The Portlandia Activity Book

by Fred Armisen (Editor), Carrie Brownstein (Editor), Jonathan Krisel (Editor)

This is The Portlandia Activity Book—a compendium of guaranteed enrichment for the Pacific Northwestern part of your psyche. Like a cool high school that prefers a sweat lodge to the traditional classroom, this book will expand your mind through participation, dehydrate you to a state of emotional rawness, then linger in the corners your bare soul.

Here you will find enough activities to get you through a year’s worth of rainy days, including: "How to Crowdfund Your Baby," "Punk Paint By Numbers," "Terrarium Foraging," and so much more. With pages unlike any you’ve seen before, this is the kind of book that you can be yourself around. Shed the trappings of normalcy, let down your glorious mane, and take the deepest breath of your life. Portlandia is beckoning your arrival.

Genres: Humor, Comedy

144 pages, Spiral-bound

First published February 11, 2014

Reviews

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fans of “Portlandia,” rejoice! — in a non-competitive, earth-friendly way, of course.

McSweeney’s has released “The Portlandia Activity Book,” by Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein and Jonathan Krisel, creators of the hipper-than-thou IFC comedy series. This spiral-bound collection — suitable for trading at the farmer’s market — is full of games, tests, art projects and advice guaranteed to help you Portland-actualize. (All this for just $28 — How much is that in CHE hours?)

If you’ve always wanted to put a bird on it, but didn’t know where to start, here are four easy-to-use stencils, including the Indigo Bunting, which is so handy for “empty spaces that could fit a bird.”

To read more of this review, go to The Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/s...

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fun book. It is loaded with satirical fun. It also includes four bird stencils in case you want to "put a bird on it." It really is an activity book full of cut outs, cards, games, and stencils. I recommend using it rather than just reading it. It will make you laugh.

[Dylan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is not funny, just like most of the television series. The humor is so dry and dull and overdone. The series could have packed their best satire into one season. Also the jabs at trans people and poor people are in poor taste. They seem to almost suggest someone gets gender reassignment surgery to stay "hip" and "on trend" or someone chooses to be unemployed because they're "childish" and "want to be cool". [Note: This entire book could be put in scare quotes.]

I personally like the jabs at hippies but they're not even funny or well thought out. A useless book really. You'd think they could come up with something more inventive and fun in such a form and format, but again, just a disappointment and a sort of why did this show last so long? I'm glad it's over.

[Printable Tire]

I've never watched a single episode of Portlandia (though I think I've seen a couple of clips) and I never plan to, but I'm just a sucker for novelty TV tie-in books. This is predictably quirky, and contains real activities, or it wouldn't have been worth my time ( was it worth my time? I dunno, probably not but you're the one reading a review for a novelty TV tie-in book, buddy).

[Hans · Rating 4 out of 5]

The physical book is an unnecessarily beautiful hybrid creation: hard back book with a spiral binding that is filled with die cuts, different types of paper, and even one sheet of redacted vellum. It's a compendium of sorts, distilling the skits and jokes from the television world into printed matter.

Sketch comedy is inherently uneven and often brave. You have the overly long sketch that works, then stops working, but then carries on just long enough to work again and pull the whole thing off (and sometimes it just doesn't ever fall into place). That is the best way I can describe how this book worked for me. It didn't feel necessary, so it was a bit of a risk. Things clicked and then they didn't (even if they had clicked in the televised version), but then they clicked again. I really enjoyed the spoilers section and the index was quite hilarious, but things like the Backyard Chicken Dossier just seemed to fill out way too many pages. The joke was the format which was funny for page one, but not long enough for pages 2-3…two more pages could have turned it around.

Seriously though: It's worth doing a close reading of the index.

[to'c · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeah. I actually read it.

[Susan (the other Susan)]

I need to live on the Left Coast. Failing that, I need this book.