The Royal Nonesuch

The hipster cultural economy of the dot-com boom is skewered in this hilarious coming-of-age memoir. As a struggling 20-something novelist (Tuscaloosa ), Phillips headed to Los Angeles in the late 1990s, where he started two iconic ventures at the intersection of art, commerce and pretentiousness. The first was a "naming company" in which he made scads of money for brainstorming resonantly vacuous brand names for image-obsessed companies. The second was a content company that produced gonzo film and video pieces (signature opus: The Sound of One Hand Clapping , starring Phillips as a Shaolin monk who defeats ninjas with his genitals) for Internet dissemination and, hopefully, cable pickup. Loosely orbiting South Park auteurs Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the author embraces their aesthetic of scabrous, juvenile shock effect as a kind of anti-mainstream media insurgency—and then starts to question it after concocting a vile fake snuff film aimed at starting a Blair Witch –style Web frenzy. Phillips embeds his off-kilter moral journey in an unsparing comic portrait of underground Hollywood, with its schizophrenic hustlers, desperate pitching, deluded financial projections, lascivious Sundance parties, bad indie films and more-alternative-than-thou poseurs who denounce corporate co-optation while angling to be co-opted. He surveys this freak show with a mordant, cutting wit that delivers insight and pathos along with the laughs. (Mar.)