They've Commissioned a Statue of Lemmy - It Better Not Suck

According to California Rock News, the Sunset Strip's storied Rainbow Bar and Grill has commissioned a statue of its most beloved and loyal patron - Ian Fraser "Lemmy" Kilmister. Los Angeles artist Travis Moore secured the bid to deliver the sculpture which, given the iconic subject matter and the mercilessly judgmental nature of the rock and metal community, simply cannot afford to be anything less than seven shades of perfect. A sculpture of this magnitude simply cannot afford to be anything south of flawless, less it devolve into a cartoonish whipping post for fiendishly vengeful and remorseless vandals — a terrifying fate endured by our own Cardiff Kook, here in North County.In 2007, the well-meaning botanical society of Cardiff-by-the-Sea commissioned artist Matthew Antichevich to celebrate the sleepy surf town's vibrant and multi-generational surf culture with a statue to be prominently displayed on Highway 101 at just under $100,000. When the final work was unveiled, the "Magic Carpet Ride," as it was officially called, drew the sort of spittle-drenched, vitriolic derision normally reserved for people who rob Girl Scouts or kick puppies. For a sport viewed by its practitioners as an uber-masculine and wholly hardcore pursuit, the statue seemed to cast surfing as the purview of asexual Pan-like beings with double-jointed wrists and strange arm gesticulations. Locals took to issuing their displeasure in the most spectacular of ways - through nightly raids on the statue, dressing it up in all manners of embarrassing costumery — a practice that continues through the present day and which the community has embraced with web sites, t-shirts and thousands of social media posts.I have no reason to believe that Travis is anything but eminently qualified to shoulder this task — indeed, he's a longtime friend of the Rainbow's owner Mike Maglieri —and so I assume that the artist already has a vision for how the sculpture will look. That said, others have undertaken the task of sculpting the Motörhead frontman, with largely successful results. There is, for example, this bust by sculptor Nick Elphick, that, apart from ears that look like dreamcatchers (in fairness to the artist, the ears are anatomically accurate — Lemmy had massive kites on the sides of his head), offers a noble, steely-eyed commemoration. In fact, Lemmy was so moved by Elphick's tribute that he reached out and requested it to display in his L.A. pad. There is also sculptor Steven Whyte's portrait study of Lemmy that not only looks exactly like him, but that places the frontman in the most hallowed company of Whyte's other subjects, like  J.F.K. and Dr. Martin Luther King. At the other end of the spectrum are the high profile, celebrity sculpture epic fails.  Take for example, this utterly disastrous statue of The King, looking more like an Asian Elvis impersonator, hopped up on quaaludes while singing the Dreidel Song on the first day of Hanukkah.  Or this utterly terrifying take on Ronaldo, who looks like an Oompa Loompa from Willy Wonka, enlarged fifty times and set out to destroy some unsuspecting seaside town, like a frowny, bun-headed Godzilla.  Then there is this sculpture of Princess Diana getting choked out by a maleficent, cackling little boy with a poorly-concealed receding hairline. This sculpture gets bonus points for giving her gigantic stony Hulk hands like the kind kids wear at Halloween. Finally there's the Worst Celebrity Sculpture of All Time - this sphincter-loosening version of a wild-eyed, uber-toothy Lucille Ball, carrying a spoon and a bottle of booze and looking like she's halfway through an eight-day heroin binge, looking for somebody to tie her off for another shot. It would be nearly impossible to turn in a shittier celebrity sculpture than this.