If You Won't Read, Then Why Should I Write?

by Jarett Kobek

In 1997, the world obtained a grainy video revealing lurid excerpts from honeymooners Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's post-wedding celebration aboard a small yacht. Laying bare the mysteries of their intimate lives, this video became the first spark in a long and culturally supported trend: the leaked celebrity home movie.

Aligning criminal histories with transcribed extracts from such broadcasts, If You Won't Read Then Why Should I Write? documents the bathetic moments beyond a publicist's protective shield, while offering a sobering appraisal of American social justice.

Kimmy K at Burger King. The petit shamanism of Miley smoking salvia divinorum. Vince bouncing on a bed. Literature... at its darkest.

Genres: Nonfiction

54 pages, Paperback

First published September 11, 2012

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The unguarded moments of famous people, where normally it is always guarded. Sex tapes are fascinating, in that the participants used them for future reference or is it the thought of being recorded while doing something nasty is the appeal? Or losing control and being totally exposed beyond one's control? Jarrett Kobek, in sort of 'just the facts man' style captures the undocumented 'recorded' moments of conversation or more like it - snippets of dialogue between individuals.

The first book I thought of while reading this was Burrough's "The Last Words of Dutch Schultz," which was inspired by the actual recording of Schultz as he was dying from a gunshot wound. His statement to the police is both lucid as well as fancy -free as his mind wondered. Probably the closest relationship between a crime figure and hardcore Surrealism. Kobek's book reads the same way. Its a fascinating document but also an interesting way to look at a culture as it is being recorded. What Kobek did was put it in a context, that says a lot about celebrities and the role they play in our culture.

The range here is quite large, from Paris Hilton to Tom Sizemore to Muammar Gaddafi. The issue of privacy seems to be an antiquity thought these days. A wonderful book with a beautiful production by its press, Penny-Ante Editions.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Celebrities (and genocidal dictators in the Middle East), capture themselves in downtime on video because they just can't be off the camera (the dictators are captured on video being executed by the public will). And their downtime consists in drug taking, sex chat, artistic mission statements to justify themselves against the police clamping down on their illegal activities. These are people we the public supposedly esteem (that's why we elevate them to celebrities), but they are bromidic, of no imagination only vanity. Kobek puts out the content of their sex/drugs tapes in this book, sat alongside their rap sheets as inserts. To suggest that his is what art and our society has become. Hence the title.

[Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books/conceptual art pieces that I've ever experienced.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This slender black paperback comes with no forward, preface, introduction, or author's note. There is a table of contents to let you know that what is on its way involves a panoply of America's most excruciating media whores, the actors, musicians, and TMZ regulars who trot their anything but private lives before the cameras of paparazzi, reality TV producers, and their friends iPhones. This is the leaked sex tape as burgeoning art form, the drug-fueled or drunken tirade as the spoken word art of the 21st century. Narrow black inserts list the featured star's legal history, and in case you have trouble keeping up incident by incident a final section analyzes and graphs the sorry state of the American justice system when it comes handling those who drink and drug their way into the courtroom on charges ranging from street brawls to vehicular homicide.

I am old enough not to know who some of these people are, but I was equally intrigued by the fact that I already knew so much about so many of them. They may sound like idiots, they probably are idiots, but similar transcriptions of You Tubes tapes of solid middle class Americans watching their young children or pets play cute for the camera would probably be just as incoherent and inane. In such cases, however, I assume their would be fewer run ins with the law

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting exercise that basically pits the public's love of sexual intrigue and spectacle against the backdrop of actual violent crimes that celebrities have been involved in, and gotten away with due to their celebrity. It's sort of a bleak image, but well worth the half an hour it takes to read through.

[Wendy Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a surprisingly interesting little read from an indie press. Love the format. Since I went in "cold," I didn't know whether the scripts were fiction or non. Kept going back & forth on it, too. They are too ridiculous to be real, but way too ridiculous to be made up. The Tom Sizemore stuff was pure gold. Worth the price of admission right there.

[Cassandra Troyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

startling presence of innate violence that is always very visible in every tabloid headline, but here the statics lay bare a new kind of brutality harbored through time, money, and self-idol worship.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Colin Farrell: [heavy panting]"