A highly entertaining account of one of rock’s most colorful tours.
Alderman, the author of Get Off: The Sordid Youth and Unlikely Survival of a Queer Junkie Wonder Boy (2020), describes his long-shot attempt to launch a tattoo-themed rock tour in this memoir.
Staging a festival that combined heavy metal and the art of tattooing was not on Alderman’s bucket list back in 1998. He had some tattoos of his own, and he’d previously worked as a promoter and club owner, but he describes the impetus of the Tattoo the Earth tour as a moment of crisis during a period of stress rather than a long-held vision: “I thought it might be an aneurysm, or my head rocketing completely off my shoulders, but what came out was the idea for Tattoo the Earth.” At the time, tattooing had not yet become a ubiquitous form of expression—it had only just become legal again in New York state in 1997. With his friend and noted tattoo artist Sean Vasquez, Alderman set out to recruit other luminaries of the art form, including Filip Leu and Bernie Luther. The hardest part, though, would prove to be booking the bands: Alderman set his sights on the biggest names in heavy metal, including Metallica, Slayer, and, later, a new group whose debut album, in 1999, went platinum: Slipknot. Alderman had no idea just what it would take to turn his late-night impulse into a reality, but the resulting ride, during which he struggled with a health scare, was a wild one, and the Tattoo the Earth tour finally launched in 2000. The author’s prose is red-blooded and energetic, as in this passage in which he describes his enthusiasm over the Bernie Luther–created sleeve he got while recruiting artists for the tour: “My tattoo made me feel like I had a bionic limb, and I held it awkwardly and stared at it, trying to get used to its power.” Over the course of the book, the author offers some typical but still diverting music memoir escapades: celebrity encounters, industry negotiations, and carnivalesque episodes from the pit and backstage. It’s most notable, however, for offering readers a rare chronicle of the era in which tattooing went from an underground activity to a part of the mainstream—a shift that Tattoo the Earth can lay claim to having energized.
A highly entertaining account of one of rock’s most colorful tours.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-578-34424-9
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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