Customer Reviews

Cold Bacon

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It's easy to love coldbacon.com, but it's easier for bibliophiles to enjoy this compilation of rants, insane journal entries, parody and more. It is a unique piece of modern art, taking the peculiarly intimate displacement of accidental web tourism and packaging it in a seductive little paperback that will tease you on the bus or in the broom closet. Has anything remotely similar been done before? I'd be interested to know, but CB's voice is inimitable ... This is your brain. This is your brain with a slab of coldbacon. Much juicier! no question...

For years Cold Bacon (Cold to his friends, Bacon to friends posing as anonymous reviewers) has entertained a whole host of loyal fans and random unsuspecting visitors with his site coldbacon.com. Bacon's site offers a beguiling mix of hit-and-run guerrilla critical thought-pieces on literature, movies and wine, trimmed with irreverent humor as whimsical as balloons (minus the hot air). Now we have Cold Bacon The Book. What does it mean for Bacon to go from pushing the aesthetic boundaries of the online experience to old-school bricks-and-paper publishing? Has he gone conservative? Well, maybe a tad nostalgic -- the book is a compendium of highlights from his many years of online activity: reviews, random musings, even emails received from everyone ranging from Dave Eggers inquiring about publishing one of Bacon's pieces to a grade schooler asking for help with her peppermint soda science experiment. At times the streams of instant messages, banner ad text and blog reflections take on the shape and rhythms of poetry. It's a funny, absurd and revealing look at how the internet has revolutionized the nature of human interaction. Therefore you must buy it immediately.

This book is pure and it's smart. Hard to pin down, but I can't help thinking that if Jonathan Ames, Stephen Wright, David Hasselhoff, McSweeneys and Mario Batali all drowned in a pool of Star Jones's vomit, the book would fill in admirably. I first checked out ColdBacon online, but it just works better on paper.

Cured meat never tasted so funny. Mr. Bacon has provided here a great selection of the unique observational material so outstandingly demonstrated on his famous website. Reading the book is like spending time with a smart and genuinely amusing new friend. The fragments themselves seem effortlessly insightful and clever. But you should consider reading the book several times, as aspects of the total offering could emerge more readily upon a second or third review.

Hilarious and totally original. Is it poetry? Is it internet detritus turned inside-out? Is it essay? Is it a series of phenomenal cosmic jokes with or without punchlines? It's all of the above and it all makes sense in its entirety ... strangely enough. Check it out!

This is the finest lowbrow humor done in the highest brow. All you could ever want to know about books, movies, life and random bits of the universe you've never heard of or never cared to all wrapped up in an impressive package of five hundred pages or less.
Some parts tickle the rib. Other parts are "Cause you to be escorted off the premises" laugh-out-loud funny. Every bit leaves you educated beyond the little world you know.

Are you asking me if I liked it? Of course, I did. Would I recommend it? Quadruple-fold. Master Bacon is html encoded genius.

A villianously clever, effortlessly hilarious collection of essays celebrating obscure films, obscure wines, the head-shaking absurdities of the internets, and a thousand other things. I upset people on the subway, I was laughing so hard, and I ended up with an awful crush on M. Bacon. You will too.

an eclectic self-portrait that elevates the personal Web page to the level of art. Although "Cold Bacon" has its share of rants (Anthony Lane gets majorly reemed) what separates it from the 19,873 other insipid blogs being scribbled away at this precise second is that mojo, that special sauce, that something you know when you see. Funny. Sad. Smart but never snooty. Antonioni gets props as do Chuck Jones & "Andrei Rublev;" "Black Hawk Down" gets attacked, witheringly, but with self-effacing irony ("My military background is sweeping. I have logged over one hundred hours on CNN."). my favorite moment is when Cold Bacon describes searching for bugs as a kid. later pages are peppered with random definitions (one for "glib") and emails, including several by clueless kids trying to sponge free help interpreting "Prufrock". do the strands coalesce into a whole? Mostly. toward the end, he says "I want to live on mountain edges / where pizzas are delivered." Read this book, laugh, be taken away, & go into the smithy of your soul where, if not a new consciousness, at least you'll feel something interesting going on.

The blog written by the narcissistic and petulant chief of the Amazon head-hunting tribe is among the great comic creations of the new century. You will find yourself trying to quote from it until you realize that there are not really any gags or jokes in the whole book, but it is the comic sensibility that is hilarious, and so original. A bull's eye from Cold Bacon's poisoned blow dart.

first time i ended up there... but how did i end up there? was i searching for taco recipes? angry letters to starbucks? who knows... who cares really. my life was altered to such a degree at that moment that it's hard to even imagine what it was like before coldbacon.com, or BCB.C, if you will. so however it was that i found myself there, falling down this kooky rabbit hole of funny essays, arresting imagery and astute criticism, it doesn't really matter... what made me fall in love with coldbacon.com was that the person behind it was clearly brilliant, but didn't take himself too seriously. how refreshing. like today's internet turned inside out. i love it. so you want to feel like that, but without sitting at a computer? you want the internet chopped up and reconstituted into the shape of a book? you want to laugh, be surprised, learn something, maybe even be offended? buy this book! ...or be sad forever and ever.