Your Opinion or Your Life!
“Carlos Libro,” guerrilla reviewer, was the hook. “Sunglasses, beret, camouflage T-shirt, cargo pants–your stereotypical guerrilla motif,” says Cox. After about five shows he decided he needed more than books to fill half an hour, so he started interdicting strangers outside video stores and multiplexes and asking them to talk about the movies they were watching. But the book segment remains the heart and soul of Guerrilla Reviews.
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Sarah McComber, a 28-year-old bartender and actress, is Natasha Libro. “Of the shooting we’ve done, being on the el is my favorite,” she says. “It’s really exciting. People are in such a weird place on the el. They’re in their own little box. They pick their nose and they don’t think other people can see them. It’s fascinating to walk up to people not knowing how they’re going to react.”
“On our last shoot there was a guy who I knew I had way more information from than I could ever use,” McComber says, “but he was so excited about this book he was reading I couldn’t get him to stop. It was a book talking about warlike tendencies in people going back to the hunter-gatherer times and pastoral times. We have this idea that way in the past, before cities and big civilizations, there wasn’t war. And there’s this book saying there is all this evidence that people have always been warlike, whether fighting in the name of the emperor or king or fighting in the name of their little family clan.”
Neither did Book, which went under last month when Barnes & Noble decided to stop giving it money. “We still have an ear to the ground for a miraculous solution,” Kramer says, “but certainly our momentum has slowed significantly. We wound up so inextricably linked to Barnes & Noble that it’s hard to imagine untangling with them and getting in with somebody else.”
After several weeks working with the chain’s director of marketing to find new ways of selling Book, Kramer and Gleason were called into a meeting in mid-October with the chairman of the board and the chief financial officer. “They were very respectful and courteous and regretful, but there certainly didn’t seem to be room to do anything,” says Kramer. “They’d made the decision that they were not magazine publishers. I think they just lost their appetite for it. We knew we were troubled, but we thought we’d hit the marks we needed to hit and were making progress and it made sense to go forward.” But from Barnes & Noble’s point of view, which Kramer can appreciate, it made just as much sense not to go forward. “Nobody thinks Barnes & Noble made a bad decision,” he says, and he’s grateful to the chain for providing Book with the wherewithal to go under in style.
