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 Novelist Barry Gifford And Photographer David Perry Take A Tour Of Hell In "Bordertown." By Buzz Click Bordertown, text by Barry Gifford and photographs by David Perry (Chronicle Books). Cloth, $29.95. BACK IN HIGH school, some of us thought we'd hit the weirdo media jackpot when we discovered a thick reference book about autopsies in the library. There were plenty of pictures of naked corpses, male and female, in various states of disassembly--gruesomely cool, man.
One gets the same shamefully titillating feeling perusing Bordertown, a collaboration of novelist Barry Gifford and photographer David Perry. Gifford's work seems to have a special attraction to weirdo American TV/movie director David Lynch, who translated his Wild at Heart onto the somewhat tarnished silver screen. Come, wallow in this disease, Gifford seems to be saying in Bordertown, which isn't really about a particular town so much as the fiscal, mental and emotional fracture lines running full length along the U.S. border with Mexico. It's the old road-trip-through-hell story told through Perry's powerful photographs and Gifford's prose, poetry and snippets of newspaper articles detailing hideous crimes. Blurry newspaper photos of bloody, bludgeoned heads and Perry's masterful photos of underage prostitutes are mixed willy-nilly in a puke-inducing pastiche. Large amounts of wasted white space and crappy typing complete the utterly hopeless, human-garbage dump feel of the border this book portrays.
One aches for an explanation for all this misery, but none is
forthcoming.
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And the best part was it was there any time you wanted to see
it, tits and all! Of course we couldn't make a big deal out of
this primo find--we couldn't laugh or bandy it about like the
zit-faced, insensitive louts we truly were--or the school librarian
would have yanked the book from the shelves. It never occurred
to us to read the dense, gray text. None of us gave a crap about
trying to understand the medical conditions that had so cruelly
laid these people wide open to our prying, juvenile eyes.
