Originally published in limited quantities in 1981, Halloween: A Fantasy in Three Acts collects photographs taken by Ken Werner at San Francisco’s adult Halloween celebrations from 1976 to 1980, assembling a visual narrative of American consciousness and popular culture as seen through lenses of queerness, black humor, and the macabre. Once touted as the “Mardi Gras of the West,” the raunchy, mostly open-air nighttime costume parties documented by Werner were hugely popular events organized primarily by LGBT and sex worker advocates, attracting tens of thousands of curious attendees as well as conservative ire from around the nation. Reissued for the first time in decades, this underground classic explores a bacchanalia worthy of the pagan and occult roots of the Halloween ritual—a magical dream/nightmare-land of terror and joy, with uninhibited celebrants reveling in stunning self-made guises that combine cartoon logic, sexual extravagance, and a highly irreverent take on American mythologies.
This artist's book is the first comprehensive monograph on sound and media artist Paul DeMarinis, born in 1948 in Cleveland, Ohio. DeMarinis has avidly followed the development of communication media, interested in discoveries being made in the realm of physical phenomena and the corresponding objects and devices that have been invented as well as in their cultural and social aspects. His works embody an aesthetic culture of invention permeated by a critical, yet humorous and poetic spirit. Buried in Noise is being published on the occasion of DeMarinis's artist fellowshipat the DAAD artists' program in Berlin. The publication compiles ocumentation on Paul DeMarinis's complete oeuvre since 1973 and the first published compendium of texts by the artist.
11.5" x 15" 160 pages Hardcover Full Color Offset Edition of 100
'By far one of the most visually striking and thought provoking books I've encountered in quite some time. Incredibly beautiful and orginal. 'The Future' has arrived and its everything we hoped for... right?' - Ross
Artist's Statement:
The Neuron Mirror is a human/AI collaborative partnership; an intensive process of inspiration, iteration, curation, finesse and judgement; a collection of images conserved while thousands of others were discarded. Yet the question continues to be asked: who or what is the artist?
Salvatore Chiarella has written that it is not technology alone that makes an artwork, but rather the totality of artistic theory, approach, and realisation. Al image generation is a Copernican revolution in the artistic field, but the technology does not replace human creativity. The spread of photography at the end of the 19th century with the advent of technology able to reproduce reality (at least as it was defined at the time), led to similar debates about its status as an art form and the possibility that it might supplant painting. The outcome, however, was photography's gradual acceptance and simultaneously the flowering of historical avant-gardes such as Impressionism, Futurism, Surrealism and Expressionism. There is every reason to anticipate similar developments in the context of art in this century.
There are other relevant implications for philosophical aesthetics, especially the discussions about the nature of creativity and authorship. The generation of art by Als calls into question the uniqueness of individual creativity and artistic imagination in an unprecedented way, questions we will elaborate on in later chapters. Al technology can be considered as an extension of human potentialities through the externalization of mental processes in the form of a distributed non-corporeal mind. Mark Coeckelbergh, however, argues that existing notions such as tool, extension, and (quasi) Other are insufficient to conceptualize the use of this technology, and proposes instead to investigate what happens as processes and performances out of which artistic subjects, objects, and roles emerge. The old categories leave in place the human/machine separation and opposition. The discussion has been about how humans and Al relate in this context, yet the focus was on the ontological and artistic status of the Al which implicitly or explicitly was compared to that of the human. He suggests turning this around, no longer taking the relationship as fixed and given, but rather bringing the relation and the process itself to the forefront of the analysis?
The process can perhaps be better viewed as 'poietic performances' involving humans and non-humans potentially leading to the emergence of new artistic (quasi)subjects and roles in the process. For example: Al image generators often introduce exquisite detail in a quite unexpected way. They also currently confuse ground and subject if the human prompter does not take extraordinary measures to avoid the ambiguity. Yet the results, which are evident in many images herein, are often stunning. This is only an 'error when conceived in terms of mirroring animal visual perception - a survival mechanism, not an artistic one. It is likely that developers will attempt to 'correct' such artefacts in subsequent versions, thereby betraying an anthropic bias towards representation within the larger project of artificial general intelligence.
The Neuron Mirror is a 3-way performance of human/Al/audience all embedded in a dynamic process which includes the role of the artist, the technology, and the viewers, philosophers and critics who ascribe meaning and value to the work, entangling the human prompter/curator and the Al into the 'Artist'. In Karen Barad's terms, what happens can be understood as dialogue, intra-action and dance between the performances of humans and the performances of Al. These are in turn embedded in extensive material and narrative contexts in which they are immanent, by which they are shaped, and to what meaning they contribute.
The final creative output may go beyond the boundaries of expectation and fulfil the requirement of and originality. These are new starting points for an artistic re-evaluation of what we mean by intelligence and creativity.
8.5" x 11" 184 pages Softcover (Two color screenprinted with flaps) Digital Press (B&W / Full Color on construction paper) Hand sewn Edition of 175
"Hands and Feet and Their Supportsrearranges dispositions and raises expectations. Tastefully rich and beautifully presented; Borruso's critical eye and thoughtful attention reaches yet another new height. This ones a keeper. Bravo!' - Ross
Description via Visible Publications:
Some fully formed, others in a state of becoming, hands and feet and their supports. Cast and recast, copied and recopied, rubber gloves, ur-feet, the feet of apes. Fragments that represent a whole, these outermost extremities can stand in for humans. The hands and feet of ancient ancestors, present selves, future monuments.
The supports extend us. Stands on stands, feet on tables, feet on shelves. A support can be ideological, structural, architectural. A support can be a matrix used to display objects in an exhibition. And sometimes supports are simply clothes on skin, or shoes on feet.
Hands and Feet and Their Supports is the result of six years of collecting and assembling images related to a show of the same name that happened in 2018 at Cloaca Projects in San Francisco. The book consists of reference images, found photographs, scans, magazine clippings, .jpgs, installation documentation, and collages organized around a strict but invisible supporting grid. The pages were printed on a digital press, and the collating, sewn binding, and screen printed covers were all done by hand one book at a time.
House Of Psychotic Women by Kier-La Janisse (Signed by Author)
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Hardcover: 10" x 8.5" Paperback: 9" x 7.5" 448 pages Published by FAB Press ISBN: 9781913051211 (Hardcover) ISBN: 9781913051341 (Paperback)
House of Psychotic Women is an autobiographical exploration of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films. Anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and examination of female madness, both onscreen and off.
Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart - 'the eccentric' - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.
Named after the U.S.-retitling of Carlos Aured's Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, House Of Psychotic Women is an examination of these characters through a daringly personal autobiographical lens.
This sharply-designed book, including a 48-page full-colour section, is packed with 680 rare stills, posters, pressbooks and artwork throughout, that combine with family photos and artifacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the obscure in equal measure. Films covered include The Entity, The Corruption of Chris Miller, Singapore Sling, 3 Women, Toys Are Not for Children, Repulsion, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Haunting of Julia, Secret Ceremony, Cutting Moments, Out of the Blue, Mademoiselle, The Piano Teacher, Possession, Antichrist and hundreds more!
The Last Slogan by Nicolas Ballet and Jean-Pierre Turmel
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8.5" x 12" 192 pages Hardcover Full Color Offset Published by Timeless Editions
Description via Timeless Editions:
This book pays tribute to one of counter-culture’s single most iconic figures of the past fifty odd years, someone who has over the course of he/r career influenced countless fellow artists and theorists. Comprised of an exclusive unpublished interview with the artist conducted by Nicolas Ballet in 2016, theoretical texts on he/r work, and archival documents from the personal collection of Jean-Pierre Turmel.
Comprised theoretical texts on he/r work, and archival documents from the personal collection of Jean-Pierre Turmel. The Last Slogan offers a completely new perspective on the work of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.The book collects multiple letters sent by Genesis to Jean-Pierre Turmel from the mid-1970s till early 1990s. These unique personal archives provide an unequaled insight into Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s life-long journey via a deeply intimate correspondence with a close friend and associate, an intellectual sparring-partner of sorts, in which the artist discusses he/r inner thoughts, strategies, doubts and plans without any of the usual control filters.
6 3/4" x 9 1/2" 144 pages Paperback B&W Published by Korm Plastics
‘America’s Greatest Noise’ tells the story of Ron Lessard, owner of RRRecords, a record store in Lowell, Massachusetts and, from 1986 to 2009, a record label, releasing the albums of Blackhouse, F/i, PGR, the first Merzbow LP outside Japan and many more, regional compilations, three widely acclaimed lock groove records and a series of anti-records, records with no music but a more conceptual and visual edge. RRRecords is also responsible for the RRRecycled Music series, which has over 300 releases on re-purposed cassettes.
Ron Lessard played music with his group Due Process and solo as Emil Beaulieau. Up until his retirement from the noise scene in 2006, he played many concerts and released a string of cassettes, LPs, and CDs. During his concerts, Lessard dressed up like a businessman and used a four-armed turntable, dubbed the Minutoli, and his performances were comical.
In this book, he tells for the first time his story in music about the highs and lows of running a label and a record store, weird projects, unfinished projects, encounters with other musicians, being on the road, and much more. Also included are two appendices: one with interviews from the past (fanzines and websites) and a chapter from Michael Tau’s ‘Extreme Music’ about the anti-records released by RRRecords.
Images used were sourced from flyers, invitations and fanzines. Introduction by Dominick Fernow (Prurient, Hospital Productions)
The first 1000 copies come with an anti-flexi, cutting up a conversation about anti-records between Ron Lessard and the author of the book, Frans de Waard. Cut up by Howard Stelzer. You may use this flexi as a bookmark.Howard Stelzer. You may use this flexi as a bookmark.
6 3/4" x 9 1/2" 425 pages Paperback B&W Published by Korm Plastics
Book containing all six issues of the Neumusik fanzine which David Elliott edited between 1979-82 while at university. The ‘zine focussed on European, electronic and experimental music which had come out of krautrock, French progressive rock and the more esoteric side of British post-punk. David travelled extensively meeting musicians in Germany and France, and for a year was based in Strasbourg. Interviews and articles range from Conrad Schnitzler and Richard Pinhas to Florian Fricke and Chris Carter. Most issues were 60-80 pages long so, together with new text and photos, this compendium weighs in at a chunky 425 pages. It also touches on the parallel YHR label.
7.5" x 10.5" 288 pages Foil Printed Softcover ISBN: 9781942801412 Published by Power Comics / Floating World Comics
The “Citizen Kane” of ‘80 outsider small press comics, published in its entirety for the first-time ever.
'The Complete Jontar' features nearly 300 pages of the full story, all-new creator interviews and never-before-released alternate issues by entirely different artists!
Male stripper by night and street sanitation worker by even later-night, Jontar finds his mulleted and naïve existence is about to seriously change after the discovery of a disappearing elf in a trashcan. When a group of blackmailing mob heavies harass his best gym buddy, Jontar intervenes only to be tragically and fatally stabbed. Before permanent death takes hold, his soul is transported to the “dream dimension” of Master Elf-Keeper, who resurrects Jontar as his chosen earthly sword-bearing avenger to lead in some of the most delightfully WTF adventures comics has ever seen.
Originally published at the height of the indie black-and-white comic boom of the ’80s, the 'Jontar' series was self-published by creator Bill W. Miller. He enlisted five separate artists over the course of nine issues to realize his wildly warped and singular vision which includes disappearing camels, petrified elves, lizard lords, Christian punk cults, and even a gritty ‘90s-style reboot rebranding the franchise with era-appropriate anti-heroes.
Foil and UV cover enhancements! Introduction by Evan Husney and Rémy Bennett of Power Comics.
7.25" x 9.75" 248 pages Softcover B&W Offset w/ Red Published by Power Comics ISBN: 9781942801320
Backflipping out of a helicopter, Floating World Comics, Power Comics, and Monster Fan Club bluntly present Ken Landgraf’s 80s masterpiece of blood soaked urban mayhem! Check your underwear before you attempt to pick up this cast-iron omnibus collecting all 5 issues, 3 broken fists full of cracked bonus material, and a new, exciting way to live your life! Can you feel the rats gnawing on your ankles?
A staggering whirlwind of vigilante chaos, the savagely inspiring New York City Outlaws heralded the ‘80s self-publishing boom. In just five issues ― here with unseen material ― writer BobHuszarand iconic cartoonist KenLandgraf (Apocalypse 5000) shredded the rules and drowned them in blood.
Printed in B&W & RED with Full Color tipped-in covers 50+ pages of backup material Introduction by Jim Rugg! KenLandgraf interview with Jason Eisner(Hobo With A Shotgun, Kids Vs. Aliens)!
8.5" x 7" 224 pages Hardcover w/ dust jacket 1991 First Edition (Factory sealed) ISBN: 0962776777 Published by Burning Books
‘What is a p’monkey?’
‘Perfect Lives: An Opera’ libretto; meticulously designed and published in 1991 by Burning Books in cooperation with Robert Ashley.
The book contains all 7 parts of the opera in addition to a preface written by book designer Melody Sumner anda 40 page section titled ‘Robert Ashley Talks About Perfect Lives’.
Through layout and typography the book offers further insight into Ashleys practice and inspirations. A companion that enhances and compliments the execution.
Revealing and eloquent; highest possible recommendation.
Lovely Music Ltd. Description:
The definitive text of Perfect Lives is accompanied here by Ashley's plot synopsis and his own candid account of the making of the opera. This is the first publication of the complete narrative of this major work of twentieth century arts and letters.
Edited and with a preface by Melody Sumner Carnahan. 8 1/2 x 7 inches, 224 pages, clothbound, smythe-sewn. Published by Burning Books with Archer Fields Press, 1991.
"Ashley calls the libretto part of a great oral tradition, and, indeed, the text is a contemporary prose poem with many levels of meaning. At times, there is a compelling beauty to Ashley's combination of words which reflects the clarity of his vision. At other times, Ashley combines sounds to suggest the rich mixture of ordinary speech that the observer might hear in any park, store, or bank. The text is suggestive of the works of Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot . . . but it is unique and distinct in form. . . . As in the works of Woolf and Joyce, the time element of Perfect Lives is illusive; story lines are taken from the context of the plot, shattered, and scattered throughout the entire opera." — James Dillon, Nit
‘We certainly have a bird’s eye view of our surroundings now, Bob’
The perfect companion piece to the SOV interview series ‘Music with Roots in the Aether’. Revealing interviews with incredibly influential musicians / artists.
6" x 9" 256 pages Paperback and Hardcover ISBN: 9781496818287 (Paperback) ISBN: 9781496810151 (Hardcover) Published by University Press of MIssissippi (2016)
After a robust career in the Netherlands as the country's most successful director, Paul Verhoeven (b. 1938) built an impressive career in the United States with such controversial blockbusters as RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, and Showgirls before returning home to direct 2006's Black Book. After a recent stint as a reality television judge in the Netherlands, Verhoeven returned to the big screen with his first feature film in a decade, a highly anticipated French-language production, Elle, starring Isabelle Huppert.
Verhoeven, who holds an advanced degree in mathematics and physics, boasts a fascinating background. Traversing Hollywood, the Dutch film industry, and now French filmmaking, the interviews in this volume reveal a complex, often ambiguous figure, as well as a director of immense talent.
Paul Verhoeven: Interviews covers every phase of the director's career, beginning with six newly translated Dutch newspaper interviews dating back to 1968 and ending with a set of previously unpublished interviews dedicated to his most recent work. He experimented with crowd-sourced filmmaking for the television show The Entertainment Experience, which resulted in the film Tricked, as well as his latest feature Elle. Editor Margaret Barton-Fumo includes "Sex, Cinema and Showgirls," a long out-of-print essay by Verhoeven on his most controversial film, accompanied by pages of original storyboards from this and some of Verhoeven's other films. Finally, Barton-Fumo allots due attention to the director's little-known lifelong fascination with the historical Jesus Christ. Verhoeven is the only non-theologian member of the exclusive Westar Institute and author of the book Jesus of Nazareth.
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6" x 9" 218 pages Paperback ISBN: 9781496828408 Published by University Press of MIssissippi (2020)
Spanning five decades and twenty-four films, director Michael Haneke’s career is one of the most significant in the history of European art cinema. However, critical reception has long lagged behind his output. By the time Haneke (b. 1942) emerged into the international spotlight as a cinematic visionary with the 1989 Cannes premiere of The Seventh Continent, he had worked in filmmaking for two decades, producing seven feature-length films.
As many of his films aired solely on Austrian and German television, they remained unknown to audiences outside the German-speaking world until 2007, when the first comprehensive Haneke retrospective took place in the United States.
Michael Haneke: Interviews presents some of Haneke’s most profound interviews to English speakers. The volume features seventeen articles, fourteen of which have been translated into English for the first time, and all of which provide a detailed, eloquent commentary on his films and worldview. This book represents the most extensive collection to date of interviews with the filmmaker, spanning his entire oeuvre—from his earliest television films to his so-called “Glaciation Trilogy” of the 1990s, from the notorious dark satire Funny Games to its similarly notorious 2007 Hollywood remake, and from his French films of the 2000s to his Oscar-winning drama, Amour, and his most recent feature, Happy End.
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6" x 9" 194 pages Paperback ISBN: 9781496827081 Published by University Press of MIssissippi (2020)
Academy Award–winning director William Friedkin (b. 1935) is best known for his critically and commercially successful films The French Connection and The Exorcist. Unlike other film school–educated filmmakers of the directors’ era, Friedkin got his start as a mailroom clerk at a local TV station and worked his way up to becoming a full-blown Hollywood filmmaker by his thirties. His rapid rise behind the camera from television director to Oscar winner came with self-confidence and unorthodox methods. Known for his gritty and auteurist style, Friedkin’s films tell the story of a changing America upended by crime, hypocrisy, the occult, and amorality. Although his subsequent films achieved varying levels of success, his cultural impact is undeniable.
William Friedkin: Interviews collects fifteen articles, interviews, and seminars spanning Friedkin’s career. He discusses early influences, early successes, awards, and current projects. The volume provides coverage of his directorial process, beliefs, and anecdotes from his time serving as the creative force of some of the biggest films of the 1970s and beyond—from his early days in Chicago to his run-ins with Alfred Hitchcock to firing guns on set and witnessing an actual exorcism in Italy. Through previously unpublished and obscure interviews and seminars, the story of William Friedkin’s work and life is woven together into a candid and concise impression for cinephiles, horror junkies, and aspiring filmmakers alike. Readers will gain insight into Friedkin’s genius from his own perspectives and discover the thoughts and processes of a true maverick of American cinema.
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6" x 9" 240 pages Paperback ISBN: 9781578062553 Published by University Press of MIssissippi (2000)
In these twenty-one interviews, filmmaker Peter Greenaway expresses his film aesthetic and discusses his combat with the dominant Hollywood style of filmmaking. His films have run unmistakably against the main current of present cinematic practice, from the short film Windows in the mid-seventies, to his more popular but nonetheless challenging films such as A Zed and Two Noughts and The Pillow Book in the nineties.
In this collection the ever-controversial Greenaway discusses his philosophies of film, art, aesthetics, literature, and reality, criticizing and even condemning the standard fare of what he calls Hollywood cinema. For him, such films tell stories or they translate literature with its linear narrative onto a medium that he feels should be preeminently visual. He finds that, instead of foregrounding the image and the composition of visual elements as in the long history of painting, Hollywood-style directors seem mesmerized by the “and then and then” narrative.
In these provocative interviews, Greenaway tells of his ambition to make cinema a medium based more on image than on narrative. He explains his painterly approach in such films as Prospero's Books and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, defends his use of total nudity of both sexes, and declares that traditional literary-based cinema is dead. He believes that the most creative imaginations, the most innovative technologies, and the greatest financial resources are being devoted to television and the Internet and that Hollywood moviemaking is no longer in the vanguard.
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6" x 9" 224 pages Paperback ISBN: 9781604732375 Published by University Press of MIssissippi (2009)
Few directors in the past three decades have produced movies more compelling, controversial, or confounding than David Lynch (b. 1946). And fewer still have been so reluctant to talk about what they do. In this collection, editor Richard A. Barney has chosen the rare interviews in which Lynch opens up to questions rather than deflecting them. Whether Lynch is talking about his earliest film shorts such as The Grandmother or the breakout surrealist feature Eraserhead, the hit TV series Twin Peaks or his Oscar-nominated The Elephant Man or Blue Velvet or his experimental tours de force, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, he stresses the power of image and sound to communicate his vision.
David Lynch: Interviews is the first survey of conversations with the director covering the broad spectrum of his artistic activities throughout his career, including filmmaking, painting, music production, and furniture design. It documents the evolution of Lynch's role in discussing his movies, from his self-described “pre-verbal stage” in the early years to his increasingly elaborate, though persistently elusive, articulations. It also registers the intense international interest in Lynch's work, with interviews from French and Spanish sources translated here for the first time.
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