Pranks, Punk and Industrial Culture from V. Vale

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.

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.

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.

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

Only 500 hardbacks & 1000 paperbacks printed for this edition, on better glossy art paper for sharper photographic reproduction.

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 excerpt

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)

Rare Signed Limited Hardback now seven hundred dollars on Internet; ours only $200. (We still have the $20 paperback.)

Also see Signed Hardback edition for 200.00 under "special release" below! 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-Eport 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

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 magazine 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

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

EACH $7 (#3, #8, #9 only available with complete set). Incomplete set of 8 issues is $39 special! These are original tabloids carefully archived from 1977-79 (#10 is a reprint from 1987; it has our first interviews w/William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard).

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

Some excerpts from Roky Erickson intv in SEARCH & DESTROY #7:

"I go for the more evil side of things. I don't really like anything unless it is evil. I go in for nightmare comics and things like that.

"I like to go to old buildings that have caved in, in the darkest part of Dallas at midnight and read about people injecting printer's ink into people's veins, and someone cutting off a man's hand because he wanted his ring and then the hand kills him in jail while he's asleep.

"I exist off things like that, but I shouldn't force people to print that kind of periodical just for me! It's kind of mean to make them keep printing it and have it come to my doorstep, because I know I'm the only person that reads it. I guess I'd have to be, because they're the ones with the cut off hands and the blood spurting out the little arteries in their wrists after they're cut off, and that gets real scary."

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)

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

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, Dammed, 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 115 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 todays 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. In New York, it seemed like everybody who liked punk in 1977 was either Jewish or Gay (or both) and from this book, San Francisco was pretty much the same deal.

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 these books; 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

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.

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

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

Excerpts:

* Nasal Hygiene (Survey) * Vomit: People, Places, and Puking (Survey)

Table of Contents

Reviews:

"Like previous RE/Search volumes (Incredibly Strange Music and Incredibly Strange Films, for instance), the book is both entertaining and informative. There is really no other place to find information on excreta in medicine and a biography of Thomas Crapper under the same cover with data from surveys of various personal excretory habits and a brief life of Joseph Pujol, the "Fartiste." Booklist

"This is an important work that shouldn't be ignored, packed with fascinating facts on excreta." Loaded Magazine

" . . .a fitting edition to the RE/Search catalog . . . " The American Music Press

* 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

"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

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

"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

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

* 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

* Thorn * Anne Hill * Diane di Prima * Charles Gatewood * Darryl Cherney * Jeff Rosenbaum * Starhawk * Diana L. Paxson * Jack Davis * Morning Glory * Joi Wolfwomyn * Don Frew * Madrone * Laurie Lovekraft * Carol Queen

Table of Contents

Review:

This book is a compilation of about 50 interviews with exponents of modern day paganism, mainly drawn from the US and Canada, with some British contributors as well.

The people interviewed are a very interesting collection, and the book covers a wide range of pagan practices from witchcraft, Northern tradition, santeria, shamanism, Druids, Goddess worshippers and more. Please note that this book does not cover santanism/devil worship as that is considered to be an offshoot of Christianity and nothing to do with us, guv'nor. Honest. The interviewees are also a heterogeneous bunch and the book covers important topics such as child-raising, living arrangements, sexuality (lots of that!), music, and bereavement as well as the more "spiritual" side of paganism.

For those familiar with some of the New Age types who came from radical backgrounds but who dropped out once they got their gurus, this book is a refreshing change. The political engagement here is widespread. These people are in the thick of things, including anti-nuclear action, sexual politics (and do read up on the Radical Faeries--they make the old GLF look very tame!), anti-capitalist / anti-globalist activism, environmental action and so forth.

Unsurprisingly, given the emphasis on taking personal responsibility for one's life, many of the people in this book are upfront anarchists. And their sense of commitment in terms of living their beliefs puts many more traditional anarchists to shame.

Now, as an atheist who remains unconvinced of the literal existence of any supernatural forces, I find this book presents something of a challenge. Admittedly, there is a recognition by many of the people that paganism has a spectrum of opinion on such things--from those who really believe that the ancient gods and goddesses (no patriarchal monotheism here!) exist and that we can communicate in a meaningful way with them, to those who are animist, seeing the divine in the everyday, in rocks, water, animals, and all creation to those who view such creations as simply human ways of visualizing natural forces.This latter anthropomorphic personification of natural forces (do read Terry Prachett--very popular with pagans apparently) seems endemic to religions inasmuch as humans relate best to other humans, and therefore any "supernatural" forces need to be couched, in some way, in some human terms, for us to get a handle on them.

The problem, as I see it, is that some people then treat these human creations as things in themselves (reification) which, given they are related to powers beyond direct human control, come to have power over people. Which gives rise to priests who try and "interpret" the god/s for their own benefit.

Against this, pagans tend (and one has to issue the usual caveat about generalizing here) to emphasize individual responsibility. Starhawk (wonderful woman by all accounts) also differentiates here between "power over," "power with," and "power from within" so that one should not seek power over others (or allow others to have power over oneself) but have power collectively and within oneself. Essentially, anarchism boiled down to its roots. But then that's hardly surprising, given that Starhawk is very politically aware and active (she issued quite a few excellent anti-war missives and musing in the build-up to the war on Iraq). Other activists are also represented including Darryl Cherney, who was bombed with Judi Bari in 1990 whilst the two of them were heavily involved in environmental/labour activism in the US.

So many of the personal stories are empowering and uplifting that it is very tempting to think that maybe there's something to all this. But from my perspective, the ideology/religion of paganism is merely the binding and veneer which allows these people to live lives less ordinary and to identify and bond with kindred spirits. That said, it's a relatively benign form of religion which--if you're into environmental activism, radical politics, good sex and cool TV--could well be just what you're looking for.

The book comes with several comprehensive bibliographies and filmographies, allowing you to delve deeper into the subject.

by Richard Alexander, Fortean Times

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 proud to say I knew the man who wrote this book. Willeford writes with quiet authority, has the ability to make his situations, scenes, dialogue, sound absolutely real." -Elmore Leonard

"The prose is clean and tough and flows easily." -The New York Times Book Review

"A tempo so relentless, words practically fly off the pages." -The Village Voice

"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.

"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

"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

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

Perrey himself describes the record as an "Electro-Pop-Easy-Listening-Music Record." The record was designed to delight the child in each of us and Perrey asserts his music "humoristic" and is designed to generate happiness which he believes is of the utmost important "in a very difficult period of the Earth age."

The album features 14 new tracks including Elephants Wedding March, La Funamble De L'Espace, and the Girl from Mill Valley. An introductory track by Cut Chemist, a huge fan of Perrey, is included. According to music historian Mickey McGowan, Circus of Life is, " a time machine sauntering back and forth twixt the roaring twenties and 2020 A.D., a menagerie of the old west, the Russian ballet, a pet shop at feeding time and rave at the dessert oasis."

Born in 1929, Jean Jacques Perrey is a native of France currently residing in Evian. His first introduction to music was at the age of four, when he received an accordion for Christmas. JJ taught himself music by ear. While studying medicine in France, he met George Jenny, the inventor of the Ondioline, and his life was changed forever. Perrey quit medical school-composer Charles Trenet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, and his unique style of electronic music gained the attention of Jean Cocteau, Edith Piaf, Robert Moog and even Walt Disney.

Perrey's releases include Musique Electronique du Cosmos (1961) The In Sound from Way Out, Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, The Amazing New Electronic Pop Sound, and Moog Indigo. Perrey's track "Baroque Howdown" was selected as the theme for the "Main Street Electrical Parade" at Disneyland (US, Japan and Euro) and Disney World and he created other well-known tracks including "Flight of the Bumble Bee" with live bees and the DJ floor-filling classic "E.V.A.'"

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)

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

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)

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.

Published in 2008 by Hardy Marks Publications. 11 ¼ by 15. 110 pages in full color.

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.”

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.

In English and Japanese. Published in 2008 by Hardy Marks Publications. 11 x 8 1/2, Hard Cover, 191 pages. Full color photographs.

This edition was published in 2005 by Hardy Marks Publications. 8 ½ x 11. Hard cover, 96 pages.

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 high-quality glossy paper for sharper photo reproduction. Pranks 2 is AUTOGRAPHED BY THE YES MEN (their film recently was released, to rave reviews) and it continues the conversation, also adding six essays on pranks by V. Vale, and a section on Internet pranks with interviews with the redoubtable Frank Discussion and Marc Powell. Other interviews include Jello Biafra, monochrom, SRL's Karen Marcelo, John Law, and the Suicide Club, Cacophony Society, Billboard Liberation Front, Paul Krassner, Julia Solis, and more.

All (or most) of the words from Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P-Orridge, Sleazy, Chris & Cosey - one hundred forty dollars' worth of RE/SEARCH & SEARCH & DESTROY for just ninety dollars. Includes RE/Search #4/5 deluxe hardbound, RE/Search #6/7 Industrial Culture deluxe hardbound, Modern Primitives, 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 hardbounds are limited editions printed on more expensive glossy art photo paper for sharper photography.

Cassette: Incredibly Strange Music, Vol 1. CD: Jean Jacques Perrey's Circus of Life. One CD plus 1 cassette, $25.

Jean Jacques Perrey's Circus of Life:

Bridges the gap between easy listening, psychedelia, funk, space-age electronics and singable pop melodies. Perrey himself describes the record as an "Electro-Pop-Easy-Listening-Music Record", and asserts his music "humoristic," designed to generate happiness, which he believes is of the utmost importance "in a very difficult period of the Earth Age." Intended to delight the child in each of us--entertaining, danceable, and fun! Has been played a hundred times in our household.

Incredibly Strange Music #1 cassette contains a spectrum of "classic" strange tunes which most people have never before heard. The Hypnodrome has been known to this cassette before shows -- people ask, "WHAT are we listening to?!" This is a great party recording, and wonderful to listen to in a car or truck. Many people have bought it and then burned it onto a CD. Original packaging; factory shrinkwrapped.

"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. Photos from the last Sex Pistols concert at Winterland, when Blondie first played the Mabuhay Gardens, and other memorable nights.

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.

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 longterm 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.

Burning Man Live ValuPak - 3 Books for $45! Burning Man Live, Modern Pagans, and Modern Primitives. $70 value for $45 - save $25! Read these books and be smarter and funnier than your peers, plus get the additional satisfaction of knowing these books are in VERY FEW bookstores -- they're hard to find...

A satisfied reader, via Amazon.com: "This book is unbelievable! I love it! It is great for the aspiring tattoo artist or anyone else interested in tattoo art. Each page contains full page pictures of Sailor Jerry's flash art. I highly recommend this book. It is definitely worth the money."

From the Mike Malone collection of Sailor Jerry flash, this book contains 60 pages of color flash printed full size. This edition was published in 2007 by Hardy Marks Publications. 15 x11. Paperback, 60 pages.

Published in 2004 by Hardy Marks Publications. 15 x 11. Paperback, 60 pages.

Interviews with:

Reviews:

"Fans of ambient music, acid jazz, ethno-techno, even industrial rock, will find the leap back to these genres and easy one to make." Rolling Stone

"This book will change your life." Mirabella

"Alfred Hitchcock's 'Music to Be Murdered By' is just the tip of the iceberg . . . a catalog of the wackiest discs ever made, goes where few audiophiles have ever gone." Entertainment Weekly

"A must read for those interested in freeing themselves from contemporary artistic self-consciousness." High Performance