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Vice Blog

LITERARY/I WANT MY DVDs

Zach Galifianakis: Live at the Purple Onion There are very few people in the comedy world that are blessed with actual funniness. So far our research has brought us David Cross, Jay Johnston, Louis CK, Daniel Kitson, Sarah Silverman and, rumor has it, Tommy Blacha.

There's also the guy that wrote, "As a cop I've seen things that would make you crap a book on how to puke" and whoever came up with "I just flew in from a Transformers convention and boy are my arms tires" is pretty good too. Zach falls into this tiny group of chosen ones. The guy just farts wit and he does it so carelessly and floppily it makes you want to fire Hollywood. Also check him out in The Comedians of Comedy where he steals the show (that's not just me saying that—everyone says that).
GAVIN MCINNES

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Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversation, and Chit-Chat (1986-2004)
JRP|Ringier

This book is swimming in that sort of condescending, naive "fascination" with American pop culture that you either find charming about Kelley and his ilk or that has managed to keep you from enjoying anything associated with any of them. Take for instance the footnotes explaining what The Twilight Zone is among other things, in case you happen to be reading this in a Bangladeshi tent-city 30 years in the future. Still, for all the crypto-pretense these are some pretty solid go-nowhere interviews with the likes of Jim Shaw and Tony Oursler and all those other folks you've always meant/pretended to be into. There's also a really good story about a turkey vulture crashing into John Waters in a convertible, but we've just spoiled it for you. Sorry.
LEWEE THOROUGH

There's an Octopus Under My Bed!
D. Ross "scribe" and Dean Blasé
Shake It, Ink

Here's something to keep in mind as a general rule of thumb if you're making a children's book: Kids don't take ecstasy. Having the main character of the story transported into a magical dreamland of friendly sea creatures to learn about the importance of friendship is a pretty safe idea, but making that dreamland look like a spray-painted reptilian nightmare-rave is the kind of thing that all the flying turtles in the world can't make unscary. For a brief moment I thought this book might be an ingenious, scared-straight-type tale about rave culture, but somehow the inclusion of the author's "graffiti name" doesn't really bespeak ingenuity.
BUTTRICKS POTTER

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Linder Works: 1976-2006
Linder Sterling
JRP|Ringier

It can get a bit rich when every shlub who ripped off Hipgnosis or Jamie Reid for some seven-inch gets qualified as an artiste after the fact, but if anybody deserves the sumptuous coffee-table book treatment it's Linder. In an age when feminist art basically meant slapping a quirky, "subversive" slogan on 50s clip art or ads, she was playing shows with Ludus wearing a huge black strap-on beneath dresses made from chicken parts. She's also pretty much the only human who managed to remain friends with Morrissey through his arch-dickhead years, and her porno collages still seem fresh and funny after three decades of being ripped off by every art student on the planet. Oh yeah, and her chin could probably stop a train.
LEROY SPHINCTS

Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth 1913-1935
James Shelby Downard
Feral House

For those of you not reading this through inch-thick glasses with a NON record playing in the background, Downard was an old southern kook who wrote an essay called "King Kill 33º" about how the JFK assassination was a giant Masonic fertility rite. This book is an auto-graphical account of all his run-ins with murderous secret societies in the first part of the 20th century, and if you're as stoned as I am right now everything he says happened makes perfect sense. Five-year-old Downard dynamiting three men in an open field? Alexander Graham Bell getting a blowjob at the convergence of two ley lines? Seven-year-old Downard winning a gunfight in a dress against an army of Klansmen? Eight-year-old Downard winning a gunfight against an army of Klansmen and Masons on top of the bridge under which JFK would later be shot? Half of the Mexican secret service dispatched by the US Bureau of Investigation to kill a single man (Downard) in Havana and failing? Yep, no questions here. I am going to go out on a long and dangly limb and say trying to read this without your third eye open (read: High as shit) might tax your gullibility, but that's what the Man is banking on, right? Well, fuuuuuuuck that.
KELRON CHUBBARD

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Guilt & Pleasure

You know the one thing that really bugs me about Cabinet? How it isn't always completely about Jews.
DAVID BEN-GUZZLION

Antibody Reference Sixth Edition, 2006-2007
US Biological

Finally a book that tells it like it is. If you're still living under the delusion that Acetyl Coenxyme A Carbolxylase I exhibits neutral cross-reactivity with monoclonal bovine antigens, you are in store for one rude awakening. And the best part about this handy, 2,000-page mindfuck is it available completely free of charge when you order one milliliter or more of human cerebrospinal fluid in dry ice. Trust us, in ten years, this little pocket tome is going to take the place of Foucault's Pendulum above every collegiate "free thinker's" bed. Dawn of a new age much?
PR GLADSTEN

I [Heart] Female Orgasm
Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller
Marlowe & Company

OK, e-nuff. We know it sucks that some women haven't figured out how to press a vibrator into their crotch, but is boring the rest of us to tears really worth the price of their "liberation"? Call it nostalgia, but I liked contemporary feminism a lot more when it was all about calling frat boys rapists instead of being cloying, sex-positive "orgasm connoisseurs" who think pig-tails are acceptable past the age of ten and that Sex in the City was "revolutionary."
ERIN FLAKE