- Hardcover: 112 pages
- Publisher: Pantheon Books (Jun 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0375401059
- ISBN-13: 978-0375401053
- Product Dimensions: 28.2 x 1.4 x 22.3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,542,673 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Join Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, on a leisurely stroll past The Institute for Soup-Nut Research and The Municipal Birthmark Registry. Savor the smell of a phone booth, circa 1961. Sign up for a guided tour of the oldest continually vacant storefront in America. Attend a championship grave-digging competition, or, should you feel you've wasted yet another day, you can check in for help at a local Misspent Youth Center.
In "The Beauty Supply District," a new twenty-four-page story, Knipl attends an evening concert and unwittingly enters the world of wholesale empathizers and chiaroscuro brokers who make the decisions critical to the production of aesthetic pleasure in all its forms -- from the shape of an olive jar to the score of a string quartet.
In "The Beauty Supply District," a new twenty-four-page story, Knipl attends an evening concert and unwittingly enters the world of wholesale empathizers and chiaroscuro brokers who make the decisions critical to the production of aesthetic pleasure in all its forms -- from the shape of an olive jar to the score of a string quartet.
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THE STENCILING OF IDENTIFICATION NUMBERS ONTO IMMOVABLE CITY PROPERTY. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
THE STENCILING OF IDENTIFICATION NUMBERS ONTO IMMOVABLE CITY PROPERTY. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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6 reviews
34 of 34 people found the following review helpful
Knipl's apotheosis
10 Jun 2000
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
The third bound installment of Ben Katchor's "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer" series finds his lonely observer at quite a distance from the simplicity and candor of "Cheap Novelties". Complex, arcane, and beautifully detailed, "The Beauty Supply District" represents, at last, a finely tuned rendition of Katchor's altogether fantastic and fully fictional Gotham. Arguably less accessible than "Cheap Novelties" or "Real Estate Photographer Stories", (I would suggest that the uninitiated read one of the aforementioned books first) it's a satisfying read for this Katchor fan, and it certainly will be for those who appreciate the moves he's made in "Cardboard Valise" and "Hotel and Farm". Katchor has sacrificed some degree of empathy in grounding Knipl increasingly less in "the actual world" but the allegories he creates in its stead are delights to be picked apart, and like a stranger's obscure promotional cap, ruminated over. The narrative that closes "Beauty Supply District" may be a sly metaphor for the real-life loss of New York City's individuality amid the burgeoning stampede of chain stores and attendant homogeneity; whatever the perspective, those 26 pages read like a warts-and-all requiem for an imperfect yet more people-oriented time. Alas, when the narrative's pretentious art fiend character makes a fateful purchase with no thought to aesthetics, the past, with its valued individuals and labored attention to detail, seems to be dealt a near-fatal blow. I can't wait to read it again and, like Knipl himself, discover what I've overlooked. Maybe I'm all wrong. That's what I love about it.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Darker than expected
10 Dec 2006
Format:Paperback
This is my 2nd compilation of Knipl - the first being the "Evening Combinator". Once again, we're taken on a tour of mysterious urban setting that seems equal parts WWII-era New York, and another city mourning for the first - at once the ghost of a city and its beloved survivors. Artist Katchor deftly etches his cityscape using tragic camp - postcard artists who depict unloved streets that nobody will visit, semi-professional gravediggers, a man who seems to own some huge industrial facility on an island in the south pacific, losers who answer wrong numbers at pay phones and the obsession that men have with cafeteria buffets.
I may have been overdosed on Katchor's Knipl Camp, but something about "Beauty Supply" left me wanting. Earlier stuff like "Combinator" had their darker side, but were also balanced - Katchor sketched a city that was terrifying, depressing and yet oddly inviting, populated by characters who seemed victimized at the same time as being inspired. Here, the accent is on the dark and defeated, and the result is unsympathetic - as if his characters had grown more than tired by their own dark jokes. It's Katchor & Knipl, yet not at their witty best.
I may have been overdosed on Katchor's Knipl Camp, but something about "Beauty Supply" left me wanting. Earlier stuff like "Combinator" had their darker side, but were also balanced - Katchor sketched a city that was terrifying, depressing and yet oddly inviting, populated by characters who seemed victimized at the same time as being inspired. Here, the accent is on the dark and defeated, and the result is unsympathetic - as if his characters had grown more than tired by their own dark jokes. It's Katchor & Knipl, yet not at their witty best.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Breathtaking!
2 Sep 2001
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Ben Katchor's work is unique. He notices all the things that otherwise go (undeservedly after you see his work) unnoticed. His humor is on a par with the best of all media: Keaton, Chaplin, Fields in films, for example. His artwork brings to mind Herriman & Holman. His text is as inventive as Kafka. No question about it, the guy's a genius, yet always enjoyable & entrancing.
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