Pranks, Punk and Industrial Culture from V. Vale

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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)

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...

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.