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Post-Teenage Riot
Harmony Korine's Bad Vibes Are
Only as Bad as the Times Dish Out
Crackup at the Race Riots
by Harmony Korine
Doubleday/Main Street Books, 1998
175 pp.; S14.95
In Greil Marcus’ 1975 book Mystery Train
— one of the first works to offer a serious
critique of rock and roll and its context —
the author writes that blues artist Howlin’
Wolf’s best records “came on like 3-minute
race riots.”
scrapbook. It subtly identifies itself, howev
er. as a meticulously crafted work whose dis
parate images defile or in the very least
question the need for literary context »n
making a literary impression.
“In my novel," he said, “half the things
that are attributed to other authors are my
work, and things that I’ve taken from other
authors are attributed to me. Then I don’t
even remember where the truth comes in.
And it doesn’t matter. All that matters is
what you’re witnessing.”
Of Gummo, a bleak, haunting vision of a
suburban town in the aftermath of a tornado,
Korine said, “What I’m doing is a mistakist
art form,” though the statement applies just
as well to his book. “It’s more about setting
things up and creating explosions. It’s very
much chemical. It’s very much about putting
people in rooms together and seeing what
happens. 1 just go in knowing something will
explode and I will make sense of that."
The “sense” Korine speaks of exists only
in what he calls “the margin of the undefined,
like a notion." And finding what that means
(or doesn’t mean, as the case may be)
requires a bit of work. It’s dirty work some
times, that requires grappling with some old
Harm jt.y Korine. Photo by An Macropotc.
That phrase comes to mind often in the
case of Harmony Korine — not just in its
evocation of his new book’s title, A Crackup
at the Race Riots, but in its relation to his
aesthetic: the violently juxtaposed cut-ups,
the devotion to immediacy, the loitering
sense of urgency.
Like Wolf’s best songs, Korine’s recent
works, the film Gummo (recently released on
video) and the novel Crackup, possess a
power unique to themselves. But it is when
they are viewed in the context of their time
— when we see where he stands and, by
extension, where we stand — that they are
most effective. This is what makes Korine’s
art so important, the passionate reactions it
incites so visceral, and the misguided criti
cism it often inspires so frustrating. Like that
eerie painful cry still resonating from the
Mississippi Delta, it seems that down the
road, in the clutches of history, Korine’s
images might haunt and teach and dispel in
the same way Wolf’s records do now.
To say this, of course, about a 23-year-old
artist is quite a leap. But after watching his
film, reading his book, seeing him “perform”
a reading at Barnes & Noble and hearing him
speak in a recent interview so eloquently
and so passionately about the art he creates,
it becomes clear that he is much more than
a nihilist — a common criticism. Instead,
Korine is a revealing artist whose only crime,
it would seem, is not taking the easy road.
Then again, a quick perusal of Crackup
shows that a flirtation with nihilism is
indeed part of the game. An assemblage of
lists, short stories, photographs (like, on
page one, a lone picture of MC Hammer at
age 11), made-up quotes attributed to the
likes of David Bowie and T.S. Eliot, two-line
stage plays and mad scribbles, Crackup is
called a novel but looks and feels more like a
Modernist standbys: disease, suicide, misan
thropy, irony, obsession, loneliness.
It’s not always a bright worldview Korine
has to impart, but it’s not always a bright
world he has to work with. Of New York City,
which Korine calls home, he said. “This
place kills you. I can’t understand it some
times. I can see people turning to ogres in
front of me. I can see them rotting and
dying.”
Many of his detractors have been quick
to dismiss such talk as ego-driven shock
bait. But Korine’s most candid moments,
both in the book and in the film, show that
when he’s at his best the author is removed
from the equation. This brief snippet from
Crackup, one of 10 “Ethnic Adolescent
Atrocities: Pictures,” is as grotesque as it is
journalistic in its believable portrayal of the
menace of the times:
A bunch of teenage black girls are beat
ing up an overweight white girl. Her
shirt is tom and one of her breasts is
scraping on the pavement. They are in
a crowded parking lot. A few people are
standing on their cars watching All the
black girls are wearing Elton John T-
shirts.
“The difference between great works and
mediocre works,” Korine said, “what makes
something masterful or true, is when you
have no idea how it came to be. When I
watch a movie like Night of the Hunter, I can’t
even imagine that James Agee wrote that
film and that Charles Laughton somehow
photographed it. It seems like the Bible; that
it has always been there; that there’s no
authorship."
Andy Battaglic
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