Customer Reviews

Catholic No.1: Cats

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Two friends chipped in to give me this book for my birthday and I am so grateful! OK, it looks a little amateur hour, but the designers and editors have come up with a really good way to help settle that uneasy feeling of nausea that comes from looking at too many pictures of cats. I'm of the school that believes my own cats are pretty good looking, but that the cats of others are basically monsters just seeking attention. Magazines like CAT FANCY try to dress up this unpalatable truth and pretend that we all love each other's cats and even cats in shelters. Instead McDaris and Pearson go here for the DIY, not to mention scary look. The endpapers (designed by McDaris) display a hanging spider web of lit filaments (like Shelob) studded with floating cat heads, like an early Judy Bolton mystery. And the writing is pretty cat-skeptical too, especially Amy Kellner's scathing expose of the thinking behind those rancid "Hang in There, Baby" drawings of cats clinging to tree branches and clotheslines. Hate them!

Roe Ethridge has a cat that looks cute, but it's asleep, possibly dead, in this photo, a cat on a blue linen tablecloth with white stitching like a baseball. Steve Lafreniere presents the cats and the cat photos of his mother--at one point, he recalls, there were no fewer than sixteen cats living with them--in Chicago, where the cats are more vulnerable and yet tougher than other cities--its artists too I think. It is more the story of a human, a woman whose passion for photography took her to Rolleiflex but just short of professional status, the ultimate mystery, rather than how cute her cats were. Somehow Ryan McGinley got his cat to climb up a piece of gauze (like Doris Day) and shot it from underneath, light stirring in the cat's left eye like an aspirant to great stardom. I'm not used to gee the George Hurrell side of Ryan McGinley, but here it is. And is that really Bruce LaBruce in Terry Richardson's picture of a masked, naked man crouched over a pan of kitty litter? Bruce, you look gooood!

Had I the time I would comment on every text and picture in the book, but they are mostly all of a piece, and that is, most of them are sort of offputting at first, than one admires the ingenuity and the freshness with which the writers and artists carried out their assignment. Terence Koh, dressing your cat in that flat, white Peggy Lee wig must be a comment of Lee's impersonation of the Siamese in LADY AND THE TRAMP? If not, what is your excuse! You're scaring me here . . .

This is not your typical cat book with cutesy photos and silly conceits ( think "why cat's paint"......)
Assorted artists get real with all the angles on the feline world and they dont' hold back. Highly amusing and a visual treat.