Pranks, Punk and Industrial Culture from V. Vale

Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" – you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.
Don't you think, replicants?

Featuring essays and projects by Eleanor Saitta, R.U. Sirius, Jack Sargeant, Annalee Newitz, Katrien Jacobs, Christian Heller, Bonni Rambatan, Kyle Machulis, Saul Albert, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Violet Blue, Carol Queen, Douglas Spink, Rose White, Rainer Prohaska, Thomas Ballhausen, Uncle Abdul, Elle Mehrmand (Echolalia Azalee), Micha Cárdenas (Azdel Slade), Ani Niow, Monika Kribusz, Noah Weinstein, Randy Sarafan, Allen Stein, Kim De Vries, Pepper Mint, Robert Glashuettner, Jonathon Keats.

Punk Rock's most radical interviews, articles and graphics were pioneered in Search & Destroy, edited by V. Vale between 1977 and 1979. Award-winning layout and photography.

Get a sample of the original issues!

Order DIRECT - you personally help RE/Search keep going! HARDBACKS: RE/Search #4/5 Burroughs/Gysin/Throbbing Gristle, #6/7 Industrial Culture Handbook, #11 Pranks, #12 Modern Primitives Hardback.

**First published 20 years ago, "Modern Primitives" is still called "the Bible of the tattooing-piercing underground." Here is a celebratory reprinting, complete with a new introduction by original editor/publisher V. Vale. Also added is a new community section, where current practitioners have been invited to have their cards displayed. "Modern Primitives" was the first book to investigate not only the "how" but also the "why" of body modification practices. It reaches far back into history to multiform cultural traditions to illuminate one of today's most wide-spread youth culture visual signifiers. Heavily illustrated with detailed, contemporary photographs, as well as archival anthropological images and drawings of ancient tattoo traditions, "Modern Primitives" was ground-zero for today''s body-modification trends. "A whole new generation needs to be exposed to this foundational handbook and manifesto for the body modification generation."

ISBN 978-1-889307-23-7, 8x10", 262pp, photos, illustrations, contributors' bios. Ltd edition.

The genre of the "fantastic" is especially well suited to the investigation of the touchy area of sexuality and pornography: actual and assumed developments are frequently depicted positively and approvingly, but just as often with dystopian admonishment. Here the classic, and continuingly valid, themes of modernism represent a clear link between the two aspects: questions of science, research and technologization are of interest, as is the complex surrounding urbanism, artificiality and control (or the loss of control). Depictions of the future, irregardless of the form they take, always address the present as well. Imaginations of the fantastic and the nightmarish give rise to a thematic overlapping of the exotic, the alienating and, of course, the pornographic/sexual as well.

Edited by Johannes Grenzfurthner, Günther Friesinger, Daniel Fabry, Thomas Ballhausen.

Featuring essays and stories by Rudy Rucker, Richard Kadrey, James Tiptree, Jr., Allen Stein, Sharing is Sexy, Jason Brown, Cory Doctorow, Annalee Newitz, Tina Lorenz, Reesa Brown, Karin Harrasser, Isaac Leung, Rose White, Mela Mikes, Viviane, Susan Mernit, Chris Noessel, Kit O'Connell, Jens Ohlig, Bonni Rambatan, Thomas Roche, Bonnie Ruberg, Mae Saslaw, Violet Blue, Nathan Shedroff, 23N!, Benjamin Cowden, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Daniel Fabry.

From the introduction: "Imagine we are fish swimming in the sea, and no matter where we look we see advertising, branding, marketing, and corporate/governmental coercive messages everywhere.What we once thought of as news, knowledge, politics, culture, art, music, and wisdom has all become one with this ocean of marketing and mind-control. What to do? How to keep one?s sanity, sense of freedom, and unique identity? What can we do to resist? Resistance is ultimately dispiriting unless we can also have fun. 'The society that has abolished adventure makes its own abolishing the only adventure.' [Situationist slogan] The last remaining quasi-legal territory of imaginative, humorous, creative, dissenting expression is signposted by pranks.

What are pranks? For us, pranks are any humorous deeds, propaganda, sound bites, visual bites, performances and creative projects which pierce the veil of illusion and tell 'the truth.' Pranks unseriously challenge accepted reality and rigid behavioral codes and speech. Pranks deftly undermine phony facades and hypocrisy. Pranks lampoon sanctimoniousness, self-glorification, selfmythologizing and self-aggrandizement. Pranks force the laziest muscle in the body, the imagination, to be exercised, stretched, and thus transcend its former self. The imagination is what creates the future; that which will be.

Why prank our world? When we look around and can see nothing but corporate propaganda as far as the eye can see, our only 'communication freedom' lies in creatively talking back, any way we can.Who gave corporations the monolithic ownership of our total environment to force their one-way coercive messages upon us? So if we replace their messages and symbols with our own, we must wear big hats and sunglasses and mufflers to hide our chins, so their ubiquitous surveillance cameras can be pranked. (Or, preserve our Internet anonymity behind layers of evasive tactics.) Imagine if everybody became artists and pranksters and poets and freely changed any noxious corporate message in sight? (It is too much to hope for our socalled legislators to come up with a bill outlawing all corporate advertising in public space, even though the majority of voters might endorse this.)

If we are not slaves and robots, it also behooves us to systematically start thinking about reclaiming all the freedoms that have, inch by inch, been taken from us over the years to serve the interests of corporations and wealthy landholders. Freedom is never willingly given; it must be taken. And Americans have definitely become less free since 1776, hundreds of thousands of laws later. In fact, how have so many humans worldwide been bamboozled into being content with their paltry, miserable lot in life?

Pranks may be our last remaining freedom of expression in post-Constitutional, post-Bill of Rights, post G.W. Bush America. This book is a mere introduction to the enormous body of unheralded, uncelebrated, undocumented pranking that has occurred just within the past hundred years. -- end of Introduction excerp

Excerpts:

Interviews with:

* Jihad Jerry
* Al Jourgensen & Jello Biafra
* The Yes Men
* Suicide Club
* Reverend Al
* Julia Solis
* Billboard Liberation Front
* Marc Powell
* Frank Discussion
* Paul Krassner
* Margaret Cho
* John Waters
* Ron English
* Joey Skaggs
* Survival Research Laboratories
* monochrom
* Lydia Lunch
* Cacophony Society (S.F.)
Table of Contents

Reviews:

Almost 20 years ago, the small, quirky Bay Area post-punk publishing house Re/Search released what would improbably become one of the most influential art texts of the past quarter-century. Pranks! was 240 pages of melon-twisting interviews with iconoclastic trickster-artists like Survival Research Laboratory's robot-destruction guru Mark Pauline, archetypal media prankster Joey "Cathouse for Dogs" Skaggs, obsessive Outsider artist and explosive provocateur Joe Coleman, and Canoga Park's own Jeffrey Vallance with a too-short precis of his early, pre--"Blinky the Friendly Hen" oeuvre.

Pranks! included anecdotes from (eek!) Earth First! ecoterrorists, proto-Borat comic interviewer Mal Sharpe and the Church of the SubGenius' Paul Mavrides, plus bite-size essays on everything from pranks in literature to guerrilla tactics of the Viet Cong. The book was a bit of a shambles. Some interviews were barely relevant while a lot of obvious subjects -- Andy Kaufman, for example; or Chris Burden -- were skipped over; but that, as opposed to some dry academic treatment, just added to its feeling of cultural immediacy. Those with their hearts and minds set on tenure might cite Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology or Dave Hickey's The Invisible Dragon, but over the past two decades the single most common volume in the libraries of young practicing artists interested in actually exploring the boundaries of creativity has been Pranks!

Many of those artists show up in the long-awaited just-released sequel, Pranks 2 (Re/Search, 196 pages, $15) -- The Yes Men, with their inspired absurd-extremist versions of global business agendas, for example, and monochrom, who jiggered the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennial with a completely fictional avant-garde Austrian artist named Georg Paul Thomann. Editor V. Vale checks in with several of Volume 1's luminaries -- Realist editor Paul Krassner, the always incisive Jello Biafra and, of course, Joey Skaggs (though to learn about his latest "legitimate" enterprise, the Universal Bullshit Detector Watch (TM), you'll have to visit www.bswatch.com) -- and rounds up a decent array of new faces from the Billboard Liberation Front to hacker chef Marc Powell to urban explorer Julia Solis.

Solis, the author of New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City, is the culminating interview in the series that forms the core of Pranks 2-- charting the adventures of the '70s-'80s Bay Area secret society the Suicide Club, its much more public spinoff the Cacophony Society and subsequent activities of the principals thereof. Under the surface of the familiar (and eventually tiresome) 100-drunken-Santas-in-a-mall spectacles lies a compelling saga of deep and subtly disruptive investigations on the borders of reality, from the infiltration of cults to the exploration of abandoned mental hospitals and crumbling industrial infrastructures.

With the same sense of journalistic immediacy, Pranks 2 follows its predecessors' model in patchwork coverage -- there are no essays here about flash mobs, A(R)(TM)-Ark or the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and still no Andy Kaufman. There is, however, an expanded sense of urgency -- even desperation -- to the interviews: How do you disrupt the monolithic spectacle in a context where the visual and rhetorical vocabulary of anticonsumerist culture jamming has been completely subsumed by the advertising industry, where cranks are yanked, asses jacked and celebrities punk'd in the comfort of your home theater every day through the good graces of Viacom?

And as Biafra and several other commentators observe, the past two presidential elections and the war in Iraq are hard to top for mischievous sleight of hand. But the bottom line remains that a good prank doesn't just entertain, it interrupts mass slumber and invites individuals to think critically for themselves. While it could never be the revelation the first volume was, Pranks 2 could easily be an equal inspiration for the next generation of tricksters -- whose work will undoubtedly be featured in Volume 3.

LA Weekly

The original 1988 Pranks! was a footloose, freewheeling, and freethinking tribute - and a vital underground history of pranks, tricks, and acts of mischievous subversion. One of RE/Search's more popular (and groundbreaking) DIY encyclopedias of fringe culture, it laid out the case for pranks as an art form, compiling stories from the likes of '60s survivor Timothy Leary, punk pachyderm Henry Rollins, post-punk performer Karen Finley, and activist group Earth First! In the process, it planted the seeds of monkey-wrenching good times in yet another generation of impressionable boundary stompers and button pushers.

In this category are loose, entertaining histories of the San Francisco Suicide Club, which pied folks like Nixon hired gun Charles Colson and took over mortuaries for vampire games; Suicide spin-off the Cacophony Society and its outta-hand Santa invasions; and the Billboard Liberation Front's ad campaign rewrite jobs. These tall, brave, and goofy tales - along with an effort to reach out to hacker-pranksters like Marc Powell - give Pranks 2 the oomph and heft that... vaults it aloft (like a flying clown), above the morass of phoned-in sequels. (Kimberly Chun)

San Francisco Bay Guardian

If the world seems one big con, from WMD to transit fare increases, then a prank might be the most appropriate response. Considering the distance most people feel from control over their daily lives, it might be one's only recourse. That was the thesis RE/Search Books, the underground's Interview magazine, put forth when it published Pranks! in 1987. Drawing its subjects from the worlds of activism, music and art, Pranks mapped a stance of challenging social relations and reactions. From tales of Yippies levitating the Pentagon to artists creating fake businesses or turning Telly Savalas billboards into S/M tableaux, it showed that free-form play was a common and secret history not owned by any one discipline. And, yes, with motivations more complex than Punk'd.

With the publication of Pranks! 2 (RE/Search, 212 pages, $19.95) almost 20 years later, not only has the generation that memorized the first book come of age (my own dog-eared copy inspired more than a few acts of youthful, enigmatic vandalism -- belated apologies to the city of Windsor), but the stakes for misbehaviour have been raised. As you can now be arrested for photographing a building, gluing its doors shut suddenly carries a sexy risk.

Strangely absent from the first volume -- considering RE/Search's San Francisco address -- was a history of that city's Suicide Club in the 1970s. Amply documented here, the Suicide Club was a secret collective of urban explorers, sewer spelunkers and exhibitionists whose members would go on to spawn both the Billboard Liberation Front and the better known Cacophony Society. An inspiration for Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk was an early member), the Cacophony Society continue to commit nonsensical attacks such as "Drunk Doctors" (members get wasted and wreak havoc while wearing scrubs at bars near hospitals), and Santa and clown mobs. Think what you want about clowns, but you probably haven't lived until you've heard a cop command, as one did to Cacophony member Jarico Reesce, "Put the balloon animals down!"

Art makes up the final section of Pranks! 2, with the funniest stunt courtesy of Georg Paul Thomann. A member of the Viennese Actionists and peripherally involved in early punk, Thomann is a complete fabrication. He was invented as a project for the Sao Paulo Biennale by the Austrian art collective Monochrom. As they say in their interview, "It's not the first time a fake artist was invented but it's the first time a fake artist represented a whole country at a giant art fair." Take that R. Mutt.

Monochrom spent the entire event dodging the press and curators who wanted to meet Thomann, deflecting by claiming, "He's just sitting in his hotel room. We're rather happy he doesn't show because he's quite an asshole." Soon after, curators were claiming to have known the reclusive artist for years. It was a successful prank because social form and pretense were illuminated with a giddy light and for one moment the playing field was levelled. Not with an explosive-laden van, but by inspiring a new perspective.

As hacker Marc Powell explains to editor V. Vale, "Hackers look at intellectual property like any social metaphor: as something to be hacked. Not destroyed, but unravelled." If Pranks! 2 has a singular mission, it's breaking through everyday reality's increasingly hard shell.

Eye Weekly -- Brian Joseph Davis

Not just for kids anymore, pranks are the focus of this weekend's Re/Search Books "Pranksfest L.A.," celebrating the publication of Pranks 2, the hotly anticipated sequel to 1988's Pranks. Re/Search publisher V. Vale promises rare video clips and audiovisual presentations of actual stunts, and will be moderating a panel with local maniacs Rev. Al Ridenour, Feederz founder Drank Discussion, and Jerry Casale of Devo (operating lately under the nom de guerre "Jihad Jerry"). Featured in Pranks 2 are monkey-wrenchers The Yes Men -- whose website, gwbush.com inspired the president to say, "There should be limits to freedom" -- and billboard liberator Ron English, who parodied Apple's "Think Different" advertising campaign. Reverend Al's latest project, "The Art of Bleeding," a cabaret act that comes on like Benny Hill's Grand Guignol, presents talking apes, robots, and legions of nurses prancing around in their scanties. Yes, protest, riot and vote to your heart's content, but these are perfunctory things. The prank represents an escape from the modern trinity of failure, servitude, and prostitution. Because giving a skinned sheep's head to Betty Ford, as ur-prankster Boyd Rice once did, doesn't make the wheels of authority turn so much as it shuts off the machine entirely, if only for a little while.

LAWEEKLY -- David Cotner

...San Francisco's RE/Search Publications is back with Pranks 2, a new volume of anti-corporate and anti-stupidity shenanigans meant to teach a little and laugh a lot between the lines of social protest. Two rockers find their way inside: Entertaining malcontent and spoken-word sage Jello Biafra hacks off about hacking scenarios, and Ministry's Al Jourgensen shares tales of subversive resistance within his major-record-label deal. Other political artists turning everything sideways include the Yes Men, John Waters, painter Ron English, comedian Margaret Cho, master satirist Paul Krassner, and those brilliant modifiers of the advertising landscape, the Billboard Liberation Front. Highly recommended, this is smart stuff for those witty enough to throw ideas instead of bomb

John M. James -- Positively Yeah Yeah Yeah

Some people think a good prank is pissing in a friend's Coke. But V. Vale takes them to a higher level: In his book Pranks 2, he describes them as 'humorous deeds, propaganda, sound bites, performances, and creative projects which pierce the veil of illusion' and 'unseriously challenge accepted reality and rigid behavioral codes and speech.' Vale follows that explanation with a rant against corporations, labeling pranks one of the last freedoms of expression. Unloading in a Coke shows a lack of spirit ? unless your friend is a congressman.

As the founder of RE/Search Publications, Vale has brought underground icons and hell of a lot of J.G. Ballard to the mainstream (but only through independent bookstores). He's serious about his subjects, as revealed in any one of his seminal books (and nearly all of his books are seminal) about writers, pagans, punks, angry women, strange music, bodily fluids, masochists, and Ballard. Pranks 2 comes a brisk 19 years after the first version (seminal), which paid tribute, in the form of profiles and interviews, to the anarchists and outsiders who made their cultural mark tweaking society in the '70s and '80s.

The new book follows the same tack. It also features some of the same figures. You should bitch about neither. We can all stand to learn a little more about the Yes Men, Survival Research Laboratories, Frank Discussion, Jello Biafra, and Joey Skaggs, and the book more than makes up for any navel-gazing with new profiles of S.F. groups the Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society, and the Billboard Liberation Front. There's even a bit about Bambi Lake.

Michael Leaverton -- S.F. Weekly

"Thanks especially for PRANKS 2, the best book in years. I'm happy to preach that book's greatness." -- Zack, The Gut (MySpace page)

A collection of essays and transcribed presentations from monochrom's Arse Electronika conference in San Francisco in 2007. Another "edgy" compendium from RE/Search, synthesizing for your pleasure future societal conceptual border-crossings. Be ahead of your time and read/contemplate/savor futuristic ideas, before the mainstream corporate culture machine waters/dumbs them down into mere consumable style and image..

The porno effect accompanies every new technological development. Immediately after producing his famous bible, Gutenberg used his press to print erotica. Photography was utilized just as quickly. And so the technological advances continue.

Featuring: Annie Sprinkle, Fakir Musafar Spider Webb, the Hellfire Club, and the red-hot worlds of erotic tattooing and body piercing! Eye-popping photographs - sizzling text too! 9" x 12" - 64 pgs HARDBACK

"Forbidden Photographs is a funny, poignant and sometimes scary document of lives-including the photgrapher's-lived well beyond the edge. Some of these portraits are humorous, some will make you cringe, some will make you cross your legs, and one, of a tattooed fetus, may even make you gag. Yet what comes across here, in a weird way, is the integrity and clarity of the vision."
- Libido Magazine

"From Diane Arbus's countless followers in the 1970's, only Charles Gatewood has been able to continue her "terrible" sensibility...with subjects from subcultures the camera eye was not ready to confront in Arbus's time."
- Das Aktfoto

"From Gatewood's early years in the American South, to the depths of New York's infamous Hellfire Club, to his first meeting with Annie Sprinkle, to the gonzo tattooist Spider Webb, to the bawdy New Orleans Mardi Gras, to the tattooed and pierced denizens of the underground, Gatewood's Forbidden Photographs text, accompanied by his striking black and white photos, shows a deep understanding, intelligence and need for the often overlooked gray areas of life."
- In Print Reviews

"Gatewood's retrospective exhibition, 'The body and Beyond,' is nothing less than a visual history of Western body modification, from its underground roots through its proliferation into the mainstream."
- In The Flesh Magazine

"Gatewood is the direct photographic descendent of Weegee. His images are pure photography, unfettered by the mock majesty of elitist art."
- Michael Edelson, 35mm Photography

Leary was a Harvard psychologist who experimented, wrote and lectured about his investigations of mind-expanding drugs, particularly LSD.

Follow Leary as he drops acid at a prison with inmates, raises his children while the adults are "swimming on a sea of jewels," becomes incarcerated, escapes prison, and generally expounds upon the politics of mind-altering substances before and after they become "controlled substances" in the U.S.A.

This is an authorized collection of Leary's writings and lectures, and includes a dozen photos from the Timothy Leary Archive. Drawings by Jared Power.

This is a hilarious, tell-it-like-it-is collection of thirteen years of Black Rock City's ALTERNATIVE newspaper, Piss Clear, which was published by Adrian Roberts on the Playa as Burning Man unfolded each year...Written as Burning Man happened! "The best survival guide to Burning Man!" - [anonymous Burner]

RE: sex, drugs, survival, performance art and social anarchy. Now, RE/Search Publications has published BURNING MAN LIVE, which has the best of all 13 years (1994-2007), including “Best of Black Rock City,” “Sex and Drugs,” “Playa Fashion Do’s and Don’ts,” “You Know You’re a Burner When…” “Borg Wars,” interviews with Larry Harvey (Burning Man cofounder) and Harley DuBois (Director of Community Services), and introductions by Brian Doherty, Adrian Roberts, and Malderor. Reading this book is the next best thing to actually attending Burning Man, and for those who have attended, this book is guaranteed to stir up compelling memories.

Black "RE" on red box with white letters "SEARCH" beneath. Shirt is black cotton knit. Sizes S, & 2 XL only left - sorry!

Says on top back: 'researchpubs.com "media against the status quo" '

Limited supply. Beautiful 9x12" hardback bound in black boards. 72 pages. Black glossy paper.

Contains a photo of DeDe from UXA, 1977 S.F. Punk Band!

Our worst-selling book - apparently many browsers were so shocked by the photos, they didn't bother reading the TEXT. Those who DID read the text were overcome by the sincerity, humanity & warmth of Bob Flanagan, R.I.P.

Two SMALL sizes only - sorry! "(In this world, nothing lasts..." -- "Blow Up" by The Weirdos)

William Burroughs, Brion Gysin & Throbbing Gristle talk about advanced ideas involving the social control process, creativity and the future. Interviews, scarce fiction, essays: this is a manual of prophetic ideas and insights. Strikingly designed, with rare photos, bibliographies, discographies, chronologies & illustrations.

... a song from an album titled "From Couch to Consultation," "The Will to Fail" -a hilarious toe-tapping Tin Pan Alley tune about the Freudian "failure complex"; and a humorous parody of Blackboard Jungle-style juvenile delinquents titled "Sweet Sixteen."

Energizing instrumentals include a vivacious, frenetic track performed on the xylophone ("Minute Merengue") and a rapid-fire guitar instrumental version of "Flight of the Bumble Bee." The album ends with a song called "A cosmic Telephone Call," a 7-minute excursion into the mind-altering and hilarious world of Kali Bahlu, a self-styled guru, done with a weirdly atmospheric sitar accompaniment. Song List: * Buddy Merrill - Busy Bee * Bob Peck - Sweet 16 * Dean Elliot - Lonesome Road * Katie Lee - Will to Fail * Harry Breuer - Minute Merengue * Rajput & The Sepoy - Up, Up & Away * The Scramblers - Mister Hot * Rod Dave Harris - Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals * Perrey & Kingsley - Swan's Splashdown * Jo Ann Castle - Tico Tico * Billy Mure - Hawaiian War Chant * Fred Lowrey - William Tell Overture * Kali Bahlu - A Cosmic Telephone Call

Withdrawn by E.P. Dutton after having been shredded by Doubleday, this outrageous work was finally in a small edition by Grove before lapsing out-of-print. with four additional fiction pieces, extensive annotations (a book in themselves).

Rare Signed Limited Hardback now as much as seven hundred dollars on Internet; ours only $250. (We still have the $20 paperback.)

Excerpts: * Chapter 1: The Atrocity Exhibition * Chapter 5: Notes Toward a Mental Breakdown * Chapter 12: Crash! Table of Contents The Atrocity Exhibition---By J G Ballard---a Signed Copy (Includes: Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan )(Aka: Love and Napalm-Export Usa ) by Ballard, J G (Signed), Foreword By William S Burroughs, Introduction By V. Vale. First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of "Crash" and "Super-Cannes," who has supplied explanatory notes for this new edition. The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character's dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, pscyhopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoils to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.

Reviews:

"The distinction between sanity and insanity, real and imagined events, is not insisted upon. [This book] is about violence and sex, but it is also a poetic inquiry into the difference between fictions and realities."
Evergreen Review

" . . . entertaining and even enlightening . . . "
San Francisco Weekly

" . . . a moving glimpse at the rarefied world of deformity; a glimpse that ultimately succeeds in its goal of humanizing the inhuman, revealing the beauty that often lies behind the grotesque and dramatically illustrating the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming debility."
Spectrum Weekly

"'The Atrocity Exhibition' is remarkably fresh. One does not read these narratives as one does other fiction, in a linear mode where action and character serve to entertain. Rather, one enters them as into a kind of ritual, in which the configuration of psychology and language confronts the reader with the cruelty, violence and repression that inform contemporary life.

One element in these fictions their author would doubtless appreciate is that they are, indeed, practically impossible to describe. Imagine a short story combining auto crashes, murders, and political/intellectual insights in a kind of sexual drama, in a pop landscape littered with grotesque anatomical references.

The experimentalists at RE/Search Publications, whose books concentrate on the more obscure and shocking aspects of modernity, ranging from performance art to self-mutilation have justifiably viewed 'The Atrocity Exhibition' as a modernist classic." Stephen Schwartz -- SF Chronicle

San Francisco, CA: Re/Search Classics, 1990. Hardcover. Book Condition: BRAND NEW. Dust Jacket Condition: BRAND NEW. 1st Edition. 1st Printing. Signed. 127 pages. Published in 1990. New, Revised, Expanded, Illustrated, and Annotated Edition of the author's classic. One of the greatest books of the 20th century. Limited Edition of 300 copies signed by the author. Should not be confused with the Softcover Edition, which was published simultaneously with it. A brilliant production in Oversize-volume format. Handsome black cloth boards with metallic-silver titles embossed on cover and spine, as issued. Original text supplemented with Annotations, Commentary, and Four Additional Stories by J. G. Ballard. Introduction by William S. Burroughs. Illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner and Ana Barrado; design was conceived by V. Vale and executed at his typesetting shop by an underling. Printed on pristine-white, archival stock paper in Hong Kong to the highest standards. In pictorial DJ with titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Re-presents J. G. Ballard's book, a collection of fragmented "condensed novels" that deliberately mimics a gallery exhibition or a record album. The 1970 First American Edition was banned by court order, forcing Doubleday to shred the entire print run. An experimental (rather than a conventional) novel, it has lost none of its awesome power to shock. The protagonist is a psychiatrist who succumbs to psychosis. "Traven" (he has other variant names) loses it as he tries to make sense of the modern world's landscape: Marilyn Monroe, NASA, Vietnam, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among other media-driven events. He continually re-stages these events, plots new ones (the assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy and a sexual assault on Ronald Reagan, whom Ballard foresaw as an emergent force long before the pundits did) until he is finally overwhelmed by them. Ballard understood that the only way for the writer or artist to capture the texture, atmosphere, and meaning of contemporary life is by appropriating the news reportage with which we are all bombarded every single day and which implicitly sees the world as an unfolding Armageddon, as "The Secret History of World War 3". Unlike the news, however, the radical vision of "The Atrocity Exhibition" is The Real Thing, profound rather than facile, authentic rather than sensationalistic, lucid rather than lurid. Its influence on every aspect of contemporary culture (music, the arts, cinema, and literature) has been immense. The Mannerist cult writer Chuck Palahniuk would literally not exist without Ballard. Everything that Palahniuk has written (often brilliantly) is Ballard Redux; his themes are Ballardian even if most of his knowing admirers do not know it. "One of the most intelligent voices in contemporary literature" (Susan Sontag). J. G. Ballard died on April 19, 2009 at the age of 78, the last of the great visionary writers of our time. A "must-have" edition for J. G. Ballard collectors. This copy is one of the Limited Edition, indicated as such on the Front Limitation Page, and it is very prominently and beautifully signed in blue pen by J. G. Ballard. This edition is now highly collectible. This is one of extremely few copies still available BRAND NEW online direct from the original publisher, V. Vale - clean, crisp, and bright, a beauty. A copy of the 1970 First American Edition turned up online and rightly commands $12,000. This is an accessible alternative. A rare signed copy thus. One of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Armed with total contempt for dogma, stereotype and cliche, these creative visionaries probe deep into our social foundation of taboos, beliefs and totalitarian linguistic contradictions from whence spring (as well as thwart) our theories, imaginings, behavior and dreams.

8 1/2" x 11" 240 pages, 135 photos and illustrations. twenty-five dollars (almost out of print). View the Table Of Content.

Reviews:

"When I’m feeling a little unsure of how to
proceed, I consult my own personal Magic 8-Ball: RE/SEARCH's "Angry Women." I especially love the interviews with bell hooks, Avital Ronell, and Diamanda Galas, and I find something new and butt-kicking every single time I read it." - blog

"This book is a Bible. . . it hails the dawn of a new era--the era of an inclusive, fun, sexy feminism. . . Every interview contains brilliant moments of wisdom." -- American Book Review

"This is hardly the nurturing, womanist vision espoused in the 1970s. The view here is largely pro-sex, pro-porn, and pro-choice. Separatism is out, community in. Art and activism are inseparable from life and being." -- The Village Voice

"These women--potent agents for cultural destabilization--are definitely dangerous models of subversion!" -- MONDO 2000

"These informed discussions arm readers verbally, philosophically and behaviorally and provide uncompromising role models for women actively seeking change." -- Publishers Weekly

"I was vaguely, immediately turned off to Sapphire until I read her interview in Angry Women, which is one of the better things I've read this morning ... but not as good as the interview with Avital Ronell. Fuck, such an amazing issue!" - from a blog, Jan 2009

Some Quotes from ANGRY WOMEN:
"I mean, what can they do to you? They can put you in jail - if you can see the ability to survive in any context as a mark of your strength, then that's not going to break your spirit." -- Diamanda Galas

"Yes, sex had nothing to do with a relationship. I actually felt it was a great way to get to know people." -- Annie Sprinkle

"I didn't want to channel my "art" into a painting that some rich person would buy and hang in his study and the close the door. So I made a conscious decision to do something that couldn't be bought or sold that easily." -- Karen Finley

"So no matter where I'm living, I call it a museum or an institute and that makes me happy, because then I am art living in art. Doing this also gives me permission to make a place a 'work of art' instead of a 'home'." -- Linda Montano

"...I was half-lying on the ground next to him, with my arms around his body. I realized that this was the first time in my life that I had felt able to really touch my father's body. I was holding hard to it - with my love - and with my grief. And my grief was partly that my father, whom I loved, was dying...that the only time I would feel free to touch him without feeling threatened by his power over me was when he lay dead - it's unbearable to me. And I think there can hardly be a woman who hasn't felt a comparable grief." -- bell hooks

"To be free of these negative, self-defeating, painful, alienating, lonely feelings, is really to accomplish a great achievement. Because "they" don't want you to feel anything but what they've drilled into you; they want to steal your pleasure - your pleasure zones; they know that when you're miserable you're not as effective or strong as when you're happy. And when you as a woman can make yourself happy, empowered, strong, loving, concerned, nurturing and encouraging (especially toward other women)...when that empowerment can be restored or regenerated in a loving fashion without threat, abuse, violence, cruelty, or ego...that's when you start developing. -- Lydia Lunch

"We live in 2 worlds simultaneously. Everything in the dominant culture is ours also; there's this 2-way mirror effect; you can see their world, but somehow they can't see yours! So you have your world as source material, but you also have access to theirs. And they refuse to see your world because they consider their world to be the only one of value." -- Wanda Coleman

"Society cuts off your limbs and leaves you a 'human torso,' but now I feel that "starfish" quality; that you can grow new limbs - that's where I'm at now." -- Sapphire

"Sometimes in my writing I've felt I was re-victimizing myself by exposing so much! But I know that I hadn't done anything wrong and had nothing to be ashamed of; that I wasn't re-victimizing myself - it just felt like that. The reality was: I was handing back shame that wasn't mine." -- Sapphire

"Some women who are in a situation which is terrible for them don't see a way out, so they adapt. And one way to adapt is: to find pleasurable what is not, because you can't live in total pain all the time." -- Kathy Acker

Combining art photography, cutting-edge graphics (now considered legendary and ahead of their time), in-depth anthropological interviews, reference sections, directories and other permanent reference-value articles -- this BOOK is crammed with lasting inspirational content and true history. Iggy Pop, DEVO, Dead Kennedys and Ramones are featured alongside William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, John Waters, Russ Meyer and David Lynch. This is not some fake, false-narrative, retrospective written by a so-called writer who was NOT THERE -- this is the real thing, captured when punk was first inventing itself.

Reviews:

" . . . Numerous books look back nostalgically at late-'70s punk. But a new two-volume collection of the pioneering zine Search & Destroy offers a genuine document of the era. . . . By discussing "ideas and culture" instead of "personal biography" with the Ramones, Buzzcocks, and others, Vale (and such contributors as Jon Savage) created fresh, thoughtful material. And discovered surprising tidbits: Who'd have pegged Nico as an Yma Sumac fan?"
Spin, May 1997

" . . . Instead of looking back at wild times, compartmentalizing them as "history," editor/publisher V.Vale presents unaltered interviews, with famous and unfamous punk figures, that remain surprisingly vital after almost 20 years."
San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 1997

" . . . . . . the hype surrounding Search & Destroy: The Complete Reprints is truly deserved. The original eleven issue run has reached near legendary status among those of us who still care about overlooked cultural icons like Frankie Fix or Jennifer Miro, and who are actually interested to learn that the Nuns' guitarist considered Jackson Pollack one of his prime influences."
Maximum Rock'n'Roll, February 1997

In today's dense communications environment, where the average New Yorker experiences 14,000 branding messages each day one needs to continually make sense of a bafflingly complex, constantly changing environment. Brief, succinct quotes can quickly produce clarity amid moral murkiness--like a torch illuminating a dark forest ahead. This book is especially aimed at all who have to work for a living. It is our hope that many a commute may be mollified by this quotations book, which is easy to carry and use--just one minute at a bus stop may yield an inspiration sufficient to set one's imagination reeling. Paperback edition is $19.99.

Excerpts from J.G. Ballard: Quotes:

* On the Future
* On Politics and the Economy
* On Sex
* Some Reflections

This is a beautiful red, white, lavender and blue on black 100% heavyweight cotton T-Shirt Size: XLarge (*just found: 1 each S, M, L). Limited printing. Graphic Artwork of twelve erotic body piercings and implants in pastel shades screened onto a quality, black, all-cotton T-shirt. Explicit. Original illustrations by Jim Ward.

Written in a sleazy San Francisco hotel in the early 1950s while on leave from the army, Willeford creates a tale of deception featuring the crooked detective Jacob C. Blake and his nemesis--a beautiful, insane young woman who is the wife of a socially prominent San Francisco architect. Blake becomes entangled in a web of deceit, intrigue and multiple murders in this exciting period tale. Excerpt: * Jacob C. Blake, Private Investigations

("Punks Against Oppression!"), raising three thousand and three hundred dollars. The check was actually mailed and received. One of the only surviving 16 mm color documents of this short-lived era. Review: "Exceptionally fine color photography, graphic design and editing" -- S.F.International Film Festival review, 1980

LOUDER FASTER SHORTER (DVD)

by Graham Rae
(2007-12-11)
1978, Un-rated, 22 minutes, RE/Search Publications A long time ago in a cultural galaxy far, far away, punk music actually meant something. In the musical anti-star wars of the late 1970s, rocknrolla's four-chord spikehair bastard offspring was the angry nihilistic self-mutilating scream of the disturbed and dispossessed and disenfranchised. It actually sparked a real frisson of fear and loathing on both sides of the Atlantic (especially in the UK, where the presence of sneering bands like the Sex Pistols was seen as the inevitable end of world after the end of the British Empire), and seemed for a brief pre-flameout period of time that it could be an evolutionary and revolutionary sonic force that would forge and force new mental and temperamental changes upon the western world.

Flashfastforward three decades to a bland conformist consumerist-con era when punk has been decoded and deformed and reformed into the codified sterile unchallenging fluff of pop-punk or tweemo. It's now hard to imagine that this rebellious music could ever once have meant anything at all beyond being fashion for problem-free middle class angst-laden teenagers. Any ideas or ideals it may have held seem as naive and utopian as the stuff of the hippies, whom the punks partly rebelled against, in a time way more black and bleak than that the pogobshites themselves even half-joyously and half-fearfully prophetically envisioned.

To get a vague sense of what the heyday of punk was like you have to go back to the pure untainted musical source it sprang snarling and screaming and spitting from. Which is exactly what “Louder Faster Shorter” does. A live music DVD, it comes to us courtesy of legendary San Francisco underground publishers RE/Search Publications whose founder, V. Vale, was very involved in the late 70s SF punk scene. He edited a now-classic fanzine entitled "Search And Destroy (whose collected issues can be bought in book form from www.researchpubs.com), and one of the zine's members, a man named Mindaugis Bagdon, directed the material here.

The live footage on this DVD is of five bands “UXA, Dils, AVENGERS, SLEEPERS, and Mutants (I admit to having heard of none of these bands, which is why documents like this are so important historical-record-wise)“ who, along with nine others, appeared at “Punks Against Black Lung, which was a concert held over a couple of nights in March 1978 to benefit striking Kentucky coal miners. The shows raised $3,300 (even more impressive 30 years ago), which went to the miners and which demonstrates one of punk's finer sides (maybe its only finer side), its humanitarian socialism. These sort of events still happen in the lower levels of the punk scene, for things like when punk scene denizens need medical bills paid, and this is a sentiment you can't argue with. The bands in this film cared about the working man, they wanted to help out financially, they did so, end of story. Superb.

Remember Green Day doing that recently?

Thought so.

The 16mm filmmaking in Louder Faster Shorter is crisp and clear and the sound excellent; no muddy poorly-filmed tenth-(de)generation drownsound video bootleg (as I have seen far too many of over the years) here. The editing is slightly choppy, but this helps convey the base visceral lunkjump immediacy of what being at the shows must have been like. The music is as primal and tasteful and raw as you would expect esoteric music from that era to be, at least not sounding like some other instantly identifiable band as everything does these daze. Interesting to note that three of the five bands, unusually (at least for the UK, where I grew up), have female singers, and Mutants have a male, female and transvestite singer - guess they must have been hedging their bets equal-opportunities-wise!

Also amusing is the fact that three of the five bands have singers who wear woolen or mohair sweaters (were they big that year fashion- wise?), as I would have thought that would have had the frontmen-and-women dripping with sweat. Maybe if they got gobbed on they could wring out their sopping sweaters on the audience in eye-stinger salt-spray revenge! Or maybe it gets cold in SF during March; who knows. Bottom line: Louder Faster Shorter is a well-filmed treat for fans of obscure old school straight-from-the-source punk, as I am, and is definitely recommended as such. The music, of course, has been robbed of a lot of its power and shock and force and originality by three post-filming decades of four-chord irritating imitating, but if you bear this in mind when watching it you can't really go wrong.

Watch it, and remember, or see for the first time, and wonder if there will ever be another time when music will be as challenging and democratic and new and liberating and frightening as punk once was. But I think we all know the answer to that one.

Excerpts from Volume II: Interviews with: * Otto von Stroheim -- Publisher of Tiki News * Dishwasher Pete -- Publisher of Dishwasher * John Marr -- Publisher of Murder Can Be Fun Table of Contents
Reviews:

Review: Review: "V. Vale has published a masterpiece. A slice of otherwise discarded and forgotten culture is preserved in this fantastic book. I wonder what's become of these zine makers since this book was published? I need more, maybe Zines 3 will surface! V. Vale is a true archivist of underground culture and should be rewarded for his efforts."

"The whole riot of the punk zine era has to be a respected one. In order to understand it I suggest reading this book. You're giving examples of some of the pinnacles of the punk zines, giving inspiration not only to myself, but those who wish to express themselves beyond their bedroom."

"It was very interesting. I loved it. I will definitely read it again."
"These fanzines represent an almost unprecedented breakthrough . . ."
Alternative Press

"An excellent look at the history of the zine movement."
American Bookseller Magazine

" . . . rousing and engrossing . . . "
Creative Loafing

" . . . a fascinating survey . . . "
Publishers Weekly

" . . . interesting and revealing anecdotes that inspire--but more importantly begin the process of assimilating one's own creative experiences."
Mole Magazine

Flaunting off-beat interests, extreme personal revelations & social activism, zines directly counter the pseudo-communication & glossy lies of the mainstream media monopoly. V. Vale's interviews capture all the excitement associated with uncensored freedom of expression, while offering insight, inspiration & delight. Features 1) how to tips to create a great ZINE without money! 2) Better Living through creative scams & pranks! 3) Queerpunk, Riot Grrrl, Fat Girl 4) A history of pre-zine rebel publishing 5) Thrift Store Shopping Confidential. Includes 10 pages of inspiring quotations, a directory of 800 selected zines, index & introduction/overview.

Review: "V. Vale has published a masterpiece. A slice of otherwise discarded and forgotten culture is preserved in this fantastic book. I wonder what's become of these zine makers since this book was published? I need more, maybe Zines 3 will surface! V. Vale is a true archivist of underground culture and should be rewarded for his efforts."

"The whole riot of the punk zine era has to be a respected one. In order to understand it I suggest reading this book. You're giving examples of some of the pinnacles of the punk zines, giving inspiration not only to myself, but those who wish to express themselves beyond their bedroom."

"It was very interesting. I loved it. I will definitely read it again."

Review:
"One of the most expressive areas of the comics publishing world belongs to minicomics: self-published, usually photocopied, very personal works. Minicomics often get grouped along with zines: small-press, very individualistic, magazines. V. Vale brought together this collection of incendiary interviews with independent publishers, which captures the excitement and raw energy of counter-culture zine publishing."

Interviews with:

* Lynn Peril -- Publisher of Mystery Date
* Al Hoff -- Publisher of Thrift SCORE
* Noel Tolentino -- Publisher of Bunnyhop

Table of Contents

Reviews:

"These fanzines represent an almost unprecedented breakthrough . . ."
Alternative Press

"V. Vale has published a masterpiece. A slice of otherwise discarded and forgotten culture is preserved in this fantastic book. I wonder what's become of these zine makers since this book was published? I need more; maybe Zines 3 will surface! V. Vale is a true archivist of underground culture and should be rewarded for his efforts."

"The whole riot of the punk zine era has to be a respected one. In order to understand it I suggest reading this book. You're giving examples of some of the pinnacles of the punk zines, giving inspiration not only to myself, but to those who wish to express themselves beyond their bedroom."

"Zines Vol One was very interesting. I loved it. I will definitely read it again."

An essential resource book for any Ballard fanatic, with some of the best interviews ever recorded, plus his rarely-seen collages. The nonpareil introduction to the visionary prophet of the 21st century.

Excerpts:

* Interview with J.G. Ballard
o Shepperton
o Imagination, Obsession
* Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell
* Excerpt from Crash
* The Atrocity Exhibition
* Sixty Minute Zoom
* From Shanghai to Shepperton
* The Fourfold Symbolism of Ballard by David Pringle
* Essay on J.G. Ballard by Graeme Revell
* Ballard: Quotations

Reviews:

"The volume has been edited with a rare combination of devotion and intelligence and has been designed with equal imagination." - Time Out

"Ballard . . . is the most engaged of Surrealists, engaged not directly in politics, but with forcing his readers to see the strangeness of the ordinary world." - New Statesman

"Sex Times Technology Equals the Future." -- J.G. Ballard

who meet and then frequent a fantastic 19th century Chinese garden where torture is practiced as an art form. The fascinating, horrific narrative slithers deep into the human spirit, uncovering murderous proclivities and demented desires. Lavish, loving detail of description. Introduction, biography and bibliography. ONLY 100 PRINTED - RARE. NOT IN STORES.

Excerpt:

* "Table of Contents"
* "Introduction"
* "Murder"
* "Robbery and Business"
* "Pearls"
* "Tortures"
* "The Cadaver"

Reviews:

"...sadistic spectacle as apocalyptic celebration of human potential...A work as chilling as it is seductive." -- The Daily Californian

"Here is a novel that is hot with the fever of ecstatic, prohibited joys, as cruel as a thumbscrew and as luxuriant as an Oriental tapestry. This exotic story of Clara and her insatiable desire for the perverse and the forbidden has been hailed by the critics." -- Charles Hanson Towne

"...daydreams in which sexual images are mixed nightmarishly with images of horror." -- Edmund Wilson

"Mirbeau, massing his words in viscous passages, creates a literary equivalent to the moist greasy substance of the victim's muscle, fat and bone." -- Paper

Excerpts:

* We Who Are Not As Others
** Look Ma, Three Hands

Table of Contents

Reviews:

". . . entertaining and even enlightening . . ."
San Francisco Weekly

"Most rewarding is the absence of contrived sensation: it is clearly evident throughout this book that the only shocking contents are the photographs. Instead, Mr. Mannix has written a sensitive, humane story about some outstanding examples of civilization's contributors. Because of his deep understanding caring attitude, this book explores innermost feelings that until now could never be presented in a book of this subject matter."
-Parlee Plus

"Mannix and RE/Search have provided us with a moving glimpse at the rarified world of deformity; a glimpse that ultimately succeeds in its goal of humanizing the inhuman, revealing the beauty that often lies behind the grotesque and dramatically illustrating the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming debility."
-Spectrum Weekly

with roots in Hot Jazz, Jump Swing, Western Swing and Rockabilly. Over thirty interviews: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Royal Crown Revue, Lavay Smith, Big Six, Flyin' Lindy Hoppers, Sam Butera and more! Hundreds of photos of the bands and dancers, hairstyles, furnishings, vintage cars, exciting retro clothes and other relics saved from extinction by cutting-edge visionaries. Full of informative directories, lists of recommended recordings, books, films, etc. this is the first comprehensive guide to a new state of mind being pioneered on the West Coast.

Interviews with:

* Royal Crown Revue
* Frankie Manning: invented the Lindy Hop aerial
* Sam Butera
* Connie Champagne
* The Coppolas
* Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
* Big Sandy

Table of Contents

Reviews:

"Hipsters and swing kids rejoice: Swing! The New Retro Renaissance is your bible."
Juxtapoz

"The newest book from SF's fave source of sedition, V/Search Publications, has everything your zoot-suited little heart desires: jump-blues, rockabilly, big-band swing; dancers, hairstyles, cars, and clothes; directories to recordings, books, and films. Most important, it's got fabulous photos and interviews with everyone from Big Bad Voodoo Daddy to the New Morty Show to Lavay Smith to the Royal Crown Revue to just about any West Coast swinger who matters."
SF Bay Guardian

"Extensive reference material, photos galore and fascinating interviews. Open the book to any page, start reading, and you'll be hooked."
Request Magazine

"Swing! is a social document as valid and valuable as any other in V. Vale's catalog, and maybe even more so."
Alternative Press

"Swing! The New Retro Renaissance is a good textbook for those seeking knowledge into the swing scene."
Dancing USA

"A gift from heaven landed in our hands, a killer book titled Swing! The New Retro Renaissance, chock full o' information and tasty pictures for all the cool cats and kittens that are into the swing/rockabilly/twang thing."
Gavin

"I'm reading this right now - it's superb." "Very great guide to the real & only Industrial Sound. Great work!" - DarYota, myspace.

Only 1000 hardbacks printed; now $60 plus on Internet.

Excerpts:

* Throbbing Gristle
* Mark Pauline
* Cabaret Voltaire
* Monte Cazazza
* Sordide Sentimental
* SPK
* Johanna Went

Table of Contents

Reviews:

". . . focuses on post-punk 'industrial' performers whose work comprises a biting critique of contemporary culture . . . the book lists alone are worth the price of admission!"
Small Press

" . . . unusually slick and professionally produced . . . "
Los Angeles Reader

"A sort of subversive artists directory, profiling an interrelated group of violently imaginative creators/performers whose works blend sex, viscera, machines, crimes and/or noise . . . take note: this could be the best $ you'll ever spend."
-Trouser Press

Confessions reveals how Wanda was forced to play "sadistic" roles in Leopold's fantasies to ensure the survival of herself and her three children—games which called into question who was the Master and who was the Slave. The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch is a compelling story of a woman's search for her own identity, strength, and independence. Underneath its unforgettable imagery and emotional cataclysms resides a woman's consistent, unblinking investigation of the limits of morality and the deepest meanings of love. Translated from French by Marian Phillips, Caroline Hebert, and V. Vale.

Excerpt:

* Introduction
* "One must not use common standards..."
* Marie
* Catherine & Nora
* Catherine
* The Servant

Reviews:

"Extravagantly designed in an illustrated, oversized edition that is a pleasure to hold. It is also exquisitely written, engaging and literary and turns our preconceptions upside down."
LA Reader

Genres examined include: "easy listening," "exotica," and "celebrity" (massive categories in themselves) as well as more recordings by (singing) cops and (polka playing) priests, undertakers, religious ventriloquists, astronauts, opera-singing parrots, beatnik and hippie records, and gospel by blind teenage girls with bouffant hairdos. Virtually every musical/lyrical boundary in the history of recorded sound has been breached; every sacred cow upturned. Like other RE/Search books that have (sadly) gone out-of-print, soon this book will be as rare and highly sought after! In this economy, books can simply not be reprinted on real paper - costs are prohibitive. Going, going, gone . . . Now you see it, soon you won't!

Interviews with:

The Cramps
Gil Ray
Mike Wilkins
Norton Records
Eartha Kitt
Gershon Kingsley
Mickey McGowan
Lynn Peril
Martin Denny
Lypsinka
Amok Books

Never has Ballard sounded so concerned, fatherly, or political. (In an earlier, 1984 RE/Search interview, Ballard impishly exclaims, "I want more nuclear weapons!") The interviews [in the new RE/Search book] make it abundantly clear that while Ballard has always proclaimed the death of reason and the visceral origins of technology, he now sees these developments as almost wholly negative. -- San Francisco Bay Guardian

Metro Silicon Valley

J.G. Ballard is the Dr Moreau of British fiction, creator of controlled environments and out-of-control dystopias...Ballard understands the transformation technology may effect on human desire.

The Observer

'Sex times Technology equals The Future,' proposed J.G. Ballard in 1972. For those who can't wait: be forewarned: the future never comes. With its promise of arousal and endlessly deferred climax, the formula, as quoted in a fabulous if messily designed [?] new volume of interviews called JG Ballard Conversations (RE/Search Publications, $19.99).

A recurring theme, wistfully expressed, through these conversations spanning two decades with RE/Search publisher Vale, Survival Research Laboratories' Mark Pauline, SPK founder turned film composer Graeme Revell, and more, is the decline in literacy and ever-shortening attention spans in the Internet age of instant gratification.

Ballard himself confesses to having little interest in music, yet for much of the 1970s and early 1980s, he was regularly featured in the UK music weekly NME, where the adjective 'Ballardian' was applied to the gear-crashing rhythm of David Bowie's "Station to Station," Martin Hannett's production of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, the machine grind of DAF, and so on. But the most significant explorations of the terrains mapped in Ballard's fiction (and retrospectively in the dialogues of J.G. Ballard Conversations) happened in Industrial Culture. Daniel Miller aka The Normal's "Warm Leatherette," Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle's grisly pathologies of the British suburban hinterland, SPK's information overloads, and the short-circuitng noise of Non's "Rise" stand as powerful testaments to the legacy of Ballard's impact. Not forgetting, of course, the writer's longstanding relationship with his most sympathetic publisher, Vale, at RE/Search, whose roots are in the West Coast punk-and-after journal Search & Destroy (issue #10 featured a J.G. Ballard interview).

Ballard's influence persists through Matmos's queasy 2001 album "A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure (Matador) and J.G. Thirlwell's score for Jonathan Weiss's 2001 experimental film version of The Atrocity Exhibition (Reel23 DVD).

Wire

It's a finely produced book in a new handbag ? or manbag ? size, and certainly one that any Ballard obsessive, and you know who you are, will want to own. Ballard comes across as a warm, private man and a highly prescient writer: recent news images of 100-mile traffic jams outside Houston as people fled hurricane Rita, or passengers on a flaming jetliner witnessing their predicament unravelling live on televisions inside their own aircraft, appear to have come straight out of his fiction. This is, for me, where the Ballard Paradox comes into play: his futures share so much with our present, that they can now feel a little old-fashioned, making even his earlier writing seem increasingly less like science fiction as time marches on.

The interviews date from 1983 to 2004, during which time Ballard's opinions and obsessions ? power, celebrity, media domination, war, politics and the future (and what else is there?) ? have remained fairly constant in a changing world, perhaps because he was already into his 50s when the first interviews took place. Our man in Shepperton reveals a solid grasp of the broad sweep of both historical and contemporary geopolitical affairs, as well as the human, and inhuman condition. On a more personal note you'll find insights into the origins of Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard's childhood experiences in a Japanese POW camp (the basis for Empire pf the Sun, his experience of success and Hollywood following Steven Spielberg's film of that "breakthrough" book. And he likes cats. A lot. It's also interesting to discover that while Ballard has always been something of a respected, almost canonical, late 20th century author in the UK, his earlier books were difficult to obtain for American readers, where he has developed a cult following akin to that of William S Burroughs, largley thanks to the work of Re/Search. While not a Ballardophile myself, reading these interviews has driven me to dig out some of his short story collections, so the programme works.

Strange Attractor

Conversations has a dozen new and unpublished interviews from various contributors. In a recent discussion with Vale, Ballard looks behind the enemy line and predicts 'a crisis will arise that will seed the neo-con mentality, and what at present seems a rather strange aberration on the part of America's ruling elite, will come to seem completely acceptable in a surprisingly short space of time.' But he finds some hope in the internet's uncensored world, and that 'if we're entering a New Dark Age, the internet could help keep the lights on!' In another conversation he discusses the ascendant 'New Religiosity' and the 'new blueprint for a kind of militaristic religion'...

Pataphysics

Here pranksters such as Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Monte Cazazza, Jello Biafra, Earth First!, Joe Coleman, Karen Finley, John Waters and Henry Rollins (and more) challenge the sovereign authority of words, images and behavioral convention. This iconoclastic compendium will dazzle and delight all lovers of humor, satire and irony. 240 pages, many photographs. NEW: HARDBACK limited edition, on better glossy art paper. Paperback also on better paper. John Waters on PRANKS

Only 500 hardbacks & 1000 paperbacks printed for this edition, both on better glossy art paper for sharper photographic reproduction. Superior to your old copy!

PUNK '77 covers the San Francisco Punk Rock scene from its beginnings in January 1977, to the Sex Pistols concert at Winterland a year later... Limited Edition from an independent publisher. Learn how a scene was created! What happened in the San Francisco Punk Scene occurred simultaneously in cities all over the U.S. and in Europe. The creation of culture by youth is an important phenomenon, and one which never loses relevance. PUNK '77 began as a Xeroxed booklet of photographs taken in and around the Mabuhay and elsewhere on the Punk Rock scene. Then James began adding text in the form of interviews with the people who were there and made it happen. James's photos were published in New York Rocker, Search & Destroy and Slash, among others. His posters for the band Crime have become classics and highly prized collectors' items.

Excerpts:

If you were in a band in 1975 or 1976, you had to be in what the 'local scene' was at that time or there was nowhere to play. That's why we started the Mabuhay. There was nowhere for anybody to go. We had to create our own place to hang out, so that's what we did. Before Mabuhay I never hung out in clubs because there wasn't a club scene. With the Mabuhay, you just went there. You didn't care who was playing because you went to hang out.--Jeff Rafael, Nuns

There was no music scene going on in San Francisco when me and my friend, Steve, moved out here from St. Louis. We moved into this little apartment by Cala Foods on Hyde Street. We couldn't play in the apartment because of complaints, so we would go down to Polk St. and play for tips. That's where I met [Michael] Kowalsky [U.X.A.] and one of the guys from Crime, and other people who later became part of the Mabuhay scene.-- Jimmy Wilsey, Avengers

In the late Seventies before Punk, it was easier for record companies to put out Donna Summer-type canned music, disco, "Love to Love You, Baby" kind of stuff. Club owners felt that as long as they could get people to pay a door charge to dance, then why should they have to deal with the expense of presenting live entertainment?

The places that had live bands were booking hippie bands, more or less. When the Mabuhay opened its doors to people like the Ramones, Damned, Blondie and Wayne County, people who started out in New York, it was exciting for everybody. There had to be more than just a handful of people who didn't want to go to discos. They had no other place to go, so this was an opportunity. It help prove to the city that not everything had to be canned music. Bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols came through with a kind of rebellious sound. It was something new. It wasn't the same old Savoy Brown, Sixties kind of bar band. It was a relief not having to hear, 'Love to Love You Baby'.--Ginger Coyote

Reviews:

When the part of the past you feel you know turns out to be of general interest and, better yet, you've held on to a mass of striking photographs, you sit down and, make a book. James Stark was a photographer, poster-maker, and scene-person the year a certain club on San Francisco's tiny strip of night life began offering Punk shows one night a week.

The photos themselves, a generous 155 of them, are richly satisfying. They're the kind of photos one wants to see, straight forwardly showing dramatic personages doing what they do, whether it's singing, playing, displaying their costumes, manifesting the effects of various substances, or just trying to talk their way in the door. Stark understood their theatrical beauty. And he knew when to press the shutter.

But the artistic ferment of the late '70s shows us that things of beauty, power, and inspiration can arise from within the walls of a couple of crummy clubs. Punk '77 is a testament to a grand moment occurring in an eyeblink of history.--Kit Drumm, Puncture; Issue 25, October 1992

There are good insights into the origins of SF Punk, the gathering together of misfits who were dissatisfied with the degenerating of 60/70's music culture, who gravitated together under a yet-as-unnamed umbrella to be self-supporting and stimulated.

I would recommend this book not only for old-timers looking for nostalgia, but especially to young Punks who have no idea how this all got off the ground, who take today's Punk for granted, to see how precarious it was at birth, what a fluke it was, and to perhaps be able to get a fresh perspective on today's scene needs, especially vis-a-vis major label intervention. The value in such a history lies not in bemoaning bygone days but in learning from that to improve things now.--(TY), MAXIMUMROCKNROLL; Issue 114, November 1992

Although I didn't experience anything in this book firsthand, it brought back a lot of memories, since Frisco's earliest punk scene was a lot like New York's. It might surprise a lot of today's hardcore youth to learn that the original Punkers weren't teenagers but bohemian artists and musicians in their mid-20's and early 30's.

Anyway, Punk 77 is not another coffee-table mainstream media ripoff but an engrossing chronicle of what went down, from somebody who was really there. Sure it's history, but if you're into Punk Rock, it's part of YOUR history, And that alone is a good reason to check it out.--Jim T., Jersey Beat; Issue 47, Fall 1992

I really like this book; you know, the nostalgic look back... Ah, the memories, and that is what makes me laugh. Anyway, the lunacy and retardedness of those days are brought back to life in a series of short stories and photos of the people that made it happen. Well done.--Al, Flipside; Issue 81, November 1992

which begins,

"I probably never would have become America's leading fire-eater if Flamo the Great hadn't happened to explode that night..." So begins this true story of life with a traveling carnival, peopled by amazing characters (the Human Ostrich, the Human Salamander, Jolly Daisy) who commit outrageous feats of wizardry. This is one of the only authentic narratives revealing the "tricks" (or more often the lack thereof) and skills involved in a sideshow, and is invaluable to those aspiring to this profession. Having cultivated the desire to create real magic since early childhood, Mannix rose to become a top act within a season; here is his inspiring tale. NEW: RARE PHOTOS! This is the first edition to include photos of the actual characters in the book, most of them taken by Mannix himself in the '30s.

As a favor to RE/Search's V. Vale, Daniel P. Mannix autographed 20 copies of this paperback just before his death in 1997, and they may be had for just thirty dollars.

Excerpts:

* Joining the sideshow *


* Flamo up in flames *
* Setting up; Jolly Daisy; the clem
* Fire-eating; buying swords from Rafael
* Krinko the Fakir; the Human Ostrich * Lock-picking & Escapism; Aunt Matty
* Billie& Bud; Cal & Daisy

Table of Contents

Reviews:

"A grotesque gallery of portraits of amazing human beings and a fascinating behind-the-scenes revelation of carnival life."
New York Times

"A sympathetic and funny account of life with a carnival by a young man who impulsively joined up with one, mastered the elements of fire-eating and sword-swallowing in record time, and then rose, Horatio Alger-like, into the rarefied company of neon-bulb swallowers . . . it's engrossing."
The New Yorker

"The beautiful world of outcasts and freaks banding together to form an alternate society is accurately and compassionately portrayed by an insider."
Circus Arts

"Having trouped with a carnival for a year, I can vouch for the authentic background and color. I thought it was absolutely fascinating; I couldn't put it down until I finished it."
Gypsy Rose Lee

Excerpts from #1-6:

Interviews with:

* Blondie
* Iggy Pop
* Patti Smith
* The Sex Pistols

Table of Contents for Issues #1-6
Excerpts from #7-11:

Interviews with:

* The Clash
* Dead Kennedys
* X

by the likes of J.G. Ballard, Throbbing Gristle, SRL (Survival Research Laboratories), Julio Cortazar, Monte Cazazza, Octavio Paz, Flipper, SPK, etc. Excerpts from RE/Search #1: (last copies!!)

Interviews with: Cabaret Voltaire Octavio Paz Table of Contents
Excerpts from RE/Search #2: "Cool" by Diane Di Prima Surveillance Techniques Table of Contents
Excerpts from RE/Search #3 Interview with Sordide Sentimental "Talking to Strangers" Table of Contents

We have a few copies of RE/Search #2 for $10 - telephone us at 415.362.1465 to order! ($5 shipping)

Unusual plots, tough dialogue starring anti-heroes both brutal and complex, and women living outside the lie of chivalry: "She wasn't wearing much beneath her skirt. In an instant it was over. Fiercely and abruptly." Plus the first publication of a play. 304 pp. 5X8". 2 introductions; bibliography; 15 photos by Bobby Neel Adams.

"HIGH PRIEST OF CALIFORNIA - The hairiest, ballsiest hard-boiled ever penned. One continuous orgy of prolonged foreplay! WILD WIVES: sex, schizophrenia and sadism blend into a recipe for sudden doom!" - Dennis McMillan.

Both novels evoke San Francisco in the Fifties, with rich details of place and lushly etched characters of every stripe. Willeford's genius has never been more more pugnacious than in these two early works.

"A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition." -- from V. Vale's introduction. An anthropological inquiry into a contemporary social enigma-the increasingly popular revival of ancient human decoration practices such as symbolic/deeply personal tattooing, multiple piercings, and ritual scarification. "Primitive" actions which rupture conventional confines of behavior and aesthetics are objectively scrutinized. In context of the death of global frontiers, this volume charts the territory of the last remaining underdeveloped source of first-hand experience: the human body. When ordering, please specify: "autographed by V. Vale and Charles Gatewood".

Table of Contents
Reviews:

"All of the people interviewed are looking for something very simple: a way of fighting back at mass production consumer society that prizes standardization above all else. Through 'primitive' modifications, they are taking possession of the only thing that any of us will ever really own: our bodies."
Whole Earth Review

"Dispassionate ethnography that lets people put their behavior in its own context."
Voice Literary Supplement

" . . . celebrates diversity by chronicling--and promoting--new paths for cultural, aesthetic, and political transgression."
SF Bay Guardian

"The opening interview with Fakir Musafar, by day a wealthy Silicon Valley advertising executive, in his spare moments a master of self-mutilation, provides a riveting introduction.

Musafar, born in South Dakota, exposes a relatively tame collection of tattoos, but the photographs of what he does to himself to experience out-of-the-body states are, for the uninitiated, truly unbelievable. Musafar recounts how he always felt a misfit until, still a child, his father took him to a carnival freak show. 'Right then I had an incurable desire to make marks on and put holes in my body.'

Musafar's practices, all documented with photographs, include radical corseting, nipple and penis piercing, and more exotic rituals such as Kavandi-bearing (an East Indian practice in which the celebrant carries a carapace of spears on his body) and the Sun Dance (the Mandan Indian puberty rite in which the initiator hangs from holes pierced in his chest).

As the latter two instances imply, such practices in tribal cultures were used to induce hallucinatory or out-of-the-body states. Musafar and others have adopted them for the same purposes -- to transcend the limitations of reason and logic mandated by the modern world.

Although the images might seem on casual viewing to be documents from an S&M cult, Musafar expresses little sympathy for sado-masochism, the banal goal of which is orgasm, a cheap thrill when communion with the cosmos is his aim.

The publishers take a sanguine view of body modification. Although they frankly acknowledges the pitfalls of romanticizing the primitive, they declare that the revival of 'modern primitive' activities is 'the desire for, and the dream of, a more ideal society.' They see such practices as attempts to achieve wholeness. 'All sensual experience functions to free us from 'normal' social restraints, to awaken our deadened bodies to life. All such activity points toward a goal: the creation of the 'complete' or 'integrated' man and woman, and in this we are yet prisoners digging an imaginary tunnel to freedom.'"
David Bonetti -- S.F. Examiner

When she stayed with us, it felt like she was the host and we were the guests! Thanks to her and Penny Rimbaud, there were many fun dinners at RE/Search House. Only a few left.
A small quantity of UNSIGNED posters available for only $5 plus $7 shipping (mailing tubes are expensive).

Chapters on psychic warfare, Moroccan magic & music, early experiments with tape recorders & the cut-up method; the Dreamachine, and much more. "One of the most influential and visionary of living writers and painters, his longtime collaborator and admirer William Burroughs has gone so far as to refer to him as 'the only modern artist.' " HARDBACK. Only 100 MADE. OUT OF PRINT. Ultra-rare; was never in stores. V. Vale (conceptual book designer) will autograph upon request; email info@researchpubs.com .

Mark Pauline - Founder of machine-mangling Survival Research Laboratories recounts giant billboard "improvements" done in his misspent youth.

Karen Finley - Provocative performance artist: sex, food, death, and butt hairs...

Joe Coleman - New York madman crashes parties with explosives wired to chest... You guess the rest!

Boyd Rice - Presents the First Lady of the United States, Betty Ford, with a skinned sheep's head on a silver platter!

Frank Discussion - Intense leader of seminal punk band Feederz throws dead dog into audience... causes big stink!

RIotously funny. Shocking. Exhilarating. A critique of authoritarian language, society, and robotic behavior. This video will dazzle the brain and inspire the imagination. Directed by Leslie Asako Gladsjo.

A master of technique, Woodruff combines the genres of landscape, portraiture, allegory, still life, and illustration with iconographic elements from posters, theatrical sets, advertising, tattoos, heraldry, carnival banners, and antiquarian books to create 32 unforgettable characters. Woodruff’s FREAK PARADE participants Miss Giggles, Anatomy Boy, and Poor Mr. P (among others), join the fantastic pantheon of characters created by artists such as Bosch, Bruegel, and Ensor. At once thought-provoking, marvelous, and terrifying, FREAK PARADE is a carnevalesque tour-de-force not to be missed.

Descriptions of Thomas Woodruff often mention the artist’s penchant for tattoos – he had worked as a tattooist in the 1980s – and that is cited to have influenced much of his work. Discussions of his work also focus upon Woodruff’s iconography and technique; he has been labeled “Neo- Victorian,” “Edwardian”, and a “Neo-Fabulist.” The New York Times art critic William Zimmer wrote, “Woodruff takes his primary cue from illustrators of the Edwardian era… animals wear clothes, and the action takes place in a lustrous atmosphere… the painting is both disturbing and sweet.”

A master of technique, Woodruff combines the genres of landscape, portraiture, allegory, still life, and illustration with iconographic elements from posters, theatrical sets, advertising, tattoos, heraldry, carnival banners, and antiquarian books to create 32 unforgettable characters. Woodruff’s FREAK PARADE participants Miss Giggles, Anatomy Boy, and Poor Mr. P (among others), join the fantastic pantheon of characters created by artists such as Bosch, Bruegel, and Ensor. At once thought-provoking, marvelous, and terrifying, FREAK PARADE is a carnevalesque tour-de-force not to be missed.

Descriptions of Thomas Woodruff often mention the artist’s penchant for tattoos – he had worked as a tattooist in the 1980s – and that is cited to have influenced much of his work. Discussions of his work also focus upon Woodruff’s iconography and technique; he has been labeled “Neo- Victorian,” “Edwardian”, and a “Neo-Fabulist.” The New York Times art critic William Zimmer wrote, “Woodruff takes his primary cue from illustrators of the Edwardian era… animals wear clothes, and the action takes place in a lustrous atmosphere… the painting is both disturbing and sweet.” OVERSIZE HARDBACK.

The 2 PRANKS books always make a great gift for friends! Order now! 1001 ways to have fun.

The original PRANKS book featured in-depth interviews with Abbie Hoffman, John Waters, Mark Pauline, Joe Coleman, Bruce Conner and many more. This limited edition HARDBACK edition (only 500 copies made) is printed on Superior Glossy Art Paper -- supersedes all previous editions for sale on Internet -- for sharper photo reproduction. Pranks 2 continues the conversation (on Superior Glossy Art Paper), also adding six essays on pranks by V. Vale, and a section on Internet pranks with interviews with the redoubtable Frank Discussion, and culture-hackers like Marc Powell. Other interviews include John Waters, Ron English, Jello Biafra, monochrom, SRL's Karen Marcelo, John Law, and the Suicide Club, Cacophony Society, Billboard Liberation Front, Paul Krassner, Julia Solis, and more.

In 2009 the four original members united to do a worldwide reunion tour. In this "ValuPak" RE/Search puts together four books containing interviews either with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge or the entire band. The breadth and depth of their "industrial cultural readout on our terminal civilization" still reads as avant-garde today, if not positively prophetic. Included in this Special Offer are R/S #4/5 (not many copies left), the **hardbound** Industrial Culture Handbook ($60 on amazon), Modern Pagans, and Modern Primitives - a hundred-twenty-five-dollar value for just ninety dollars. Also included is a special 11x17" folded reprint of the TG interviews in SEARCH & DESTROY #6 (1978) and RE/SEARCH #1 (1980) tabloids. For TG lovers & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge fans!

All (or most) of the words from Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P-Orridge, Sleazy, Chris & Cosey - one hundred twenty-five dollars' worth of RE/SEARCH & SEARCH & DESTROY for just ninety dollars. Includes RE/Search #4/5 printed on Superior Glossy Art Paper, RE/Search #6/7 Industrial Culture deluxe HARDBOUND, Modern Primitives signed by Charles Gatewood & V. Vale, Modern Pagans, and the TG interviews from Search & Destroy #6 (1978) and RE/Search #1 (1980) tabloids (these are special 11x17" reprints, folded in center). The hardbound is a limited edition printed on Superior Glossy Art Paper for sharper photographic impact.

"Hey Vale,
Thanks a lot for the signed copy of the Burroughs/ThrobbingGristle/Brion Gysin book. (AND the poster!!!) It came in the mail during my 1st week in the fear-occupied States." - Graham Rae

(forty dollars), plus a copy of ZINES Vol. One (nineteen dollars) and ZINES Vol. Two (fifteen dollars). Your price just sixty dollars (save fifty dollars). Editor V. Vale will sign one book UPON REQUEST. "Search & Destroy" tabloids cannot be found in any store (that we know of).

"Punk 77" features interviews with original "Punks" talking about rebellion, creativity, and survival, plus photographs by James Stark who was there for the very beginnings of the San Francisco movement. Also contains photos from the last Sex Pistols concert at Winterland; when Blondie first played the Mabuhay Gardens; and other memorable nights.

RE/Search founder V. Vale is the ONLY independent U.S. publisher to publish FOUR books by J.G. Ballard: The Atrocity Exhibition; J.G. Ballard Conversations; J.G. Ballard QUOTES. Also included is Search & Destroy #10 w/JGBallard interview (& WSBurroughs intv, too) plus an 11x17" xerox of a JGBallard 2-page piece in the rare RE/Search #1 tabloid. (Sorry but this ValuPak does NOT include "RE/SEARCH #8/9: J.G. Ballard. Why? Because we're down to our last few copies! You would have to order this one SEPARATELY.) Newest addition: a 4"x6" color photographic analogue (not digital) print of J.G. Ballard in his home, taken by V. Vale in 1986!

Details:

The Atrocity Exhibition - A large-format, illustrated edition, Atrocity Exhibition is widely regarded as Ballard's finest, most complex work. Withdrawn by E.P. Dutton after having been shredded by Doubleday, this outrageous work was finally in a small edition by Grove before lapsing out-of-print. with four additional fiction pieces, extensive annotations (a book in themselves). Includes notes on the original writings by Ballard himself and beautiful illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner, plus haunting infrared photographs by Ana Barrado.

(No longer included, sorry!: RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard - A comprehensive special on this supremely relevant writer, now famous for Empire of the Sun and Crash. This strikingly illustrated volume contains interviews and a wealth of rare selections from every aspect of Ballard's career.)

J.G. Ballard: Quotes - The musician Nick Cave once said that he keeps this book on his bedside table. 'Sex times Technology equals The Future,' proposed J.G. Ballard in 1972. For those who can't wait: be forewarned: the future never comes. With its promise of arousal and endlessly deferred climax, the formula is echoed repeatedly in today's world of advertising. J.G. Ballard not only was the first primary writer to deal with ecological catastrophes (in his first four novels), but also the first to recognize the significance of celebrity and psychopathology in the future media-inundated landscape. He psychoanalyzed the ulterior significance of the car crash in his book CRASH, and mapped out Inner Space as the primary cultural territory of the future -- as he signaled the Death of the Space Age.

J.G. Ballard Quotes - In today's dense communications environment, where the average New Yorker experiences 14,000 branding messages each day one needs to continually make sense of a bafflingly complex, constantly changing environment. Brief, succinct quotes can quickly produce clarity amid moral murkiness--like a torch illuminating a dark forest ahead.

This book is especially aimed at all who have to work for a living. It is our hope that many a commute may be mollified by this quotations book, which is easy to carry and use--just one minute at a bus stop may yield an inspiration sufficient to set one's imagination reeling.

J.G. Ballard CONVERSATIONS: in these collected dialogues, Ballard proves himself to be among the most prophetic visionaries of the 21st century. His advice RE the long-term economic downturn we're immersed in: "I remain optimistic!"

Search & Destroy #10: tabloid has an interview with J.G. Ballard PLUS an interview with William S. Burroughs, available nowhere else. Impossible to find in a store.
Again, a 4x6" color analogue (not digital) photographic print of J.G. Ballard taken at his home by V. Vale. Signed by V. Vale.

Burning Man aficionados will get the additional satisfaction of knowing these books are in VERY FEW bookstores -- they're hard to find...

Burning Man Live ValuPak - 3 Books for $45! Burning Man Live, Modern Pagans, and Modern Primitives. $70 value for $45 - save $25!

Henry Rollins, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jello Biafra and Billy Childish discuss in depth the state of western culture today and what led to its demise, including firsthand accounts of their own experiences as leading figures in social movements. Subjects discussed include: the Internet and social change; the necessity for everybody to paint (!); mind control, marketing, branding and consumerism; Beat history and the importance of inexpensive publishing--City Lights was the FIRST paperback-only bookstore in America; corporate chain stores and Amazon's impact on independent freedom of expression; Punk Rock history and the rise of Do-It-Yourself (D-I-Y) culture production; fame and its downside; sex, relationships and their travails; "originality" as fetish; travel advice . . . and much more discussion of issues relevant to every creative artist and thinker. Excerpts of interviews of: Henry Rollins Lawrence Ferlinghetti Billy Childish Jello Biafra Who is Henry Rollins? Lawrence Ferlinghetti? Billy Childish? Jello Biafra?

Review:

"How do Rollins, Biafra, Ferlinghetti and Childish remain independent in a corporate world?" That's the question posed on the back cover or RE/Search's Real Conversations #1. This question of "independence" from corporate entanglement within the world of media and the arts interests me, and it should interest you too.

A couple of weeks ago on the Bad Subjects editors' list we had had a similar discussion related to profit-minded self-promotion vs. a more politically-minded ideological promotion (I am certainly reducing each of the arguments). Anyway, the point being -- in a world dominated by commodities and their accompanying desires, does one get out a message critical of the largely corporate communications infrastructure necessary to get out a message? I don't know if Real Conversations' interviews provide either an answer to my and V. Vale's question.

In order to find out what it means to strike the right balance, Vale interviews a logical cast of countercultural entrepreneurs and artists: singer/actor/publisher Henry Rollins; former Dead Kennedys frontman, political pundit and Alternative Tentacles Records proprietor, Jello Biafra; City Lights Books publisher and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and the perennially youthful garage punk intellectual Billy Childish. The topic of self-promotion and ideological work is one of the more compelling segments of the Rollins interview. For instance, Rollins admits that his company and web site (2.13.61.com) promotes only his material; Rollins is pretty straightforward that it's a matter of what the market will bear. Is this shameless self-promotion? Or just getting out the message?

Vale illustrates how Rollins uses both. Rollins recognizes that American culture, especially entertainment, is all about being pleasured. The consumer expects it and the artist, if s/he hopes to have a lasting career, must provide it. Rollins does voice-overs for Merrill Lynch, GMC Truck and so on. He uses corporate gigs for self-promotion and has his own "Think Different" Apple Computers ad. Depending on one's attitudes toward corporate America you could even call him shameless. Rollins does take the money, too; it's not just self-promotion.

However, the former Black Flag singer clearly understands his place in the "system" and the necessity of articulating an alternate vision free of the imperial reach of corporate globalization. Rollins is clear in his distastes for the banal mediocrity of "American" corporate culture; I'll let you read the issue for his insights into MTV and such. Rollins, simply, is not naive about political economy. But he's not adverse to taking advantage of the system either. Indeed, it was almost impossible to avoid Rollins on MTV during the mid-1990s; nor is it unreasonable to expect to see the former Henry Garfield giving spoken word performances in 'politically incorrect' countries such as Israel.

What I found most interesting and least developed was an aside by Ferlinghetti that Vale opted to include. The two had just completed an exchange about the recent corporate troubles at the Bay Area's "progressive" radio station KPFA; Vale sums up the argument: "Well, it's also taking away the autonomy and independence of the local station, whose character is formed by its neighborhood. KPFA sprang out of Berkeley, and Berkeley is a radical hotbed"; Ferlinghetti replies, "It WAS." Then Vale springs a question about Ferlinghetti's travel habits. At that moment, the silence that followed Ferlinghetti's disavowal of Berkeley's radicalness was profound.

I regretted not being able to read Ferlinghetti's analysis of the demise of Berkeley, and presumably, the Bay Area left. I have lived up here for five years and am often amazed at how quickly people admire the liberal nature of this area. So, I may have my own personal investment in this issue. But, with the brave exception of Representative Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) the elected face of the liberal left of Northern California have all rallied, and pretty uncritically, around the domestic and international war against all that is not white and corporate, oops, I mean the War on Terror -- catch it tonight on CNN. Ferlinghetti's pre-September 11th insights on the weakened state of the left would have been useful. Regardless of all that, the interview is pretty good. As is the entire volume... [RE/Search is] an "independently" produced book series that remains interesting after nearly a generation's worth of remarkably influential editions. -- Robert Soza (Bad Subjects)

2009 marks the 20th Anniversary Celebration of MODERN PRIMITIVES – a book which launched “a Revolution”…and introduced the world to Body Piercing. With brand new 2009 interview with Raelyn Gallina, (the "grandmother" of the body modification movement), plus tattoo/piercing community sponsorship pages in the back. Limited Edition Deluxe Hardback on Glossy Art Paper for sharper photography. Replace your old copy and upgrade as well! HB $50, or get the economical paperback for $25