The Book of the Un ― Friends of Smiley: Dissertations from Dystopia

The Book of the Un is the sequel to Chicken John Rinaldi’s wildly popular 2012 book: "The Book of the Is." In his new book, Rinaldi goes for broke and calls for a global thesis for artists to come together and create the change needed in the world that only artists, together, are capable of. The Book of the Un is filled with stories, analogies and irreverent examples of how things actually work... or don’t. Rinaldi presents a vision of utopia as an inescapable inevitability, leaving readers both hopeful and perplexed.The Book of the Un makes four points and they fit together in the most unlikely ways: #1) There is a magic to doing shows and that magic is crazy powerful. #2) We are experiencing a phenomena of “movements” -- the Movement of Movements. #3) Art Groups are suffering from patterned bad behavior and can be mapped with a 12 point, predictable script. #4) We need to create a global artists thesis.The Book of the Un tackles these four points with an accessible dissertation, written in a conversational style, yet packed with information, examples, and citations. Rinaldi references his history as a punk in the early hardcore days in NYC then as an organizer in SF in everything from the Cacophony Society to Burning Man to the first punk circus and many things in-between too complex and messy to report here. An effective, brutal thinker, Rinaldi presents his odd viewpoints with a sometimes jarring, no-nonsense writing style -- it's easy to see why so many people love to hate this guy.