An in-law sent me a PDF of this rudely hilarious little picture book that would warm the cruel heart (or maybe cruel the warm heart) of every new parent. Turns out the artist, Ricardo Cortes, does great little books like Sketches of the Drug Wars and the celebration of power blackouts pictured above (both links here are PDFs).
The latter gives a nicely upbeat human-scale take on the 2003 blackout, which Jane Bennett analyzed in Vibrant Matter (see my comments in the blogathon for that book, and Sean Cubitt’s incisive critique of it here). The picture book’s one page that seems off-kilter to me is the one with the text, “Radios blasting music and news/ People dancing in the street, doing the boogaloo.” Music, okay, battery-powered… But news? Wouldn’t the stations shut down? Not that that couldn’t be a good thing…
That book-for-new-parents’ author, Adam Mansbach, also has some good writing to his credit.