Venus & Dave Rock, Venus & Dave Rock

Previously published as: Whack JobMeet twenty-one-year-old Jeff Land, winner of a national furniture design award in his third year at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. He plays drums and sings for the locally popular band, Whack Job, bears a striking resemblance to Kurt Cobain, and it would seem like the world should be his oyster. But alas, the timing of his birth would tend to suggest differently. Regardless of the wealth of talent he embodies, contemporary society has deemed him and his ilk overrepresented in the current job market. Maybe not in the world of Rock & Roll (which short of winning some cosmic lottery will never pay the bills), but most certainly in the world of furniture manufacture where he seems doomed to labor in the trenches as an underappreciated design minion for the remainder of his productive life.Enter Parsons graduate student Amy Brock, who brings Jeff a business proposition he believes he’d be a fool to reject. The daughter of an immigrant Vietnamese mother and billionaire industrialist Caucasian father, she doesn’t have Jeff’s talent but does have the advantage of gender, a bold self-confidence, and the kind of bi-racial bonafides currently in high demand in the commercial business world. All those things plus the potential financial backing of her father seem to make her the ideal business partner save for the fact that she also has a Bulgarian stepmother and a stepsister, both hatefully jealous of her. They would do anything to see her venture fail.Venus & Dave Rock is an irreverent romp through Jeff’s New York City world of ambition and challenge as he struggles to overcome obstacles constantly thrown in his path while seeking to find a balance between his music and his exciting new enterprise. For a kid from the upstate New York sticks, it’s a bigger chunk of life than he’d ever imagined biting off, let alone chewing.