The Freakers

The Freaker Team. Oliver, Zach and Lauren. (From Left to right).

I first learned about the freaker team last September. I was crossing Dolores Park in San Francisco, when I noticed a group of people huddled around a boxtruck parked at the side of the park. The boxbody of the truck opened in the front, exposing a colorful room which looked like a magical chamber .

As I came closer I encountered the freaksters. Dressed in a freaskish yet hip style, glowing with smiles, and exuding an air of adventure and pranks, they were giving out sandwiches to random by-passers, promoting a peculiar product called “A Freaker”, which turned out to be some kind of ingenious garment for bottles of all kinds, invented and designed by Zach, one of the freaksters, to keep bottles warm, cold and cool (as well as to relentlessly fight against bottlesweat and moist handshakes) .

They told me that 2 months ago they have set out on a cross country tour, aimed at freaking the world, making stops in towns and cities to bring the news of the freakers to people all over. Looking at this traveling carnival of madness and good vibes, I could not help but be reminded of the pranksters, the legendary freakish-psychedelic pack which traveled the US in 1964 led by author Ken Kesey, and became immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Kool-Aid Acid Test”, which told the story of that magical bus-trip, and the acid tests that followed .

Like the pranksters, the freaksters used a distinctly patriotic-american aesthetic, often flashing the american flag around on their products and clips. As I watched some of their stylish self-promotion clips, which were shown on the LCD screens featured on the trailer, I could not help but think about the pranksters film, shot by the merry pranksters in the 1960s during their cross country tour, and finally edited and brought to cinema 50 years later this summer. (See trailer below)

The freaksters in their truck, when I met them in Dolores park, together with some by-passers.

The freaksters seemed like a modern day variation of the pranksters. Meeting them, was for me, a long time admirer of the pranksters, like surfing through a strange time-space glitch and meeting the cousins of my cultural heroes: a 21st century updated version of the pranksters. When I told Lauren, the magic-girl freaker, about my associations she told me that it’s not their intention, but that they’ve heard it before.

So I bought a couple of freakers to bring back home toIsrael. Then, when I got home, I started watching the rest of the freaker videos online, which triggered even greater excitement in me. The videos had the rare quality of looking both effortlessly creative and fun, as well as meticulously stylish and professional. In fact, they were so well done that I actually found it hard to believe that the freakers created them themselves.

Turns out that the videos were indeed all done by Oliver, the film-freaker who directs, films and edits them all by himself “low budget, low maintenance, and extremely independet”. And the freakers have an incredibly delightful YouTube channel. Most of their videos aren’t explicitly psychedelic in style, but they always have some kind of playful and pranksterish spirit which I find highly psychedelic. However, what I like most of all about the freaksters is that they just live out their life in a highly psychedelic fashion.

The Freasters original Kickstarter video

The freaksters present us not only with a way to do truly-hip psychedelic advertisements. They also present us with a kind of psychedelic entrepreneurialism. Psychedelic not only in style, but also in spirit. I mean, how many people do you know who came up with an idea, used it to launch a whacked off cross country tour, while shooting films about it, making art and starting their own business – all at the same time?

Making entrepreneurialism psychedelic, in the best sense of the word, the freaksters have a radical way of dissolving the boundaries between work and fun, something which fits beautifully with the situationistic revolutionary ideas of the 1960s and the psychedelic revolution of that time – but fulfills them in ways which even the 1960s revolutionaries hardly ever accomplished. I mean, the pranksters didn’t manage to get any work done during their bus trip, and they never managed to finish their film by themselves.

“We all love what we’re doing so much that most time “work” doesn’t feel like ‘work’” says Lauren. “From the beginning, we knew that our product would be a hard thing to market so we decided just to do what we loved and interlace Freakers in everything that we do… so I guess we are marketing our personalities and lifestyle and from this, we hoped that people would start asking questions about Freakers. So in a way, our business IS pleasure. And pleasure is business.“

Like Lady Gaga, another one of my psychedelic heroes, what I find to be most alluring about the freakers, is that they take their lifestyle of freakerdom and turn it into a form of art from which everyone can be inspired. Watching them and their videos gives me inspiration for alternative ways of living and making your dreams and hallucinations come true. And that, my friends, is truly psychedelic. So I say Amen to that, and freak on!

NYC Freaker