MadLit

vicemag: An Interview with Harmony Korine In 1998, shortly...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:45:41 -0400

An Interview with Harmony Korine

In 1998, shortly after his feature-length directorial debut, Gummo, Harmony Korine published a novel called A Crackup at the Race Riots. The book is built from an insane collage of images and thoughts, including lists of ideas for movies, titles for novels, suicide notes, joke routines, celebrity rumors, and strange short scenes and dialogues involving rapists, amputees, dogs, vaudeville performers, and manic-depressives. Like all of Korine’s work, it is a rare collision of fun, fucked, funny, sad, and bizarre—the kind of thing you pick up every so often just to buzz your brain. For years the book has been out of print, fetching prices upward of $300 used online, until recently when it was repackaged and rereleased by Drag City. Harmony was kind enough to get on the phone with me and talk about the making of the book.

VICE: The first thing the reader sees when they open A Crackup at the Race Riots is a picture of MC Hammer at age 11. Why did you decide to start the book that way?
Harmony Korine: At the time I was doing a lot of narcotics. I remember basically the process was that I would hear things, or I would see things… I would hear somebody walking down the street, and maybe they’d say something interesting, and I’d put it on a piece of paper. Or I would see a pair of socks hanging from a telephone pole with a Star of David on the ankle, and I would just write that. Or whatever… I’d see someone juggling some toilet paper, and I would describe that. And then I would see a picture of MC Hammer at age 11, and I would just think maybe it all kind of came from his imagination.

The book is a thought in MC Hammer’s mind?
Well, it could be. Like most things in life, it could be. [laughs]

So, if I’m understanding you correctly, you basically started acquiring bits and pieces and then just let them fall as they may on the paper, in the order you found them?
Not exactly. What happened was I would just write everything down. I’d write things in crayon or on the side of the wall in my apartment, or on a typewriter or whatever. You would just see things, you know… cut them out of books. I might hear something really crazy that somebody said on a city bus, like somebody might be spewing some kind of crazy racial rant, and then I’d go back home and write that down, and then I would just look at it for a while, and I would imagine, like, What if it wasn’t that guy on the bus? What if Harrison Ford said that? What if I was actually riding a horse or something, and Harrison Ford was riding a horse, and we were riding somewhere, we could even be racing, and what if he just turned to me, and he said that same exact thing that I just heard? And I was like, Whoa! The context completely changed the humor. That’s basically what the book is. I started thinking about it like that, and there started to be these thematic connections in that way, and after I had amassed all of these fragments, these tripped-out, micro narco blurts, I went back and recontextualized them into something that was closer to a novel, or closer to a novel idea.

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Re-Release: Waves

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:01:00 -0400

Three friends experience life altering moments at 2012’s Coachella Music Festival.

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Step your garden game up.

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:48:00 -0400

Step your garden game up.

chicagopubliclibrary: Library Slide By Moon Hoon via...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 01:50:06 -0400

chicagopubliclibrary:

Library Slide By Moon Hoon

via Colossal:

Architect Moon Hoon recently designed the Panorama House (scroll down), in Chungcheongbuk-do, South Korea. One of the most unique features incorporated into the home is a wooden slide built directly into a library which also functions as a stair-stepped home theater seating area.

Click here to see more photos of the Library Slide!

I love that the books I order on Amazon for 99 cents or find in...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 13:16:38 -0400

I love that the books I order on Amazon for 99 cents or find in used book stores come all fucked up with handwriting and highlights. Charming imperfections non-existent in digital.

whatshewanted: The Joy of Reading by artist Joel Robison ...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:25:41 -0400

whatshewanted:

The Joy of Reading by artist Joel Robison “F is for Finding Fiction in the Forest”

thank you to fillingham for telling me about this wonderful artist and sending me the link! ;)

heyoscarwilde: Fear and Loathing… Hunter S. Thompson...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:25:19 -0400

heyoscarwilde:

Fear and Loathing…

Hunter S. Thompson illustrated by Jim Mahfood :: via whatnotisms.blogspot.ca

"I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love."

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:23:34 -0400

“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”

- Charles Bukowski (via lunaoki)

In 1927, at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller contemplated...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:20:00 -0400

In 1927, at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller contemplated suicide. As he stood on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago, where he was living at the time, he found himself saying, “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe.” - Profiles, “IN THE OUTLAW AREA,” The New Yorker, January 8, 1966

http://tinyurl.com/bq8jn3d

Photo

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 11:36:59 -0500

aminuteofperfection: Hunter S. Thompson Midnight - Hunter...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:17:06 -0500

aminuteofperfection:

Hunter S. Thompson

Midnight - Hunter ready to write.

New Short Story: The Commute

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 16:16:00 -0500

Read here at Litbar.net

MadLit!

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 19:33:00 -0400

Available at Community 54.

A Bitter Short Story

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:35:00 -0400

The gallery was filling up to capacity. The wine was flowing freely. The sound of cheap beer cans being popped was drowned out by all the commotion: artists talking to artists; dealers to important clients; broke Downtown kids there for the booze. The occasion was the first ever solo show from a promising young artist straight out of art school. She wasn’t there. Terribly shy and insecure, she couldn’t bear seeing people judging her art. If she was present, one thing would have put her anxiety at ease: all the red dots taped to the pieces’ info tags; significant because that meant she was a success. Years of hard work and dreaming of being an actual artist in New York City —one who makes a living off it — was finally becoming true. All her pieces sold that night. All to one single collector.

At the after party later, some club in the East Village, where the girl did attend with friends and close ones, her dealer introduced her to the man who bought her ten pieces —large, abstract pieces made from random objects that somehow managed to look elegant. She had that gift that all successful artists possess: make paint, materials, and other average items accessible to anybody look beautiful and expensive. The man was dark and tall, middle-aged, and wore a fitted suit, which probably meant he worked in finance. Her dealer gave her his back story: self-made wealth, first-time collector. He was the perfect client, the dealer explained. He was eager to support new, emerging artists, and was committed to preserve the art, letting its value rise for years and years safely out of harm’s way, while keeping the series intact. The man humbly shook the artist’s hand and assured her that her work was in good hands. He had a large apartment in New York City and a summer house in the Hamptons, both with ample empty space for his newly acquired art. He gave the girl his personal cellphone number and told her she could stop by and see her work whenever she pleased. The girl hugged the man, thanked him, then went back to her party. She never saw the man again.

For the first time in her life, the girl had her own money. She took a long vacation to Europe with her boyfriend. In Paris, as they drank a bottle of wine sitting on a bench near the Seine River, her boyfriend joked about how cliche it was what he was about to do, before getting down on one knee. It was nearing midnight, the moon was bright, the City of Light was as splendid as it has been for the last few hundred years, making it very hard for the girl to say no. She figured she should embrace the moment. But as soon as they walked back to their hotel and made love on a bed full of roses set up by the hotel as they were out, she chain-smoked cigarettes on the balcony of their room overlooking rue Saint-Honoré, and thought of how she should break up with him. She was twenty four and finally getting her life in order. She was becoming the person she always saw herself growing up to be, having overcome drugs and battles with depression. Nowhere in her past day-dreams of the future was a husband or children or settling so near. She had been with her boyfriend for two years, and she loved him, but she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him. She quietly put on her clothes, packed her bag, looked at her boyfriend sleeping soundly, a symptom of when he drank, nothing would wake him, and left a note on the night table simply stating, “I’m Sorry,” before walking out and hailing a cab to the airport.

One of the personality traits the girl had, along with a lot of modern women, was an evolutionary gift passed down by hurt women throughout the ages: the ease of getting over a relationship. It was almost cold-blooded, but it served the girl well as a defense mechanism against broken hearts. Her art also helped. As soon as she returned to New York, she dove into her work, ignoring the countless calls and texts from her boyfriend. He even tried showing up to her place multiple times. He tried everything to win her over. He sent her flowers, promised her the world. He told her he couldn’t live without her and promised to wait for her until she was ready. By then, the girl was already involved in other relationships. After all, she was beautiful, independent, and lived in a city abundant with good looking and successful people. It was her boyfriend who hadn’t realized this, still hung up on her.

A few months after the break up, the girl was ready to present her work. She had ten new pieces, and her gallery was hosting a group show with her and few other artists. As preparation, her dealer attempted to contact the man who had bought the girl’s entire collection. But when she called his number, a man who said he was a janitor in Queens answered, and when the dealer attempted to visit the address on file, it turned out to be a still under construction hotel in Tribeca. Dumbfounded, the dealer hid this information from the girl, not wanting to worry her. But it was already too late. The girl had already received an invitation in the mail for a new “type” of pop-up opening using the girl’s artwork happening later that same evening. The girl called her dealer and they agreed to meet at the location on the invitation. It was an empty lot in the Lower East Side, a site which was about to begin construction on a new apartment building. People were walking in past the open fence gates, and a small man, a Central American wearing a ridiculously oversized black tuxedo, was handing out pamphlets. In the center of the the lot, surrounded by a circle of huge men in tuxedos, tall slabs of wood were prepared in a pyramid, as if ready for a bonfire. Hung neatly on these pieces of wood, like on a wall of a gallery, were the ten art pieces the girl had sold months earlier. Confused, the girl grabbed a pamphlet and began to read:

“Bitter, 2012: Several years ago a man was hurt. He never overcame the bitterness. Silently, like a villain in his lair, he plotted his revenge. When the timing was right, he attacked. He received a loan from a friend, hired an actor to play a rich collector, and bought all the artwork of his ex-girlfriend. This is the work.”

As if someone was watching the girl read the pamphlet, her eyes opening wide to what she was reading, the wood began to burn, and within seconds, all the girl’s artwork was engulfed in flames, turning to a dark crisp within minutes. The girl stood there and quietly watched her work burn. She felt an arm on her shoulder. It was her most recent ex. In his hand he held an invitation.

“Somebody handed me this today at work. I wasn’t sure whether to come or not. But the person said I would enjoy it.”

The girl looked into his soft brown eyes for the first time in months.

“Did you?” she asked.

“No. This is terrible.”

The girl looked around at the people standing around watching the fire. She looked at her ex and her dealer, looking at her with sympathy, and started to laugh. She grabbed her ex’s hand, and led him to the ground. Together they sat in front of her artwork being disintegrated to ashes, until there was nothing left.

{Cover} Art Appreciation: Albert Camus - The Fall

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 18:50:28 -0400

MadLit Short Story "Stashed" Featured on Lit Blog Discount Liquors

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 14:30:00 -0400

Read it here.

{Cover} Art Appreciation: Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 13:43:02 -0400

”It always bothered me that the original cover of this book showed the main character’s face so clearly straight-on. In fiction covers, I always want to give readers the chance to create what the characters look like in their minds as they read.” -Chip Kidd

Check out all covers by Chip Kidd here.

mothkingdom: Forever more books. {Cover} Art Appreciation

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 13:33:36 -0400

mothkingdom:

Forever more books.

{Cover} Art Appreciation

Writing Song of the Day ~ 8/13/12 ~ College - TWA Flight 450 New...

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:17:14 -0400

Writing Song of the Day ~ 8/13/12 ~ College - TWA Flight 450

New Feature!

Songs (mostly instrumentals) to listen to while you’re writing. This one is an upbeat one from College!

{Cover} Art Appreciation: Haruki Murakami - 1Q84

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 12:36:11 -0400

From this NPR article:

“The jacket is made of a semi-transparent vellum and holds part of the woman’s image within the lettering of the title. Underneath is the complimentary image on the binding, and together they ‘complete the reality.’ Even if you don’t know anything about the book when you first see it, you are forced to consider the concept of one person ‘stradling’ two states of being.”

Brilliant!

Murakami is one of my favorite living authors. His influence is evident in my short stories: Rats! and Paint.

-C.E. Santana