Akashic Books, 150 pages, trade paperback, $15.95
The collaborative Please Take Me Off the Guest List is a book of contradictions.
It is a book of photos, but at six inches square it’s the paradox of photo books. Aside from a half dozen panoramic shots that span the small book’s spine — and of these, five are cut in half by essays and one resides on the back cover and a folded book flap — most of the photographs (taken by Nick Zinner, guitarist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) are barely more than oversized thumbnails, enveloped by white space.
The essays by Zachary Lipez (a singer, bartender and DJ in New York City), of which there are five (not including a brief sort of introduction, as well as a kind of afterword), run perhaps just a couple thousand words apiece. Despite being 150 pages long, the book has all the heft of a handful of “Mr. Men” books.
Yet, perhaps “small” is a misleading word to use when describing “Guest List,” as the book is anything but diminutive in context. Lipez’s essays range in topic from the coke stories in the again paradoxically titled “Boring Coke Stories” (the stories he relates are anything but boring: “I went home once with this girl who, being close friends with my recent ex, was entirely off-limits. But she was often wearing nothing but tiny sheriff outfits and pasties, and setting limitations with a girl like that is counterintuitive,” he writes in one), to a meditation on strep throat and society in “Strep Throat Lover” (“All bodies, all carriers, all welcome”), to a reflection on love in “You Can Always Do Better” (“I don’t know why women, as a gender, have such shitty taste in men. I’m just glad that they do.”)
There’s even an essay in the form of a letter of resignation to New York City’s The Strand bookstore (“My Letter of Resignation”), which seems to document a resignation to a certain lifestyle as much as to resigning from a position stocking bookshelves:
“The majority of my coworkers, if the break room chit-chat is any indication, moved here for the mediocre Thai food and the plentiful artistic forums to express their first-world hassles as some sort of Gaza-level tragedy,” Lipez writes. “For myself, I moved here for the poetry, the hard drugs, and the roving gangs of loose and insecure publicists.”
Lipez’s prose is this candid throughout, the voice of his writing the carrier of a subtle dry humor that flows somewhere between that of Chuck Klosterman and the protagonist of an Arthur Nersesian novel.
If Lipez’s essays capture the essence of living within the moments of a Nersesian lifestyle, Zinner’s photographs document the essence of the moments in between, and it’s difficult not to acknowledge the photographer’s background as a touring musician when paging through the images.
What stands out most about the photos is that nothing particularly stands out: Here’s a shot of a cat in Tornillo in 2009; here’s a shot of a dog in Panama in 2008. Here are views of Tokyo and Bangkok in 2006. Without labels, these shots could have been taken in the same place, at the same time.
The girl with her back to the camera in the desert in New Mexico in 2008 could be the same one with her back to the camera in a bedroom in Tokyo in 2006. The bat shot in France in 2009, for all we know, could have been just flying above the moth-laden streetlight shot in Perth in 2010.
Zinner’s photos capture this ambiguous dislocation of the kind of lifestyle Lipez writes about in a way that’s harder to describe than it is to feel, a sensation due in large part to designer Stacy Wakefield’s distinct presentation. (Even the text is cast in a maroonish red, avoiding the common black and white contrast.) It’s as if this book is a journey, and the photographs are the subtle yet potent everyday moments you experience as you travel between the essays of your life.