Vigorously Lazy

Full disclosure: This weeks BBCDW entry comes more out of an interest in the material itself than an interest in the accompanying design, which, as will soon be explained, is not all that great.

I’ve been sitting at my desk all this week (plopped in front of my desk, really) contentedly chipping away at a new issue. Yesterday, though, something hit me all the sudden. Holy Shit. I’m a 27-year-old healthy young man. What the fuck am I doing whiling away my days at a fucking desk when I could be out breaking laws and jumping my motorcycle over gorges. Or at the very least, introducing myself to random women on the street and having long drawn out conversations about life and love, a la Before Sunrise. Taking some sort of risks, I guess, instead of being cautious and careful all the time.

That’s why William Gurstelle’s new book struck a chord with me. Living dangerously reminds you that you’re alive, not a worker drone  toiling away for dubious reasons. Kind of an idealistic, college kid notion, but the truth nonetheless.

The cover design, on the other hand, is nothing special. It aspires to greatness, something along the whimiscal lines of The Dangerous Book for Boys, but falls shamefully short. The little flamethrower man is an almost embareassing example of poor Adobe Illustrator skills and the knives in the lower left almost look like cooking cutlery, not anything truly menacing, like so. It appears they were going for the turn-of-the-century Almanac aesthetic but just ended up with a design hodge podge straight out of Stuff magazine. Hopefully they can get it together for the paperback. What’s that?  This is the paperback? Yikes.

So this thing just came in hot off the wire. The second I saw that it had an MSRP of $489.00 I was pretty livid and was all ready to write some tirade about how Amazon is totally out of touch with the modern reader and that this product could, in no way, be the future of books and how I got my hands on an original Kindle a couple years ago and was not that impressed and found it to be a middle piece of technology on the road to something better (iPhone reader? When is this going to happen? Hello?) and how it should be reserved for late 40’s techies who want to get in early on some hot new piece of gear but feel too old to Twitter. Some angry bullshit like that.

But then I looked at the specs.

This thing is 1/3″ thick and has a 9.7″ screen that can show a shitload more detail than the first Kindle. It holds 3500 books and Amazon is now in league with a handful of major colleges to provide this new gadget to students for all their textbook uses. Dare I say it: this thing is kind of cool.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and buy one. $500 for an ebook reader is fucking stupid, I don’t care how much money you have. But if you’re a student getting one for free and you don’t have to pay an ungodly amount for heavy textbooks that you will use once and store on your bookshelf for the rest of your life in hopes that it will serve you at some later date, well, then you’re stoked.

The concept of an ebook is a ways off from being revolutionary. Nothing will replace a real, perfect bound, paperback book. Nothing will replace the ability to dog ear, make notes in the margin, underline. Not to mention a paperback is never subject to battery failure, blunt trauma and if you spill a beer on it all you do is stick it out in the sun for a while. Sure it’s gonna be all puffy and stinky when it dries out, but it will technically still function.

This whole Kindle experiment whiffs of desperation to me: An ailing company trying way too hard to maintain relevancy in an advance technological age. Something tells me Jeff Bezos thinks so too.

The book is not broken, Amazon. Johannes Gutenburg got it right the first time. Quit trying to fix it.

Thanks Gallycat.

Dear friend Jason Gregory just launched a new version of the MAKR site. Jason makes insanely high qulaity leather goods. If you’re into fashion and hand crafted things that carry other things then you should check him out.

When I was a kid no one made me laugh harder than this man.

NY artist Erika Somogyi is doing some inspiring things with watercolor and gouache. A lot of artists lately have been trying to capture that magic of finding yourself in nature. Erica nails it without veering into the realm of corny myhtological creatures and co-opted indian imagery. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a painting recreate the look of staring directly at the sun. Very impressive. Well done, Erika.

Dan Wickett over at EWN has been promoting the shit out of the month of May being Short Story Month. In an effort to support the cause I’m providing a link to the best story I’ve read most recently.

“Leopard” by Wells Tower. It isn’t the greatest story in his new collection Everything Raveged, Everything Burned, but it’s still a hum dinger. A young boy, tormented by his stepdad, stays home from school and revels in the idea that there may or may not be a jungle cat prowling around his woodland home. If you’re not the reading type I’d wager it’s because you’ve just never read anyhting good before. Do yourself a favor and change that.

Ha. So looks like ABSPB might have to be a bi-weekly thing seeing that I still haven’t finished any one of the 3 books I first showcased. Looks like I’m not as quick a reader as I thought I was! Heh Heh! Looks like I’m not as smart either! Looks like I bit off more than I can chew! Ha Ha! Looks like I’m a complete failure at everything I do and I fail to finish the things that I start! HA HA HA! Haha, hah, whoo (whiping tear from eye), heh heh, ha… (sigh).

Anyway here’s the cover for Mark Twain’s “Who is Mark Twain?” A collection of unpublished journals, letters and lectures. A beautiful and playful little cover. Though I’m not sure what all that top hat business is about. I don’t remember him being known for that. A head of billowy white hair maybe, but top hat? Maybe Harper Collins saw how much Slash’s memoir was selling so they threw Samual Clemmins on the top hat bandwagon. Or maybe the answer to the titular question is right here.

After years of silence (for no apparent reason) I just started talking with extreme journalist Brooke Geery today. Turns out she recently blogged about my blog, so in good form I’m blogging about her blog about blogging me. Blog.