Crank – Review

Crank

#6
$3.00 (PO Box 633, Prince Street Station, New York, NY 10012)
by William Ham

Sometimes I wonder why such a big deal gets made over low-brow scumpuppies like Larry Flynt when there are people out there with much more imaginative means of being offensive. Take Jeff Koyen, for inst. He’s a guy with a whole closet full of axes to grind and the crazed, hacking stealth of a speedfreak Paul Bunyan when he wields `em. In large measure, Crank is the ongoing saga of one ‘zinester’s range war against the tyranny of the thieving dolts, naïve psychotics with arrested vocabularies, and gullible schmucks who comprise the greater portion of American society. His engine runs on venom, piss, booze and ego, and fuck if his uncontrolled emissions don’t taste like fresh air to me. But man can’t live on vengeance and bad taste alone, and Big Jeff knows it, jamming the rest of the mag with uncommonly perceptive pop-cultural plop. Jeremy Braddock’s piece on the cinematic domestication of Elvis is a particularly pleasant surprise – rarely have I seen a piece on that over-referenced icon that gives in to neither dumb trailer-park reverence nor snobbish dismissal of his mythical power and makes such an honest attempt to understand the King’s years in the Hollywood wilderness. Working similar deconstructionist turf are Koyen’s careful reading of the messiah/Antichrist subtext in E.T. and Don Frew uncovering the hidden anti-Semitic stereotypes in Star Trek.

On the more sophomoric tip, there’s also a rundown of classic teen jerkoff flicks and the endings to a bunch of others spoiled for you (“The Crying Game: It’s a cock. Big deal.”). Great, nasty, smart un-PC fun as per usual. Just don’t tell Jeff Details ripped off his “Better Dying Through Chemicals” piece, okay? There could be trouble.