August 4-10, 2005

artpicks

Burning Bush

by A.D. Amorosi

Books

Tom Wolfe was wryly pulling the chain of Manhattan's moneyed elite when he wrote 1970's Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, roasting the delicate socialites who toasted members of the decidedly more militant Black Panthers. Yet turn the Panthers into feminists, their vehemently protested cause comically sexual, and their tams into Prada clutches and Choo shoes, and you've got Periel Aschenbrand. Think of Aschenbrand as a rude social theorist, an agent provocateur of fashion and word, an instigator/author/designer with a foul, smart mouth as wiry as Sarah Silverman's and a political agenda as sharply rhetorical as Air America's. Body as Billboard, her clothing company, was the first place her sloganeering texts appeared — flashy advertisements against date rape, AIDS in Africa and Republicans — the latter via the dictum "The only Bush I trust is my own."

That last mantra is the title of her first book (Tarcher/Penguin), a verbose nonfiction volume that finds Aschenbrand yakking at her mom about the differences between her half-Pakistani friends who look like Kevin Spacey and the "tall shady-looking fucking Arab who looks like a terrorist" that causes her to question her next flight. Or she's prodding her friend, Kat, to whom all gay Mormons are inordinately drawn. Or she's looking to find a way to wipe out stockholding yuppie scum and cocky salespeople and save the Game Boybouncing souls of America's youth, all while selling them her "drug dealer" T-shirts. Which — public salvation aside — is what the firebranded Aschenbrand is all about: selling the self-awed Periel brand of dicey, leftist, hilarious rhetoric about sex, drugs and poli-science.

I'll bite.

Periel Aschenbrand reads and signs, Wed., Aug. 10, 7 p.m., Borders, 1 S. Broad St., 215-568-7400.