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Asphalt Flowerhead
A picaresque movement in a nameless city. An America engaged in a propaganda-war, determined to clog drug-flow from the Netherlands, and the rubble of a broken city on the opposite shore of the Atlantic. The youth who dream in the face of nightmares, who explore themselves with chemicals with sad paint with jail cells with institutions with a belief in something bigger than the flesh that holds them and strong to the constant symphony of junky poetics, melancholy.
148 pages
First published April 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 15, 2009
Wallets are cumbersome things. Mine shit the bed a while back and I figured a driver’s license and a library card didn’t warrant a new one which meant fresh real estate in the back pocket. Now, whoever had the idea to make Forrest Armstrong’s “Asphalt Flowerhead” the size of those little green Bibles deserves a beer because I’ve been able to carry it with me everywhere, in my back pocket, opening it at random and savoring Armstrong’s deft, vivid prose one or two paragraphs at a time.
The novel opens at a literal hole in the wall, Club Africa, an art gallery/drug den run by the enigmatic Brad Kelly. The club is raided and we follow the friends through the diaspora. Bill is a painter, arrested on his first offense and dropped into a hallucination chamber. Nail is a junky who gets bailed out and sets out to create a new drug in the questionable hope that the proceeds might bail out his friends. Johnny is a junky who seeks spiritual enlightenment at the risk of self combustion. And then there’s Chevy, born into a perpetual acid trip, an Einstein-esque father of a weapon of mass destruction more deadly than any atomic bomb. We follow these characters at a lightning pace, leading to my one complaint, which is that, while I don’t need character names to be Pynchonian, in a story that moves this fast, it would be beneficial to have slighlty more distinct character names than Bill, Brad, and Johnny.
From homicidal fascist cops to a robot destruction of Amsterdam, the story is so surreal and apocalyptic and the voice is so eloquently angry that one can’t help but imagine the words being shouted through a bullhorn, from atop the burned out shell of an SUV, which, in my opinion, is something all serious literature should aspire to.
I believe that Forrest Armstrong is the real deal. I believe that his talent for language is something to get excited about, and I think “Asphalt Flowerhead” is a great introduction and an ideal place to become a fan.
The novel opens at a literal hole in the wall, Club Africa, an art gallery/drug den run by the enigmatic Brad Kelly. The club is raided and we follow the friends through the diaspora. Bill is a painter, arrested on his first offense and dropped into a hallucination chamber. Nail is a junky who gets bailed out and sets out to create a new drug in the questionable hope that the proceeds might bail out his friends. Johnny is a junky who seeks spiritual enlightenment at the risk of self combustion. And then there’s Chevy, born into a perpetual acid trip, an Einstein-esque father of a weapon of mass destruction more deadly than any atomic bomb. We follow these characters at a lightning pace, leading to my one complaint, which is that, while I don’t need character names to be Pynchonian, in a story that moves this fast, it would be beneficial to have slighlty more distinct character names than Bill, Brad, and Johnny.
From homicidal fascist cops to a robot destruction of Amsterdam, the story is so surreal and apocalyptic and the voice is so eloquently angry that one can’t help but imagine the words being shouted through a bullhorn, from atop the burned out shell of an SUV, which, in my opinion, is something all serious literature should aspire to.
I believe that Forrest Armstrong is the real deal. I believe that his talent for language is something to get excited about, and I think “Asphalt Flowerhead” is a great introduction and an ideal place to become a fan.
August 21, 2019
Allen Ginsberg once howled “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…looking for an angry fix,” went on in a drug fueled frenzy to berate the fact this was no place for the creative, the free thinking, the stoned, the defiant. Over fifty years later, Forrest Armstrong picks up the chant in Asphalt Flowerhead, chronicling the misadventures of five young men, most of them junkies, hurtling like comets through a surreal counterpart of the USA, in which the reader is never quite certain what is hallucination and what is reality, or if in fact they are inexorably inseparable.
The drug of choice is flash, derived from the organs of a rodent called a grillo, a super LSD of sorts, but walls melt and skies bleed even for the straight.
The cast of characters include Nail, a junkie poet who doesn’t write poetry; Johnny, a junkie seeker, who graduates from drugs to an “eastern” esoteric discipline every bit as addictive; Brad, who is mostly straight, but digs the scene, winds up in the frontlines of the War on Drugs with a rifle after a drug bust; Chevy, who is straight, and can animate anything; Bill, the congenial club owner and painter, as comfortable among the aesthetes as the druggies.
The US has invaded the Netherlands in a politically motivated attempt to stem the tide of foreign drugs into the US. Men and robots designed in part by Chevy annihilate Amsterdam after the war is won to “send a message.” The fact that this is a European country removes the cultural distance from images of Viet Nam or Iraq, animates the surreal.
It is a coming of age tale, filled with hopes, hallucinations, betrayals, in which maturation hemorrhages lost innocence, paintings come to life, the world constantly teeters between the images of Dali, the sentiments of Burroughs, and the anger of Ginsberg as the fates and fortunes of these young men intertwine. Asphalt Flowerhead feels as if it was inspired by real events and characters, moves with a destructive fury through a world made mad by rationalization.
Not for the faint of heart, definitely worth the read.
The drug of choice is flash, derived from the organs of a rodent called a grillo, a super LSD of sorts, but walls melt and skies bleed even for the straight.
The cast of characters include Nail, a junkie poet who doesn’t write poetry; Johnny, a junkie seeker, who graduates from drugs to an “eastern” esoteric discipline every bit as addictive; Brad, who is mostly straight, but digs the scene, winds up in the frontlines of the War on Drugs with a rifle after a drug bust; Chevy, who is straight, and can animate anything; Bill, the congenial club owner and painter, as comfortable among the aesthetes as the druggies.
The US has invaded the Netherlands in a politically motivated attempt to stem the tide of foreign drugs into the US. Men and robots designed in part by Chevy annihilate Amsterdam after the war is won to “send a message.” The fact that this is a European country removes the cultural distance from images of Viet Nam or Iraq, animates the surreal.
It is a coming of age tale, filled with hopes, hallucinations, betrayals, in which maturation hemorrhages lost innocence, paintings come to life, the world constantly teeters between the images of Dali, the sentiments of Burroughs, and the anger of Ginsberg as the fates and fortunes of these young men intertwine. Asphalt Flowerhead feels as if it was inspired by real events and characters, moves with a destructive fury through a world made mad by rationalization.
Not for the faint of heart, definitely worth the read.
April 23, 2010
While a shallow observation, the first thing I noticed about Asphalt flowerhead is the small size of the book. Not the depth (it is a bit thin, but word-wise it's packed), but the length and width. However, it is pleasant to be able to cart the thing around anywhere in one's pocket and to advertise it to one's friends. The last bit is important, because Asphalt Flowerhead is a great read.
Nail the junky, Bill the artist, Brad the club owner, Chevy the scientist, and Johnny the spiritual seeker are all entangled in a plot involving a drug called flash, a war between the United States and the Netherlands over drugs, and ideological straw-grasping. All events therein are shown with hallucinatory detail that personally gave me the impression of animated graffiti murals. Hunting grillo creatures for their flash-producing organs, entering and marketing and operating in the Africa club, sending robotic soldiers to slaughter Dutch defenders, entering the realms and practices of the Hinkon-bou, being interrogated under the hallucination chamber, and other actions are rendered in beautiful detail. The ways in which the characters develop throughout the story are just as detailed, and by the end the about-faces and new resolves are satisfying.
That said, the writing is sometimes a bit melodramatic. Yes, war is terrible. Yes, the war on drugs never gets anywhere and harms more people than it helps. The problem is that the protagonists sometimes have thoughts regarding these which sound as though they are unknown insights. One example: "The lights of Landschaftspark stream like watercolor through bullet holes in the sky, a muddied composition in technicolor, and in them Brad sees the tears not of one country or the next, but of all humankind, one unified man, weeping for the things it has done to itself."
The above complaint doesn't quite water down the experience, however. This is still a book which is well-spoken and which delivers a good experience. Modern-day Burroughs with more hallucinogens than opiates.
Nail the junky, Bill the artist, Brad the club owner, Chevy the scientist, and Johnny the spiritual seeker are all entangled in a plot involving a drug called flash, a war between the United States and the Netherlands over drugs, and ideological straw-grasping. All events therein are shown with hallucinatory detail that personally gave me the impression of animated graffiti murals. Hunting grillo creatures for their flash-producing organs, entering and marketing and operating in the Africa club, sending robotic soldiers to slaughter Dutch defenders, entering the realms and practices of the Hinkon-bou, being interrogated under the hallucination chamber, and other actions are rendered in beautiful detail. The ways in which the characters develop throughout the story are just as detailed, and by the end the about-faces and new resolves are satisfying.
That said, the writing is sometimes a bit melodramatic. Yes, war is terrible. Yes, the war on drugs never gets anywhere and harms more people than it helps. The problem is that the protagonists sometimes have thoughts regarding these which sound as though they are unknown insights. One example: "The lights of Landschaftspark stream like watercolor through bullet holes in the sky, a muddied composition in technicolor, and in them Brad sees the tears not of one country or the next, but of all humankind, one unified man, weeping for the things it has done to itself."
The above complaint doesn't quite water down the experience, however. This is still a book which is well-spoken and which delivers a good experience. Modern-day Burroughs with more hallucinogens than opiates.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews