The City & the City: Ripped Backsides – Reviewed
“City as shadow, spectre, crucible.” With Ripped Backsides, author Richard Cabut invites us on a free-wheeling trip through noir cities, finds Mike Pinnington…
In Richard Cabut’s Ripped Backsides – aptly named for Iggy Pop’s The Passenger – the author takes us on a free-wheeling trip through what he describes as the ‘ruined maps of the noir cities’. An evocative six words that. Fortunately, what follows – organised geographically from Amsterdam to Warsaw – delivers on the poetic imagery Cabut summons in this turn of phrase.
This is a book as time-travel and encounters with parallel universes that, today perhaps, seem more out of reach than ever – even if they can still be glimpsed, even visited. Cabut’s dispatches from invisible cities offer a balm to those (all of us, I suspect, whether we realise it or not) fatigued by contemporary encounters with urban spaces, often largely dictated to us by wayfinding apps.
This is no typical travelogue or city guide (though it masquerades – occasionally is – both). There is, for one thing, a cut-up feel to some of the despatches here; memory and thought coalesce, organised by fragment. Which works better than that might sound. In his foreword, fellow traveller Jeff Young tells us that Ripped Backsides ‘inhabits a space between anxiety and uncertainty,’ that it is situated somewhere in the ‘territory of notebook and dream diary’. Cabut himself tells us in his intro that, among other things, we should expect ‘a literary mosaic/montage… a hauntological drift… a wild catalogue of snapshots…’
These, then, are deep topography transmissions received, scratchy static in-tow, through the ether. Because, while Cabut’s epistles include reportage – from London, Manchester, New York, etc. – what we have here is something of a City and the City scenario; we are reading versions of places that once existed, or exist only to those that can properly intuit and access them, or perhaps lie dormant and will exist once more at some unspecified moment in the future. As Cabut says, they are ‘fucked up visions’ from ‘beneath the streets’.
That isn’t to say there aren’t truths here, or usable information with which to navigate the world – you just wouldn’t necessarily find them in a Lonely Planet Guide (nor would you necessarily want to!). In Amsterdam: ‘People read Malraux at the tram stop for secrets of human soul. Spoiler – people are even more unhappy than anyone thinks.’ And, later in the Dutch capital: ’People masturbate to texts of revolutionary politics. The money shot is Hollywood redemption.’
What about in the sunnier climes of Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid? We segue from high art to pop culture and criticism by way of wry observation by the hoi polloi at the drop of a hat – or turn of the page. In Catalunya, we’re given a vista of the storied football clubs’ Camp Nou stadium, then marshalled by messrs Messi, Suarez and Neymar: halcyon days of recent memory for the Culés. Simultaneously, this is ‘City as movie. The belief in directors to choose from the maelstrom of everything only those details that comprise certain significance. Do people buy into those meanings?’ And, a few entries later: ‘Art happens in high heel shoes. Senselessly. Fassbinder is aware.’
At times, it is reportage as cinematic endeavour – you can practically hear the projector, see the motes of life caught in its glare. Everywhere there seems there is an inciting incident, a drama about to unfold. A city about to awaken, drift into eternal sleep, or reinvent itself, fashioning something from the ruins of the past. In Berlin, Cabut observes, ‘We inhabit the Trümmerfilm, or the rubble aesthetic. Remake and rerun.’ While, in New York, a ‘Passer-by says: American nightmare is unforgiving. Stating the obvious is greatest transgression in poetry, film, city.’ And: ‘City as unspooling film: Narrative device – dramatis personae put in difficult predicament/Escape/But only to even more punishing predicaments/Again and again/The end.’
Ripped Backsides is city as shadow, spectre, crucible. From Derrida to Fisher, Brecht to Baudrillard – they’re all here, join the party, Cabut seems to say. But late stage capitalism, try as it might, has not yet stripped us of such thought and thinking, of ways to better navigate space and life, of manoeuvres dictated by more than mere commerce and lunch hours and life admin.
Cities aren’t, as they increasingly appear on the surface, simply sanitised spaces with stop-offs for high-street coffee and Instagrammable moments. Well-disguised they may be, but what they are, as ever, is alive. They are characters in their own movie – our own movie – not merely places to be gamified or hacked. A dérive through the demi-monde, this little miracle of a book – which should be tucked snugly in the back pocket of any budding flaneur/flaneuse out there – is a timely, energising reminder.
Mike Pinnington
Richard Cabut’s Ripped Backsides, published by Far West Press, is out now
Images © Richard Cabut/Far West Press
