Category Archives: Amerikan Krazy

Underrated Reads review of Amerikan Krazy

June 21, 2016 Henry Korn Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Amerikan Krazy JD Jung! Glad you enjoyed it!

The full review from Underrated Reads appears below. (Emphasis is mine.) Be sure to check out their site for other great recommendations.

“The next thing Herb knew he was standing naked in the Johns Hopkins University powerhouse with a combination of Kennedy’s brains and his study date’s menstrual blood smeared all over his body…”

This hallucination was among many as Herb Horn was near death after an explosion in Viet Nam. He had an obsession with finding out the truth behind the JFK assassination. Before serving in the war, he was expelled from John Hopkins for accusing Lyndon Johnson for the murder. Herb’s other possible scenarios would later include a mafia hit or that Joe Kennedy sold his soul to the devil.

For most of the 1970s he was recovering from combat injuries while suffering from permanent PTSD. During this time, he was plagued with an overactive imagination that quietly drove him nuts. The cartoon characters that he grew up with from an amusement park franchise kept creeping back into his mind and he believed that they were controlling society as a whole.

He joined up with some fellow vets and they go through many bizarre adventures for various purposes. Most of all they try to make sense of what was happening to America with the purpose of saving the country from corporate brainwashing and control . However, paranoia, lust and drugs try to to divert them along the way.

Amerikan Krazy takes us on a hilarious, surrealistic trip through American political and cultural history. Part fact, part conjecture with a lot of fiction, this story provides a cautionary tale for American society.

Chunks of current day culture creep into the story such as AnonyMouse (the cartoon mouse) and cell phones. I’m sure that I didn’t even catch all of them. I thought that the bit with Teyvon Rudolph, the fictional son of Olympic track star Wilma Rudolph and JFK was in bad taste though. The murder of the young Floridian a few years ago is still painful for most of us.

That said, Author Henry James Korn’s bold and irreverent style is what I liked most about the story. If you’re interested in a bizarre fictional take on American history, this is for you . Just remember, American Krazy is not for those who are easily offended.

Source: JD Jung in Underrated Reads | Amerikan Krazy – Henry James Korn

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Amerikan Krazy, Angry Mobs

Drugs, Revolution and Rock & Roll: How I Lost My Political Virginity at the Morrison Hotel

June 20, 2016 Henry Korn 1 Comment

A few weeks ago artist Glenn Brooks asked an interesting question about Amerikan Krazy on my author page at Goodreads.com. I thought I’d share the answer with everyone here as well.

Question

Glenn Brooks asked Henry James Korn:
“You use several song lyrics throughout your book, some more subtly than others. On page 60 you use the term “Dusky Jewel” and on page 88 “Roman wilderness of pain” my question is: Are you a Doors fan? were you fortunate enough to see them live? and, if so, do you think this experience (coupled with the 60’s “tune in, turn on and drop out” mentality in some camps) influenced/affected your writing?”

Answer

Thank you for noting that Amerikan Krazy contains references to consciousness-changing music by The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and more.

Like many in my generation, folk and rock music strongly influenced my socialization and political development. As I think back on those years, my prototypical Woodstock-like communal experience occurred at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 where Robert Allen Zimmerman premiered a searing acoustic version of Mr. Tambourine Man. But to respond to your question more directly, I first saw The Doors live in the futuristic International Ballroom of the Washington Hilton Hotel in the fateful year of 1967 when I was expelled from my university for publishing an article criticizing President Lyndon B. Johnson in the pages of the campus newspaper.

My guest at the Doors bash that night was a poet and Vietnam bound draft resister who was AWOL from the U.S. Army at the time. As college friends, he and I had “chased our pleasures here and dug our treasures there” and witnessed “weird scenes inside the gold mine.” And if you must know we experienced our first Doors performance under the influence of Aldous Huxley and were thoroughly familiar with the British author’s promise of ecstatic redemption via chemistry espoused in The Doors of Perception–a book title that inspired the naming of the band. Jim Morrison’s socially surrealistic and ferocious performance at the Washington Hilton that November night reinforced our intoxication with the revolutionary potential of art. After playing the Doors songs that comprised their debut album, Light My Fire over and over on my dilapidated stereo, my friend and I were more eager than ever to Break on Through. Our heart’s desire in those days was to arrive at an ideological tipping point exemplified by Berthold Brecht and Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater that the Doors termed “the other side.”

But according to Morrison’s dark prophecy, William Blake’s road of excess apparently did not lead to the Palace of Wisdom but rather to The End– a haunting neo Freudian epic about incest and patricide that describes a psychotic killer on Jack Kerouac’s freeway to purgatory. In the course of what later became the Apocalypse Now theme song, an assassin informs his father that he intends to bash in his skull–a direct political action at the familial level that my friend and I mistakenly believed was a prerequisite to overthrowing state power. Even today, Robby Krieger’s wicked take off on My Country ‘Tis of Thee (God Save the Queen) that kicks some versions of LA Woman into gear remains a insolent challenge to ruling class values that still sets its listeners on an anarchic trip arguably inspired by Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and City of Night by John Rechy. But in Morrison’s version of paradise lost, the Hollywood Hills are filled with fires, flea bag motels and topless bars are burning to the ground, and murder rules the streets–perhaps a reference to the Watts riots in 1965 that dramatically revealed what overthrowing state authority might look like.

Many years later, the news that our country’s titular sugar daddy, President Ronald Reagan had been shot by a pistol toting young fantasist named John Hinckley Jr. at the Washington Hilton hit me hard–perhaps because I knew in my gut that I could have grown up to become Morrison’s road killer or Bob Dylan’s orphan with a gun instead of a sweet talking, bow tie and blazer wearing museum executive. But in my new role as a teller of humorous tall tales from a radical perspective, I try to do what Bob Dylan recommended in It’s All Over Now Baby Blue and take what I have gathered from coincidence. If only my former Brooklyn Heights neighbor, Norman Mailer, was still alive and helping me puzzle through the ramifications of a national nightmare that came true at the very location where the Doors advocated for madness, murder and revolution fourteen years earlier.

Nevertheless, I hope this extended response helps you understand why numerous Amerikan Krazy protagonists, PTSD victims all, are depicted battling both patriarchic rulers and knee-jerk patriotism that are represented in my novel by a dystopian theme park that I intentionally named Founding Father Land.

Artists take aim at their country and their county – The Orange County Register

June 16, 2016 Henry Korn 12 Comments

I was quoted in this recent article about the gallery exhibition inspired by my recent book Amerikan Krazy.

Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald in corporate suits shake hands as the Twin Towers burn behind them. A little boy carries a machine gun and wears a helmet and boots, his colorful clown costume dissolving into military camouflage. A neon sign that says “TREASURE FREEDOM” but blinks “R U FREE.”

Max Papeschi, Just Married

Mark Chamberlain has run BC Space Gallery for more than 40 years, and said this current exhibit, “Amerikan Krazy: Life Out of Balance” has been an easy one to pull together. It’s a distillation of many of the shows he and his late business partner Jerry Burchfield have held in the space, one flight of stairs up from Forest Avenue in downtown Laguna Beach. Not only that, but it’s a collection of many Orange County artists who have long worked with or known Chamberlain, a fixture in the area’s art and environmental scene for years.

“Amerikan Krazy” is provocative, and no topic is off-limits, from Disneyland to war to corporate power. Most of the artists in the show have been featured at BC Space before, and the works range from the 1980s until now.

“I’ve done a lot of thematic shows that deal with social/political (issues), and I come up with these concepts and I send the word out to a few people that I know are politically attuned or environmentally attuned or something, and they come through,” Chamberlain said as he walked through the gallery recently.

“Amerikan Krazy: Life Out of Balance” takes part of its name from the new book” Amerikan Krazy” by Henry James Korn. From 2008 to 2013, Korn worked at the Orange County Great Park. He was responsible for the creation of the Palm Court arts complex and culture, music, art and history programs.

“The book is very much about total corporate control of public and private space,” Korn said. The story follows a wounded Marine veteran haunted after having missed the chance to assassinate a presidential candidate who later causes massive human suffering and wreaks havoc on America’s wealth and democracy.

It’s a way of understanding what’s happening in politics now, Korn said.

“Because if ever there was a recognition that our public life and politics have gone crazy, it’s this moment.”

The central setting in the book is modeled after a dystopian Disneyland. But it also parallels the development of the Orange County Great Park, which was formerly the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, Korn said. As a nod to Korn’s ties to the Great Park, Chamberlain included art about the park in the exhibit.

Photographer Tom Lamb took aerial photos of the park. One, “ET Courts,” shows the officers’ tennis courts from the former Marine base seen from directly above. The surface is broken up by dirt and debris. A palm tree sprouts in one court, perhaps where someone once stood to serve a ball.

“The courts was actually a wonderful image that I found while flying,” Lamb said. “It really shows the change of time. There’s layers and layers of information.”

Chamberlain and Burchfield had their own involvement with the Great Park. In 2006, they created the world’s largest photograph, 11 stories wide and 3 stories tall, of the control tower and its surroundings. “The Great Picture” was meant as a document of the land’s transition from the El Toro base into a park.

Chamberlain at one point was an advocate for the Great Park’s creation, he said.

“The Great Park was a grand vision created by the public as to what we were going to do with this former Marine Corps air base, the swords would be pounded into ploughshares. And now it’s become a developers’ haven.”

Development and corporate power is a theme throughout “Amerikan Krazy.” Mickey Mouse’s face pops up throughout. Sometimes he’s wearing a Nazi uniform. In one work, he’s the representative for Playboy.

Aritst Jeff Gillette takes aim at Disneyland. His paintings in BC Space Gallery include one that has replaced the Disneyland sign with a common expletive and another with the Magic Castle as a flimsy, cheap facade in a field of trash. His “Dismayland” paintings in part inspired a massive installation last year in England by street artist Banksy, a macabre take on the famous theme park.

“The perpetuation of fantasy, sheer fantasy, and as if that’s the American Dream, when the reality is more like this,” Chamberlain said as he walked by Gillette’s “Desert Debris Dismayland Castle.”

Lynn Kubasek’s “My Father’s Flag” and “Flag of My Brother” are versions of the American icon that she created in the 1990s. It’s not an anti-war statement, she said.

“They were created during a period of time when people were burning flags, and I’m thinking, ‘That’s ridiculous. Let’s create something new.’” She used her brother’s Air Force fatigues to make a flag and emblazoned it with little military aircraft. She made “My Father’s Flag” out of baby blanket fabric. That kind of turns the flag as a military symbol on its head.

“We don’t show work predicated on its salability,” Chamberlain said. “We focus on art that we think needs to be shown.”

Source: Artists take aim at their country and their county – The Orange County Register

Amerikan Krazy

Art and social commentary combine at BC Space | LA Times

June 13, 2016 Henry Korn 15 Comments

The Los Angeles Times has a nice piece through the Laguna Beach Coastline Pilot on Amerikan Krazy:

Art and social commentary combine at BC Space

by Kathleen Luppi, kathleen.luppi@latimes.com

During the early 1970s, photography wasn’t commonly accepted as fine art. Laguna Beach, even then known as an artists colony, was devoid of photography laboratories producing color and black and white prints.

But some, like photographers Mark Chamberlain and Jerry Burchfield, fought back against the idea.

Artist friends tried to discourage the two from opening a photography business and gallery in the coastal town, but Chamberlain and Burchfield were set on creating a studio that would meet the needs of their artwork and vision.

And 43 years later, BC Space, the nondescript gallery off Forest Avenue that never relied on advertising — other than a listing in the phone book — is still attracting audiences to its innovative shows and exhibitions, which often depict political, social and environmental issues.

That cultural unease and rebellion runs through the gallery’s current collection, “Amerikan Krazy: Life Out of Balance.” The assembled art — not just photographs — of more than 20 Southland artists was named after author and arts curator Henry James Korn’s latest book, Amerikan Krazy.

Korn, former arts and culture program development specialist for the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, wrote about the meaning of power in post-modern America and the conditions of contemporary life.

The exhibition, which features artists Jeff Gillette, Tom Lamb and Stephen Anderson, among others, spoofs theme parks, fast food restaurants and development.

Jacques Garnier’s black and white photograph “Ode to Failure” is a snapshot of a highway overpass.

Glenn Brooks’ “Good Meds Bad Meds” is an actual miniature bookcase — not a photo or a painting — that holds pill containers and a mask of a lifeless face.

Lynn Kubasek’s “Flag of My Brother” is a similar sort of artifact, in this case a replica of a flag made out of a striped military jacket.

“A lot of this is questioning American values, corporate power and abuse,” Chamberlain said. “War has been a constant theme, because it’s the most uncivilized and inhumane activity we can do.”

Chamberlain, a native of Dubuque, Iowa, earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Iowa. Two days after receiving his master’s, he was drafted into the Army.

His one-year tour of duty in South Korea during the Vietnam War would change his life.

While stationed overseas, Chamberlain picked up photography as a creative outlet. He took Korean language classes and met a photography instructor in the military crafts program who told him to capture deeper meanings when photographing subjects, landscapes and lifestyles.

When he returned home, Chamberlain wanted to open a photography gallery, so he headed to Los Angeles. He relocated to Laguna Beach when he learned that his brother-in-law was studying at UC Irvine.

When inquiring about submissions for the Laguna Beach Winter Festival of Arts, Chamberlain met Burchfield, and the two became the first to submit photographs for the festival.

Two years later, the friends formed a business partnership and opened BC Space.

The gallery, which can only be entered through a discreet steel door, is a former Masonic Lodge. When the artists took it over, the 900-square-foot studio quickly became a place for dialogue during contentious times locally and nationally.

In 1980, Chamberlain and Burchfield began to photographically document Laguna Canyon Road, to help preserve it and draw attention to the route’s importance. Over 30 years, at the beginning of each decade, the two took photographs of the length of the road, day and night.

With the help of artists, they created “The Tell” photomural and installed the giant work across from the Irvine Co.’s proposed Laguna Laurel Housing Project.

The statement of environmental destruction received coverage from CNN and Life magazine and attracted over 11,000 demonstrators. The land was released for public acquisition and is now part of the Laguna Wildnerness Park. “The Tell” was disassembled for storage after most sections were destroyed in the massive 1993 Laguna wildfire, which destroyed or severely damaged 441 homes and scorched thosands of acres.

Burchfield split from the business partnership in 1987. He and Chamberlain remained friends and collaborated on art projects together up until Burchfield’s death in 2009.

Chamberlain, the sole owner of BC Space, has since expanded the gallery’s exhibitions and said he continues to explore current art trends and mentor other artists.

“We just kept evolving,” Chamberlain said. “And I am very proud of that.”

—
What: “Amerikan Krazy: Life Out of Balance”
Where: BC Space, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach
When: Runs until June 24; gallery hours by arrangement
Information: (949) 497-1880; bcspace.com
—

Amerikan Krazy, Appearances

Calling All Krazies!

April 27, 2016 Henry Korn 14 Comments

What’s not to like about Henry James Korn performing excerpts from his hilarious novel Amerikan Krazy at Lenny’s Deli on Sunday, May 1st at 3 pm? We’re offering coffee, cookies and a highly entertaining, free-thinking mini-show about our nation’s past, present and future. Korn’s zany new book is a movie — so be there or be square.

Amerikan Krazy Reading and Book Signing at Lenny’s Deli

Amerikan Krazy, Appearances

Amerikan Krazy Reading and Book Signing at Lenny’s Deli

April 18, 2016 Henry Korn 20 Comments

Have you missed my recent appearances at Chevalier’s, BC Space, or at PowPAC Theater? You’re still in luck…

I’m going to be appearing in the Back Room at Lenny’s Deli (formerly Junior’s) on the West side of Los Angeles to do a reading and book signing of my recently released political satire Amerikan Krazy on Sunday, May 1, 2016, at 3pm. See the details below from Frank Entertainment:

Jeannine Frank & Frank Entertainment Present:

Entertaining ideas from the historical to the hysterical!

Book launch party for Henry Korn’s AMERIKAN KRAZY

Back Room @ Lenny’s Deli
2379 Westwood Boulevard (just North of Pico Blvd.)
Los Angeles, CA 90064

Sun., May 1 @ 3pm
Free — but space limited. RSVP ASAP!
Books available for purchase

My old friend and occasional co-conspirator Henry Korn reads from and signs copies of his new darkly satiric novel Amerikan Krazy.

Henry is the former Director of Arts & Culture for the City of Beverly Hills, and it was through him and then-Library Director Michael Steinfeld that I was able to bring dozens of programs to the Library and City Hall Plaza. Henry’s wife, Donna Stein, is an accomplished art curator, educator and current Deputy Director of the new Wende Museum (Museum of the Cold War) in Culver City.

Please join us at Lenny’s — and stay afterwards for dinner!

R.S.V.P.

(310) 666-9066 or (310) 476-6735

Jeannine@FrankEntertainment.com

Amerikan Krazy, Appearances

Henry Korn Book Signing & Launch Party at PowPAC

Link April 6, 2016 Henry Korn 2 Comments

Bookmark: Wherevent: Henry Korn Book Signing & Launch Party.

The book signing & launch party at PowPAC is almost half sold out. Get your reservations soon!

Amerikan Krazy

Amerikan Krazy: Top 100 on Amazon?!

March 29, 2016 Henry Korn 24 Comments

Late yesterday on Amazon, some fans noticed that Amerikan Krazy was on the borderline of the top 100 in the rankings at #101 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Lawyers & Criminals! The ebook version was also at #331 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Satire and has been quickly climbing.

I have a feeling that a few more sales this week would not only put us solidly in the top 100 in the first category, but could earn the book a space among some of the greats in the genre along with Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Hiaasen, Ray Bradbury, Bret Easton Ellis, Vladimir Nabokov, Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Umberto Eco!

If you haven’t purchased a copy yet, but want to help support our efforts to get the book out there, now is the time to take the plunge.

Buy Now!

If you’re a Kindle Unlimited member, keep in mind that you can read the ebook for free! If you’re not a member, you can read it now by trying the Amazon Kindle Unlimited 30-Day Free Trial.

Amerikan Krazy, Quotes

Building a Better AnonyMouse Trap in The New York Times

Quote March 21, 2016 Henry Korn 13 Comments

Either Amerikan Krazy has already broken into the political zeitgeist in America or AnonyMouse really is just a pernicious and rapidly breeding character. Either way in one of her final print columns for The New York Times, public editor Margaret Sullivan felt compelled to share some thoughts on our masked rodent friend:

“The Times has a new way to handle information supplied by people who don’t want to be identified by name — also known as anonymous sources, or jocularly, because they are omnipresent and hard to control, as “anonymice.”

–Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor, The New York Times
in Building a Better Anonymouse Trap on March 19, 2016

AnonyMouse, a seminal character from the novel Amerikan Krazy

If, for some reason, Ms. Sullivan wasn’t aware of Amerikan Krazy, we’re happy to send her a review copy for her entertainment before she starts her new gig as a media columnist for the Washington Post. Perhaps it might serve as the perfect de-stressing tonic between the shell shock of being public editor and covering the realities of media in Amerika? Certainly the political satire will serve her in good stead in her coming role.