stencil pirates / the future dictionary of america

[December 8th, 2004]

^stencil pirates

By Josh MacPhee

(Soft Skull Press, 180 pages, $20)

A subgenre of graffiti, stenciling allows its proponents to print the same image over any surface, most notably sidewalks and the sides of buildings. Josh MacPhee describes stencils as a portable printing press, and the book focuses mostly on the political and cultural aspects of the phenomenon.

As a book, Stencil Pirates comes at you from several angles all at once. First, it's an art book, depicting more than a thousand stencil images, many in color, from all over the world. Second, it's a compendium of the scattershot history of stenciling, paying homage even to mundane and corporate uses. Lastly, it's a political book, describing the effective use of stenciling in a number of social movements and the ability of the form to usurp the public's consciousness from the grip of mainstream media.

Since public stenciling is an outlaw art form, its effectiveness relies on its boldness and creativity. The book also includes pages you can cut out to create stencils of your own.

The risk in creating a book like Stencil Pirates is that by researching and documenting the phenomenon, you might lessen its shock value and street appeal, rendering it passé. MacPhee sidesteps this by maintaining his outsider enthusiasm. It helps that stencil art doesn't always photograph well and its message is often lost when removed from its immediate context. To get the full picture, you need to go and see for yourself, and any urban environment will do. Stencil Pirates provides the impetus.

Unlike many other political-minded books, the relevance of MacPhee's work only increased following last month's election. In the post-provisional ballot times in which we live, Stencil Pirates provides food for thought while waiting for 2008. Richard Melo

^the future dictionary of america

Edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, Eli Horowitz

(McSweeney's Books, 208 pages, $28)

In 2009, 83 percent of all American newspaper content will be found to be false, according to The Future Dictionary of America. Reader, beware. In its introduction, the Dictionary alleges to be in its "sixth printing since 2016." In reality, it was put together over the summer of 2004 on a one-month deadline when McSweeney's Books asked a who's-who list of canonical and emerging writers to donate words and definitions for a project that would benefit groups working for "the public good" in this year's election.

One hundred and seventy-six people responded with contributions, and the result is a lexicon that falls somewhere between Borges (a visible influence on McSweeney's projects) and Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. Unlike Bierce's, this dictionary combines satirical (and optimistic) definitions with corruptions of current words and linguistic tomfoolery.

"Tealebrity" is "the distinction or honor publicly bestowed on teachers," according to novelist Karen Shepard, while the definition of "woman" as "machine...with the universal function of converting semen to children" is noted as "archaic" by poet Sarah Manguso.

Plays on the names of Bush administration face cards abound ("ashcrofted," "bushwhack," "Rumsfeldian Geometry"), with "bush" being described by Paul Auster as "a poisonous family of shrubs, now extinct." Would that it were so.

Kurt Vonnegut, whose essay "Cold Turkey" appears among appendices, demonstrates his typical economy of movement with his lexical contribution "rumsfeld [ruhmz'-feld] n. one who can stomach casualties."

The Declaration of Independence, Charter of the United Nations, and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which also appear as appendices, remain unchanged for now. Kaja Katamay