This, my most recent book of themed prints will certainly re-secure my unchallenged position as Americas least wanted graphic artist. “Naked Souls” picks up where “Rank ’n File” (2011) left off as it follows America’s ever beleaguered ne’er-do-wells down to the next level of humiliation as they get booted out of motels and trailers and into tents, parked cars, cardboard boxes and other rent free (so far) venues.
A roof and four walls now require three incomes and a side hustle to acquire and maintain in America’s unregulated Capitalist Xanadu. In heroic but futile defiance, this book is about the ugly, dirty, butt-crack of American's tax-free billionaire plantation, behind the opaque media gloss. This is the true face of runaway plutocracy, in the wake of all the slick commercial pimping - happy-faced, multi-ethnic America on a permanent Disney world vacation, going home to blazing white designer kitchens in Rancho Bernardo, dancing with a pina colada in one hand.
Obviously I’ll never get rich, but hardly anybody who wasn’t rich to start with can get that way in America anymore. Self-made wealth is a great, lavishly promoted cultural myth, and Americans are the most propagandized people on earth. But tent cities dotting our grey horizons are no myth, they are real. America's once vital and contentious art scene addresses this and all other social catastrophes with beach house decoration, shopped by republican trophy wives - sunshine, lollypops and rainbows.
Thank you. Exit through the gift shop......
Back in the day, one could dismiss the bottom dwellers as bums. Now there’s way too many of them to be written off as mere hopeless derelicts. Most of them just didn't make enough money to support a greedy landlord or pay a hospital bill. Others are the wandering elderly or the deranged. A lot of them are children.
Skid row is America's cheap, default solution to lousy incomes and unwanted persons.
Only dope makes the filth and destitution bearable. I suspect that addiction keeps the tent city multitudes occupied and distracts them from rioting.
I live at the high end of America’s bottom. My breaks have been better, my addictions less debilitating, my parents more responsible and my spouse a remarkable gift, but I’m not a hustler, major stock holder or a vulgar con man, the new American skill-sets for getting ahead. With less dumb luck I’d be picking dumpsters with the cast-offs in this book and so would a lot of other people. Along with my contempt and outrage about America’s obscene wealth inequity, people booted out of the poorhouse and into the un-house, there’s also a stiff portion of identification in this book.
A delightfully snarky forward by the lovely and talented Ashley Holt, ex-spat pen pal and fellow traveler, (along with his graphic mug shot), introduces the American street circus.
84 pages, B/W premium. $11.30 plus ship. Get it here-
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