Almost exactly a year ago, I sang the praises of Philip Earl Pascuzzo’s graffiti-style photo-illustration for the paperback edition of The Messiah of Morris Avenue. While I like that cover quite a lot, it was remarkable mostly for not being the awful dustjacket design that preceded it. But now Pascuzzo has done himself one better, while mining the same territory. This time the book is Never Drank the Kool-Aid, a collection of essays by one-named journalist Touré that were originally published in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and other publications. Never one to stop at a good stock photo and some tasteful type, Pascuzzo has in this case taken a David Stuart photo of a guy in a suit, hand over mouth (the author? who knows), and obscured most of his head with some gestural patches of paint, upon which he’s then placed the typography and a few graphic doodads. The end result is a little bit street, as if the book itself has been tagged, and a little bit kooky. I’d like it better without the arrow under the hand-lettered name, but that much also appears on the Pascuzzo-designed cover of Soul City, Touré’s novel, so maybe it’s really his signature. As it turns out, the author has been quite lucky with covers and illustrators. His story collection, The Portable Promised Land, has a cover by one of the immensely talented Clayton brothers.