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.

A Crack Up at the Race Riots

Literature & Fiction

Korine, Harmony

United States

DOUBLEDAY

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.

Crackup at the Race Riots

Contemporary

Faber&Faber

It's the "great American teenage movie" about real kids, quoted by Amy Taubin of "The Village Voice" as a "masterpiece" and "the kind of film that pulls the ground out from under you".

Kids

Clark, Larry

Dramas & Plays

GROVE PRESS

A native of Hungary, Rita Ackermann moved to New York City in the mid-1990s. She arrived to find a culture (and art world) in transition: rave and zine culture was in full swing; collaborations between artists, musicians, and magazine and book publishers were pervasive; and the dawning of the Internet age was upon us. Within a few short months after settling in New York, the artist received widespread attention for her work, particularly a group of canvases populated with figures inspired by the cult German film We Children from Bahnhof Zoo about the heroin subculture of the 1970s. Her work forged a new visual language: paintings, drawings, and collages which telescoped between a virtuoso—and sometimes brutalistic—expressionism and taut, precise figurative drawing. Ackermann’s work explores the paradoxical relationship between fragility and violence, as she derives inspiration from literature, film, philosophy, and popular culture. This lavishly illustrated volume—created in close collaboration with the artist—chronicles the entirety of her career. Bonnie Clearwater connects the artist to Eastern European art historical precedents and examines the evolution in her practice over the last twenty years. Felix Ensslin thoughtfully examines Ackermann’s work through a panoply of European theorists’ writings, from Jacques Derrida to Jacques Lacan. Harmony Korine (famed writer of Kids) contributes an imagined conversation with the artist. John Kelsey explores the artist’s use of collage and its meaning in her body of work, and Josh Smith contributes a foreword, in the form of a personal letter.

Rita Ackermann

Arts & Photography

Clearwater, Bonnie

Kelsey, John

Ackermann, Rita

Ensslin, Felix

Individual Artists

Skira/Rizzoli

The first comprehensive monograph on the cinema, art, and creative world of Harmony Korine, the boundary-breaking auteur of Mister Lonely, Kids, Gummo, and Spring Breakers. Harmony Korine’s talent as a writer and filmmaker has earned the approval of a wide range of audiences. His first major monograph gathers together many of his most significant projects, spanning film, writing, and art. Korine rose to prominence after penning Larry Clark’s infamous Kids (1995) at the age of nineteen. In the years since, he has created critically acclaimed cult classics, including Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, Mister Lonely, Trash Humpers, and Spring Breakers, as well as the lauded street-art documentary Beautiful Losers. Korine’s creative practice extends to photography, drawing, and figurative and abstract painting. This book is the first to reflect on Korine’s career to date, and will mark his massive influence on indie culture over the past twenty years. This project aims to explore the importance of process and experimentation as well as the artist’s wide variety of creative tools such as collage and editing that help shape his ever-changing practice. An interview by film critic Emmanuel Burdeau and an essay by curator Alicia Knock trace common themes through his films and art works, exploring Korine’s interests in the surreal quality of contemporary life.

Harmony Korine

Knock, Alicia

BURDEAU, Emmanuel

Rizzoli Electa

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.

The Collected Fanzines

Gonzales, Mark

Drag City

The Collected Fanzines comes in two formats: one, a trade paperback version compiling all eight fanzines in full color, and this version: a limited-edition box-set of replicas of the original eight 'zines and a poster. These zines were written over the last fifteen years, mostly in dark rooms and the basements of old people. With names like Adulthood, Foster Home and Gardens,Pocohontas Monthly, Hümer, and others, they were sold in limited editions out of the Alleged Gallery and Andrea Rosen Gallery. Some were sold on street corners and given away to the tramp sects that were so prominent during that time period. Scraps of paper and half thoughts in the guise of art objects, you see. They were never meant to be collectible just low-concept laugh-inducing juxtapositions 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. If you sold them on eBay for a bunch of money, I want my cut. Or if you bought them then please spare a percentage to the dyke army and the flame militia, its a good charity and it's ribbon buttons are invisible. - Harmony Korine, 2008

The Collected Fanzines: Featuring Collaborations With Mark Gonzales

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.

A Crack-Up at the Race Riots

Harmony Korine - Raiders

GAGOSIAN GALLERY

Harmony Korine shocked a nation with his first movie script, 1995's Kids, about drug-addled adolescents wallowing in ennui and sex. Arbiters of culture and morality wrung their hands, but two first-time actors in Kids--Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson--found longtime fame in the ensuing years. Korine himself went on to direct several audaciously polarizing feature films. This book, The Trash Humpers, is based on the photographic research for Korine's latest directorial project of the same name. Released on lo-fi VHS and edited in part while blindfolded--or so Korine attests--the 78-minute movie follows a gang of miscreants who roam the streets of Nashville, molesting garbage bins and causing random mayhem. It's an "ode to vandalism and the creativity of the destructive force," Korine has said. "Sometimes there's a real beauty to blowing things up, to smashing and burning. It could be almost as enlightening as the building of an object."

Harmony Korine: The Trash Humpers

Photography & Video

JRP|Ringier

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Korine, Harmony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Korine, Harmony