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4 oeuvres 96 utilisateurs 6 critiques

A propos de l'auteur

Gavin McInnes has been called the "godfather of hipsterdom" and the "primary architect of hipsterdom." He is the author of The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll; DOs DON'Ts; and Street Boners, which is based on his website StreetCarnage.com. He writes for television, creates funny afficher plus commercials with his ad agency Rooster NY, and is a regular "wild card" on Fox News's late-night show Red Eye. He is also the star of the films The Brotherhood of the Traveling Rants and How to Be a Man. He lives in New York with his wife and three kids. afficher moins
Crédit image: Photo by Pete Hurd (Wikipedia)

Œuvres de Gavin McInnes

Étiqueté

Partage des connaissances

Date de naissance
1970
Sexe
male
Organisations
Vice

Membres

Critiques

Interesting, although excessively raunchy (particularly his sexual exploits, but also drugs). What I liked was learning about how he took advantage of the Quebec government to start Vice, and their multiple rounds of boom and bust. Also interesting how he inevitably became more (socially, personally) conservative after getting married and having kids.
 
Signalé
octal | 3 autres critiques | Jan 1, 2021 |
Anyone who's familiar with Gavin McInnes' output knows that he says whatever the hell he likes. I've become a fan of his through his political videos on Rebel Media, and his comment that he "speaks in public the way people speak in bars" gets to the root of his appeal. Still, even though I knew his views ('politically incorrect' doesn't begin to cover it) and was very much aware of his shameless (and fearless) approach to entertainment (see the videos 'How to Fight a Baby', 'How to Piss in Public' and his film How to Be a Man), I was still surprised – positively scandalized – by The Death of Cool. Sometimes it makes the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson or the dirty-old-man fiction of Charles Bukowski look like free copies of The Watchtower.

It's essentially a memoir of his hard-drinking, hard-shagging, hard-living life, an unashamed chronicle of "no-holds-barred, asshole mayhem" (pg. 232) which somehow also included co-founding a media empire. Here's a summary Gavin gives as early as page two:

"After discovering pussy, I dropped acid, started a band, got beat up, ripped my foreskin, went to jail, planted trees, dealt drugs, got tattoos, squatted Europe, got hustled, had some threesomes, farted, watched my friends die, lived in China, played some pranks, started a multimedia global empire, got on TV, gave myself gonorrhea, got beat up again, invented hipsters, went broke, got rich, got married, got knocked out, and had some kids."

And there's a lot more besides. It's a colourful life, to be sure, but what makes the book is just how honest Gavin is about it all. He'll tell a story regardless of whether it casts him as an idiot or an arsehole or a coward, so long as it's funny and/or interesting. Some are gruesome (for example, the frenulum story) and some are hilarious (the time he gave himself gonorrhoea – of the throat), whilst others are momentous (watching the World Trade Center collapse from the roof of his New York apartment block, or the New York blackout party of 2003) and surprisingly touching (Dr. John the tree-planter). And through it all Gavin's candidness is heightened by his genuine storytelling ability and the occasional delicious phrase ("It was colder than a dead slave's eyes that night" (pg. 194); "adrenaline had my knees jiggling like a pair of tits" (pg. 61)).

Given that Gavin states at the outset that the book was called The Death of Cool "because it's ultimately about the party years of your life and all that dies when you become a grown-up" (pg. v), I was a bit disappointed that he didn't really go into how he matured and turned from decadent all-night partying to loving husband and father seemingly on a dime. He claims it is because he doesn't want his children in the same pages as dead junkies (pg. 269), but it could just as easily be because it is less marketable and objectively interesting. (Similarly, I was interested to know all the ins and out of how he built up Vice, but I didn't get it – rightly or wrongly, amusing anecdotes take precedence.)

But greater emphasis on how his family anchored him and changed him would have, in my opinion, sunk more depth into the main purported theme of the book: not only the death of the 'cool' phase in life, but the rebirth into a new phase. To be fair, he does touch on this ("although I wouldn't trade those days for the world, I just traded them for a whole new world" (pg. 266)) and the paragraph after that line in which he compares the highs of drugs to the highs of fatherhood ("Having a baby fall asleep on your chest feels like heroin") is very neat, but I for one would have enjoyed a bit more on this noble, catch-rainbow-trout period of domestic bliss. That must be what it's all about. Or maybe I'm just gay.
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Signalé
MikeFutcher | 3 autres critiques | Jun 8, 2017 |
If you liked I hope they serve beer in hell you will like this book. This is about the author Gavin McInnes and goes from when he was a teenager in Canada to his 40th birthday. The chapter "The Time I gave Myself An STD is is so gross, and so funny I could not stop laughing. Read this book.
 
Signalé
zmagic69 | 3 autres critiques | Apr 1, 2012 |

Statistiques

Œuvres
4
Membres
96
Popularité
#196,089
Évaluation
½ 3.6
Critiques
6
ISBN
6

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