In Richard Cabut’s kinetic new book, Ripped Backsides, we are drawn into a maelstrom of memories, impressions, imprecations, cognitive dissonances, short sharp bursts of two-or-three-line post-Beat post-punk streams of consciousness as Cabut explores his travels of and through the past via this vivid and surreal series of prose-poem fever dreams. Author as voyeur, seeking out the under-celebrated truths of city life, ignored and denied by the 5-day City Break mob focussed on the meticulously ordered fictions of city squares, cathedrals and museums. Here, the lost souls are fated to scour the ripped backsides for scattered hopes and dreams. In Cabut’s world you can believe in anything, mean nothing – or everything – that you say, a place where nothing is true, so everything is.
The book takes its name from The Passenger by Iggy Pop, from his album Lust for Life
Get into the car
We’ll be the passenger
We’ll ride through the city tonight
See the city’s ripped backsides
We’ll see the bright and hollow sky
We’ll see the stars that shine so bright
Oh, stars made for us tonight
And so in Ripped Backsides we become passengers on a journey through the shadowed districts of Cabut’s photo-receptive mind: snapshot glimpses of city life as lived in diverse settings from the mid 1980s until the early 2000s. We the passengers become bewitched as these fleeting impressions neither need nor expect responses but have the effect of making us wonder what a response might be, what aspects of the city’s haunted spaces we might realise for ourselves, were our minds – like Cabut’s – receiving on all frequencies – blessing or curse never mind, it’s what’s happening. Like someone on an intravenous drip of raw amphetamine, thoughts flicker in restless procession, forming images that twist and blur in the frantic crosswinds of Cabut’s inner world. As passengers can we only look on and wonder in what dark corners the improbable and inexplicable lie? No, because Cabut’s scenarios seem so remarkably fresh and immediate. Considering he took, with one exception, no notes at the time, these telegrams from the ether are remarkably vivid. As readers we collaborate in forming new worlds. This is the power that Cabut’s writing commands through a style that is both/neither prose and/or poetry; and which, like Dylan or Lennon’s lyrics, suggests rather than delineates. In doing so he invites us, the backseat riders, to participate in unpicking the puzzle that all remembrance forms and embraces. A more conventional form of autobiography might claim some kind of precise recall or final interpretation. Cabut wisely avoids this: memory doesn’t need to be reliable, it only needs to seem authentic. We can fill in the gaps for ourselves.
Someone said of Philip K Dick that he wrote about the future so he could explain it to us. Cabut writes not to explain anything but to report back what palimpsests of awareness his experiences in and of these cities – from London to L.A., Barcelona to Tijuana and multiple points in between – lodged in his mind. This is the function of any artist in any genre, to jumble the atoms of experience, to rearrange them into new and unexpected forms. Through this alchemical process we, the Passenger’s passengers, can clear the mists of conventional perception to catch those flaring images, to see the stars tonight in new lights, claim them as our own, and be improved as a result.
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Keith Rodway
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