Who Says Igor Kenk Stole Your Bike?

Idiots, Kenk would insist: A bunch of fucking idiots.

Only people who are ignorant and retarded,
he would insist, would say that Kenk stole your bike.

Because Kenk's clean, basically.
Kenk's a fucking pro-green, recycling-forward saint ~
although he's tired of waiting around for the rest of the world
to realize that.

You should meet Kenk, get to know him a little better,
put yourself in his survival-of-the-fiercest world for a few months,
see what fucking bullshit is all this bike-stealing accusations.

Don't worry about your vintage Schwinn,
your top-of-the-line Cannondale,
your goddam hipster fixie being ripped off by Kenk, though.

Your bike is safe: Because you get to know Kenk,
"the world's most prolific bicycle thief," vicariously.

You get to see his life, get to witness the day-to-day bullshit
he's had to deal with since immigrating to Toronto from Slovenia decades ago.

You get to see that from a distance.

This is how: Richard Poplak's written a documentary about him,
a documentary filmed and designed by Jason Gilmore.
Don't forget the illustrations by Nick Marinkovich before you say
that instigator Alex Jansen produced the graphic-novel version of the doc
through his, Jansen's, ass-kicking Pop Sandbox company.

This is some shit. This is some good shit,
and people like David Mamet or Richard Price
would have to labor intensely to write it this well,
because it's all straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
Because Kenk – a maths whiz and childhood chess prodigy, allegedly –
philosophizes and justifies and dissembles and speaks raw truth
like a rat-savvy immigrant poet of the meaner Toronto streets.

And the look of the book?

You take a first glance at it, at the fotonovela-by-way-of-Xerox style,
and you think, okay, this is crude but effective. You think: this is striking,
it rather fits the subject, and it was probably a necessary gambit
due to the book being based on actual film footage.

"Rather fits the subject," though?

Give me a fucking break.

"The images have been doctored," says author Poplak's prefatory note,
"using now-ancient technology employed by underground artists battling
state-run presses in Yugoslavia during the 80s: the photocopy machine.
Kenk came of age in that country during the punk-like FV movement.
This style informed – and informs of – his ethos. I came to believe that this
is the prism through which Kenk sees his world."

Word.

The deeper you read into this book, the less you think that statement's
just some sort of academically phrased yet still Kenk-like justification:
The style employed within this medium is perfect to represent what's being shown.
It is effective, but it's not really crude at all: Gilmore and Marinkovich
have raided the toolkit of sequential art to transform these series of film stills
into a vivid record of Kenk's life and crimes, to describe the gritty urban environment
in which the whole scene goes down, to do things that prose alone (or film alone)
couldn't as sharply accomplish.

Okay, the book's binding isn't that great.
Perfectbound paper, maybe half a brick thick, the glue's not the best glue around.
It's okay, but the book's just not as sturdy as it should be.

We're not even being petty, here: We wouldn't give a shit about the binding,
about how long this volume could last in fine condition after many readings,
if it wasn't such an impressive work of journalism and visual documentation.

And it is, most definitely.
Whether you ride a bike, or stole one or had one stolen, or not.
We recommend this documentary and look forward to seeing
whatever Pop Sandbox will do next.

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THIS JUST IN: That binding problem? Already corrected in the second edition, FTW.