An unfocused New Age primer redeemed by captivating arboreal photographic studies.
Deep wisdom can be gleaned from pictures of trees, according to this vaporous picture book–cum–self-help guide.
Half of Bush’s tome is an exegesis of his philosophy of life as an oscillation between two states of metaphysical darkness and light. The first he calls Wandering, which manifests as feelings of alienation, anxiety, and suicidal despair in people and as virtually every bad thing, from pandemics to mass shootings and corporate greed, in societies. The opposite condition is Illumination, “an explosive expansion of consciousness,” which imparts a mind-blowing enlightenment and cosmic connectedness. Bush associates this scheme with many traditions, from Hindu mythology to Freudian psychoanalysis, but especially with the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient Greek religious movement that ritually celebrated the harvest goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, whose migrations to and from the underworld govern the seasons. The other half of the book displays the author’s two titular photographic series, featuring pictures of tree branches seen against the sky, heavily edited into a four-fold rotational symmetry and Photoshopped into three-dimensional images. (3-D glasses come with the book.) The black-and-white Wandering series shows trees in winter, bare of leaves, while the color Illuminations series shows them clothed in green foliage in spring and summer, when Persephone returns from the underworld. The symmetry and three-dimensionality give the images a kaleidoscopic patterning and eerie depth, with tree canopies converging in diamond, star-shaped, and spiral geometries that recede from the viewer. These effects, Bush suggests, are so mesmerizing that readers can approach Illumination by staring at them. Bush’s text is often meandering and nebulous, written in prose that tends toward mystical effusion. (“I felt love for everything without exception,” he writes of his own Illumination, wherein “all distinctions and boundaries fell away, and all opposites were joined together—desire and acceptance, movement and stillness, masculine and feminine, energy and matter, sacred and profane, right and left, the depths and the heights—everything was one.”) Fortunately, Bush’s photos, with their arresting mix of abstract spatial harmonies and vital, earthy textures, are a visual feast that many will enjoy.
An unfocused New Age primer redeemed by captivating arboreal photographic studies.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-99-939302-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Beyond Editions
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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