Predictably, this event drew more of the Fashion crowd than the Art crowd…. it’s okay, I like pretty people.

Upstairs, there was this big cube projecting Hedi’s signature black and white images while LA-based No Age banged on drums.

Copy + Paste of an Article in The New York Times on the show:

November 9, 2011
A Fashion Designer’s Second Act
By AUSTIN CONSIDINE

WHEN Hedi Slimane stepped down as artistic director at Dior Homme in 2007, Fashion Wire Daily summed up his tenure this way: “Slimane leaves Dior with the well-earned reputation as the single most influential men’s designer this century, the most copied of his peers and the only one to achieve the status of a rock star.”

The comparison was apt, given Mr. Slimane’s celebrity and his role in styling the likes of Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Jack White, and the outsize reputation he garnered in his relatively brief life as a fashion designer, starting at Yves Saint Laurent in 1996, when he was just 28, and then at Dior in 2000.

Few people leave their profession when they are at the top of the game. In fashion, perhaps only Tom Ford comes to mind. But even Mr. Ford — after a stint in Hollywood that culminated in his direction of the Oscar-nominated “A Single Man” — came back into the fold and is now designing again.

But Mr. Slimane seems to have left fashion behind with nary a second thought, reinventing himself as a photographer in the past few years, one who has produced an array of strikingly intimate portraits, nearly all of them black and white, of some of the most famous faces in contemporary culture: Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Brian Wilson, Gisele Bundchen, Robert De Niro and Kate Moss.

Never one to talk volubly about himself — interviews from when he was at Saint Laurent and Dior were infrequent, and now read as if they might have been slightly torturous for the young designer — Mr. Slimane has remained somewhat elusive in his new career. He regularly declines to talk to the press and consented to an interview only under the condition that it be conducted solely by e-mail.

His postfashion life has not gone entirely unnoticed, however. Most recently, Mr. Slimane’s photographs of an all-grown-up Frances Bean Cobain — the daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love — became an Internet sensation, bringing Mr. Slimane’s name back into the public domain.

Those portraits of Ms. Cobain — “It was about a simple testimony of her 18 years,” Mr. Slimane wrote in an e-mail — followed a series of well-received gallery shows in Europe and the release of a new book of Mr. Slimane’s photos, “Anthology of a Decade: 2000-2010.” And now there is the unveiling of an exhibition of his new work, “California Song,” which opens on Saturday at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center.

Taken together, they represent something of a coming-out party for Hedi Slimane, photographer.

Certainly, for Jeffrey Deitch, recently appointed the director of the Los Angeles museum, Mr. Slimane’s work is worthy of a major multimedia exhibition, which will include prints and projections and feature music by No Age, a Los Angeles band.

“I’ve always, from the beginning, thought that he was one of the most original artistic voices of his generation,” Mr. Deitch said in a telephone interview. “I’m fascinated with artists like Hedi, where there’s a vision of art that goes beyond one’s medium.”

As the name of the show suggests, Mr. Slimane, who is French, has found something of a muse in the state of California.

“It is just about alignments really, and everything falls into place right now,” he said about Los Angeles, which he has called home since last year. “Artists, museums, and galleries are much stronger. There is also the space for everyone, the distance to elaborate. It certainly had a big influence on me.”

When one looks at much of Mr. Slimane’s American work from the last few years, it is hard not to think of the Swiss photographer Robert Frank, the consummate European outsider looking in, identifying and reassigning to Americans their own lost mythology.

“It is almost about a utopia,” Mr. Slimane said of the show, adding: “I discovered Los Angeles in the late ’90s. The city was not at its best at the time, but I fell for it right away. There is something almost haunted about it, a vibrant mythology I find rather inspiring.”

Mr. Deitch said that in Mr. Slimane’s work there seemed to be no clear line between where photography ended and music, fashion or fine art began.

“One of the reasons why there’s such a connection between the photography and the clothing design is that his vision is sculptural,” Mr. Deitch said.

It is difficult to examine Mr. Slimane’s photo work separately from his reign atop the world of men’s fashion. In particular, the Dior years would define a very specific moment in his and pop culture’s conjoined histories. The black skinny jean, the skinny black tie, the short-waisted leather jacket or snug blazer: his work at Dior, where he created Dior Homme, is credited with helping bring men’s wear from the loose-fitting, slacker style of the 1990s into the postmillennial look of form-fitting, clean lines.

When Mr. Slimane left Dior amid well-publicized infighting with executives, published reports suggested he wanted to start his own label and possibly move into women’s fashion. Since then, however, the world of design is one he has not seemed particularly eager to rejoin.

“With fashion design, there was also always a risk at the time to lose the sense of the perspective, the discernment,” he said, adding: “It might have been perceived as an abrupt switch for others, but it felt like precisely the right moment for me, in 2007. I had already mainly defined my style, and could let it on its own for a while, see where it ends up, or survives in the streets.”

For Mr. Slimane, now 43, full immersion in photography was a return to an interest he pursued while growing up. As a student, he took classes in photography and studied political science, in hopes of becoming a reporter and photographer on international affairs.

Ultimately, he would switch his focus to art history. Fashion came next, which, like his photography today, exhibited an intense fixation on rock culture.

“Just like zillions of children, album covers educated and informed me, and certainly did I later transpose organically, rather than by intent, those principles both in fashion design and photography,” he said.

His photo work often portrays musicians at the fringes of fame or notoriety: up-and-coming artists whose bona fides lie primarily in the independent music scene. Others, perhaps, achieved widespread renown (or infamy), like Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty, but seemed somehow to remain at the frayed, tragic edges of rock culture.

Mr. Slimane wrote that he felt most attracted to “a certain creative honesty, an authenticity, sometimes a vulnerability” when selecting photo subjects. Those subjects, whether emerging musicians or simply someone he discovers on the street, “are usually not yet fully aware of their talent, or grace,” he explained.

“They are either completely restless, in a romantic, antiheroic manner,” he continued, “or, on the contrary, totally introverted — which you might call an ambiguous space, or rather, for me, an oblique space.”

What unifies much of Mr. Slimane’s work is its fixation on the “transient age between childhood and adulthood,” as he described it. It also, as some have praised and others have criticized, vaunts a certain prepubescent androgyny.

“It is about transformation, and search of identity,” he said. “By nature, it is undefined, both psychologically and physically.”

Mr. Slimane attributed his longstanding fascination with androgyny in part to the ambiguities in his first name.

“Hedi was and is still misspelled ‘Heidi,’ and my perception of genders ended up slightly out of focus from an early age,” he said.

“Besides this ambiguity, my first record was a Bowie album,” he said, referring to “David Live,” which he got for his sixth birthday. He absorbed glam rock, he said, which “became a normative experience for me, and certainly the most significant creative influence for the future in both design and photography.”

One of Mr. Slimane’s favorite subjects at the moment — and the promotional centerpiece of “California Song” — is Christopher Owens, the singer and the guitarist for the San Francisco band Girls. A look at Mr. Slimane’s portraits of him make it clear why: the skinny, sad-eyed singer, with his painted nails, long, stringy blond hair, tattoos and haunting stare, perfectly encapsulates the California moment — its sun-infused indie rock sounds and its slacker-fashion renaissance, recalling early images of a young, drug-addled Kurt Cobain, peering warily and wearily into the abyss of impending stardom.

Mr. Owens said in a phone interview that Mr. Slimane’s portraits of Gore Vidal, one of Mr. Owens’s favorite authors, persuaded him to pose for several shoots: one in and around Mr. Slimane’s home in Los Angeles, and two more in Mr. Owens’s environs in San Francisco.

“He doesn’t talk very much at all while shooting or while he’s hanging out; he’s more of a listener,” Mr. Owens said. “He wanted me to very much be myself, you know; there wasn’t any kind of styling or weird things like that, which are always uncomfortable. He just wanted me to do my thing and be very natural. But, at the same time, he knew exactly what he wanted to do as far as the structure of the shot went.”

Still Mr. Slimane remains elusive, even among friends.

“It’s kind of embarrassing now that we’ve become friends, but I really don’t know that much about him,” Mr. Owens said.

That intense circumspection is, of course, what seems to make Mr. Slimane who he is. It’s a kind of resolute searching in the darkness that has come to define his work, which has, in turn, documented and informed, defined and refined the era in which he lives.

“He’s interested in performers, artists, who have an affinity for and an inspiration from the darker side,” Mr. Deitch said. “The work is something that leads into the darkness, but you come out with positive inspiration. It’s not all depressing work. It looks into the deeper recesses of the soul.”

Copy + Paste of MOCA’s Press Release:

The Museum of Contemporary Art presents Hedi Slimaneʼs California Song, the first West Coast solo museum exhibition of the photographerʼs work, on view at MOCA Pacific Design Center from November 12, 2011, through January 22, 2012. California Song spans the photographerʼs “California period” and traces his explorations of cycles of urban youth culture and artistic communities, through installations of photographic essays, exhibitions, and publications.

Slimane has achieved global recognition over the past decade for his discovery and presentation of emerging musicians and artists. His publications on London youth are among the first books published about the early days of the new British punk-rock movement at the beginning of this decade, capturing the birth of the first generation of Internet users, and redefining the concept of “fans” as an indie youth imagery that has developed globally through emerging social networks. Slimaneʼs widely followed photographic “diary,” created in 2006, established and popularized an entirely new genre—the online photo diary.

Slimane has invented a new and oblique visual language to represent youth and reinvent the rock documentary. In his work, live performance is reduced to a minimal, photographic lexicon—a ritual black-and-white convention of signs. Still life photographs become almost liturgical—a singular, silent expression of youth.

“Hedi Slimane has created a new and fresh visual language for youth today,” said MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch. “His black-and-white images capture the essential expression of the emerging art, fashion, and music scenes around the world.”

Slimane’s exhibition at MOCA will be divided into two parts. An installation and a series of black-and-white print photographs from his California years will be presented on the ground floor, and a sonic, motion-photography installation, produced specifically for MOCA, will be featured on the second floor. The installation will reference a multi-projection, cubic, architectural format, which Slimane has constructed in previous exhibitions to present his photographs, using serial construction and repetition to create an archaic form of cinematic narration.

Slimaneʼs allusive portraiture, in which photographs, portraits, and still life compositions are often signs or fragments of a portrait, will be projected in a repetitive, almost ritual, manner. The installation will also address “performance act,” as defined for the first time in Slimaneʼs photographic essay, Stage (2004), and will include a live performance space underneath the projection.

Select California bands, such as No Age, will contribute to the installation, using a fragmentary sound system, and composing panoramic scores—extended, visual song formats—which will form a dialogue with and define a sonic vocabulary for the photographs.

The exhibition will reference Berlin Project (1999–2002), which was presented in 2003 at Kunst-Werke, Berlin, and MoMA PS1, New York, and is accompanied by the book Berlin (Steidl, 2003). It will also encompass The London Years (2003–2007) presented in 2004, 2006, and 2007 at Almine Rech Gallery, Paris; at Sprüth Magers Gallery, Munich, in 2005; at MUSAC, León, 2008; and referenced in Stage and London Birth of A Cult (Steidl) in 2005.

The California period began in July 2007, during Young American at Foam Amsterdam. In February 2011, Fragments Americana, an exhibition of Slimaneʼs photographs, was presented at Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels. At the same time, Almine Rech Gallery in Paris presented California Dreamin—Myths and Legends of Los Angeles, a group show curated by Slimane featuring artists John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Bruce Conner, John McCracken, Aaron Curry, Mark Grotjahn, Mark Hagen, Patrick Hill, Dennis Hopper, Mike Kelley, Joel Morrison, Raymond Pettibon, Ed Ruscha, Sterling Ruby, Jim Shaw, Hedi Slimane, and Aaron Young, many of whom are included in the museumʼs permanent collection and have been presented in solo, retrospective, and large-scale thematic exhibitions at MOCA. Slimaneʼs book Anthology of a Decade, published March 2011 (JRP/Ringier), includes a photography essay dedicated to the California period.

anyways, here’s a picture of me with an instagram filter, trying on this amazing 1-button jacket by Japanese label, N. Hoolywood, at American Rag Cie.

..did you know that you’re not allowed to take pictures in the store? =X

Link:
N. Hoolywood

Link: Chris Anthony

show notes.

The artist is Blu. One of my favorites. Instantly recognizable.

Paris.

Scary

How it was all laid out.

Copy + Paste of the Press Release:

Street Art: Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin by Larry Yust Opens Sept. 19 at the Fowler Museum at UCLA

Since 2002, filmmaker and photographer Larry Yust has created what he calls “photographic elevations,” long, horizontal perspectives of metropolitan streetscapes. In Street Art: Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin by Larry Yust—on display at the Fowler from Sept. 19, 2010–Jan. 16, 2011—Yust applies his panoramic perspective to emergent, often controversial art forms that appear on the streets of Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin.

With this body of work Yust explores how red-brick warehouse facades, cinderblock walls lining thoroughfares, wooden barriers at construction sites, and fences surrounding vacant lots become prominent sites for open-air, and largely unofficial, artistic expression. The large, colorful prints—measuring from six to more than twenty feet in length—present richly detailed views of popular, and often overlapping, urban decorative styles: aerosol art (murals and graffiti), storefront signage and commercial advertising, and the creatively ordered display of merchandise and personal possessions.

Included are blocks-long images that intriguingly juxtapose the highly commercialized signage of Hollywood Boulevard with graffiti coated walls found throughout Southern California; the mural-covered remnants of the Berlin Wall with elaborately decorated exteriors of artist’s collectives in Germany’s capital; and the wildly painted delivery trucks of Paris’ Place d’Aligre market with the stunning open-air aerosol artworks presented at the city’s Musée d’Art Moderne (Palais de Tokyo).

Yust provides distinctive and telling observations of the urban landscape, but also reframes discourses about how street artists and others use the built environment as a display space or canvas, with or without permission. Do the photographic elevations fashioned by Yust depict a raw, essential artistic impulse that enhances our experience of the city? Or are we looking at visual noise and evidence of vandalism that detracts from an ideal urban aesthetic? What makes a street or a wall attractive?

Yust makes his compelling images by snapping overlapping photographs of blocks of storefronts and buildings, ensuring that the plane of the camera lens and the plane of the subject always remain parallel. He records numerous pictures for each elevation, and then digitally composes them into one long seamless image, rendering a perspective that cannot be captured by other photographic techniques or even the naked eye.

About the Artist
Larry Yust began taking photographs while scouting locations as a filmmaker, a career launched as the writer/director/producer of a series of dramatizations of classic short stories and plays for Encyclopaedia Britannica Films. He has written and directed feature films and for television, and his photographs appear in the books Salvation Mountain: The Art of Leonard Knight and METRO, a collection of his photographic elevations of Paris Metro stations. His work was the subject of the 2004 Fowler exhibition Street Seen: Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles by Larry Yust.

Additional Information
Street Art: Photographic Elevations of Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin by Larry Yust will be on view in the Fowler Museum’s Goldenberg Galleria. This exhibition is curated by Patrick A. Polk, the Fowler Museum’s curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts. A book is being published in conjunction with the exhibition (ISBN 978-0-9778344-4-0). This exhibition and publication are made possible by a generous grant from the Lloyd E. Rigler—Lawrence E. Deutsch Foundation.

The Fowler Museum at UCLA is one of the country’s most respected institutions devoted to exploring the arts and cultures of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas. The Fowler is open Wednesdays through Sundays, from noon to 5 p.m.; and on Thursdays, from noon until 8 p.m. The museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. The Fowler Museum, part of UCLA Arts, is located in the north part of the UCLA campus. Admission is free. Parking is available for a maximum of $10 in Lot 4. For more information, the public may call 310/825-4361 or visit fowler.ucla.edu.

Opening Day Event:
September 19, 2010 2 and 4 pm
Exhibition Tours of Street Art with Larry Yust

MOCA members were given easy entrance, but still had to wait in line to see the exhibition. Killing time in line.

View from the line….

See? Crowded.

Art Highlights… Dennis Hopper had an eclectic body of work…

this is what my friends and I usually do when we come to these things… become each other’s paparazzi.

….and that was the show.

After-show shenanigans.

Late dinner at Koraku..

Cheers!

Close up of one of Vhils’ pieces.

Connor Harrington has a way with the spray can.

Antony Micallef’s work, however morbid and dark, is amazing to look at.

and of course, there’s JR, who I’ve featured on my blog many times before..

Really have had to be in the space to appreciate the artistry..

Cheers!

Copy + Paste from Lazarides

Immortalizing the individual in monumental proportions is what these exciting artists do best. Using the overlooked, misunderstood and mundane elements of our everyday, each artist captures our attention with their distinctive style and alternative approach. Sharing a vested interest in their individual and collective surroundings and society, they poetically express a desire for universal appreciation.

Here are some of the pieces that caught my eye:

Dane Goodman’s Untitled (Black Mesa Series) was featured on the show’s post card.

Robert Murray makes these incredible frames with a bajillion screws.

Rose Kelly’s Peacefulness in a Cup of Tea, which was created following an inspirational trip to Bhutan. 

My favorite was Eugenie Spirito’s Kissing Fish.

Link:
PYO Gallery LA
Estrada Fine Arts

Dalí Atomicus, shows the madcap Dalí aloft, brush and palette in hand. He is flanked by a chair and two easels (holding Dalí canvases) — all elevated, and seemingly floating, above the floor, which heightens the sense of suspension. But the main event is the great curve of water arcing across the image, along with three flying (or flung) cats in damp, disconcerted disarray. For once Dalí’s characteristic look of exaggerated surprise makes sense.

Link: Joys of Jumpology by Roberta Smith, New York Times, 5/23/10.

Masataka Nakano did a similar project featuring Tokyo, another one of my favorite cities.

Link: Empty LA

At the heart of the genre of portrait photography lies the particular challenge of expressing the personality of the portrayed by means of a mechanical medium… Portrait photography of famous people plays constantly with the viewer’s expectations, which are based on the celebrities’ status… [Sheryl] Nields’ portraits of Scarlett Johansson invite the viewer to be an accomplice in a coquettishly seductive moment in which the actress knowingly and ironically flaunts her sex appeal. 

Links:
Lumas
Sheryl Nields Phtography

Photo taken and captioned by Cesare Naldi

 Nazroo, a mahout (elephant driver), poses for a portrait while taking his elephant, Rajan, out for a swim in front of Radha Nagar Beach in Havelock, Andaman Islands. Rajan is one of the few elephants in Havelock that can swim, so when he is not dragging timber in the forest he is used as a tourist attraction. The relationship between the mahout and his elephant usually lasts for their entire lives, creating an extremely strong tie between the animal and the human being.

Links:
Cesare Naldi
National Geographic International Photography Contest

In August of 2008, as part of his Women project, JR went to Morro da Providêcia, one of the most dangerous favelas (shantytown) in Rio de Janeiro, and posted huge photos of faces and eyes of 20 women all over on the outside of 40 houses.

This series of works pay tribute to “those who play an essential role in society, but who are the primary victims of war, crime, rape or political and religious fanaticism.”

Recently, JR exhibited a selection of his Women Are Heroes work around Île Saint-Louis, in Paris, France. I told EM about it, since she’s there now for school. I’ll have to ask if she got the chance to visit. 

Link: Women Are Heroes

The message is clear: Regardless of religious and political affiliation, we are all the same. 

 Copy + Paste:

When we met in 2005, we decided to go together in the Middle-East to figure out why Palestinians and Israelis couldn’t find a way to get along together.

We then traveled across the Israeli and Palestinian cities without speaking much. Just looking to this world with amazement.

This holy place for Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
This tiny area where you can see mountains, sea, deserts and lakes, love and hate, hope and despair embedded together.

After a week, we had a conclusion with the same words: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families.

A religious covered woman has her twin sister on the other side. A farmer, a taxi driver, a teacher, has his twin brother in front of him. And he his endlessly fighting with him.

It’s obvious, but they don’t see that.

We must put them face to face. They will realize.

We want that, at last, everyone laughs and thinks when he sees the portrait of the other and his own portrait.

The Face2Face project is to make portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and to post them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides.

In a very sensitive context, we need to be clear.
We are in favor of a solution for which two countries, Israel and Palestine would live peacefully within safe and internationally recognized borders.

All the bilateral peace projects (Clinton/Taba, Ayalon/Nussibeh, Geneva Accords) are converging in the same direction. We can be optimistic.

We hope that this project will contribute to a better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Today, “Face to face” is necessary.
Within a few years, we will come back for “Hand in hand”.

amazing stuff.

Links:
JR’s website
Face2Face Project

Link: Miles Aldridge

Since 1972, the Himalayan nation of Bhutan adopted an economic policy that stressed wellbeing and the quality of its citizens’ lives, termed Gross National Happiness (GNH), over material growth, or Gross Domestic Product (GDP). 

The idea of General National Happiness rests on four pillars: economic self-reliance, a pristine environment, the preservation and promotion of Bhutan’s culture, and good governance in the form of a democracy.

Sounds pretty cool. I could get behind that.

Random Fact: The current King of Bhutan, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk, is the same age as me.

Links:
Ann Muller (where the photo in this post came from)
Gross National Happiness: Centre of Bhutan Studies
The Kingdon of Bhutan

In this serie Liaisons Erotiques, shot for a calender for Lambertz, we encounter a Gabo combining style, fashion, self-confident women, eroticism, and sensuality. Remarkable are the interiors in which she places her models; it has absolutely nothing in common with the “typical German” coolness associated with German style. On the contrary, the scenery incorporates elements of an ornamental delight that appeared a few years ago in the scene of art photography as well. Gabo’s talent is to create scenes of intimacy. They inspire us to fantasize about what might have happened in the moments before the photograph was taken, and what might happen a moment later. Which “plot” came to life? How will the story continue? Gabo’s view is female and her view of passion, sensuality, and erotic self representation never turns into embarrassment, but rather everything seems to be staged by the women themselves and therefore natural and self – evident.

Link: Gabo

Picture taken by David Hiepler and Fritz Brunier.

Links:
Georgia Aquarium
Hiepler and Brunier

Scott Schuman just wanted to take photographs of people that he met on the streets of New York who he felt looked great.

His now-famous and much-loved blog, thesartorialist.com, is his showcase for the wonderful and varied sartorial tastes of real people across the globe. This book is a beautiful anthology of Scott’s favorite images, accompanied by his insightful commentary. It includes photographs of well-known fashion figures alongside people encountered on the street whose personal style and taste demand a closer look.

From the streets of New York to the parks of Florence, from Stockholm to Paris, from London to Moscow and Milan, these are the men and women who have inspired Scott and the many diverse and fashionable readers of his blog.

After fifteen years in the fashion business, Scott Schuman felt a growing disconnect between what he saw on the runways and in magazines, and what real people were wearing. The Sartorialist was his attempt to redress the balance. Since its beginning, the blog has become hugely admired and influential in the fashion industry and beyond. Thesartorialist.com is consistently named one of the top blogs in the world. A self-taught photographer, Schuman shoots for publications including French Vogue, American GQ, Fantastic Man and Elle, and a growing list of advertising clients. Scott has also shown his work at the New York photo gallery The Danziger Projects and appeared in the GAP Style Icon campaign in the fall of 2008. He has been named the number one fashion photography trend by American Photo magazine, as well as one of Time magazine’s top 100 design influencers.

Based on these artists and the many other experiences in his eventful and always independent life as a designer, actor, and author, Wolfgang Joop has developed a type of fashion drawing completely his own, in which “pose and personal demeanor become one.”

For him, art and fashion are most impressive when the objects have the spark of an old master, whom
he studied extensively, and possess “an aura of unintentionalness; or the intention to be completely
self-satisfied.”

The French call this l’art pour l’art. Wolfgang Joop’s sketches are art for art’s sake.

“My sketches should look as though they emerged effortlessly. They explain my sense of time, my concept of beauty, with the most minimalist and yet self-assuredly effective means.”

Bodhi Oser recently released FUCK THE WORLD, his second book of photographs, featuring one of the most colorful words in the dictionary. For those not in the know, Bodhi goes around and alters signs with these stickers, transforming the original message and providing passerby’s with something to giggle at. 

Here are a few samples:

If you like this, the first book in the series, Fuck This Book, is worth picking up as well.

Get them both off of Amazon.com.

Links:
Fuck This Website