Brian's Staff Reviews

This brash collection of sketches, paintings and the occasional photograph form an impressive companion to Pynchon’s stunning masterwork. Smith is well-steeped in both punk culture and comic book artistry, and the works herein are duly brazen and unflinching. The artist’s bold pen is particularly suited to render Pynchon’s super-sexual war narrative, with its numerous carnal couplings/groupings and its sadomasochistic theme of military dominance. The ladies are prevalent, the rockets are fueling and the chaos is paramount.

Revisit this macabre tale from German writer Patrick Süskind before viewing Tom Twyker’s (Run Lola Run) long-awaited film adaptation. Süskind’s creation Grenouille is the ultimate lurker; he is born with no bodily scent, emitting instead a palpable wrongness that even the most resilient of caretakers cannot abide for long. The misfit is eventually apprenticed to a Parisian perfumer, where he hones his ironic counter-trait - a nose preternaturally adept at identifying and cultivating pleasing scents – to a point of obsession. We descend with the antihero through provincial France on his madman’s quest to distill the essence of life wherever he sniffs it out, at whatever cost to the living source. This is a stunning literary exploration of beauty’s pull and the power of the most evocative of senses.