Book Review: A Crack-Up at the Race Riots, by Harmony Korine

On the back of his latest (and greatest) film, Harmony Korine has reissued of his sui generis collection of fragments, A Crack-Up at the Race Riots. The latter, sadly, is far from cause for celebration: its scattershot movement between shaggy-dog shards, cultural appropriation and pretentious but obvious name-dropping displays the worst of the artist. In fact, Korine's subsequently improved film work suggests that this book served as a kind of mental clearing of Korine's most irritating tics. For that reason more than anything else, Crack-Up is worth a read by the curious, but be sure to have a copy of Julien Donkey-Boy on hand to see how this nonsense could somehow result in something beautiful.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.