Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s and 1950s, Palestine adored his teddy bears, finding to his horror that his mother had thrown them away. “My mother, when I was around 10 or 11, thought I was too old to have these kinds of toys,” Palestine recalled ruefully. “One day when I was at school, she took all my animals and threw them out. I came back and I no longer had any of my friends – my cuddly friends.”
These days Palestine has all of his cuddly friends. “I call them divinities,” Palestine says. “But I use it as a sacred secular term, meaning I believe it’s sacred – it really is important to me and gives me all the reinforcement that sacred things can without it being dogmatic. My religion has no name. Maybe ‘Meshugahland’. You know the word ‘meshugah’? It means crazy. But it means ‘crazy’ in a nicer way than the word ‘crazy’ means. ‘Crazy’ is a crass word. In Yiddish, when you say ‘meshugah’, it has kind of an embrace – you sort of embrace somebody with that. It still means ‘crazy’, but it’s embracing.” (A recent show by Palestine at New York’s Jewish Museum was titled Bear Mitzvah in Meshugahland.)
(via 'I call them divinities': Charlemagne Palestine's 18,000 stuffed animals | Art and design | The Guardian)
