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By: Dylan Rainforth
Date: 28th May 08
Format: Book
Motivation: Kill twenty minutes dead
WHAT
AIR GUITAR
WHO
DAVE HICKEY
WHERE
PLEASE ASK AT YOUR FAVOURITE BOOKSHOP BEFORE YOU GO HERE
HOW MUCH
WORTH MORE THAN US $13.57
RELATED LINKS
DOWNLOAD A PODCAST HERE TO EXPERIENCE THE HICKEY GREATNESS AURALLY
Dave Hickey is the love child of Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Giorgio Vasari, Anais Nin, Mark Twain, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and, still skimping on his alimony, Lenny Bruce. To wit, he is: promiscuously inclusive, as humanly warm as pee-pee on denim, smarter than a dagger, as serious as your life and funnier than a muthafucka.
Subtitled ‘Essays on Art & Democracy', AIR GUITAR is like having an old, acid-dropping art professor - and Hickey is exactly that - drop by and just talk about stuff. All kinds of stuff. Like how Wild Style graffiti is part of a 300-year-old orientalist art tradition which includes psychedelic concert posters and the pre-Raphaelites. Basketball. Perry Mason. Siegfried and Roy. Flaubert. Keith Richards. Hot dogs.
Usually all at once and with a conviction that all these things really matter. The hot dogs as much as the pre-Raphaelites. So if ‘Art & Democracy' basically sums up the things in the world that Hickey digs on (i.e. everything) then it'll be in this book. His style is a kind of perfection - simultaneously as giddy as altitude sickness, as beautiful as the mountain itself, and as perilous as the highest fall.