I Am a Bullet: Scenes from an Accelerating Culture

Dude, this book is the bomb. I saw it on my friend's coffee table, and first started just looking at the pictures. I especially liked the stuff about the demolition derby, because those people are like Springer material, but you get the feeling that they have real lives and stuff, which is a perspective I was totally into. When I started reading the essays, at first I didn't get that it was all interconnected, but by the end I understood that there is a lot in common between say, teenage chicks in Tokyo and gangbangers in South Dakota. Even if you're too lazy to actually read it, you'll look a lot smarter just having it around.

It seems Aitken and Kuipers have taken the best lessons from their association with "Raygun" and left behind the more Sprockets- like habits that often made that publication frustrating, if not plain unreadable. We not only know exactly what Kuipers is talking about in each essay, but get involved enough in these disparate and exotic locales to want to make the thematic stretches that are sometimes required. The text style is something I found especially interesting, and be it genius or accident, placing all text in caps accelerates the rate of comprehension in an almost imperceptible way. Given the theme of acceleration and the speed of culture, I found myself part of an experiment I quite enjoyed. The piece about the Lakota boys in Wanblee forsaking the warrior culture of their ancestors for that of TV sensibility gangland posturing is chilling and unbearably sad. Aitken's photos are exceptionally moving in this piece, especially that of a boy around 16 leaning against a tattered babyseat with an aluminum Louisville Slugger, waiting in his res grotto of chaos, diapers, and abject boredom for something to move him. I like very much that Kuipers refrains from editorializing about their lives, and he seems to have an unfailing sense about when to let the subject speak for him or herself. An outstanding effort.

I Am A Bullet is an amazing book about the state of pop culture. Its scope--these guys go all over the world and find the same obsession in 10 totally different forms--makes the text incredibly lively, a real page-turner. But you'll slow down to look at the images, which make the ideas here all the more vivid.