What do you think?
Rate this book
Place Space
John Waters
This series of photography books by designer Oldham highlights remarkable people, places, and spaces and feature essays by noted critics and cultural figures.
64 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2008
99 people want to read
About the author
Todd Oldham
40 books17 followersJacky Todd Oldham is an American fashion designer originally from Corpus Christi, Texas. He hosted a segment called "Todd Time" on MTV's House of Style in the 1990s. He produced a clothing line associated with the Warner Brothers Batman Forever. Oldham designs furniture and home accessories for the La-Z-Boy Furniture company and was named creative director for Old Navy effective Oct. 1, 2007.
Oldham is openly gay. He is a member of the board of advocates for Bailey House, the nation's oldest supportive housing program for persons with HIV/AIDS. Additionally, Oldham supports the animal rights movement and has worked with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Oldham was the host of Top Design on Bravo for the 2007 season.
Oldham is openly gay. He is a member of the board of advocates for Bailey House, the nation's oldest supportive housing program for persons with HIV/AIDS. Additionally, Oldham supports the animal rights movement and has worked with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Oldham was the host of Top Design on Bravo for the 2007 season.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 15, 2020
Because I am a nosy person, there is little I enjoy more than visiting peoples' homes and looking at all their stuff!
And, who would have more interesting stuff than John Waters, director of Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos?
Enter Waters' lair and prepare to be amazed. Marvel at his mass murderer action figure collection, his startled cat collage, and an astounding assortment of fake food. Behold his awesome bulletin board featuring photos of Waters posing with Elton John and Chucky, a tabloid clipping of a bloated Marlon Brando, a young and adorable Amy Carter, and JFK, Jr. adjusting his junk. Shiver at the horrific close-up painting of Michael Jackson's noseless face. And, take a peek at John's spice rack. (The man loves his curry powder!)
And, oh, OH, OH! - THE BOOK PORN!!!
Shelf after shelf crammed with books! Tables piled high with stacks and stacks of hardbacks! Drool! And most of the photos are zoomed in close enough to see the titles. It's no surprise that Waters appears to be a big fan of true crime, pop culture, and film star bios.
This book itself is pretty nifty. Virtually text free, it is indeed nothing but photos of the Waters abode. There are also some punch out note cards and book plates The neatest touch of all is that the dustjacket unfolds into a large poster. Pretty cool, eh?
I wouldn't say this is worth the asking price, unless you are indeed Waters' biggest fan and HAVE GOT TO have a glimpse of the man's private world. But, if you're a busybody like me, and can find a cheaper copy - go for it! It's a weird and wacky snoop-fest.
And, who would have more interesting stuff than John Waters, director of Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos?
Enter Waters' lair and prepare to be amazed. Marvel at his mass murderer action figure collection, his startled cat collage, and an astounding assortment of fake food. Behold his awesome bulletin board featuring photos of Waters posing with Elton John and Chucky, a tabloid clipping of a bloated Marlon Brando, a young and adorable Amy Carter, and JFK, Jr. adjusting his junk. Shiver at the horrific close-up painting of Michael Jackson's noseless face. And, take a peek at John's spice rack. (The man loves his curry powder!)
And, oh, OH, OH! - THE BOOK PORN!!!
Shelf after shelf crammed with books! Tables piled high with stacks and stacks of hardbacks! Drool! And most of the photos are zoomed in close enough to see the titles. It's no surprise that Waters appears to be a big fan of true crime, pop culture, and film star bios.
This book itself is pretty nifty. Virtually text free, it is indeed nothing but photos of the Waters abode. There are also some punch out note cards and book plates The neatest touch of all is that the dustjacket unfolds into a large poster. Pretty cool, eh?
I wouldn't say this is worth the asking price, unless you are indeed Waters' biggest fan and HAVE GOT TO have a glimpse of the man's private world. But, if you're a busybody like me, and can find a cheaper copy - go for it! It's a weird and wacky snoop-fest.
June 27, 2010
Bound: SunPost Weekly June 24, 2010
http://bit.ly/dBL3qS
Beautifully Troubled Waters
From Role Models to Living Arrangements with America’s Kookiest Auteur
There’s something heartening about looking at John Waters bookshelves and seeing many of the same titles I once owned. And while I can’t help wondering if some of those titles did in fact once belong to me (could he have bought a lot at auction?), the symmetry of our reading habits far outweighs any foolish speculation of the sort.
Chances are if I dig someone, then said someone and I probably have read many of the same books. So it’s a bit of thrill to see that notion verified.
And in Todd Oldham’s Place Space edition on John Waters (Ammo Books $19.95), there’s enough photographic verification to sate me and every other book-crazed beast in this wild world of ours.
Or his. Because once you crack the spine of this intimate visit to the home of America’s kookiest auteur, there’s no question that you are in Waters World. A place where the high and low collide with a permanently crooked smile.
Dig the Cy Twomblys hanging in the dining room, the Richard Artschwager faux mirror in the entry foyer, the Richard Tuttle sculpture that helps guard the front door, and the Lichtenstein that winks down on a barking Koons.
There are serial killer action figures and slates from many of Waters 16 films and a “massive collection” of fake food. There are full-color images of mythical creatures such as Leave it to Beaver’s Lumpy and Oz’s Wicked Witch. There’s a rack holding some of the 160 magazines he subscribes to each month and a bulletin board blasted with ephemera, including what appears to be a Swedish newspaper handbill which quotes our man calling Bergman “the King of Puke.” There are snaps of Elton and Chucky and John John and Amy Carter, and there’s a pile of laceless Comme des Garcons sneakers in various shades of awful.
Mostly though there are books, lots and lots and lots of books. Art books and murder books and stroke books and joke books; high lit, low lit, fag lit and thug lit. So many books, in fact, that they seem to be reproducing on their own.
According to Waters’ recently released Role Models (FSG $25), there are in fact 8,425 books (or there were at the time of this writing anyway), and each and every one of them is “catalogued but no longer in complete order.” (Waters doesn’t mention whether or not he uses the Dewey Decimal System.) And though he has “jitterbugged with Richard Serra, eaten Thanksgiving dinner with Lana Turner, had tea with Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, gone out drinking with Clint Eastwood, and spent several New Years Eves in Valentino’s chalet in Gstaad,” what our manic friend likes best is “staying home and reading.”
Waters especially digs reading Denton Welch, and he thinks there’s “no better novel in the world” than In Youth is Pleasure. “Just holding it in my hands,” he writes,” so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.”
It is an odd and oddly beautiful book (Burroughs tipped me to it back in the ‘80s). And the young hero’s penchant for strapping straight men sets up perfectly the later chapter on “Outsider Porn,” where Waters wades into a kinda beauty that‘s beyond me, but apparently not beyond many, many men of certain inclinations, including a continuous stream of red-blooded Marines.
According to our subject, one Bobby Garcia, “Marines like three things: beer, porn and blow jobs.” And Garcia should know, because he’s spent the last thirty years given them that and anything else they wanted from him – and putting it all on film.
In fact, Garcia accidently started a sorta cottage industry in the field; unfortunately he’s so inept a businessman he wasn’t able to capitalize on his predilection. And these days “Bobby actually lives in a pigpen!”
Other, more successful role models, include Little Richard, Johnny Mathis, Tennessee Williams and Rei Kawakubo, “the genius fashion dictator” behind his “favorite line” Comme des Garcons. Waters has been sporting Kawakubo’s “purposely wrong” clothing since 1983, despite (or probably because of) the fact that “many pieces looked fresh out of the sale bin at [Baltimore’s:] Purple Heart thrift shop.” And it seems he’ll be sporting such lavish monstrosities until he dies.
But by far the most frighteningly entertaining of the role models are those found in the chapter “Baltimore Heroes,” all of which are encountered in his “Night of a Thousand Drinks.”
In other words, here he hits the bars – “not faux” bars, mind you, “but real and alarming” bars like Martick’s, where Waters was too young to get into so he hung outside in the alley, and Pepper Hill, where a fake I.D. got him in with the likes of Pencil, the Baltimore male equivalent of Selby’s Tralala.
In addition to Pencil, there’s Lady Zorro,” “the lesbian stripper from Baltimore’s red light district The Block,” who continues to be his “inspiration,” though she did her last dance back in 2001. Waters gets with Zorro’s daughter, Eileen, and spends a high ol’ time finding out what it was like to be raised under such a wild mom.
Waters does likewise with the offspring of Esther Martin, late proprietress of the Club Charles, which in its heyday was called the Wigwam, and where “you couldn’t get buzzed in at the front door unless you were a bum. A real one.”
“The real reason I loved Esther right from the beginning,” writes Waters, “was her mouth. No one in the world cussed more!” But quick as she was with a curse word and kind as she was to the downtrodden, Esther was also pro law and order (“she carried a slapper”), pro education (she was always intent on having her kids do well in school – and they did), and a bit of teetotaler, who “loved Nixon” and “hated Kennedy,” yet added more color to the town of Baltimore than any thousand liberals combined.
Role Models is a fun romp with a crack wit, and when taken together with Oldham’s home intrusion, you really get a sense of what makes this merry mad man tick. Sometimes it’s a bomb; others it might a Timex. But it keeps on ticking no matter what, with a tick-tock-tick all of his very own
http://bit.ly/dBL3qS
Beautifully Troubled Waters
From Role Models to Living Arrangements with America’s Kookiest Auteur
There’s something heartening about looking at John Waters bookshelves and seeing many of the same titles I once owned. And while I can’t help wondering if some of those titles did in fact once belong to me (could he have bought a lot at auction?), the symmetry of our reading habits far outweighs any foolish speculation of the sort.
Chances are if I dig someone, then said someone and I probably have read many of the same books. So it’s a bit of thrill to see that notion verified.
And in Todd Oldham’s Place Space edition on John Waters (Ammo Books $19.95), there’s enough photographic verification to sate me and every other book-crazed beast in this wild world of ours.
Or his. Because once you crack the spine of this intimate visit to the home of America’s kookiest auteur, there’s no question that you are in Waters World. A place where the high and low collide with a permanently crooked smile.
Dig the Cy Twomblys hanging in the dining room, the Richard Artschwager faux mirror in the entry foyer, the Richard Tuttle sculpture that helps guard the front door, and the Lichtenstein that winks down on a barking Koons.
There are serial killer action figures and slates from many of Waters 16 films and a “massive collection” of fake food. There are full-color images of mythical creatures such as Leave it to Beaver’s Lumpy and Oz’s Wicked Witch. There’s a rack holding some of the 160 magazines he subscribes to each month and a bulletin board blasted with ephemera, including what appears to be a Swedish newspaper handbill which quotes our man calling Bergman “the King of Puke.” There are snaps of Elton and Chucky and John John and Amy Carter, and there’s a pile of laceless Comme des Garcons sneakers in various shades of awful.
Mostly though there are books, lots and lots and lots of books. Art books and murder books and stroke books and joke books; high lit, low lit, fag lit and thug lit. So many books, in fact, that they seem to be reproducing on their own.
According to Waters’ recently released Role Models (FSG $25), there are in fact 8,425 books (or there were at the time of this writing anyway), and each and every one of them is “catalogued but no longer in complete order.” (Waters doesn’t mention whether or not he uses the Dewey Decimal System.) And though he has “jitterbugged with Richard Serra, eaten Thanksgiving dinner with Lana Turner, had tea with Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, gone out drinking with Clint Eastwood, and spent several New Years Eves in Valentino’s chalet in Gstaad,” what our manic friend likes best is “staying home and reading.”
Waters especially digs reading Denton Welch, and he thinks there’s “no better novel in the world” than In Youth is Pleasure. “Just holding it in my hands,” he writes,” so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.”
It is an odd and oddly beautiful book (Burroughs tipped me to it back in the ‘80s). And the young hero’s penchant for strapping straight men sets up perfectly the later chapter on “Outsider Porn,” where Waters wades into a kinda beauty that‘s beyond me, but apparently not beyond many, many men of certain inclinations, including a continuous stream of red-blooded Marines.
According to our subject, one Bobby Garcia, “Marines like three things: beer, porn and blow jobs.” And Garcia should know, because he’s spent the last thirty years given them that and anything else they wanted from him – and putting it all on film.
In fact, Garcia accidently started a sorta cottage industry in the field; unfortunately he’s so inept a businessman he wasn’t able to capitalize on his predilection. And these days “Bobby actually lives in a pigpen!”
Other, more successful role models, include Little Richard, Johnny Mathis, Tennessee Williams and Rei Kawakubo, “the genius fashion dictator” behind his “favorite line” Comme des Garcons. Waters has been sporting Kawakubo’s “purposely wrong” clothing since 1983, despite (or probably because of) the fact that “many pieces looked fresh out of the sale bin at [Baltimore’s:] Purple Heart thrift shop.” And it seems he’ll be sporting such lavish monstrosities until he dies.
But by far the most frighteningly entertaining of the role models are those found in the chapter “Baltimore Heroes,” all of which are encountered in his “Night of a Thousand Drinks.”
In other words, here he hits the bars – “not faux” bars, mind you, “but real and alarming” bars like Martick’s, where Waters was too young to get into so he hung outside in the alley, and Pepper Hill, where a fake I.D. got him in with the likes of Pencil, the Baltimore male equivalent of Selby’s Tralala.
In addition to Pencil, there’s Lady Zorro,” “the lesbian stripper from Baltimore’s red light district The Block,” who continues to be his “inspiration,” though she did her last dance back in 2001. Waters gets with Zorro’s daughter, Eileen, and spends a high ol’ time finding out what it was like to be raised under such a wild mom.
Waters does likewise with the offspring of Esther Martin, late proprietress of the Club Charles, which in its heyday was called the Wigwam, and where “you couldn’t get buzzed in at the front door unless you were a bum. A real one.”
“The real reason I loved Esther right from the beginning,” writes Waters, “was her mouth. No one in the world cussed more!” But quick as she was with a curse word and kind as she was to the downtrodden, Esther was also pro law and order (“she carried a slapper”), pro education (she was always intent on having her kids do well in school – and they did), and a bit of teetotaler, who “loved Nixon” and “hated Kennedy,” yet added more color to the town of Baltimore than any thousand liberals combined.
Role Models is a fun romp with a crack wit, and when taken together with Oldham’s home intrusion, you really get a sense of what makes this merry mad man tick. Sometimes it’s a bomb; others it might a Timex. But it keeps on ticking no matter what, with a tick-tock-tick all of his very own
May 12, 2020
Yeah, I know it’s an art book with a couple small essays. Fuck off. The man’s an inspiration.
May 1, 2025
So fucking good
September 14, 2009
The best item in a series of books of photographs of eccentric interiors of the semi-rich and infamous, this takes you inside the truly unique Baltimore home of filmmaker, essayist, and provocateur John Waters. If he chose, he could move out and it could instantly become a museum--a monument to the socially twisted strains of American culture. If you're interested, I can tell you much more about it.
Reviewed by:
Phil Overeem
Language Arts teacher
Reviewed by:
Phil Overeem
Language Arts teacher
February 16, 2011
What does John Waters have in his home? Fake food, way too much true crime, and an art installation in his attic that features rotting pizza and other perishables. Like rotting for decades. Actually I don't think that's mentioned in this book. Maybe I read about it someplace else. Anyway, it makes me happy.
January 3, 2010
Beautiful photographs of a rare genius.
March 12, 2011
Do I want to browse John Waters bookshelves? Yes, yes I do. Do I want to see all his crazy plastic food, yes again.
February 7, 2014
Fascinating series of photographs. John Waters has an amazing fake food collection (among other things).
February 18, 2009
Riveting...
September 15, 2011
PICTURES OF BOOKS in John Waters home. He is my favorite.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews