This reprinting of Korine's first novel presents fragments of a portrait in multimedia: print, photographs, drawings, news clippings, handwriting, a poem, attempted diagrams, clip art; but mostly text, including hard-luck stories, off-and-on-colour jokes, script-scraps, found letters, free rhymes, drug flashbacks and other scenes, exploring the world of show-biz with feet set lightly in the black humours of the real ol' world. This excretion of the danglers of public life would make William Burroughs sigh and turn the page, at least.
Harmony Korine burst onto the scene with his screenplay for Kids - a film so gritty and unsettling in its depiction of teenage sex that it was almost banned in the UK. A Crackup at the Race Riots is similarly controversial. The novel is without plot, linear narrative, character development or scene setting. In other words, it is totally original. The book is a montage that takes literary convention and explodes it in a sequence of half-remembered scenes, suicide notes, dialogue fragments, movie ideas, rumours and jokes. Korine captures the fragmented moments of a life observed through the demented lens of media, tv and teen obsession. Korine's darkly bizarre imaginationhas created the ultimate post-postmodern novel - funny, offensive, depraved and sad.
Long out of print, Harmony Korine's 'zines are comprehensively collected in this new book. Filled with low-concept, laugh-inducing juxapositions of words and images, images and images, lists, monologues, cartoons, free verse, jokes, half-thoughts, fake/real interviews, innuendo and Matt Dillon's phone number. Includes collaboration with Mark Gonzales, the skateboarder and poet. This is a collection of seven fanzines from a time of innocence, exploration, experimentation, discovery, depression and hanging around.
Harmony Korine: Interviews tracks filmmaker Korine's stunning rise, fall, and rise again through his own evolving voice. Bringing together interviews collected from over two decades, this unique chronicle includes rare interviews unavailable in print for years and an extensive, new conversation recorded at the filmmaker's home in Nashville. After more than twenty years, Harmony Korine (b. 1973) remains one of the most prominent and yet subversive filmmakers in America. Ever since his entry into the independent film scene as the irrepressible prodigy who wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids in 1992, Korine has retained his stature as the ultimate cinematic provocateur. He both intelligently observes modern social milieus and simultaneously thumbs his nose at them. Now approaching middle age, and more influential than ever, Korine remains intentionally sensationalistic and ceaselessly creative. He parlayed the success of Kids into directing the dreamy portrait of neglect, Gummo, two years later. With his audacious 1999 digital video drama Julien Donkey-Boy, Korine continued to demonstrate a penchant for fusing experimental, subversive interests with lyrical narrative techniques. Surviving an early career burnout, he resurfaced with a trifecta of insightful works that built on his earlier aesthetic leanings: a surprisingly delicate rumination on identity (Mister Lonely), a gritty quasi-diary film (Trash Humpers), and a blistering portrait of American hedonism (Spring Breakers), which yielded significant commercial success. Throughout his career he has also continued as a mixed-media artist whose fields included music videos, paintings, photography, publishing, songwriting, and performance art.
Key Zest arises from Harmony Korine's 2019 film The Beach Bum, which follows the misadventures of a poet named Moondog (Matthew McConaughey), a "rebellious burnout who only knows how to live life by his own rules." Set in Key West, Florida, and also starring Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Zac Efron, Jimmy Buffett, Martin Lawrence and Jonah Hill, the movie tracks Moondog's comical mishaps and assignations, culminating in his unlikely fame after the publication of his memoirs, which are universally lauded and win him a Pulitzer Prize. Key Zest is a collection of Moondog's poems. Hilarious, preposterous and ribald, it includes such gems as "Alright, sunrise. / Let's get this party started." and "We can do whatever we want or nothing at all. / Eh, civilization." Harmony Korine writes, "Moondog is the greatest poet in the history of Key West. I read a few of these pages and loved every minute of it."
During the height of the crack epidemic that decimated the streets of D.C., Ruben Castaneda covered the crime beat for the Washington Post. The first in his family to graduate from college, he had landed a job at one of the country's premier newspapers. But his apparent success masked a devastating secret: he was a crack addict. Even as he covered the drug-fueled violence that was destroying the city, he was prowling S Street, a 24/7 open-air crack market, during his off hours, looking for his next fix. Castaneda's remarkable book, S Street Rising, is more than a memoir; it's a portrait of a city in crisis. It's the adrenalin-infused story of the street where Castaneda quickly became a regular, and where a fledgling church led by a charismatic and streetwise pastorwas protected by the local drug kingpin, a dangerous man who followed an old-school code of honor. It's the story of Castaneda's friendship with an exceptional police homicide commander whose career was derailed when he ran afoul of Mayor Marion Barry and his political cronies. And it's a study of the city itself as it tried to rise above the bloody crack epidemic and the corrosive politics of the Barry era. S Street Rising is The Wire meets the Oscar-winning movie Crash. And it's all true.
A narrative history of America's deadliest episode of race riots and lynchings After World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War. Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots and lynchings swept the country for eight months. From April to November of 1919, the racial unrest rolled across the South into the North and the Midwest, even to the nation's capital. Millions of lives were disrupted, and hundreds of lives were lost. Blacks responded by fighting back with an intensity and determination never seen before. Red Summer is the first narrative history written about this epic encounter. Focusing on the worst riots and lynchings—including those in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Charleston, Omaha and Knoxville—Cameron McWhirter chronicles the mayhem, while also exploring the first stirrings of a civil rights movement that would transform American society forty years later.
A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now. As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay -- with officer Nestor Camacho on board -- Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night-until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the 'hoods, "de-skilled" conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, "spectators" at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night's orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an "Active Adult" condo, and a nest of shady Russians. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous bestselling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.
In this insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture. Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination.
