the city is a plastic flower: a book review of ripped backsides by richard cabut

by David Estringel

When I agreed to review Richard Cabut’s book, Ripped Backsides (Far West Press), I have to admit it was with some trepidation. My background in punk music was essentially nil (and still is), and I frankly had some serious concerns about my capacity for coolness and its possible detrimental effects on my critical lens. After diving into Cabut’s evenly-tempered, sardonic tome of metaphysical angst, however, I was pleasantly surprised (shocked even) to find that the work itself not only fulfilled its promise to deliver a dopamine-laced travel log/urban anthropologist shadow diary but also an erudite commentary on societal decay and disconnection that rings true today, as much as it did decades ago, if not more. Friedrich Nietzsche warned us over a century ago that staring too long into the abyss, with all its alluring pulls and fascinations, ultimately comes to bite us in the ass later, having allowed it ample time to peer into us and make its own discoveries. For Cabut, the abyss is “the city.” It is a cogent presence that offers up an illusory life of contradictions and sharp edges, while simultaneously lulling the unwitting into states of complacency, isolation, and artificial contentment. In truth, “the city” is not any one particular city, nor is it all cities as Cabut relays in his pages. “The city” is a collective consciousness, an egregore that haunts high rises, tenements, and alleyways, birthed from broken dreams and innate weaknesses that are all too human. Ripped Backsides is more than just a memoir that satisfies our voyeuristic need to figuratively walk in the shoes of someone who is far more interesting than ourselves. It is a revelation. A wake-up call. An affirmation of the longing and sense of void many of us push down day to day.

Cabut’s pulls no punches in his critiques. While recorded in fragments, like last-call epiphanies on dampened cocktail napkins, his observations reveal a cohesion of recurrent themes— complacency and isolation—that paint society as asleep, caught in a REM cycle of social compliance and cheerless satiety, accepting mediocrity and misery as fixed, even as happiness, sometimes. Because of this, the reader has to look at Cabut’s main motivation for writing what would ultimately become Ripped Backsides: his never-ending search for the “soul of the city.” Flipping though his pages, one gets the sense that perhaps it is not “the city’s” soul that he is searching for but his own, especially with his multiple references to “the city” in the personified manner “city”. This, however, is not the act of someone who lacks insight or clarity, who is “asleep” with the rest of us; it is an action of someone who is “awake” and looking for something kindred, to further understand himself now that the blinders are off. There is sagacity in his angst, a frustration that things are the way they are and not how they ought to be. This is best exemplified by one of his many reflections on sex, a regular focus of Cabut that explores the book’s theme of disconnection, where he scorns the quid pro quo nature of physical intimacy, hoping for the day when someone gets him off without the expectation of having to return the favor. At first glance, this seems selfish, almost toxic, but upon further reflection one comes to realize that very rarely is satisfying the needs of others done selflessly in today’s society. Within a sexual context, Cabut sees physical intimacy as devolved, transactional and, ultimately, self-serving. A pale reflection of itself, reduced to B-movie money shot mimicry.  

Perhaps the most amusing (and saddest) of Cabut’s observations are the T-shirt messages he observes on his travels, speaking unspoken truths that threaten to fall deafeningly upon the ears, such as “Once there was a God. A vicious god,” “Cowardice and violence forever,” and “There is zero moral upshot.” While mostly humorous (and a nice palate cleanser from the gravity of his other musings), these statements read like vain cries hurled out into the void by the waking. Though seemingly trivial, they prove themselves to be brief moments of resonance, signposts (if you will) along the way to true consciousness and vision.

Cabut insists, “The city is a plastic flower” and it is a powerful metaphor, indeed. It (society) dazzles the eye with artifice, lures with its colors of promise, but (in the end) delivers nothing tangible except loneliness, numbness, and the very misery we are comfortable living in, the misery we ask for. It is a place of smoke and mirrors, realizing suffering on its streets and within its walls, while seducing the hopeful with glamours from a distance, in dreams and reflections from the rearview mirror. In and of itself, there is no one soul of the city to find, but we can catch glimpses of it by peering into our own. Cabut understands this and wants to bring us along for the ride (the cities change, societies don’t), if only we would wake up from our collective fever dream and hop in the passenger’s seat.

I would be lying if I said I completely resonated with every page of Ripped Backsides, but I feel those dice were cast prior to flipping the first page given our significantly different life experiences. Where I (and the reader) do connect with Cabut and his work is through the experiences we have collectively shared inside and outside “the fever dream”. Reading Ripped Backsides affirmed my own critical perspectives about society and its mores, revealing the universality of my own angst, which is validating and valuable. To some extent, reading about Cabut’s experiences made me (re)discover myself on many levels. On others, consciousness now exists where there once was none.

I will be revisiting Ripped Backsides again in the near future. (I can only say that about a handful of books, btw) Can’t wait to see what new things I will discover about myself then—something I fully anticipate happening a second (and third) time around.  

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BIO: David Estringel is a Xicanx writer, Professor of English, and EIC at The Argyle Literary Magazine and Blood+Honey with words at The Opiate, Cowboy Jamboree, Dreich, Mythic Picnic, Literary Heist, Street Cake, The Milk House, BULL, The Hooghly Review, Drunk Monkeys, The Daily Drunk, and The Honest Ulsterman. David has published seven poetry/hybrid collections, six poetry chapbooks, and one co-authored novel Escaping Emily through Thirty West Publishing House. Connect with David on X @The_Booky_Man, Instagram @david_estringel, and his website  www.davidestringel.com