Main Menu

Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 07:19:21 PM

Login with username, password and session length

"Banksy Unmasked"

Started by JJJJH, August 08, 2004, 08:10:29 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

terminallyrelaxed

Its actually quite fun book, if you get past the edgy urban attitude.

sproggy

Wouldn't LOL NO Ironies be more appropriate?

He's self-deprecating and making a mint off the idiots willing to pay through the nose for his stuff.  Brilliant.

Catalogue Trousers

Quoteself-deprecating

Not really a word that I'd use to describe Banksy. He's about as self-deprecating as Malcolm McLaren, and a good deal less inventive.

Part Chimp

Malcolm McLaren was a producer on Fast Food Nation (sorry, second post I've made about that movie today). It was odd seeing his name in the credits, I wonder how he got involved?

terminallyrelaxed

He's out of kooky vocalists, they're all busy recording acoustic soundtracks for american 'drama' programs.

Saul

I got a copy of Walls and Piece for Christmas last year and I think its really good. But bringing out a new eddition with 10% more stuff is really taking the piss. I'm not fucking paying 13 quid for a book thats 90% identical to one I already own.

sanchopanza

I can exclusively reveal what this cunt looks like, taken in some down town ghetto(Hertfordshire), I DISCLOSE:  BANKSY...


Catalogue Trousers

Ooh crikey, look at the big circular dent in his forehead! Obviously caused by someone creating a genuine piece of guerrilla art by smashing the base of a spray can of paint into his worthless skull.

Santa's Boyfriend

He seems to have a face like an arse...

terminallyrelaxed

Guardian Journalist is amusing - why? Read the bottom line..

QuoteBafflingly, I have not been asked to contribute to any newspaper's best books of 2006 feature, in which authors, politicians and major thinkers such as Anne Atkins nominate their favourite titles of the year. (I have also, rather pointedly, been left off Martin Amis's Christmas card list ever since I can remember: evidently, my maverick opinions are simply too unsettling for London's soi-disant literati.) I am happy to correct the oversight here, with a very personal list of the year's publishing highlights.

In our conflict-ravaged times, no such list could start with anything other than Bob Woodward's State of War of Denial of Plan of Attack, the third part of his insider analysis of how George Bush invaded Iraq. The first two books, based on weeks of one-to-one interviews with Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, exclusively revealed the inspired and decisive leadership of the president and his defence secretary. In a twist that can only be described as masterful, part three - based on weeks of one-to-one interviews with Colin Powell - exclusively reveals that they were actually rubbish.

A perfect companion piece, looking at the homegrown threats to democracy here in the West, is Mullahland: The Terrifying Secret World Within My Head, by the Daily Mail commentator Melanie Phillips. The word most often used to describe Phillips is "courage" - it's there on the jacket of this book - and I have to agree. Whether rescuing disabled children from burning tower blocks, scaling sheer alpine mountain faces without ropes, or simply searching for a cure for cancer, it is pure courage that always shines from Phillips. I'm lost in admiration for every word she writes, and also for the way she joins them together into sentences.

I've long been an ardent fan of soccer, or "the beautiful sport" as I like to call it, so of course I loved Ashley Cole's autobiography, On The Defensive: My Historic Battles On Behalf Of Humanity. When I first received the galley proofs for this book, it was a goal-by-goal account of how England sailed to victory in the 2006 World Cup. It has since been revised and updated, and now focuses mainly on the former Arsenal left-back's brave fight to get paid £60,000 a week instead of £55,000. Anyone who has ever suffered from a life-threatening disease, or been killed in an act of genocide, will immediately be able to sympathise with Cole's tribulations. Get hold of a copy today.

I wish I had more time for serious fiction, but I did have the opportunity to read the novel that won the Booker, the Orange prize and the new Irn Bru prize this year, A Thousand Years of the Inheritance of Solitude - the story of an undertaker's niece torn between loyalty to her family and a world on the cusp of globalisation. What I particularly liked about this book was the way it was subtitled "A Novel", so that I knew it was a novel. Also, it had a nice cover design.

Ruminations: A Memoir, by the ageing American literary lion Gore Vidal, was another real treat. In recent years, Vidal has become a trenchant critic of the current White House - I'm thinking particularly of his erudite monograph, God I Really Hate Bush The Nazi Tyrant - but this book is a bewitching journey among the leading lights of 20th-century American literature, and I adored it. There's one absolutely wonderful episode in which Vidal goes to stay at Saul Bellow's villa on Capri, and Tennessee Williams is there, and they sit around and drink wine and have conversations about things. Brilliant!

Even intellectuals must relax from time to time, though, so I made sure to pick up a copy of That Extra Special Little Bit Extra: Victoria Beckham's Guide to Fashion, Healthy Eating and All-Round Psychological Stability. As soon as I read about it on Amazon ("Customers who bought this book also bought The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins") I knew it was one for me. And I wasn't disappointed: apart from all the bits about high heels and lipstick and women's clothing, it is a richly imagined tour de force, astounding in the sheer scope of its ambition. I'd put it right up there alongside Faulkner and Henry James. Or I might just leave it on the shelf under the coffee table. I haven't decided yet.

Charlie Brooker will return next week.


Sorry, bit of a red herring, but this is the official Banksy/Brooker thread, wow, thats deep man, they are like two sides of the same coin, like yin and yang, one gets off his arse and tries stuff, the other sits on his and sneers at everything.

amputeeporn

Christ, he should include himself on the list of bottomless sarcastic praise.