Hip Lit - The 1990s.

by Thomas Dimopoulos
From a series of book reviews published in Lollipop Magazine, Flipside Magazine, and The Source, 1995-1998.

My Brother's Gun
(St. Martin's Press) by Ray Loriga

From deep beneath the musky dungeons of the Spanish Underground and the torturing cells
of the corpse of the Great Cortez, a flag has sprouted, waving westward, stamped in nouvelle vague motif and crested with Ray Loriga's name upon it.

Following a pair of works, Lo peorde todo, and Heroes, trumpets blare from castle hills where cannons once lay, heralding the arrival of Loriga's first American release, My Brother's Gun.

Translated to English by Kristina Cordero, Gun is the short bangbang prose of a young man's memoir reminiscing his hero/killer brother in a high-speed race to obliteration.
Big brother blows away a security guard, hijacks a class European automobile with a mascara'd beauty in the back seat, who is all too happy to trade in her money marriage boredom/whoredom and join in the merry hijinx.

"She was singing something, Sonic Youth I think. She made these little guitar sounds, like distorted guitars."
The shiny stolen BMW. Killer and Heiress. Two strangers chasing death, never having been more alive. Mad Max On The Road. Great tears in the time tense. Rips in the reality fabric. Seconds are years. Moments a lifetime. And, beyond, wet grass, sparrows, sky. The Lust of Speed.

"I don't think he knew what the hell he was doing. He just wanted to drive and drive and never go back anywhere."
An armada of press joins the chase. A circus of cops. Violent fury. Screams. Lovers flashing, the speed of light. A hail of bullets raining down on the beach. Rounds of fire that fall the hero. The passion. The fiery flame of youth. In life, a criminal. In death, martyred. And forever young.

Paradise Burning: Adventures of a High Times Journalist
by Chris Simunek
(St. Martin's/Griffin 176 pp. $12.95)

One morning, in the not so distant past, while riding the New York City subway en route to a teaching assignment in Queens, author Chris Simunek was confronted by a dichotomous angel hovering outside his rattling window.
Waving a pair of slab placards Moses-like over its head, the spirit presented Simunek with the rustic and charred plates upon which were engraved the symbolic scriptures of life's mysterious duality.

Plaque #1 outlined the immortal rock 'n' roll vision - a composite of flurrious windmilling limbs banging neurotic over a sextet of Ernie Ball Super Slinkies and vibrating over a pair of humbucking pickups that powered a three-chord Ke-rangakong through stacks of Marshalls, severing the heads of a frenzied goo-goo eyed mass that was gloriating in the cacophony of his original polyrhymes.

WOMMMP!

By contrast, Stone Plaque Numero Two-o had a small TV screen carved into its core. The cathode-ray beamed a vision of his future-script - a tenured and secure educator, faceless among rows of blue collar tombstones and weedy lawns, reclining on a summer lawn chair evening, guzzling Rheingold and listening to The Mets on Power 66.

Accosted that day by a swarming invasion of The Guilt Gnats, he was shocked into taking personal inventory of his situation right there and then: "As I rode that R train home - looking out at the factories, the billboards, the clapboard houses - I felt like I'd betrayed every dream I ever had."

Making like a spirit-spooked Jacob Marley, Simunek bails on the school teaching assignment and shoots it back right quick like Sheriff (bing-bing-binnng!) Ricochet Rabbit across the river and hitches a freelancing gig at High Times Magazine.

Eager for any assignment sent his way (usually the ones too crazy, too difficult, or too dangerous for the regular staffers), he volunteers for (hell, even suggests) loony travelogue excursions: Tumbling with motorgangs at their annual Sturgis, South Dakota bikerfest; Traipsing through the treacherous shanties in the crime-sodden trenchtowns of Jamaica; Communing with hempville prophets at post-hippie Rainbow Gatherings in Taos, New Mexico, all the while riffing on his native root NYC jibble-babble and espousing from the hazy depths of an ominous weed cloud "Feeling like a psychedelic Edward R. Murrow. The Allman Brothers were playing on the radio, and as I watched the tumbleweeds blow through the New Mexico desert, I half expected to see the Roadrunner dropping an anvil on the Coyote's head."

Simunek's invisible (protecting) angels serve him well, fusing his good-luck soul with the gift of a rhythmically literal diatribe. His jaunts cover the recent Sex Pistols revisionist tour, drug-sniffing searches by Canadian border guards (while stowing a trunkful of High Times gear festooned with leafy star logos), and landing in Chichen Itza where college students on Spring Break don Mickey Mouse t-shirts and make like Ugly American ingrates by dragging cases of Budweiser across the Mayan Holy Lands.

Mucho offended at the sight of this, the sacred entities whirl like p.o.'d dervishes and take flight into the black-and-white sky on long strands of FelliniString. Falling back through the atmosphere, their Mayan brains get licked clean from cadaverous skulls by the pounding KO of Motörhead on a boombox, then thrust back Earthward, coffins ablaze, burning missile projectiles that pierce the piss-yellow roof of a painted hippiferous bus and land in a riot of Patchouli Perfume and torn tie-dyes. At the roadside, onlookers rush to catch the falling sparks with tennis rackets. Others roll joints and smoke out their brains, an armada of bandannas draped across their torsos and smoke rings drooping from their mouthal cavities before f-f-fading into an ashen pile of dusty cinders. Musing the smell of excess that the rich lil' momma's boys (tomorrow's straight-suited stockbrokers and lawyers, boys and girls) confuse for Cool, Simunek slices their evilness with one fell swoop from his silver sword of Truth: "Dark - like somehow Satan managed to squeeze just enough puss up from the bowels of hell to penetrate the Terra-Firma."

Borrowing Rimbaud's anvil of hope, he crowns The Uglies with the cap of Revolution, then turns on his heels, cool-style, and marches back up the Glory Hill. Hallelujah.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
by Jean Dominique Bauby (Random House)

As recently as 1996, if you were to glance at the portfolio of Jean Dominique Bauby, here's what you'd find: Globe traveler, father of two, jet-setting editor-in-chief of a major French fashion magazine.

His days were spent on assignment in the world of thigh-high-booted models with colorized
eyes and surrealistic lips, where he oversaw the marketing of gaunt expressions, high cheekbones, and subtle hints of sexuality draped in ultramodern attire.

One day, in his 43rd year, while riding in a "gunmetal-gray" BMW, he is unwittingly thrust into a defining moment that alters his world forever. While the car radio pumps out The Beatles' "A Day in the Life," he senses something inside him is not quite right. As the song screams towards its grand orchestral finalé, his mind begins to fall in a beautiful slow motion ballet, an oblivion spiral in sync with the rising crescendo that builds and builds and finally, crashes.
Sustaining a massive stroke, he subsequently slips deep into a coma.

Upon awakening some time later, he finds himself laid in the bed of a hospital room, unable to move or speak. Vision comes from his one working eye. Totally paralyzed, he later learns he is a victim of what is called "Shut-In Syndrome." With no means of communication, he sets about creating a primitive form of contact. He and his therapist devise a special alphabet code on a screen in the hospital room whereby he can respond to questions and make dictations by blinking his one working eye at figures to create letters, words, phrases. This long, physically grueling effort lends itself to some hilarity - a comical montage of misspellings and incorrect communications - as well as to deep sadness; he can only listen as the one-way telephone conversations come from his 93-year old father, or his 8-year old daughter, trapped in the center and unable to grasp onto either; he is an observer of his own existence.

Weeks and months pass, and Bauby begins to see himself through the eyes of his visitors - friends filled with pity; a family he loves but cannot embrace; the business-as-usual staff of the hospital. As the circumstances grow more bleak and hopeless, he travels the path inside, where all dreamers dream: "My head weighs a ton, and something like a giant invisible diving bell holds my whole body prisoner," he eyeblink-dictates to an aide, "and my mind takes flight like a butterfly."

Living inside his head, he conjures old memories, smells, tastes, and imagines their return; a gourmet feast fantasy is shaken alive from the brown nourishment liquid that runs through tubes to his stomach; the hospital balcony wheelchair-bound view of the distant beach becomes the setting of a scene from his directions, complete with stage blockings, cued lines, and running dialogue. In his mind, the ocean is an orchestra, and he the conductor, invoking a symphony that nobody hears. "I am fading away," he writes, "slowly but surely. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory," as the sea crashes beyond his hospital window, its high and low tides a metaphor for his existence.

Bauby, who suffered the stroke in December of 1995, dictated these memoirs in painstaking fashion during a particularly creative spell in 1996, by blinking his one good eye at a makeshift alphabet screen on the wall of his hospital room.
Two days after the original publication in his native France in 1997, Bauby passed away, memorializing these memoirs as the legacy of one man's final testimonial of a life.