Book Review Revue

edited by
Dian Hanson

(TASCHEN) $59.99.

The Big Penis Book is BIG. Twelve rock-hard inches. Well…
it’s 12 inches by 12 inches and rock-hard bound. It’s really
THICK, too. I’m sitting here, just holding it, all alone, in my
apartment. God, it’s so, so… so HUGE! It weighs almost, what,
seven pounds? I can barely lift… oh man! Anyway, yeah, it’s
just me, a girl, sitting here with one very large book of
penises.

Which brings me to my point. I’m a GIRL. Why, in two different
Seattle bookstores, was The Big Penis Book hidden away in the
gay/lesbian section? Since when DON’T straight girls love great big
cocks? I have to tell you, anonymous bookstore stockers, you really
disappoint me.

What does NOT disappoint is this gorgeous new 384-page book, with
over 400 historic color and black-and-white photographs, reproduced in
the almost-flawless fashion that master archivists and undefeated
art-book champs TASCHEN is known for. I suppose the “GAY!”
classification of the book is because many of the photographs are from
the studios of Bob Mizer (Athletic Model Guild) and David Hurles (Colt,
Falcon, and Champion Studios). But still… I dare anyone, gay or
straight, to look at pages 50, 203,
and/or 361, and tell me
they’re not amazed. And I daresay a healthy fascination with the
large phallus is timeless and compelling to both sexes. I might
even say this coffee-table book of supersized schlongs might be the
ultimate gift to give to more than one person, male or female,
on your holiday shopping list. KELLY O

by Drew Magary

(Little, Brown) $16.99.

Drew Magary is a funny motherfucker. Magary, one of the principal
dick-joke writers on the hilarious Kissing Suzy Kolber sports
blog—which, in fact, contains very little sports
analysis—is the latest blogger to cross over and join the guys
from Stuff White People Like and Waiter Rant in a weird, semilegitimate
circle of hell in the literary world.

Magary sticks with what he knows—completely ludicrous sports
satire, all of which appears to be new material—in Men with
Balls. He provides sage advice for up-and-coming rookies (“Smart
athletes use racism to their advantage, and so can you!”), (fake)
advice from star athletes—see: Gary Payton’s guide to
shit-talking—and off-handed observations about the problems with
sports today (“If any game could benefit from the presence of
large-breasted remedial nursing students dancing around in outfits the
size of a Wet-Nap, it’s baseball”).

While there’s plenty of great material in Men with Balls (a
bitchy letter from the Philly Phanatic and a guide to making love like
a pro-athlete are standouts), the book drags a bit in the middle as the
material wears a bit thin—no amount of effort can make a
collective bargaining agreement funny.

While Men with Balls attempts to be accessible to casual
sports fans in its earlier chapters, the book ultimately descends
into—pardon the pun—inside baseball, with semiobscure
references to dead quarterbacks and Alex Rodriguez’s lack of sexual
prowess. Unless you’re someone who YouTubes the hell out of brutal
career-ending sports injuries, you’re probably better off reading a
real book. But if you spend more time poring over your fantasy-football
lineup at the office than doing actual work, the endless stream of
jokes about asshole coaches, audible calls, and athletes’
domestic-abuse charges may give you enough of a chuckle to keep you
from killing yourself for at least one more day. JONAH
SPANGENTHAL-LEE

by Jed Perl

(Knopf) $25.

Jed Perl is not in with the in-kids. He’s a critic’s critic in a
world mostly populated with yes-critics; you value him if you value
criticism itself. Agreeing with him or not doesn’t matter. For
instance, I think this is wrong (he wrote it last May after the death
of Robert Rauschenberg, for the New Republic, his regular perch
since 1994): “As for his art, it stank in the 1950s, and it doesn’t
look any better today.” I still read him.

So when he takes a break from long jeremiads or thick books about
history (like his 2005 New Art City on the postwar art of New
York) and writes a book you can fit in one pocket with 26 bitty
chapters corresponding to the letters of the alphabet the way a
children’s book might, you have to ask: What is he up to? Is this yet
another dissent from the trendy scenesterism of the Artforum crowd? Is he just being cute?

Probably both of those poses are at play in Antoine’s Alphabet:
Watteau and His World, but Perl is also trying to write the most
expansive possible love letter to his favorite
painter—subsections veer in content from Vasari and Giorgione to
Cezanne, Picasso, and Virginia Woolf—and he is simultaneously
trying to resuscitate the rococo, that art historical equivalent of
low-cal dressing.

He is most convincing when he is closest to the art. His readings of
images—Watteau’s Gersaint’s Shopsign, The Pilgrimage to
the Isle of Cythera, Gilles, and his lesser-known depictions
of war and soldiers—are specific and sweeping at the same time,
not only going places but also providing something to hold on to for
the mental ride. He’s especially good on the interlocking nature of
ideas and styles, the ways they rely on each other even in opposition:
“With Watteau, classical wholeness is not something to be achieved but
something to be aware of, an enduring hope or promise, a prize to be
pursued but not necessarily to be captured. At which point classicism,
for all intents and purposes, has become romantic.” Conversely, it must
simply be said that Perl is not so good at historical fiction.

What keeps the book’s lock on the reader is that the “sadistic
charm” and “wig-powder cloudiness” of Watteau, to use Jean Cocteau’s
descriptions, are in fact deserving of a reputation upgrade. And Perl,
with his alphabet format, is for the most part successful at being as
sly as the tangled lines of Watteau’s not-as-light-as-it-looks art. JEN
GRAVES

by Dave Gibbons, Chip Kidd, and Mike Essl

(Titan Books) $39.95.

With a big, fancy film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s
mind-
blowingly brilliant comic series Watchmen on the way,
publishers will undoubtedly be rushing all kinds of crap onto shelves
for the holiday season to cash in on the hype.

Watching the Watchmen is just such crap.

At about 60 kazillion pages, you’d think the enormous coffee-table
book—written by Gibbons—would be brimming with
behind-the-scenes info. Instead, the book is full of dull, blotchy
thumbnail art; early sketches; and anecdotes about going to comic
conventions in the 1980s. It is about as lifeless as you could possibly
imagine.

Reading Gibbons waxing nostalgic on Watchmen is about as
interesting as listening to George Harrison talk about how brilliant
the Beatles were. Sure, Gibbons, like Harrison, was a fundamentally
important cog in a genre-redefining machine, but he was still just the
backup band.

That’s not to say Gibbons’s art wasn’t an integral part of
Watchmen, one of the best—if not the best—comic series ever. But let’s face it: He wasn’t the brains
behind this operation.

While the thumbnails, color tests, and character
sketches—sandwiched between fawning passages about the brilliance
of Alan Moore (duh!)—are bound to bore the living shit out of
anyone who’s already read the series or flipped through an issue of
Wizard (RIP), it might be an all right read for someone who
really wants to see how the series came together. Still, a copy of
Absolute Watchmen would be a much better use of your money and
coffee-table space. JONAH SPANGENTHAL-LEE

by Michael Medved

(Crown Forum) $26.95.

I have just finished reading Michael Medved’s book The 10 Big
Lies About America, and I am confused. This confusion has nothing
to do with Medved’s writing (which is clear, simple, and sturdy), nor
his politics (pro-American no matter what). The confusion results from
the types of critical weapons he displays, like an arms dealer, for
cutting down standard anti-American arguments. The whole purpose of the
book is to supply grenades of facts, swords of historical information,
and machine guns of data to those who are (1) on the right, (2)
undereducated, and (3) fighting a seemingly losing battle against those
who are (1) on the left, and (2) overeducated. But Medved’s weapons are
very curious.

Before examining them, some background on this Medved chap. He is
the last man standing on the far right in far-left Seattle. He has a
radio show, he is on TV a lot, he is in the habit of crossing his legs
when he sits, and his upper lip often raises his broad mustache with
the pride of a confident weightlifter. That is Medved. Now, his
book.

Chapter after chapter, Medved sets up a target—”America Was
Founded on Genocide Against Native Americans,” “The United States Is
Uniquely Guilty for the Crime of Slavery,” etc. And chapter after
chapter, he shows the reader—a man who knows he is right to
believe in the essential goodness of America, but does not know
why he is right—the facts, information, and data that can
strike at the heart of these targets. But the examples Medved uses tend
to complicate or confuse, rather than make things clear. Read this book
closely and you’ll realize America is neither bad nor good. America is
beyond good and evil.

One example out of many: In the chapter “The Power of Big Business
Hurts the Country and Oppresses the People,” Medved says that the
American “public views contemporary corporate leaders as even more
dangerous, degenerate, and scheming than the 19th-century captains of
industry. Ironically, the big corporations that dominate Hollywood
entertainment lead the way in promulgating the image of businessmen as
immoral, sadistic exploiters and even killers.” He then lists
anticorporate films (Michael Clayton, There Will Be
Blood, Constant Gardener) made/distributed by corporations.
This contradiction, which is supposed to expose us to the fact that the
bad feelings we have about the rich are manufactured rather than real,
only complicates matters. Why is the public so suspicious of rich
people? And is it peculiar to Americans? No, it is not. We can find the
same suspicion in Dickens’s novels, in Shakespeare’s Merchant of
Venice, in Sophocles’s Antigone, and also Aristotle’s
Politics. Medved has not slain his opponents on the left with
this particular Hollywood weapon, but opened a can of worms.

However, Medved’s book does have its share of stupidities, one which
I’ll leave you with: “African Americans, feminists, Latinos, gays,
Asians, the disabled, hippies, Native Americans—each aggrieved
segment of society demanded justice and redress, competing for
recognition as the most victimized and gypped.” Gypped! As in Gypsy!
Really, Medved, a Jew, should be a little more sensitive. CHARLES
MUDEDE

Michael Medved reads Thurs Nov 20, Town Hall, 7:30 pm,
$5.