Press
Book Review: Paper Bullets
Eric Lister , Artsweek
May 31, 2001
Kip Fulbeck is fluent in the language of pop culture.
It is a vocabulary of songs everyone in a graduating high school class
knows by heart and the handful of advertising campaigns that creep into
homes as plush toys or prime time television movies. It is the collective
voice of soundbites from films based on characters from Saturday Night
Live routines repeated ad nauseam in social interactions. It is a language
of a million bits and pieces of information that mutate our thought processes,
individually and as a culture.
Award-winning video maker, performance artist and UCSB professor Kip
Fulbeck presents the fictional autobiography Paper Bullets. Fictional
autobiography?!? What, no reality-based television show mentality with
the promise of the dirt on a real person from the most intimate of sources?
Fulbeck promises the reader it's all there and offers up personal stories
of the relationships he's had in his life - relationships with people,
nature and one's inner self.
He deals in no small part with his own self-identification as a Hapa.
Ha¡pa (hŠ' pŠ) adj. 1. Slang. of mixed racial heritage
with partial roots in Asian and/or Pacific Islander ancestry. n. 2. Slang.
a person of such heritage [der./Hawaiian: hapa haole (half white)].
Raised in Southern California, in "a Chinese household with an out-of-place
American father," Fulbeck pays acute attention to his relationships
with the women in his life. He talks bluntly about the politics of race
and culture, gender and sex. In everything from Saturday morning cartoons
to forms filled out in triplicate; from surfing the break on a foreign
beach during a storm to his "first time" (in his living room,
awkwardly, while watching "Enter the Dragon"); Fulbeck examines
the language involved in living.
This is not a wistful voice quietly sharing stories over tea. These stories
blare with all the bright light and volume of advertisements shown during
halftime on Super Bowl Sunday. They run as if they were spun by a DJ slapping
in bits of samples we can recognize - movie quotes, schoolyard taunts,
song lyrics - to contextualize what he says pop culture was reflecting
back to the public that invented its forms. The tone is direct and unapologetic
but not threatening. The stories, like life, are rough at points; they
grow and develop. They may crescendo in an enormous pouring out of question
after question, like a speed-metal guitar solo after the drums and bass
have dropped back. But they retain the certain and gentle guiding hand
of an author who quite literally would not hurt a fly.
Touching and tough, intelligent and entertaining, Paper Bullets really
hits the mark.
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