A Crack-Up at the Race Riots - Paperback

by Harmony Korine (Author)

Originally published by Mainstreet/Doubleday in 1998, this debut novel from an underground filmmaker uses print, photographs, drawings, news clippings, handwriting, a poem, attempted diagrams, and clip art to enhance the text, which primarily tells of a race war that happens in Florida, where the Jewish people sit in trees, the black people are run by MC Hammer, and the white people are run by Vanilla Ice. Or as the author himself described it front of a national television audience, I wanted to write the Great American Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Novel. In actuality, it is a collection of hard-luck stories, off-and-on-color jokes, script scraps, found letters, free rhymes, drug flashbacks, and other missing scenes, all exploring the world of show business with fingers prying in the cracks and feet set lightly in the black humors of the real world. With chapters about books found in Monty Clift's basement and Tupac Shakur's 10 favorite novels, and a set of 11 suicide notes with room included for the reader's signature, the book is a one-of-a-kind post-postmodern examination of the dangers of public life from a unique voice in independent culture, one that might make William S. Burroughs sigh and turn the page at least.

Front Jacket

The original Ritalin kid, Harmony Korine burst on the scene with "Kids, a film so gritty and unsettling in its depiction of teen life that it was slapped with an NC-17 rating and banned in some theaters across the country. In some ways, the media frenzy over the rating overshadowed the harrowing portrait of teenagers destroying their lives and the then twenty-one-year-old screenwriter who created them. "Whether you see the movie as a masterpiece or as sensationalism," wrote Lynn Hirshberg, "the movie is relentless and brilliant and extremely disturbing. It's powerful-both steel-eyed and sexy; horrifying and captivating."

Now, in this first book of fictional set pieces, Korine captures the fragmented moments of a life observed through the demented lens of media, TV, and teen obsession. Korine reinvents the novel in this highly experimental montage of scenes that seem both real and surreal at the same time. With a filmmaker's eye and a prankster's glee, this bizarre collection of jokes, half-remembered scenes, dialogue fragments, movie ideas, and suicide notes is an episodic, epigrammatic lovesong to the world of images. Korine is the voice of his media-savvy generation and "A Crack-Up at the Race Riots is the satiric lovechild of his dark imagination.

Author Biography

Harmony Korine is the director of the films Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, Mister Lonely, Spring Breakers, and Trash Humpers, as well as music videos for artists such as Cat Power, Sonic Youth, and Will Oldham. He was the writer of the film Kids. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.