A red G-string glazed with piña colada
POP CULTURE
By Brian Joseph Davis
Coach House Books
96 pp., $15.95
The cover of Brian Joseph Davis’s
Portable Altamont features a
woman lobbing a
Molotov cocktail
at the reader —
and she’s smiling. Which about sums up the attitude of this savagely funny book. Davis may loathe pop culture and want to destroy it, but damned if he doesn’t revel in the attack.
It’s been said that the Rolling Stones’ free concert at the Altamont Speedway in 1969 — during which the Hell’s Angels stabbed a young man to death — was the end of one form of youth culture and a warning of what could happen if a cultural ethos is taken too seriously. Davis has the same intentions here as in his first book, though this is by far the funnier effort.
When it first appeared in the Pocket Cannon chapbook series — the underground it-lit forum led by Davis’s wife, Emily Schultz ( author of Black Coffee Night) — Portable Altamont was an instant cult hit. It’s easy to see why.
Davis’s pop- art poetry uses every form available to wickedly satirize local and international celebrities — everyone from Toronto author Russell Smith to Jessica Simpson. There’s the blond bombshell’s grant application, in which she explains that her projected series of songs “ constitute a sustained ‘ pollution’ of hierarchical forms.” There’s a takedown
of Us Weekly’s Best Dressed column, an interview with Nicole Richie and an uproarious Page Six from the world’s last day: “ REVEaLED! J. Robert Oppenheimer’s two dozen plastic surgeries! The pacifist father of the nuclear age was tired of having sand kicked in his face by the new buff generation of playboy physicists.” There are the Eight Fascinating Facts About Canadian Authors, in which we learn that “they’re not originally from Canada. Paleontologists have evidence that Canadian authors originated on the Asian steppes in the Eocene epoch ( 40 to 50 million years ago), ranging through Asia, Europe and Africa. Today their range is limited to urban Canada.” There’s the news report with the headline “ Yo- Yo Dieting Among French Post-Structuralists: New Perspectives.”
It may sound discouragingly McSweenyish, but Altamont is not like other books written solely to prove the author is hipper than thou. Sure, there’s a whiff of selfindulgence, and Davis’s poem that uses band names as words to string sentences together is a tiresome device that should be driven out to the country in an REO Speedwagon and put out of its Misery with a Velvet Revolver. But for the most part, his humour is so sharp and his imagined cultural collisions so ridiculously pointed that you’ll never look at Margaret Atwood or celebrity culture the same way again.
My personal favourite is the poem Nick Nolte:
so much depends / upon / a red G string / glazed with piña / colada / beside the white / powder.
Rare is the writer who can satirize a Hollywood star and allude to the poetry of William Carlos Williams in a single breath. But Davis, a Toronto artist, writer and filmmaker, has plenty of experience taking cultural icons and artifacts and doing what he wants with them.
This year, he recorded a punkrock record with lyrics drawn from the writings of Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno. Imagine the line “Glorification of the splendid underdog is only a glorification of the splendid system that makes him so” sung to Police Brutality, by ’80s hardcore group the Necros, and you’ve got an idea of what you’re in for with Portable Altamont.
By turns aggressive and hilarious, it’s a twisted assault on mass culture in which nothing is sacred and nothing safe. Blowing things up has never been so fun.