SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL

by Tao Lin
104 pages, Melville House

Life is Bleak, Ain’t it Neat

Review by Marie Mundaca

Is it possible that a book filled with instant message exchanges can also be incredibly moving? In Shoplifting from American Apparel, Tao Lin explores the notion that internet friendships are somehow different from real life connections. Imbued with Lin’s dark comedy and deadpan humor, Shoplifting is a fun and penetrating trip into the mind of someone trying “not to be a bad person,” and make connections with people. Readers know Sam, the novel’s protagonist, isn’t a bad person at all. He’s aimless and confused, but his quiet demeanor is incredibly appealing.

Sam spends his days and nights IM’ing with his Internet friend Luis, interrupted by work at a vegetarian restaurant and occasional trips to shoplift clothes from the hipster clothing outpost American Apparel. When he gets caught stealing, the store’s manager has this conversation with Sam.

“Steal from some shitty corporation. We have fair-trade labor. I mean fair labor.”

“I spend my money on even better places,” said Sam, “Organic vegan restaurants.”

“I’m all for that,” said the manager.

Sam goes to jail, but this doesn’t get him down—he’s already as far down as he can go. Sam thinks, “Loneliness and depression would be defeated with a king-size bed, an expensive stereo system, a drum set, a bike, an unlimited supply of organic produce and coconuts, and maybe calmly playing an online role playing game.” If this is what it will take to make him happy, then spending a night in jail is no worse than spending a night at home.

In the second half of the book, Sam travels to Gainesville to see some friends and meet a girl. Of course, the real life conversations are much more awkward than Sam’s and Luis’s IM conversations. When Sam is interacting with friends in real life, his loneliness abates, but the specter of depression looms humorously. “I feel really good right now, I feel like I’ll just kill myself after this,” Sam says to his friends. When he tells his friend Audrey, “I honestly don’t know what to do, like, overall,” she suggests that he draw hamsters.

“ ‘I already did that,’ said Sam.

‘There’s nothing left for you,’ said Audrey.”

When he finally kisses Audrey, Lin writes this awkward exchange: “They kissed some more and then stared at each other with neutral facial expressions. … Sam felt his own neutral facial expression.” Even during passionate moments, Sam tries hard to remain aloof and detached.

Lin is writing about ennui, depression, loneliness—all difficult subjects to write about. How to get these emotions across without sounding desperate and boring? Lin succeeds wildly. Shoplifting from American Apparel is a quietly bleak and humorous book that will stay with you for a long time.

IT LOOKS LIKE A C**K!

by Ben and Jack
112 pages, St. Martin’s Griffin

Review by Marie Mundaca

Looking for the perfect Father’s Day gift, or something for the new grad? Well, look further.

Recently, GQ online declared the official end of the blog to book (or what they called Tumblr books) with the purchase of Hipster Puppies. But that won’t be published for months, so we lucky readers have many many more blog books to look forward to. But It Looks Like a C**k! isn’t one of them. It only seems like it would be a good idea for a blog. Smart boys Ben and Jack took it directly to publication, as if there was no Internet! It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy just knowing that there are upstanding boys like Ben and Jack who have such old-timey values.

C**k! features lovely full-page color photos of things that look penile, with a handy graphic scale guiding the reader as to how trouser-trout-like said object is. Astute readers may not agree with the assertion that the exotic flower is only 17% weenie, while an aerial view of the Thames is 49%. I know I don’t agree. Were Ben and Jack trying to be inflammatory, or were they simply looking for something to fill up the book?

You can guess what some of the ding-a-ling simulacra are: strange fruits, cloud formations, fungi. But the vast number and incredible variety gives the book a wow factor. Gourds, sure, you expect that. But tomatoes?

C**k! features short essays on each pants porpoise simile, all of which are only vaguely humorous. And that’s weird because I usually find jerkin’ gherkins to be hilarious. But perhaps I’m not the target audience for C**K! For example, the text is in a little tiny font size (that’s not a euphemism), often dropped out white on light backgrounds. I can’t read that! Obviously Ben and Jack knew that their target audience were teens. I’m pretty certain that 13 year old boys will love C**k!, along with adults who enjoy the Twilight sagas. I do like writing C**k!, though.

But seriously, we must hail St. Martin’s Griffin for publishing this in the US—in the UK it’s published by the formerly esteemed Bloomsbury—for C**k! is something that should be read in the bathroom, and who would want to bring the laptop into the loo? Now we have this handy, slim volume to puzzle and laugh over all the different things that look like weenuses.

And, yes, they really all do look like c**ks.

MY BLIND DATE WENT BLIND

True Stories of Dates Gone Wrong
by Virginia Vitzthum
256 pages, Workman Publishing

Review by Marie Mundaca

I’ve recently become single, and being forced into the dating world at my advanced age has been a horror. I have to force myself to go on dates that I assume will either be boring or painful. Occasionally I have a good date, but then the guy isn’t interested in me. No matter what happens, I go home alone, slightly bloated and intoxicated, and usually feeling worse than I did before. Sometimes I even miss Lost. But at least none of my dates brought their soon-to-be-ex-wives. Yet.

Yes, actually occurs in one of the fifty-two stories in My Blind Date Went Blind: True Stories of Dates Gone Wrong. First, the protagonist meets a guy at a singles event and his not-yet-ex is there. That means, yes, a guy and his wife are at a singles mixer. For some crazy reason the protagonist gives him her number and they make a date. And then, for another crazy reason, he brings his wife to pick up his date. And, get this, this is nowhere near the craziest story in the collection, culled and edited by sex and relationship columnist Virginia Vitzthum. There are dates with killers, future kidnappers, people with atrocious table manners—Vitzthum really packed this collection with the funniest and most puzzling bad dates.

Blind Date is like my fave old game show, Love Connection, where people would go on blind dates and then have to dish about the date for our entertainment. Every so often there would be a “happy ending” date (not literally, but those happened too), but the best date stories were the ones where one of the daters was just insane, or the two were just ridiculously mismatched. And those are exactly the stories you’ll find in My Blind Date Went Blind. Even with a few happy endings (both kinds).

The collection features bad dates from a variety of people, from giggly teenagers who meet guys at McDonalds, to men in their sixties who travel from London to France for the possibility of romance. After reading about the guy who took his teeth out and the woman who admitted to doing time for manslaughter, my bad dates seemed almost OK.

Vitzthum shares some of her own bad dates too—she’s not an impartial observer, but a fellow sufferer. She briefly dated a guy with anger issues who suggested they go to couples counseling—on their forth date! Sounds like more than anger issues going on with him.

Many of the stories don’t really have the narrative arch I would like—it’s much closer to hearing friends tell you funny stories than it is like a short story. But the collection is meaty, and Vitzthum neatly divides the date stories into categories, like “Honesty,” “Communication,” and “It’s Medical.” Apparently some people have medical emergencies on dates, hence the titular story.

At first, I found this book incredibly depressing. There were so many bad date experiences—what hope is there for humanity to prosper? Yes, Vitzthum sprinkles some happy stories in the book, but those managed to depress me too. But as I started to talk to other people about the book, I realized that all of us single folks are in the same boat. It says something about our indefatigable spirit and desire to be coupled that we continue to endure this dreadful experience. And if we can’t laugh about it, we’ll just go postal and kill someone. And then we’ll give someone a great story to tell people after they date us.

GRISTLE: FROM FACTORY FARMS TO FOOD SAFETY (THINKING TWICE ABOUT THE MEAT WE EAT)

Edited by Moby with Miyun Park
160 pages, New Press

Review by Marie Mundaca

Let’s be honest, the majority of the people who are active in the small planet food movement—the movement where you know the emotional state of the cow that your milk came from (and really, why are you drinking cow milk anyway?)—are affluent folks. Buying products from small local farms is an incredibly expensive and time-consuming proposition. At my local farmers’ market, 6 eggs cost 7 dollars. At Whole Foods, organic apples average around $2.99 per pound. I don’t know what meat costs anymore (I’ve been a veg for a long time), but a few years ago my friend told me she spent forty dollars on her small free-range Thanksgiving turkey. It was important to her that he could run around and have sex. But for $25 I could have gotten him a blow job near the Lincoln Tunnel!

Anyway, the average American can’t afford the luxury of happy meat. But that didn’t stop bon-vivant and “musician” Moby from “editing” a book on the horrors of factory farming. What does Moby know about editing a book? Not much, judging by the fact that the book has TWO subtitles! I’m sure the real editor was food activist Miyun Park. The book is made up of essays by rich white people, with Cesar Chavez’s granddaughters thrown is as tokens. Almost every contributor has something related to promote: we have John Mackey, the wacky and contentious CEO of Whole Foods Markets, Sara Kubersky, the co-owner of vegan shoe store Moo Shoes, Lauren Bush who is still pretending to be a co-founder of FEED… you get the picture. While the basic idea of the collection is sound—factory farms are a pretty bad way to produce food—who wants to be preached to by people who have something to gain? It dilutes the message.

The book is not fun. It’s very preachy, and the allegedly fascinating charts are quite dull. There are no cute drawings of cows and pigs. I like my “fascinating” charts to be cute! The information is important, but the presentation is so condescending it’s hard not to have the urge to run out and order a crave case of White Castle sliders just on general principle. The essays outline the myriad problems with American farming, specifically the meat industry: the workers and the animals are treated poorly, our taxes subsidize these bad practices, there is a lot of waste, factory processes can make the meat disease-ridden. Because the factory farm business is so heavily subsidized, fast food becomes very cheap and attractive to the working poor, single parent families, and other members of at-risk populations. Populations get fat and ill.

But what is the solution? Gristle offers none. As a single unemployed vegetarian, I’m fortunate enough to live in a city where I can get my fruit and veggies at the farmers’ market (but not eggs. As much as I want to support my local farmers, I draw the line at $1.20 per egg). But if I were a single mother living in the Midwest, you can bet I’d be stretching my dollars at the incredibly cheap Walmart. Moby and pals don’t know what real life is like in America, and all their preaching isn’t going to change that.

DIARY OF AN OXYGEN THIEF

by Anonymous
149 pages, V Publishing

Review by Marie Mundaca

Diary of An Oxygen Thief is getting high praise. The back cover claims that New York magazine called it “Kinky, artsy, and swoon-worthy.” Although I can’t find that review online, the magazine did feature it in their Valentine’s Day “Romantic Reads” feature, where a representative of hipster Brooklyn bookstore Spoonbill & Sugartown said that, "Women seem to be very fond of this book, about a down-and-out guy who has lots of trouble with women. It's a surprise dark-horse Williamsburg bestseller.” It also got a decent review in Faster Times, which called it, “brisk, original, and deceptively astute.”

So get ready, folks! This is by far one of the suckiest books I’ve read in a long time. The only thing that kept me turning the pages was the disbelief that it was so bad.

Let’s start with the conceit—an alcoholic Irish guy living in London likes to emotionally hurt women. This is not in diary form, but in confessional form, making it exceedingly dull. There is none of the excitement of participating in events as they happen, or the dirty fun of reading someone’s secrets. The anonymous author is writing this for public consumption. But everything is told and not shown, and not told very well. I was not given any idea of the sort of thrill he got from this emotional torture, other than he liked to do it. Over and over again. Then he gets sober and moves to America. Bizarrely, he gets an advertising job in an ad agency with the very Irish name of Killallon Fitzpatrick in a made-up town in Minnesota, conveniently located near the famous Hazelden Addiction Treatment Center. Only he calls it “Hazleton.” You’d think this might come into play later, but you’d be wrong. Also, oddly, people at the agency have British names like “Graham.” And one has a niece in the author’s hometown of Kilkenny, which, yes, is what they do every week on South Park. The author keeps reminding readers that he will get his comeuppance, and he does, but who cares? By that time we’ve been punished by having to live through his boring day job and his masturbatory habits. Besides the fact that the set-up for the comeuppance relies upon a very strange plot device--that there is a publishing program at Harvard where the STUDENTS can publish any books they want, no matter how ridiculous.

Here’s a scene demonstrating his cruelty (both to his lover and the reader), which is set in what appears to be 14/15 New Times Roman. The design, along with the text, is an affront.

“‘I’m going to dismantle us tonight. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll have to sit there and listen while I wrench the U from the S. You’ll question your own judgment. Maybe you’ll never really trust yourself again. I hope so, Because if I don’t want you, and believe me I don’t, then I don’t want you being happy with someone else when there’s any doubt that I might be with another girl.’
I was not yet aware, you understand, that I was to become the Soulfurnace you see before you, But I was losing the bolt-uprightness I felt I deserved, so I added,
‘Your c*nt is loose. … Let me put it another way. Your vagina is baggy…feels overused.’
Now we were cooking. Her eyes widened. I saw how she tried to keep her outrage to herself. But it was too late, I was already in there. I could almost see out through her eyes. She couldn’t hide. Not from me, I was the undercover cop. I knew all her moves. I’d helped create them. This was too easy.
‘Your tits sag.’
This was delivered like a punch. I leaned back to better view the effect.
‘They’re too big and they hang too low.’ ”

No, I don’t know what a “Soulfurnace” is either. Or why she had to sit there and listen. Or where in the world saying that a woman’s breasts are too big is an insult. Or why there’s a paragraph break after a comma. So many unanswered questions!

To be fair, most of the book is not this exciting. Much of it has to do with Anon’s boring day job working on some luxury car ad, and how he hasn’t dated much since he got sober, and how friggin’ cold it is in Minnesota. Also, he claims Minnesotans say “cwaffee.”

Diary of An Oxygen Thief was so awful it had me yearning for the florid, over the top prose of James Frey. At least that guy knew how to tell a story.

THE TICKING IS THE BOMB

by Nick Flynn
304 pages, W.W. Norton and Company

Review by Marie Mundaca

About a third of the way through The Ticking is the Bomb, author Nick Flynn is at a Buddhist retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh. The famed Buddhist monk, says “it is a mistake to say ‘the rain is falling,’ to say ’the wind is blowing.’ What is the rain if it is not falling? What is the wind if it is not blowing? The falling is the rain, the blowing is the wind.” The next day Flynn brings this up to some others at the retreat. “He’s talking about impermanence," someone says. Really? Because he’s not. He’s talking about the intrinsic nature of things. Rain cannot not fall, wind cannot not blow, at least here on earth. However, ticking is not intrinsic to the bomb, is it? I guess if it’s set to go off.

And thus we have the major problem with The Ticking Is The Bomb: Flynn, whose previous book was the highly acclaimed Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, is trying to write a book about disparate things that go together in his life: complicated love affairs, torture, his mother’s suicide, and the birth of his first child. These things may be intrinsic to Flynn, but they have nothing to do with the rest of us, making for a confusing, self-indulgent memoir, albeit one with drop dead gorgeous prose. Although The Ticking Is The Bomb doesn’t really work as a memoir, I have to concede that Flynn’s prose is enticing enough to keep me interested for an entire book.

I’m guessing that because these subjects are so important to Flynn, he doesn’t understand that they may not be important to the reader. He makes no attempt to tie the any of these topics together, other than talk about both of them in short, provocatively titled sections (“a box of dolls,” “sheepfucker,” “the inventor of the life raft”) with quiet sentences. It’s a beautiful book prose-wise, but it really fails spectacularly at what it’s trying to do. Which, to be honest, I don’t know what that is. I only know that it doesn’t really do anything.

Flynn’s discreet sections within chapters have very little connection to each other, other than recurrent symbols and themes like monkeys, lava, imprisonment, and torture. It’s not until he brings his father into the book that the themes of family and torture really start to coalesce—his father claims to have been tortured while in prison in the US, and Flynn discovers that he may not be lying—the CIA experimented in what they called “light” torture (standing for days, sleep deprivation--little fun things like that.) in two of the prisons that held his father. But his father is prone not only to criminal behavior but to hoarding and disconnection to reality, so Flynn never really knows.

The use of Inez as a pseudonym for his real partner, actress Lili Taylor, is strange. It’s not like their relationship is a secret. He’s writing a memoir, or so it says on the cover. He wants the reader to come into his life and find an identifiable emotion, like his hatred of torture, his implied (but not well conveyed) ambivalence over having a child, his screwed-up parents, but when it comes to the mother of his daughter he tells readers to stand back. Even though he tells readers many personal things about their relationship. Perhaps it was a desire to keep the memoir out of the realm of gossip, but, really, how many people out there are hungry for juicy details of Lili Taylor’s life?

Every so often at the end of a section Flynn will attempt to bring things together: the torture, the mother, the women, the daughter. He’ll pose questions about how far would you go to get back a kidnapped daughter, or write about the differing reactions his stepfather and his real father have about the birth of their granddaughter. But little gestures are too subtle to come close to binding these big subjects. The bomb isn’t ticking after all.

I AM THE ANGEL

by Michael Stuart
296 pages, iUniverse

Review by Marie Mundaca

Everyone has an idea of what heaven might be like—bright blue with fluffy clouds, lightning speed conversations with famous people, and lots of chocolate. But few people would include school and jobs. In Michael Stuart’s I Am The Angel, heaven is as pimped out as you’d like, but there’s still a lot of bureaucracy for the newly dead, like classes, with tests and everything. I would’ve hoped for a little less structure. In some ways, Stuart’s afterlife is a cross between The Lovely Bones and Beetlejuice, with its hellish waiting-room limbo. But don’t expect the sentimentality of Bones, -- the unnamed protagonist of I Am the Angel is fairly cantankerous, and his difficulty with his post-death assignment gives Stuart the opportunity to present philosophical discussions about the plight of humanity with a great degree of insight and humor. Readers will find Angel maybe a little sappy, but not at all predictable.

The hero of I Am the Angel dies as a result of getting hit by a car on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and we immediately see where his priorities lie—the first thing he notices upon realizing that he’s dead is that his hair looks perfect. Apparently, when you die you get an idealized version of yourself to parade around it—pretty nice! And regular clothes too. No flowing white robes here, unless that’s what you want. But unfortunately for our hero, his obvious misanthropy is overlooked by the all knowing angel of death, Michael, and he immediately gets shuttled into “Angel School,” where he’ll learn to help out the living when bad hair days push them over the edge.

The protagonist has a slow and believable journey throughout the novel—his hatred and intolerance of people comes from how they constantly disappoint him with their bad decisions and bad manners. He struggles with the decision of whether or not to accept his assignments. Sure, he gets to go back to earth, but he has to deal with—eww--people. But an accidental overdose victim, Marley, along with his fellow students, show him that everyone has some good in them, and just about everyone deserves to get an angelic hand now and then.

Stuart spends quite a bit of time describing how things work in heaven. Besides the idealized self, you get to design your home and place it in the neighborhood of your choice, and you can also go to fantasy ballgames. It’s pretty swanky. But Stuart’s descriptions and side trips don’t get in the way of the real story, which is the hero’s journey from regular ol’ dead person to angel.

The protagonist starts out with general distain for humanity, and some of his fellow students. As he gets to know people a little better, his hatred tempers a bit—he is obviously a man who can hate on a large scale, but is able to find a little good in the people he actually meets. But when he attends his own funeral, his anger and disappointment are palpable as he notes the absence of his former fiancé and the presence of people he doesn’t even know whom he suspects may be business associates of his parents. He writes. “Who the hell were they to turn my death into a networking opportunity? Didn’t they have expensed business lunches where they could spew their sycophantic dialogue to dear old mom and dad?” He bemoans the lack of heart-felt eulogies, and people talking about the weather instead of about him. And who can blame him? Hopefully we really don’t get to attend our own funerals—I’m sure we would find them equally appalling.

Despite the fact that this book takes place in a fairly traditional version of a Judeo-Christian heaven, the archangels tend towards a very liberal interpretation of the Bible. Readers shouldn’t be expecting any evangelizing here. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. At one point archangel Michael says, “We find it very distressing when someone imposes his interpretation of the Bible onto someone else. It’s the same as forcing your personal values onto others. This mocks the very idea of both free will and the individualist nature with which God created humans.”

Stuart missed some opportunities to explore the protagonist’s misanthropy and his relationship with his ex-fiancé isn’t as fleshed out as it should be. But these minor flaws don’t detract from this sweet and enjoyable novel.

BRIAN ENO’S ANOTHER GREEN WORLD

(33-1/3 series) by Geeta Dayal
136 pages, Continuum

Review by Marie Mundaca

The Discreet Charm of Brian Eno

I attended a David Byrne concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York City earlier this year. I hate David Byrne for personal reasons—I was deeply asleep at CBGB’s Theater in January 1979 when he rudely awoke me with “Psycho Killer”—so I didn’t really want to go. But there are seats at Radio City, which made the show more enticing for me—it’s hard to stand in a crowd for two hours! But what made this show interesting to me was that the focus of the show was to be the music Byrne made with producer and songwriter Brian Eno.

I was first introduced to Eno’s music when I was a punk rock teenager. My older friends’ musical taste went beyond The Adverts and Richard Hell. They all tried to educate me by subjecting me to music by The Residents, Stockhausen, and Brian Eno. Eno’s Music for Airports, Discreet Music, and Another Green World were the perfect soundtracks for late night conversations about nothing. Well, they were about something, usually creating Great Art, or starting a Great Band. Regardless, these talks never got beyond the conceptual stage.

But it was at the David Byrne concert, as Byrne performed hit songs like “Once In A Lifetime” and “Burning Down The House” that I realized that most of the late 20th century musical catalog would not exist without Brian Eno. His work with the Talking Heads and U2 had a tremendous influence on pop music. I used to think that Eno had sold out; after all he curated the great No New York album;, and now he was hanging out with Bono? No New York was probably single-handedly responsible for Sonic Youth, the Pixies, and Nirvana. His work in ambient soundscapes led the way for trance and techno. Not to mention that he created “The Microsoft Sound,” the startup music for Windows 95, called by one youtube commenter, “the sound that marked… the digital age.”

I’ve forgiven Eno for his work with Byrne and Bono. After all, without his influence, both bands probably would have been a lot more boring, and popular music a lot mundane.

In the recently released “33-1/3 series” monograph, Another Green World, music and science writer Geeta Dayal explores how this album cemented Eno’s theories about “the recording studio as musical instrument,” and all that entailed. The development and recording of Another Green World took place over a few months in 1975, and throughout the book Eno and other musicians remark on how expensive that was. Eno would gather musicians into the studio with only vague ideas, but an outstanding group of musicians, like Robert Fripp, John Cale, Phil Collins (To be fair to Eno, this was ten years before abominations like "Sussudio"). According to Dayal, Eno encouraged creativity among the musicians utilizing a deck of cards with suggestions that he created, called “Oblique Strategies,” rather than dictating exactly what they should play. Eno said in an interview, “(T)he musicians I work with play a very creative role—they’re not there as executives of my ideas.”

Dayal takes her time exploring all the personalities and backgrounds that Eno brought together for this project. Describing production and creative processes and how they produced the warm evocative songs on Another Green World would be difficult for anyone not versed in electronic music. But Dayal writes about the production of this album in an accessible and interesting way. The story of this album not just the story of how an album was made, but a story about the creative process and having faith in one’s ideas. Dayal doesn’t waste readers’ time reviewing the album, knowing that everyone can easily listen to tracks like “St. Elmo’s Fire” (no, not that one) and “Over Fire Island” on their own.

The album Another Green World can get a bit wonky and weird, which is not surprising upon finding out how it was made. The amazing thing about the album is how successful it is on many levels. There are experimental pieces and gorgeous pop songs that sit side-by-side. Dayal makes it clear how important this album was both to Eno’s development and to the development of late 20th century music in general.

Readers interested in Eno will love this book, as will any creative types struggling with how to make something from only vague ideas. Beware, though, there are no ribald stories about Bono or Byrne. Perhaps my friends and I should have listened to Eno more closely during those late nights—we might all be famous now.