A roulette wheel spins in front of you. The Bernie Sanders ice cream, Travis Scott burger, Wendy’s mixtape, Lady Gaga Oreos, USYD x the Mujahideen, Martin Luther King Jr. in Fortnite, Nicki Minaj in Call of Duty. Names, places, ideas, all have become a surrealist assault. Drake is getting married to a penguin to spread ecological awareness, Mumford and Sons came out as polyamorous, David Hughes has an upcoming collaboration with Shein. Are these true? Why not? If George Lucas announced tomorrow a collaboration between Star Wars and Bad Dragon Dildos, would anyone care a week later?
Nathen Mazri enlivens all these fantasies.
Nathen Mazri is an interesting figure. His deep attachment to his brands is so on-his-sleeve that it seems farcical. Where KISS has KISS-themed condoms, Mazri has a cat-mascot named “Nathfield” (a portmanteau of Nathen and Garfield). Where KISS adorns face-paint, Mazri dons two custom-made suits in the colour of the two IPs licensed to him, Garfield and Scooby-Doo.
To this end I must admit, before this interview Nathen Mazri was a character to me. I looked at him like a crow looks at a scarecrow, not as an aggregation of components, but as a cultural representation without any heart. I didn’t consider this as weird, either. Contemporary culture has created a world where fame’s clock spins around us like the sun and everybody gets their 15 minutes. It feels only natural that those in the public eye are not individuals, but colossal representations of stereotypes and schema. We reject the reality that celebrities are people, affixing to them the fictions and psycho-stereotypes of socially understood caricatures. I had been told so much about Nathen Mazri, and very little in his own words.
In 2018, Nathen, as the world’s youngest ever Garfield licensee, opened a Garfield-licensed restaurant: GarfieldEATS. Beginning in Dubai, it soon expanded to Toronto in 2019. Shortly after, this largely innocuous restaurant began to face difficulties.
“So you wanna know why it closed down,” Nathen said. “And you know, it’s very simple. Paramount terminated the licence agreement… Covid, and the lockdown… [I] really worked hard to, you know, bring a taste of Garfield through delivery… and until we were able to reopen we continued to serve Lasagna’s Garfield-shaped pizzas [and] Garfuccino coffee.”
While the brick-and-mortar GarfieldEATS has passed on, the feelings that created it remain, with photos on Nathen’s social media showcasing Nathen in his custom-made Garfield-orange suit, which was then later sold off with the proceeds going to charity.
“I love cartoons and there was relevance: Garfield ate lasagna,” he said. “There were Tacos for Taco Bell, Burgers for McDonald’s, pizza for Pizza Hut… Lasagna was an untapped market, and so I wanted to make Lasagna fast food… and I had an app. We had a beautiful app. You can still download it on Android, by the way.”
GarfieldEATS was such an “entergaging” (a Mazri-made portmanteau of entertaining and engaging) moment of corporate food history that it’s easy to forget the process, both before and after, that led to its creation. For us, the peanut-gallery public, it is just the blink of a lizard’s eyelid on a bald night. For Mazri, it was everything.
“Jim [Davis] and I are best friends,” Nathen said. “We still email and he’s doing great. You know he’s an elderly man now, and he’s lived quite a life. I really saw him as my Godfather, I looked up to him so much, and when I first shook his hand, and you know he was strong and tall. It was a magical moment for me, and I was starstruck also.”
I asked him whether he felt like he was “grieving the loss of Garfield”. “You carry this idea of Garfield within you… would you say there’s a sense of loss?”
“I did, I went on a hiatus,” he said. “I left Instagram for about 6 months, and I had to grieve, I had to grieve. I mean, I wore him for a while. That’s what they taught me in branding and marketing courses, live the brand, feel the brand, be the brand. And what I did is I took it too far and I lost myself. I forgot who Nathen Mazri was. The cat will never leave me.”
“Have you seen Wandavision?” I asked.
“No,” he replied.
“Oh, well,” I said, “Vision says to Wanda Maximoff: What is grief but love persevering?
During the brief window that it was open, Nathen and GarfieldEATS have created an outsized effect. The concept drew both hate and love: there were articles mocking North America’s first Garfield-licensed restaurant, while Garfield fans welcomed a place to dish down on a pizza the shape of their favourite cat’s face. Beyond this, Nathen himself has vocally waged a war on injustices of our society, taking shots at “land monsters” (a neologism made to replace landlord), and taxation, with a recent Twitter post (now deleted) calling for a “tax-free country.”
Nathen explained this to me. “Even closing down a business needs a budget… And the landlord, I call them the “land monster”, he gave us hell… I always said, you may have the keys, I have the Garfield fans. And with that I won and kept the rent as low as possible until he wanted more and more… Why is someone still [struggling to buy] a piece of bread? It’s all about money. You talk to me about ethics, morality, and [it’ll] override it! We live in a triangle. There’s someone up there in the pyramid that is really controlling this world. I mean I know who, but maybe we’ll leave it for another interview.”
The boundaries of capitalism are pushed, but so are those of sexuality.
“You seem to hold quite high value to the fact that Garfield is celibate,” I said. “Could you explain why that holds such importance? Obviously, it’s extremely valid.”
Nathen clarified his position. “Garfield is almost 43 years old, I think. And yeah, obviously, you know, he might have crushes here and there, but he’s a selfish person who loves himself, and yes, he’s celibate, and so am I.”
“Honestly,” he said, “I’ve spent 1.5 million dollars on GarfieldEATS. Yes, but I haven’t made that. Imagine having all this taken away from you after you spend that much. They don’t give a shit. They don’t give a shit. No one gives a shit, imagine how people wanna try to take away from you, but they don’t know that there is a fight in good men. There’s a huge warrior inside of good men, and once you keep pushing, if that warrior comes out they will win. Why? God is with the good. And now we’re getting ourselves trademarked. My father wanted me to be a corporate lawyer.”
“Whoa,” I said. “That’s a heavy expectation.”
“Yeah well,” Nathen replied, “You know I always wanted to make him proud. But you know, he is proud now… I’ve done something, and I would love to tell other, you know, young people out there. Don’t be scared. Get out there, you know. Get out there and do something… Stop blabbing about me and others on social media. Really?”
Talking to Nathen Mazri was akin to seeing The Capture of Christ by Bartalomeo Manfredi for the first time. I recall being struck by how lifelike Manfredi’s painting of Jesus’ arrest was, how it seems so revolutionary to see Jesus as human, taken by human hands. And Judas, so lovingly portrayed in Borges’s Three Versions of Judas, whose betrayal has thundered for millenia, was himself simply acting on human feelings. To speak to Mazri was to uncover the skin under the sculpture, the man behind the mockery, the heart that beats in us all.
“I’m at 11pm, my time,” Nathen said at last.
“Oh wow! It’s midday for me!” I replied.
“Well,” said Nathen, “Have a lasagna and go to class!”
