Pop, Pop...Pop Culture

Hi, How Are You. So there's a few interesting books that I got used through Amazon.com recently that are worth your perusal. The first two are really coffee table books, "Banksy: Wall and Piece" and "I Am Plastic: The Designer Toy Explosion". The third is "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim", a collection of autobiographical essays by humorist David Sedaris. Here we go:


Now I've mentioned Banksy before in a previous post, and when I got this book it really cemented my love for his "art". This book is really a composite of a few of his previous paperback exposes on his urban guerilla graffitti art. I use the pronoun "his" loosely because we're not really sure who "he" is. In fact, I don't know who really put this book together. Maybe Banksy is a whole conglomerate of people or some kind of artists' union based out of the UK. As I've mentioned before, I usually have a lot of disdain for graffitti, but this stuff is more than that. You come to realize that it's very subversive, smart, ironic, optimistic, all the while being completely mischievious in "stickin' it to the man". Also, most of it is created from pre-cut stencils. My favorite section is the part where he infiltrates several famous art museums around the world and hangs his own works (usually some dime-store, mass-produced oil paintings you usually find in hotel rooms which he has slightly altered to make a statement), then to boot they time how long those works remain before someone takes notice that they don't belong and removes them. Brilliant!


So apparently there's been this whole underground "designer" toy movement that's been around since the late '90s which began when some visual design artists in Hong Kong started taking G.I. Joe action figures and rearranging their body parts and adding trendy urban elements and putting them on display in galleries. Now, there's a handful of small, independent plastic and vinyl toy manufactures that create limited-edition (and quite expensive, I should add) dolls and action figures. They're really more tiny works of art than playthings. The scene has sort of culminated in a franchise of toy stores called "Kid Robot" started by Paul Budnitz (also the editor of this book), which are currently only in about four major cities across the U.S. You may be familiar with one of the featured artists, Jamie Hewlett, the graphic designer behind all of the cartoon imagery of the band Gorillaz. Not surprisingly, most of the other artists are Japanese. Toys may not be your thing, but the photographs in this book are really visually striking.


Yes, it's true. I'm always the last to jump on a bandwagon, especially when there is a lot of hype surrounding something. Typically, I'll discover things on my own years after they've left the forefront of the public consciousness. David Sedaris is a perfect example of that. My brother and sister-in-law have been raving about him to me for years, and I only recently got this book which came out a few years ago. It was a New York Times #1 bestseller. I happened to pick it up and read a chapter while waiting for my wife to use the restroom at a Barnes & Noble in Boston, and I've been completely hooked since! Most of his stories are autobiographical (and have been accused of being slightly embellished for comic effect, but hey, who cares!). The humor has a melancholy, self-deprecating tint to it that most people with half a soul can relate to. I find myself laughing out loud at some of the things he writes about that I wouldn't even dream of speaking about! If you don't have the time to read any of his books, you can also check him out periodically on NPR's program, 'This American Life'.

Lastly, I know you're tired of reading all of my dribble, but I just wanted to mention the new album, "The Fragile Army" by The Polyphonic Spree, which just came out this week. If you're already a P.S. fan, this collection will be nothing groundbreaking to you. It's more sugary, cult-like goodness. Enjoy the Kool-Aid, suckas!