Pranks, Punk and Industrial Culture from V. Vale

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 Withdrawn by E.P. Dutton after having been shredded by Doubleday, this outrageous work was finally in a small edition by Grove before lapsing out-of-print.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.

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

"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

"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.

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

"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

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)

* 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

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

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

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.

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)

"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

"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.

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.

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

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."