HiLoBrow Illustrations
For the past year and a half, I’ve been lucky enough to a contributor to the terrific cultural website, HiLoBrow. Edited by Josh Glenn and Matthew Battles, it’s an online journal that attempts, usually very successfully, to parse out the genuine cultural gems in our rapidly accelerating cultural from so much chaff. Glenn and Battles are experts at not only figuring out the real deal from what is an increasingly confusing brew of humor, advertising, self-promotion, art, and commerce, but presenting it in a way that reengages the audience in something they may have been trained to ignore. We all accept the precepts of Highbrow, Lowbrow, and Middlebrow, but Glenn and Battles take it a step further, finding the sliver of real deal in the grand Venn diagram. From it’s manifesto, HiLoBrow is
…a manifestation of engaged irony. (When the cast of John Waters’s 1998 movie Pecker toast the “death of irony,” they’re toasting the death of middlebrow sarcastic hipsterism.) The engaged ironist is a hilobrow.
It’s a great experiment in cultural semiotics, and I’m very glad to be a part. Over the past year or so, they have been running a series called “Hilo Heroes”, in which every day they celebrate the birthday of a Hilo Hero. I have have done quite a few by now, and I have now also collected some of my more favorite illustrations that accompany my text into a HiLoBrow Flickr group. I’ll be adding more as I do them. Follow along!
Make Yourself Heard