Harmony Korine, Crackup at the Race Riots, 2013. [1998.]
www.harmony-korine.com/
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.
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.
Doubleday press release:
Slacker meets James Thurber in this idiosyncratic collection by the daring young screenwriter of Kids, the most controversial film in recent years.
The original Ritalin kid, Harmony Korine burst onto the scene with Kids, a film so gritty and unsettling in its depiction of teen sex that it was slapped with a NC-17 rating and banned in theaters across the country. In some ways, the media frenzy over the rating overshadowed the harrowing portrait of teenagers destroying their lives and the eighteen-year-old screenwriter who created them. "Whether you see it 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 book of fictional set pieces, Korine reinvents the novel form, capturing the fragmented moments of life observed through the demented lens of media, TV, and teen obsession. 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 ode to the world of images. This is the ultimate postmodern video novel -- funny, offensive, primitive. Korine is the voice of his media-savvy generation, and A Crackup at the Race Riots is the satiric love child of his darkly bizarre imagination.
Riding a gush of critical acclaim for his work on the films Kids (screenwriter) and Gummo (director), Korine, at the ripe age of 23, attempts to make a novel by using a little bit of everything, but botches the job. What we get, in fact, is more an MTV-style collage of lists, story fragments, indecipherable handwritten notes, crude drawings, photos, dialogue, bad jokes, wordplay and pop culture references to music, movies, drugs and deathall resolutely defying cohesion. Still, there a few identifiable thematic concerns. Suicide tops the list, as frequent references culminate in a group of 11 suicide notes, the last of which begins, ``Mother, I am in love with you.'' Not far behind is a focus on the celebrity life, and in this vein Korine demonstrates a certain breadth of knowledge and interest. A scandal involving silent movie star Fatty Arbuckle is given almost as much attention as the final thoughts of Tupac Shakur, and in between are snippets about Kris Kristofferson, Billie Jean King, Howard Hughes, Matt Dillon, and a cavalcade of others. Jessica Tandy earns especially randy attention (although the motivation behind this is never revealed), and sexual detail pops up in other ways as well, ranging from the incest angle to homophobes planning action. The racial component noted in the title features in a suicide note, and separate photos of the KKK and an unsmiling black boy round out the picture. A final observation notes that ``To feel nothing was peace''perfectly describing the impact of everything in the preceding pages. Neither the voice of a generation nor the ravings of a lunatic, but creative overreaching, clearlythe writing of a talent thrust too soon into the limelight. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -
Kirkus ReviewsHarmony Korine's 'A Crack-Up at the Race Riots' Gets Its Long-Awaited Paperback Release
As many a Harmony Korine fan will tell you, the absurd realist filmmaker dabbles in just about every medium. Whether it's putting out some of the most controversial films of the last twenty years, photographing abandoned parking lots or writing novels, Korine's unique and bizarre voice spills into many territories, always filled with a radical view on life. And this April, his first novel A Crack-Up at the Race Riots—originally published in 1998—is being re-issued on paperback. "It's about a race war and it happens in Florida. And the Jewish people sit in trees. And the black people are run by M.C. Hammer. And the whites are run by Vanilla Ice. I wanted to write the Great American Choose Your Own Adventure novel," said Korine on his premiere work.
In 1998 a scruffy, sweatshirt-clad Korine went on Late Night with David Letterman to promote the book, in one of his many odd and hilarious appearances on the show. When Letterman asked Korine how much the book sold for, Korine answered: "Uh…I don't know…regular book price? I can't imagine why anyone would buy a book nowadays." Letterman asked if Korine would go out and buy the book himself, to which he responded, "Um…I'd probably read an older book." Always his own best self-promoter.
A Crack-Up at the Race Riots presents a multimedia fragmented portrait through print, drawings, news clippings, handwriting, a poem, attempted diagrams, clip-art—but mostly text. It includes hard-luck stories, his signature off-brand jokes, and other bizarre ground exploring the world of show business "with fingers prying in the cracks and feet set lightly in the black humors of the real ol' world."
In addition, the book also features some semi-attempted scripts, letters to Tupac (because why not?), and a set of eleven suicide notes with empty space for your signature. Speaking to Crack Up, Werner herzog said, "I was struck from the very beginning that there is a totally independent & new voice in writing. I believe that [he] is a great talent as a writer."
The lists in the book include:
Titles of Books I Will Write
Movies
Ten Ethnic Adolesecent Atrocities: Pictures
Books Found in Monty Clift's Basement
The Most Famous Home Movie
Bowery Boys
Rumors
Tupac Shakur's Ten Favorite Novels
Three Or Four Claims to Fame
Ethnic Atrocities: Pictures Continue
Son's Favorite Foods
Titles of Books I Will Write
Movies
Ten Ethnic Adolesecent Atrocities: Pictures
Books Found in Monty Clift's Basement
The Most Famous Home Movie
Bowery Boys
Rumors
Tupac Shakur's Ten Favorite Novels
Three Or Four Claims to Fame
Ethnic Atrocities: Pictures Continue
Son's Favorite Foods
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.
You gathered things from reality and imagination and pop culture and shit on the bus and grew it until you were finally at a point that seemed complete.
And also thinking of the idea of authorship, and anti-authorship, and appropriating certain types of writing, taking credit for that writing, maybe manipulating it, or writing something and giving someone else credit for it, or fake quotations, or a kind of mixture of real quotations and manipulated quotations, trying to blend them in such a way that even I didn’t know where one began and the other ended. I remember seeing all those Sherrie Levine photographs, those re-photographed Walker Evans photos, and wondering if there was a way to make a book that worked like that. Something that still had a soul but at the same time was kind of inexplicable. A kind of anti-authorship. Or I wanted to write a book with pages missing in all the right places.
I’ve heard you say something before like, “Not perfect sense, but perfect nonsense.”
Yeah. You know, like I’d write titles for books I wanted to write, then I would see that the titles were more interesting than the book, and I would say maybe the book would actually kill the title. Maybe the title is better than the full book. It’s like that page [in A Crackup at the Race Riots] that just says “hepburn.” I’d spent like three years just trying to figure out what would be the perfect one word novel. And I finally thought of the word “hepburn.” And it was the last page in the book. It just made perfect sense. I felt like all the answers to the world were wrapped up in those letters—or actually not answers, but all the questions.
The fact that you don’t limit or qualify it allows it to be that much bigger.
For sure. And at the same time I wanted it to tell a story too. It’s the unspoken story that’s the real story. It’s the blankness around the word.
What is plot, to you?
The idea of a plot is unattractive, because I never liked people who plotted out their lives. I don’t like people who plot too much. I try to stay away from people who plot. But a story can be more liquid. It can be without a point. It can be more impressionistic. So the book is a story, but I don’t think the book is a plot.
So there’s a gap between what plot and story are?
A story is like we’re walking down the street and I see a guy and he leaves his shoes in front of a tanning salon. So I go and I pick up his shoes, and inside his shoes there’s a note, and the note says, “If you call this number, I’ll give you three gold bars and a blowjob.” So you call that number, and you go to that person’s house, and actually… uh, it’s your, uh, guidance counselor, and it was just a ploy to get you to take your MMP personality test to figure out which school you should go to. So you go in there, and you take the test, he grades it right in front of you, says you should become a bricklayer. You don’t listen to him, you go back home, your mom cooks you dinner, and you go to sleep. And that’s a great story, right? But I can’t tell you what the plot is.
I always thought plot was a prop word Americans were taught to eat the shit that most of our entertainment is. There’s a plot in that story you just told, but it’s not a redemptive plot, or any of those things that people are trained to look for.Maybe it’s more anti-American.
I think not plotting would be considered a terrorist act to some people.
I agree with you.
I was reading the Amazon reviews that people wrote of your book in, like, 1999, when it first came out. I really like one-star Amazon reviews because it often seems like the person got the book totally wrong, and somehow then their perspective becomes interesting—like how did you get it so wrong that it’s almost like you read a different book?
Or what’s great is when that type of description makes you want to read it more than anything. Like sometimes you read those things, and you’re like, Man, if that same person had just written that and changed it to a five-star review, it could be the greatest endorsement of all time. Everything that they railed against, everything that they hated, was exactly what you loved.
This one reviewer said your novel reminded him of the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. He was trying to be rude, but I thought that was kind of a beautiful accidental parallel, both somewhat in style and how your book is in some ways a Rolodex of atrocities and hate speech and so on.
I never read The 120 Days of Sodom, but I will say at the time I was reading lots of joke books, like the Milton Berle joke books, or the biography of Henny Youngman. I also read this book someone had written about the history of molestation in the Boy Scouts. This was obviously pre-internet days, so there were certain books that just explored the mythology of celebrities. And books of lists. I had a book that was just a compilation of things that were written on bathroom walls: profanities, slogans, platitudes. And I had also liked the idea of Walter Benjamin, when he talked about how the great novel would be a book consisting entirely of other people’s quotations. I was interested in that and seeing if there was a way to do that in words. To deconstruct authorship. To recontextualize it in some way and at the same time, make it funny like a joke book.
Were there different freedoms in writing a book of ideas as opposed to making a film of ideas?
It was more immediate, obviously. It was something I could just think up and it existed on its own, and I didn’t have to deal with other people. More singular and aggressive and immediate. It was just fun, there wasn’t so much at stake. A lot of it was a reflection of the way I was thinking about things at that time. It felt more like I was a strange conduit to all these ideas, and I didn’t really know how to buffer there, or where they were coming from, or why I was attracted to whatever it was I was attracted to. It was kind of trying to make sense of that, or to create my own logic. To entertain myself, really.
There’s a moment early on in the book where it says, “He thought to himself, this scene would probably cost around $200,000 to replicate on film.” That made the book feel really funny after that, like if you started thinking about how difficult and time consuming and expensive it would be to film all of the ideas in this book. It’s like the book is a film that would cost an impossible amount.
Exactly. You could just have some scene where two people are dancing in a room, and they’re just dancing in, like, a bare room, and there’s nothing there except a window. But then they go and put the radio on, and it’s a Rolling Stones song, and then all of a sudden that fucking scene costs 2 million dollars. It’s enough to make you hate the Rolling Stones.
Do you think it's important to feel alone as an artist?
I guess I just always accepted that that’s the way it’s going to be. I never really knew anything else. I wasn’t really looking for acceptance. It was more like just trying to do something beautiful. Make a body of work that was beautiful. And so I just always thought that you can only ever really be alone. That’s just the way it’s supposed to be. Or what’s the point? There are things obviously beyond money and pussy. Not many things, but… - Blake Butler
Uncovering 'A Crack Up at the Race Riots' With Harmony Korine
By Hillary Weston
If you ever feel like you're losing your mind, like you're hanging by your toenails on the brink of insanity, watch some videos of Harmony Korine from the late 1990s. Not only will you realize, okay yes, I am probably selling my lucidity short, but also, if there's anyone who can turn manic energy and a deranged psyche into something brilliant, it's Korine. And in 1998, the absurd realist filmmaker, writer, photographer, and artist sat down with David Letterman for one of many strange and hilarious appearances on his show to promote his new novel, A Crack Up at the Race Riots.
In his previous visits to the show, Korine had been dressed like a well-mannered schoolboy in sweaters and khakis, the words coming out his young mouth standing in sharp in contrast to the pleasant looking fellow sitting in front of you. But when he appeared this time, Korine came clad in a ratty yellow sweatshirt, scruffy-faced, and very twitchy. It was his final time on the show before being banned after Letterman caught him snooping through Meryl Streep's purse in her dressing room. But he did love having Korine on there, shining a light on this odd specimen, a sample of youth culture to show the world before telling the very jittery Korine to "go back the hotel and take a long shower." But the book he was there to promote was not only his debut work of fiction, but would go on to be a cult classic that perfectly encapsulated Korine's geniusly crazed and frenetic mind, but would however fall out of print until this month, sixteen years later.
And after more than a decade and a half off the shelf, A Crack Up at the Race Riots is available again—just in time for all those sixteen year old kids who went to see Spring Breakers and walked out of the theater clutching their smartphones, faces permanently frozen in an expression of, "What the hell, man, that wasn't like The Hangover but with chicks?!" And what you'll get from A Crack Up is an unhinged and fragmented multimedia portrait told through slices of conversations, frantic drawings, news clippings, hypothetical lists, suicide notes, letters from Tupac, and much more, giving you a glimpse inside the mind of one of our generations most radical and bizarre voices. "It's about a race war and it happens in Florida. And the Jewish people sit in trees. And the black people are run by M.C. Hammer. And the whites are run by Vanilla Ice," said Korine on Letterman and well, you'll just have to read it for yourself to find out what that all means.
With the reissue out now from Drag City, I got the chance to chat with Korine for the second time this year about letters from Tupac, schizophrenic cohesion, and replacing Barbra Streisand with John Holmes.
So why did you choose to reissue the novel now, after sixteen years?
It's been out of print now for more than a decade and I know that people were selling it for a lot of money, and I didn't really like that. I thought enough time had gone by that it would be good to republish it and let people see it again.
So you said recently in an interview with Little White Lies that you haven't read a book since the 7th grade. Now how does that fit into here?
Well, I'd read a lot of joke books, I'd read the beginning of a lot of books, or certain like middle parts of certain books but just on principle I never finished the book. So technically, I probably haven't finished a book since That Was Then This is Now. I had also read a bunch of Choose Your Own Adventure books in the early '90s.
And you originally said that you wanted this book to be a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.
I wanted it to be the Great American Choose Your Own Adventure novel with pages missing in all the right places.
So how did A Crack Up at the Race Riots become your version of that? Where did all these fragmented bits and pieces come from?
It's hard for me to remember exactly how it happened because it was a long time ago and I was tripping out really, and some of the pages are even just like hallucinating or something. I just had all these ideas and I was seeing all these connections in things—micro-movements and ideas about authorship and anti-authorship. So I was trying to write a novel that existed in the margins that had as much to do with what was undefined as what was written, that had as much to do with the whiteness around the ink, you know? And so I'd walk around and hear someone like on a bus talking to themselves or ranting to themselves or hitting themselves in the head or singing some type of opera or something and I would just write what I saw. And then I would imagine like, what if Woody Harrelson said that? Or what if that conversation those two gay vagrants on the corner were having was between John Ford and his wife? And I liked how it would transform it and turn it into something so hilarious that so much of it was about context and the shifting humor and the re-contextualizing of things. I love those Sherrie Levine photos of all the Walker Evans pictures that she re-photgraphs and I remember wanting to do that but in words, in a way that was not just an experiment or just an exercise in craft but had a heartbeat and told a story. So I did that and the process was more abstract and I started writing a lot of that stuff in my early 20s and it took place over a couple years. I would just write notes and ideas and fragments on paper and crayon on the side of my wall. And then after I felt like there was enough of that stuff around me, I tried to make sense of it and re-collage it and re-contexualize it and give it some narrative in its own way to tell a story.
And like you said about how it's about the white space just as much as the words, or about the context of what's on the page, for the person reading it, it's about their own experience with it and how they see it and how they interact with it. The pages of suicide notes with blank spaces from signatures that you have. Those pages are some of my favorites, but for the reader, it's a participatory element.
Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. Back then I thought that would be insane if you could write a suicide note that was like a form letter. So for someone who wasn't creative enough, it had a blank signature space at the bottom. It's horrifying but also, it's funny.
A lot of the book is horrifying but also very funny. You mix dark humor with the banal, casualness of offensive things like homophobia or racism, but it seems natural because in the voice that they're written in, you can imagine someone saying it on the street in passing to another person who felt the same way.
Which is like the way I remember things growing up.
And there are themes that run throughout that make it not a schizophrenic but a cohesive story.
Yeah, I was trying to deal with all the great philosophical strands of the American psyche. [laughs]
Back in 1997 when you went on Letterman to talk about the book, you seemed pretty passive about promoting it. When you see that now do you feel differently?
I thought it made sense of the book—like when I went on Letterman I thought I should just promote someone else's book.
Yeah, you said that you didn't know why someone would buy this and not an older book.
I didn't understand why you would buy a new book, there's so many older books that you haven't read before. So I didn't want to go out there and tell people to buy this book, I wanted to go out there and tell them to buy some other book. I love the idea of promoting other people's shit for no reason.
The book originally came out just after Gummo and mainstream people seeing you on a show like that still didn't really know what to make of you. Do you think the public perception of you has changed in recent years or do you not care?
All I wanted to do was just be great. But I never really think about it too much or spend too much time on it. I think it's all perfect just the way it was meant to be.
And in your early interviews you talked a lot about wanting to create a new type of film. So with this book were you looking to rework the classic confines of a novel and create a new writing style?
No, because even the thing with film, what I was trying to do was develop a language and an idea that was very specific to the way I was thinking and the things I was feeling, but I couldn't necessarily articulate it. And so it was more of a unified aesthetic, this idea that everything's connected and that I wouldn't try to differentiate between any of it—between the writings or the films or the actions or even like the demonstrative behavior—it was all connected. In some way it was all part of a single vision or an idea or an energy. It was like Vaudeville.
Do you a favorite section of the book?
I like all the letters from Tupac a lot, I like some of the jokes, and I like the list of rumors.
I like the list of imagined movies. Did you ever actually think about making any of those?
They were all ideas for films and I thought just the idea would be better than the film. Or like, I was writing the titles of books I wanted to write, but then when I would look at the titles, I just liked the way they functioned on their own. There's even one page where all it says is the word "hepburn." And that took me like four or five years to write that one page because I was trying to come up with what you'd think if the greatest novel consisted entirety of one word, what would that word be? And so I struggled with that for years and years and one day I saw the word "hepburn" and thought that word said so much, there was so much, the entire history of the world was just tangled up in those letters.
And some pages just have one word like that or something like "Robert Frost Bite," some pages are handwritten notes, and some are more formal notes. Were you trying to create a sort of collage of different mind sets and different tones?
Yeah, yeah I was making a lot of fanzines at the time and was writing a lot of jokes and obsessed with joke books. I had all the dirty joke compilations and knock knock jokes; I would cut up the joke books. I liked the long set ups like "the guy walks into a bar and blah blah blah" or I had these books that were just lists of Hollywood mythology and specific horrible attributes of dead celebrities, and I thought those were hilarious so I would use those and add things or take them away. Like, what if I read an interview with Barbra Streisand but then you just change Barbra Streisand's name to John Holmes or something? It becomes so much greater.
I feel like a lot of your work is taking something apart and re-appropriating it or changing people's perception of something very set in their minds. Do you find that there's a crossover for that in your films too?
I'd say there's definitely a connection.
So do you think you could write something like this now, or was it specific to being really young and whatever insanity was going on in your world then?
I'd like to think that book is just so juvenile and base that it's something I could only do back then. But I probably haven't really grown all that much and my humor hasn't really evolved, so it probably wouldn't be too far off from something I'd come up with now. I'm writing another one right now though, it's maybe a bit more centralized or something.
In the same cut-up style though?
Yeah, it's something that someone with a head wound would write.
I can be very into that. But you did write this at a time when you were first getting to make films and produce work and it seemed like you were just sort of bursting with a million ideas. What was that time in your life like?
It was great. I used to sit in my room and think like, what if someone had a gun to your head and you had no fingers, and they said to write a book about the history of, I don't know, prostitution, and you have three hours to push away on that keyboard—what would that look like? And then I would just try to do it. Or let's say someone duct-taped a tree branch to your hand and then gave you a huge bowl of ink to dip it in and said that you had thirty five minutes to render your version of the Mona Lisa on this canvas. A lot of it was just playing games with myself to see where it would go.
And do you still do that?
Yeah but it's different. I don't really do it in that way. Now I understand things differently. There are certain things that ... I don't want to use the word refined…
How about evolve?
Well, to a certain extent there's still some of that going on.
Narco-Fueled Micro Deconstructed Jam: An Interview with Harmony Korine by Christopher Higgs
Excerpts:
MPUTEE'S MOTHER
When he first came into my life, I was immediately drawn to him. I was immediately his mother, and I know that he could tell that I was his mom. It didn't take long, the bond was there for us in the first seconds. And when he was very, very little I would take him in my backpack. I had seen a television special, it was on the news, about a zookeeper who adopted a baby kangaroo because its mother had abandoned it. And the zookeeper had to keep this baby kangaroo in a blue rucksack. So this immediately reminded me of Igor and myself, because Igor's mom had left him in much the same way. So I made a very small sack by hand that I fashioned with a soft furry material on the interior so that Igor could be warm and comfortable inside. And when we would go shopping together all the other moms in the store would come up to me and say how cute he was, but because he was in the sack all they could see was his smiling little face bobbing out. He looked confident inside, they couldn't tell that he had no arms because he was tucked in so nicely. That's when the mothers were friendly, when they didn't know what Igor really looked like, how he was physically. But we all knew that when Igor grew older, he wouldn't be able to fit on my back anymore, that he would eventually have to grow up. This was very hard for me to accept. Sometimes I think it was more difficult for me than it was for him. I could always judge the times in Igor's life by the changes in the expressions of the faces of other mothers, the ones who didn't know Igor well, or the ones who were witnessing him for the first time with no explanation.
from page 80
IDEA FOR A MOVIE ABOUT TWO BROTHERS AND A MOTHER
A blind boy and his older brother live together in a small house with their middle-aged mother. The older brother takes care of his blind brother. He walks him arm-in-arm to the grocery and back and forth from school. He tries to teach him how to play basketball. One day the blind boy recovers his eyesight. The blind boy begins an affair with his brother. The mother freaks out. The blind boy kills himself. The older brother and mother are stuck together.
from page 83
from page 95
SUICIDE NOTE #4
First things first: I would like to set the record straight. The reason I am hanging myself is not solely because I am a midget. Two days ago while I was visiting Vancouver I went to a hockey game and I got so upset at myself because I realized I would never be capable of being what I wanted to be. This is obviously due to my stature; I am unable to go out on the ice and compete. I spent four hard years of my life writing what I consider to be one of the greatest romance novels of our time (Please Consider My Lust), of which I have now burned the only existing copy. No one would give it a fair read. There was not a single reply, even from the people whom I consider to be close personal friends, not naming names, they never got around to reading it. All I can say is to hell with this life. Plus I am only attracted to tall women, these are the women who time after time consistently refuse me. Do they ever give me a chance? No. Do they even care? No. My only regret is that I was never able to visit Sweetwater, Florida. I have always wanted to go there because it is a town that was originally settled by a troupe of Russian circus midgets in the early 1940s. My parents were married there and I was conceived there. I leave all my belongings to the NAACP, except my art deco wall clock, which I would like to leave to the Dayton, Ohio, public library because this was the place that I first discovered the works of Emily Brontë and S.E. Hinton, whose works inspired me to become a failed midget writer.
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from page 103
THE TUPAC LETTER
Sup Nigga Floyd,
I haven't written in so long, I been watchin' baseball on the set (I got the biggest TV you ever seen, the kinda boob that when we wuz children they didn't even have shit like this, a small movie screen with drink holders comin' out the side), an the Braves is slamin' this year, mad homers an a fly infield. When I was locked up you sent me music an I must tell you lil' homie that shit kept my ass in check, some jazz, some blues, an the rock shit was cool, The Who, I read the liner notes about Keith Moon and that shit struck me for some reason, I wrote a song based on his childhood called "The Boy Trapped in the Moon," the beat is funky, that nigga Dre Bone flew in the beats from his crills in Florida, we sampled a buncha shit from Marvin Gaye an this crazy slide guitar from a country album. I'm gonna tour a little bit with Snoop an some others but I'm gonna be out your way real soon so get ready. But listen yo I'm much calmer these days. I felt like I been seein' the light burn bright as hell an that shit singed my skin with the word Righteous, it don't mean I ain't no thugg, that as you know is my destiny, but the time is time an my ass is gonna sit back, rhyme, get hella busy with the bitches, keep prayin' day after day, buy shoes, whatever, the important thing is just livin' in step, the tragedy is yesterday's news homie, that shit is straight-up fin as they say in the French land. When I was shot I started having visions, I started remembering whole passages from books that my moms made me read when I was a reluctant nigg, she made me read Mark Twain an Moby Dick an shit an that shit was just poppin' into my head like it'd been there the whole time stuck in the back under a puffed-out haze of fog, whole fuckin' passages an shit about the power of the light an the force of the sight. That's why those East Coast pussies couldn't lay me down, the thugg bone had too much force, them bullets was rendered silly Lil' Floyd. I still gots problems an shit as you know, the typical and the anti-typical, it's hard for me as a man to show a woman respect, I feel I can respect her for a time, but then she just gives her shit up easy an I want to spit on her. I could be in love with her one moment and the next I'll hit her shit deep from behind an her face will make a certain grimace an the game's all over for me an especially for her, I'll turn her shit out like the devil, I don't know what's in me that makes me do the shit I do. That's the thugg in me, the thugg life story, or as Michael Jackson would say my (his)tory. I've turned out so many bitches that at one time or another I've pledged my love to, I'll give her to a nigga I fought years back, some dark-ass fool I busted way back in the day, I still don't like the muthafucka but I'll give a piece just out of whatever nonsense I'm feelin at the time. That shit is wrong with me but I'm young still. So much in me has calmed, the loot tends to make a nigga calm. I got a steamin' bowl of clam chowder coolin' off in front of me an they're playin' reruns of the Ali vs. Foreman match from 1974 on the sports-classic channel. Hug all the women I love. I'll be there soon, we can take your Bronco to the beach an rub up on some shit. Say thugg love to those in the hood, the 3-5 crosstown niggaz, Rd J., Da Fat Bitch Worm, Knocc Out, King Kennedy, Kerm, Angry Avi, 123 Hot Sauce Hustlaz, Archie Arch, Kiesha Anderson, and everyone else sippin' the sauce down at Kent College.
Thugg Life Survivor,
Tupac Shakur
LETTER FROM TUPAC SHAKUR #3, TO HIS MOTHER, WRITTEN 3 WEEKS BEFORE HIS DEATH
Dear Mom,
I just got finished reading an article in the New York Times about a guy who got lost in the woods on a hiking trip. He survived by eating egg corns and wild berries. For some reason he was barefoot when he was rescued, in the picture of him his legs were all torn up and bruised. He looked so skinny but he was smiling in the picture. He was wandering around by himself for ten days straight. In the article he was quoted as saying, "I heard the sound of bagpipe music coming from the bottom of a mountain, I just closed my eyes and followed the music. When I finally reached the source of the music after walking for what seemed like hours, I opened my eyes and saw a deer having sex with a moose. I was so surprised to see two different species of animal engaged in sexual intercourse." In the photo the guy was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt, so I bet as you could imagine that he was on acid and that he was a hippie.
Much love to you Moms,
Tupac
from page 171
Harmony Korine, The Collected Fanzines, Drag City, 2008.
These eight limited-run fanzines were originally created between 1992 and 1999 and were sold out of the Alleged and Andrea Rosen galleries in New York City. Collected together for the first time, all of the original content is represented—low-concept, hilarious juxtapositions of words; scribbles and doodles; lists; monologues; free verse; jokes; innuendo; and both fake and real interviews. They blur the lines between fantasy and reality, and are often prankster in nature and laugh-out-loud funny. With weird musings, fake celebrity gossip, and hastily drawn art, this collection is a must have for fans of the authors and lovers of pop culture.
“Scraps of thoughts strung together—impressionistic jokes, story fragments, Hollywood apocrypha, and lists—offer unaltered evidence of the artist's creative process through his 20s.” —Village Voice
Before he got involved in this whole "film" thing, Harmony was a prolific zine artist. Though distributed in minor quantities (and sometimes given away to homeless people), word has travelled to Drag City HQ of their greatness. They're filled with funny/creepy musings, fake celebrity gossip and found art. We're putting this collection of his work out in two formats: a soft-cover book and a box set. The former contains all the zines bound as one book. The latter recreates the zines in their original format inside a hard cardboard box with a poster.
Includes
MY FRIEND OR SHEEP BOY
ADULTHOOD
ADULTHOOD 2
OH DEATH WHERE IS THY STING
FOSTER HOMES AND GARDENS
HUMOR
POCAHONTAS MONTHLY
HUMER
Harmony Korine, Collected Screenplays: "Jokes", "Gummo", "Julien", "Donkey-boy" v. 1, Faber and Faber, 2002.
 |  Written by Harmony Korine along with his brother Avi Korine. Directed by Harmony Korine. Cast includes Samantha Morton, Diego Luna and Werner Herzog. |
 |  Written by Harmony Korine and directed by Larry Clark and Ed Lachman. Cast includes Tiffany Limos and James Ransome. |
 |  Written and directed by Harmony Korine and starring Ewen Bremner, Chloë Sevigny and Werner Herzog. |
 |  Written and directed by Harmony Korine and starring Chloë Sevigny, Linda Manz, Max Perlich, Jacob Reynolds and Nick Sutton. |
 |  Written by Harmony Korine and directed by Larry Clark. Cast includes Chloë Sevigny, Leo Fitzpatrick, Justin Pierce and Rosario Dawson. |
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 |  Music video for the track Living Proof from Cat Power's 2006 album The Greatest. Directed by Harmony Korine. |
 |  Music video for the track No More Workhorse Blues from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's 2004 album ...Sings Greatest Palace Music. Directed by Harmony Korine. |
 |  An album of music by Harmony Korine and Brian DeGraw that was released in 1999. |
 |  Music video for the track Sunday from Sonic Youth's 1998 album A Thousand Leaves. Directed by Harmony Korine. |
 |  Song from the 2001 Björk album Vespertine. Lyrics co-written by Harmony Korine. |
 |  Unreleased music video for one of the Daniel Johnston tracks that featured on the 1995 soundtrack to the film Kids. Directed by Harmony Korine. |
 |  Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's Ease Down the Road / James William Hindle / Puerto Rican Crime / Sun City Girls' Carnival Folklore Resurrection #11 & #12 / ... |
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Harmony Korine, Trash Humpers, Drag City; 2010.
"The first thing that comes to my mind after watching Trash Humpers is a rather insouciant question: I wonder how many reviews of this film are going to stretch the limits of what constitutes an accurate synonym for ‘transgressive?’ Every indication given from the basic premise of the movie would naturally suggest that Harmony Korine is trying to freak out the squares again. However, I think this is dead wrong. Mr. Korine is at a point in his filmmaking career where he should understand that very little shocks most astute audiences anymore. If it turns out that he is in fact trying to pass Trash Humpers off as a trangressive piece of art, then he’s fallen prey to the one thing that you’d think would be most vile to him: obsolescence. Thankfully, I’m pretty sure this is not the case.
Trash Humpers’ narrative is at best loosely cobbled together, involving four elderly people roving around the suburbs of Nashville, committing all kinds of crimes against nature, and humping a godawful lot of trashcans. Mr. Korine, after his most technically mainstream film to date, Mister Lonely, has gotten back in touch with his dogmé roots, crafting a film that, in terms of its technical aspects, verges on the laughably amateur. The film plays out like an old found VHS tape, complete with an auto-tracking display and that annoying tendency of old tapes to pitch-shift in places after one-too-many viewings. Korine shot the entire film in character, making random, creepy cackles and leading his fellow actors in various chants from behind the camera, the effect of his looming presence heightening the verité mood of the film. What we see when watching it is a seemingly random stringing together of disparate scenes, the one unifying thread between them being the total and utter depravity of the movie’s principal subjects."The first thing that comes to my mind after watching Trash Humpers is a rather insouciant question: I wonder how many reviews of this film are going to stretch the limits of what constitutes an accurate synonym for ‘transgressive?’ Every indication given from the basic premise of the movie would naturally suggest that Harmony Korine is trying to freak out the squares again. However, I think this is dead wrong. Mr. Korine is at a point in his filmmaking career where he should understand that very little shocks most astute audiences anymore. If it turns out that he is in fact trying to pass Trash Humpers off as a trangressive piece of art, then he’s fallen prey to the one thing that you’d think would be most vile to him: obsolescence. Thankfully, I’m pretty sure this is not the case.
For the film, Korine, his buddies Travis Nicholson and Brian Kotzur, and his young wife, Rachel, donned thrift store outfits, orthopedic shoes, and quite realistic old-people masks and set about the business of sexually dominating the trash bins of their hometown, Nashville. Along the way, they meet a pair of conjoined twins who they force to make them pancakes, a transvestite poet, some overweight prostitutes, and several other weird folks, all of whom they abuse. But what’s the point? Any attempt towards a linear understanding of the film will definitely prove fruitless and frustrating. Korine gives us hints about what he might mean through all of the depravity, but sure enough contradicts himself moments later. After a while, it becomes clear that this is intentional on the director's part, that he is in fact steering us away from trying to interpret the vague symbolism and shades of meaning and plot that he dangles in front of us like a carrot before a confused horse. He is not trying to make a statement about the depravity of mankind or how we may or may not have lost our way as a society. He's just showing us a raw portrait of the way his demented characters interact with the world around them. If you allow him to do so, the entire experience becomes electrifying.
It seems to me that this movie’s depraved subject matter will surely pique the disdain of many of Mr. Korine’s most vehement detractors, who, for the most part, dislike him because they think his work merely serves to unsettle and disgust. Korine’s harshest critics have always thought of him as an immature shock artist, and the content of this film will most likely give them more than enough firepower to level their arguments of bad taste and degeneracy against him. I’m pretty sure a lot of people will come away from the experience of watching Trash Humpers with the feeling that Korine has lost any dignity that he might’ve still had after making Julien Donkey Boy, the director merely spinning his wheels, trying to get a rise out of his audience by showing them disgusting images of old people fellating tree branches, murdering people, and destroying private property, etc. This cursory and thick-headed reading of Korine’s latest effort would serve no justice to the indelible characters and honest portrayals of humanity that have always been a benchmark of his films, Trash Humpers being no exception.
Trash Humpers will probably pass under the radar of mainstream Western moviegoers much in the same way that Korine’s other films have. This is a real pity, seeing as he’s one of the most original and talented filmmakers our country has to offer the world. The director’s now famous maxim that he “never cared so much about making perfect sense” rings true throughout the film. Somehow this works to his advantage: by freeing himself from the worry of meaning, Korine has crafted something truly interesting and thought-provoking. There is absolutely no guile whatsoever in this film. It’s terrific." - Paul Bower"In this paper, Deborah Orr recently recounted an argument she had after seeing Chris Morris's Four Lions. "Satire is supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," her companion raged. "Who did that comfort and who did it afflict?" Well, Harmony Korine's new film, Trash Humpers, afflicts everyone, the afflicted and the comfortable. It is a continuous, 78-minute afflict-a-thon. It sendeth acid rain on the just and the unjust. It is a downpour on those who admire good taste, and those who admire bad taste. George Clooney fans will have a fit of the vapours; old school John Waters fans will be yearning for a reprise of the Good Morning Baltimore number from Hairspray. It is an exercise in experimental provocation and in pure insolence, while sometimes being horribly funny and fascinating, reviving the spirit of Tod Browning's Freaks and the ice-cold vision of Diane Arbus.
Trash Humpers is the home movie from hell, filmed on what appears to be ropey analogue video and is viewed as if on some giant, cheap monitor or VHS machine. This video seems to have been rescued from, well, the trash. The lettering for the opening and closing credits is in the same fuzzy sans-serif style as for the instructions PLAY and REW that sometimes flicker up on screen. It features three grotesques, monsters from a horror film who have somehow got existentially excluded from the main gory action, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play.
Before the film began, its title made me think it might actually be about garbage men, and I even wondered nervously if the director would risk a pun on "humpers". Suffice to say that the opening shot shows three ageing hillbilly weirdos getting sexual pleasure from dry-humping rubbish bins at dead of night. They giggle and snicker continually, moronically, like Beavis and Butt-head; visually, they faintly resemble Monty Python's Gumby. Their faces appear from a distance to be horror masks – but perhaps aren't. They travel around screeching, giggling, tittering, occasionally murdering people. There is an extraordinary sequence in which a very, very fat man lies down, plays the trumpet and talks trash. Who on earth is he? You've got me. But he is funny.
Harmony Korine, a once fashionable indie figure whose star fell after early success with Kids and Gummo, is once again showing some spark: a gadfly who annoys and provokes. One abandoned project of the director's is called Fight Harm, a collection of footage showing him picking fights with people in the street and getting his ass kicked, a little like the Kentucky Fried Movie sketch. I'd like to see him revive the idea, beginning with very cross people who object to Trash Humpers." - Peter Bradshaw"In 1999 Harmony Korine began a video project called “Fight Harm,” in which he encouraged random people to beat him up. Because of his success (otherwise known as injuries), that project was abandoned, but it continues in spirit with “Trash Humpers,” a film that cries out for its maker to be bloodied, perhaps unfairly, by critics and audiences alike.
At first glance (and second and third), it appears that Mr. Korine has handed an ancient camcorder to a quartet of geriatric mental patients, then released them into a parking lot to have sex with trash cans. Yipping and yowling, these crusty degenerates (two of whom are played by the director and his wife, Rachel) embark on a nighttime prowl through suburban Tennessee, defecating on driveways and fellating foliage. Behaving like drunken teenagers, they smash television sets and fornicate with obese prostitutes, the camera clinging for dear life to a jiggling, be-thonged rear capable of crushing watermelons.
Shot and edited on VHS tape that seems to have been fermented in a Dumpster, then gnawed by angry raccoons, the characters’ gleeful exploits unspool in freaky — and punishingly repetitive — vignettes. Designed to resemble an artifact that, according to the press notes, “was found somewhere and unearthed,” the film is a brutish stunt that slowly evolves into a nightmarish fairy tale. Its decrepit delinquents, concealed behind burn-victim masks and chanting snatches of old American folk songs, abduct a baby and invade a home, forcing the resident to eat pancakes smothered in dish soap. At one point the lone female shows a little boy how to secrete a razor blade in an apple — a scene that’s somehow more repulsive than the film’s other insertions.
Drawing inspiration from underground videos and urban legends, Mr. Korine builds an increasingly troubling atmosphere of decay and deviance. Off-screen grunts accompany crawling close-ups of bloody sneakers and a corpse’s wrinkly scrotum; a knife and an ax are snickeringly deployed. Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph.
Even the humor is exotic, including a monologue on the benefits of headlessness (“Models would be judged by their shoulders”) and the hilarious sight of a character being turned on by a mailbox.
Idolized in some quarters and reviled in others, Mr. Korine, now 37, may be a bit long in the tooth for the enfant terrible act. But it’s impossible to dismiss completely a filmmaker capable of producing the charmingly surreal “Mister Lonely” (2007). And if there is a point to “Trash Humpers” beyond simply mooning the audience, it’s that this visual experiment — like Johnny Rotten’s sneering rendition of “God Save the Queen” — suggests a future martyred to greed.
“Make it, make it, don’t take it!” chant his vintage vandals, ranting against “entitled elites” and peeping in windows. However crassly delivered, Mr. Korine’s warning against over-consumption is unambiguous: these savages are our future, our “true seed.” The only surprise is that he didn’t include a shot of one of them violating this film." - Jeannette Catsoulis
"If ever there were a movie that cried out to be either accepted on its own terms or fucking hated, that film is Trash Humpers. This should come as no surprise as it is a film by Harmony Korine, a filmmaker whose very name incites temper tantrums or seething faux-indifference from cinephiles of all stripes. Each of Korine's films is (calculatedly or inadvertently) a provocation, and nearly all of them succeed in this regard. His never-to-be-finished auto-portrait Fight Harm, in which the director literally goads people into beating him up, would perhaps be the least subtle example of this career-long goal. But following in a close second place is Trash Humpers, which, in its very title, begs for immediate dismissal.
So, if you're not interested, or if you, like many, insist on taking some kind of personal offense to Korine's films, spare yourself the anguish. For those who imagined the comparatively normal, humanistic, even kinda pretty Mister Lonely was some indication of a career 180 for the director, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Trash Humpers finds Korine back in the grim and grimy universe of Gummo, a place of grotesquerie, bestiality, apathy, decay—and snickering, unrepentant jollity.
For the latecomers and those who haven't yet run screaming, a synopsis: A gang of elderly degenerates wanders aimlessly through suburban neighborhoods, wreaks havoc, and films their exploits on a decrepit VHS camcorder. All we see for the film's 80 minutes are the images captured on this device: The trash humpers squatting to crap on driveways and doorsteps; the trash humpers smashing televisions, cinder blocks, and boom boxes in a desolate parking lot; the trash humpers hosing down their wheelchair in a carwash at night; the trash humpers jumping on a trampoline in the middle of the street; the trash humpers partying with some fat prostitutes; the trash humpers ogling a garbage can, while offscreen other trash humpers grunt lustily, cackle maniacally, and chant, sing, or simply yelp, “Git it!”
If all of this sounds completely idiotic, it is. But Korine's perverse commitment to this idiocy holds the film together, allowing you to lose yourself (if you're so inclined) in its grisly and analog-fuzzy view of the world. Veering from the sublime to the repugnant, Korine maintains the form of a "pseudo-artifact" to the letter, plotlessly persisting with random interjections, long, pointless passages, maddening repetitions, and overall sloppiness. The film maintains a form of curious, mind-bending verisimilitude, and this is in no small way thanks to the masks worn by the cast (which includes Korine himself). The mask of the female humper (played by Korine's wife, Rachel) is perhaps a little too ghoulish, but those of her male counterparts more deftly, abstractly toe the line of the believable. With their clenched mouths, gnashing dentures, veiny necks, shrunken eyes, and odd age-discoloration, they're expressive enough that they consistently mess with your suspension of disbelief. Your brain tries desperately to make sense of these figures as something human, plausible, reasonable. Naturally, your brain fails, and this inability to reconcile what you're watching with any fully comprehensible provenance is what makes the film fascinating, even as it tests your patience or your gag reflex.
What Korine seems to be attempting here is a project similar to those of his sometime musical collaborators, the Sun City Girls (who provided half the soundtrack to Mister Lonely), who in their "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series from the early 00s tried to recreate, imitate, and even mock various forms of world music and pass the results off as artifactual. (They’ve also long been fond of obscure cassette-tape releases well into the CD and MP3 ages.) However dim-witted this seems, neither the film nor the Sun City Girls' projects is as easy to pull off as it might sound, either technically or in terms of believability. In other words, contriving sloppiness and chaos and making it credible is no mean feat, with or without the use of abject, bargain-basement technology. Nonetheless, Korine very nearly manages to author his very own suburban legend of wild, geriatric savages who perform their bizarre, ritualistic evil seemingly for the pleasure of it, like bored, stoned teenagers: giggling, breaking shit, playing basketball, setting off bottle-rockets, inflicting violence on objects and people for no reason.
Of course, while all this sounds like gleeful stupid fun, there are also many nods to some of the more folkloric evils of the American hinterlands: peeping toms, dirty old men, wicked old ladies secreting razor blades inside apples, and, of course, racist hillbillies. A mounting undercurrent of terror drives this seemingly unstructured film forward with increasingly upsetting imagery, as the camera happens upon a row of blood-spattered white Velcro sneakers, or a naked corpse lying in the weeds. Through the miasma of VHS, Korine fashions an unsettling atmosphere out of the sound of porch- and street-lights buzzing, the sight of syrupy brown sunsets over highways and parking lots, and hot orange crisscross flares on the lens. The sight of Korine's own character wearing a confederate flag t-shirt while grinding his crotch against a tree is a particularly unsubtle piece of audience baiting, but there are weirder, more subterranean gestures, too. The soundtrack is largely devoid of music except for two songs that the humpers repeat (and repeat and repeat), both drawn from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: “Single Girl, Married Girl” (as popularized by the Carter Family) and a butchered version of “The Devil and the Farmer's Wife.” References like these, buried in the muck of bland contemporary Americana, suggest a sort of collective, subconscious evil that is uniquely rooted in the hollers and crevices of Appalachia. This is, in many ways, the film that Rob Zombie has been almost-making for years.
There are similarities here not only to weird, underground video ephemera but also to skateboarding videos of the Nineties (where Jackass gleaned most of its talent), and these suggest that the film's primary influences lie completely outside the realms of tasteful, beard-stroking cinema that dare not speak Korine's name. But the ultimate paradox of Trash Humpers is that it is a real movie—transferred to celluloid and everything. Sure, fetishists of dead technologies will relish the coy VCR-dubbing discursions, the lovely crisscross tracking issues, and visible "REW" and "PLAY" displays in the upper left-hand corner, but Trash Humpers is a film designed not for the personal use of a fictional video underground (like a snuff film, also something of an urban legend) but for the communal experience of a movie theater. In the cinema the experience is downright magical, what with the haze of video washing across the celluloid and people walking out after ten minutes and audibly cursing the film. (Somehow, the idea of watching Trash Humpers in your home theater is too depressing a notion to contemplate.) In fact, provocateur though he is, Korine is neither thumbing his nose at cinephilia, nor daringly embracing video, but rather paying curious tribute to both by resuscitating a format that’s even deader than film itself." - Leo Goldsmith
"You can take Harmony Korine’s latest film to task for plenty of transgressions: mistaking willful incoherence for free-form profundity; the worshipful wallowing in Vice Magazine scuzziness in the name of avant-street cred; trying to pass off vintage, butt-ugly analog visuals as some sort of viral found-footage anarchy. (Throw a coin in a room full of critics—we kindly ask that you aim for their heads—and you’ll hit one that praises the movie for these exact same qualities.) But what you can’t accuse this Dadaist America’s Funniest Home Videos of doing is peddling false advertising; you will indeed see trash being humped, repeatedly, by Korine, his wife and several buddies in grotesque geriatric masks. Plus, there’s wanton destruction of TV sets—viva vandalism!—spastic tap dancing, and real-life American Gothic eccentrics spewing racist bile. Awesome.
Korine’s strength has always been finding odd moments of poetry in backwoods perversity (see Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy), a talent that’s AWOL from this extended YouTube experiment until the surprisingly tender final shot. But by that point, viewers have been subjected to one long, screeching exercise whose point is its sheer pointlessness. Once, we got a mustache on the Mona Lisa and a urinal in a gallery; now we get Trash Humpers. If this is what passes for contemporary art terrorism, we’ll opt instead for something truly subversive—like genuine art.—David Fear
"A mind-numbing piece of would-be provocation from the button-pushing Harmony Korine, "Trash Humpers" gets no stars from me -- not because it's offensive and disgusting like his earlier "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy," but because it's about as enervating a way to waste 78 minutes as I've ever experienced.
Deliberately shot on eyeball-gougingly ugly, badly lit analog video in Nashville, this plotless mess features Korine and his pals in geriatric masks, sometimes in wheelchairs, acting out.
They repeatedly try to raise audience hackles by committing "outrageous" acts like dragging dolls behind bicycles and, well, rubbing up against pretty much any surface available, including trash containers.
All the while they sing twisted nursery rhymes like: "Three little devils who jumped over the wall, chopped off their heads and murdered them all."
"Trash Humpers," which somehow made it into last year's New York Film Festival, demonstrates that a supposedly "subversive" no-budget film can be every bit as boring and predictable as a megabucks Hollywood blockbuster." - Lou Lumenick
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