Richard Cabut’s book Ripped Backsides is not a memoir, nor a travelogue, nor a novel but an unclassifiable work that weaves together prose, photography and personal mythology into a hypnotic, hauntological collage.
Subtitled 'Postcards from Beneath the Pavement', Ripped Backsides unfolds as part dream-diary, part psychic field manual, part poetic dérive, charting a hallucinatory route through the urban subconscious.
Amsterdam, Berlin, London, LA, Manchester and Marseille become portals into remembered lives, sublimated loves, aesthetic debris, and symbolic ghosts. The book takes its place somewhere between the streets and the spirit world, where fragments of dialogue, deranged aphorisms, found postcards and intimate flashbacks form 'a literary mosaic... a creative directory... a ruined map' in the author’s own words. I