names: Lola (front) & Pablita (rear)
Breed: Ameraucana
Peck order: A2, A3

My Ameraucanas are of an untouchable caste the American Poulty Association dubs “mongrel easter-egger”. Like all mutts, they are smart, good-natured, energetic, and wholesomely attractive in their flecked sparrow coats. Impurity notwithstanding they do share significant oddities with their rarefied monochromatic show kin including earmuffs, beards, and striking pale blue eggs.

[more to follow]