Amazon
Publisher: Fast Track Publishing
Damn, this book is funny, crazy, insightful, resourceful, intriguing, chaotic, Asiaphilic, new-agey, hodgey-podgey, and PUNK. I recommend it to the old, the accepted, the comfortable, and anyone who might pass it over because of its title. I recommend it to the bored, the curious, and the seekers. I also recommend it to anyone who is fascinated with the energies that exist in the categories of Trickster and Punk. As Bette Davis says, in All About Eve (1950), “Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.” Prepare for a great ride.
This book is, of course, ordered disorder and fractured fractal. It is divided into two parts playing like two hands of the same body wrestling, finger-popping, and gesturing to the beat that all tricksters and punks recognize. Part I, called unassumingly “Introduction,” is a whirlwind tour of Punk, and if the history of punk interests you, this is a place to start. Nicks seems to know his stuff, but what is most intriguing is how he weaves punk and tricksters with humor and insight into a delightful narrative.
Part II, called “Trickster Tales,” is an dizzying trip though Asia visiting Tricksters real and literary, folktales and folk-tellers. Part expat guide, part How-to, part hip ethnography, part biographic remembrances, and part advice-column, “Trickster Tales” covers the gamut of adventure in the Wild, Wild East and those wonderful areas of shady boundaries of time, money, sex, and life that tricksters in habit. Organized like an intellectual three-card monte game, Hicks dazzles the play of categories asking the reader to find the Joker as the real money card. Margins, edges, marks, flips, blow offs, the love the the Con is clearly part of Hick's personal obsession. He's been there and done that, and takes the reader on a wonderful memory-ride around the edges of the world.
Personally I found the first part the most insightful and enjoyable. The second part became one of those collections of anecdotes that are worth reading at multiple settings. The text is provocative sending the reader out to look up stuff and shadowed by the question of is this all there is. It smells of smoke, feels of bars, looks out from the night, and continually winks at the reader, but the center is still very whole and human. If you have ever been in “a clean well-lit place” at the existential hour of three o'clock in the morning, if you have ever walked down the street talking to yourself, if you like trickster, if you like punk, if you like cons, if your mind is whole, your heart pure, and your soul perverse, you will delight in what Hicks presents. Buy it! Mark it! Use it! You won't be sorry.
