SPBH Book Club Vol. VII continues Blalock's investigation of stand-ins, or surrogates, with hot dogs acting as line, brushstroke, body part, and still life object. The bodied-ness of this food stuff has an uneasy, uncanny, relationship with the surface-less photograph, and this is a situation that the pictures exploit through humor and ickiness. The book itself is as much object as book with its contents in shifting orientation and the whole thing sealed shut with a sticker.

There was a Phillips 66 gas station just beyond the border of the neighborhood I grew up in which had two employees that looked, each in his own way, remarkably like Santa Clause; at least it was remarkable in the sense that there were two of them in this one gas station. I saw them often because they would sell me cigarettes before it was even remotely plausible that I was old enough to be buying them. They were $1.35 when I started. It was 1992. They are $12 now, in NYC, where I spent last winter working on the pictures collected in this book - All hot dogs.

Condition: Good condition, has been opened.