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Chronicle Strange tale of a rudeboy

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echoes dystopian classics

Ratz are Nice (PSP)

by Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite Alyson, $11.95 trade paperback

Reviewed by Anthony Glassman

Almost forty years ago, Anthony Burgess wrote a nightmarish joy ride through a futuristic, dystopian England in A Clockwork Orange, later turned into a movie by Stanley Kubrick. It's a classic, every bit as interesting for its look at government gone wrong and society in decay as George Orwell's 1984.

Fast forward to 2000. It's the cusp of a new millenium, and Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite has taken the same youthgone-wild air of Clockwork and transplanted it into the current-day Pacific Northwest, set in the skinhead culture,

and with vernacular just as difficult to translate as Alex and his "droogies" in Burgess' masterpiece.

Perhaps some explanations are in order. When you see skinhead, don't automatically read it as "Nazi." The skins in this novel are a complete cross-section. There's white, black, Jewish, gay, straight, bisexual; a bit of everything thrown together, as long as it has a shaved head.

"It moves away from the stereotype of

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neo-Nazi louts, and stirs the movement back out of the suburbs and away from the jock mentality," said the author in a press interview. "It takes you to a place, what is remembered, about the interchangeable traditions of the Jamaican Rudeboy and North American Skinhead."

That pretty well covers it.

The book is narrated by a multi-racial, gay rudeboy named Edison. The main thing that connects him to the other characters in the book is his friend Elie, who seems to know everyone at one point or another.

It's a strange little book, difficult to describe. Part stream-ofconsciousness, part Beat generation gone whole bad, and a heckuva lot of punk sensibility mixed with homoeroticism and occasional flashes of misogyny from some of the characters, all in a patois that is an amalgamation of English, French, German and 1930s gangster slang. A Clockwork Orange was probably easier to understand, but that book only mixed English and Russian.

Another fascinating thing about the novel is the peculiar punctuation and changing typeface, which sometimes tells as much of the story as the words themselves. If someone is yelling over loud music, it might look like this. A little distracting, possibly a little pretentious, but that also pretty well sums up much of the punk culture in North America.

Overall, an interesting book; not for the easily distracted or confused, perhaps, but worth the money. It's another example of Alyson Publications taking risks with their work, instead of following the herd.

Hennessy

Continued from page 9

that they were shooting the scene where Janis [a bit character] gives birth to the bunny [mocking Ganatra's Reena in childbirth].

I thought, "How dare you make fun of my girlfriend. She's trying to give birth in the other room. This is not fucking funny." I was really upset. That was a really moving film.

A lot of this film was very much me. I've been afraid of committing. I've been afraid of having a kid.

I've rarely seen a straight relationship written as well as the way she wrote our relationship, and just the normal human conflicts we were going through.

Of all the work I've done, I think I'm most proud of this. I'm dying for my grandmother to see this. My father keeps saying, “I'm dying to meet your girlfriend."

Were you around gay people growing up?

When I moved out of the house, I guess I moved right into the gay heart of Toronto. My grandmother would come to visit and I would take her out. I was doing a lip-synch contest at the Rose, which is a lesbian bar blocks from me. I did Indigo Girls' "Land of Canaan" got a standing ovation, thank you very much. That was my community. Those are the people who almost raised me from age seventeen to twenty-one, because I didn't have family there.

Hennessy is looking forward to the Toronto debut of Chutney Popcorn, where a lot of her family members-including her father and grandmother, who is now eightyone-will see the film.