Madonna & Other Spectacles (PAJ Books)

Stories deal with Madonna, President Reagan, terrorism, AIDS, South Africa, Dynasty, the Three Stooges, and Max Headroom

Crackling with rage and black laughter, these 13 short pieces by the author of Beasts wrench themselves out of grimmest fact: genocide, nuclear devastation, black poverty, corporate murder. It's all delivered in pop lingo, with erudite references to Foucault, Levi-Straus and Chomsky, and a frenzied invocation of celebrities and media personalities, their names flung in rough-and-tumble order. "The Marx Brother" is Karl, buried, because he was a Jew, in unconsecrated ground in Highgate Cemetery. Japanese tourists photograph the gravestone and the narrator notes that in white South Africa the Japanese are honorary whites. "Tonto," on the other hand, an Indian who isn't an honorary anything anywhere, lives on a big reservation, only an infinitesimal piece of which is being requisitioned to dump toxic waste. It's not that toxic, cajoles the government toady; it brings in steady bucks and sure beats starving. The format changes radically with "Bomb," a blistering expose of the difference between soft and hard porn. The final pages include "Video/Video." a 1984-like scenario of the world after the "devastation," and "Max Headroom," a reworking of the child abuse case that rocked Greenwich Village, brutal conclusion to a collection that confronts terror in street language and redoubles its impact.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.