With the appearance of the demonic Christmas character Krampus in contemporary Hollywood movies, television shows, advertisements, and greeting cards, medieval folklore has now been revisited in American culture. Krampus-related events and parades occur both in North America and Europe, and they are an ever-growing phenomenon.
Though the Krampus figure has once again become iconic, not much can be found about its history and meaning, thus calling for a book like Al Ridenour's The Krampus: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil. With Krampus's wild, graphic history, Feral House has hired the awarded designer Sean Tejaratchi to take on Ridenour's book about this ever-so-curious figure.
Al Ridenour has lectured on Krampus at the Goethe Institutes in Los Angeles. He became somewhat of an internet phenomenon himself due to the hilarious hijinks he coordinated with the controversial Cacophony Societies.
Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY) will be remembered for its crucial influence on youth culture throughout the 1980s, popularizing tattooing, body piercing, acid house raves, and other ahead-of-the-curve cultic flirtations and investigations. Its leader was Genesis P-Orridge, co-founder of Psychick TV and Throbbing Gristle, the band that created the industrial music genre.
The limited signed cloth edition of Thee Psychick Bible quickly sold out, creating demand for any edition of this 544-page book, which will be available in a handsome smyth-sewn paperback edition with flaps and ribbon. According to author Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, this is the most profound new manual on practical magick, taking it from its Crowleyan empowerment of the Individual to a next level of realization to evolve our species.
American Hardcore sets the record straight about the last great American subculture--Paper magazine
Steven Blush's definitive treatment of Hardcore Punk (Los Angeles Times) changed the way we look at Punk Rock. The Sony Picture Classics-distributed documentary American Hardcore premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. This revised and expanded second edition contains hundreds of new bands, thirty new interviews, flyers, a new chapter (Destroy Babylon), and a new art gallery with over 125 rare photos and images.
Just Kids for the grunge era.
Seattle band, The Gits and their charismatic front person Mia Zapata were on the verge of international rock stardom but on July 7, 1993, days before their third US tour, Mia Zapata, The Gits 27-year-old singer-songwriter, was brutally assaulted and murdered by a stranger. Zapata's death sent chilling ripples through progressive communities throughout the United States. She became a cause-celebre for women's rights activists outraged by the brutal killing and lack of law enforcement support. This book reclaims Zapata's story to focus on the art she and The Gits created and not her tragic end.
Much has been written and said about her murder, yet Zapata's life and work remain overshadowed by the circumstances of her death. Zapata's friend and bandmate, Steve Moriarty, tells her story--and the story of their band, The Gits--from their first meeting in 1985 to their last goodbye.
Moriarity and Zapata met in 1985 as first-year students at Antioch College, where they discovered the power of punk rock and found an outlet for their progressive ideas through music. Zapata, Moriarity, and fellow students Matt Dresdner and Andy Kessler attended a show by San Francisco punk legends Dead Kennedys that inspired the friends to start a band fueled by Mia's provocative lyrics. They quickly gained critical praise and dedicated fans.
Moriarty details their struggles as newcomers to the then-pre-tech outpost of the Seattle music scene. Interspersed are the tales Zapata told of her legendary ancestor, Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, to entertain the band as they spen't countless hours on the road crammed into a single un-air-conditioned van touring the US and Europe. They shared stages with Beck, Nirvana, Mudhoney, Joan Jett, Bikini Kill, L7, and more--all who expected Mia and The Gits to be the next big thing.
The Gits's story is more than a biography; it's a testament to the ability of artists and musicians to challenge the status quo and the power of friendship to change the world. Moriarty reframes the sensationalist story as he shares his personal narrative and presents, with intimacy, grit, and humor, the lived experience of The Gits and his dear friend, Mia Zapata.
Included are never before seen paintings, letters, and pictures.
Welcome to Liartown! A place where reality is skewered with a hilarious combination of comedic genius and graphic design wizardry. There's an Apple Cabin Foods on every corner, and your favorite Corduroy Porn mags are always in stock. Liartown is a convulsively funny compendium of Sean Tejaratchi's brilliant takedowns of popular culture and societal trends.
For the past four years, Tejeratchi's Liartown USA blog has delighted thousands of online visitors with each new slice of satirical visual commentary. With a selection of the best posts and otherwise unseen material collected into a glossy, full-color trade paperback, readers can now immerse themselves in an alternate world where blockbusters and bestsellers include Banjo the Man-Faced Dog and the Captain James Feelings' Nautical Romance novels.
Working with a stunning array of source material, Tejaratchi creates clever, uproariously detailed visuals and descriptions of book and magazine covers, films and TV shows, celebrities and historical images that at first glance would pass for the real thing. Upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that The Hardy Boys Lose Their S*** was never on the shelf at the local library, and the British crime drama Inspector Cliffchap didn't have a time slot on the BBC.
Contrary to general belief, there is no federal law against growing P. somniferum.--Martha Stewart Living
Regarded as 'God's own medicine, ' preparations of opium were as common in the Victorian medicine cabinet as aspirin is in ours. As late as 1915, pamphlets issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture were still mentioning opium poppies as a good cash crop for northern farmers. Well into this century, Russian, Greek, and Arab immigrants in America have used poppy-head tea as a mild sedative and a remedy for headaches, muscle pain, cough, and diarrhea. During the Civil War, gardeners in the South were encouraged to plant opium for the war effort, in order to ensure a supply of painkillers for the Confederate Army. What Hogshire has done is to excavate this vernacular knowledge and then publish it to the world--in how-to form, with recipes.-- Michael Pollan
First published fifteen years ago, Opium for the Masses instantly became a national phenomenon. Michael Pollan wrote a lengthy feature (Opium, made easy) about Jim Hogshire in Harper's Magazine, amazed that the common plant, P. somniferum, or opium poppies, which grows wild in many states and is available at crafts and hobby stores and nurseries, could also be made into a drinkable tea that acts in a way similar to codeine or Vicodin.
With Opium for the Masses as their guide, Americans can learn how to supplement their own medicine chest with natural and legal pain medicine, without costly and difficult trips to the doctor and pharmacy.
The proximity of the East L.A. barrio to Hollywood is as close as a short drive on the 101 freeway, but the cultural divide is enormous. Born to Mexican-born and American-naturalized parents, Alicia Armendariz migrated a few miles west to participate in the free-range birth of the 1970s punk movement. Alicia adopted the punk name Alice Bag, and became lead singer for The Bags, early punk visionaries who starred in Penelope Spheeris' documentary The Decline of Western Civilization.
Here is a life of many crossed boundaries, from East L.A.'s musica ranchera to Hollywood's punk rock; from a violent male-dominated family to female-dominated transgressive rock bands. Alice's feminist sympathies can be understood by the name of her satiric all-girl early Goth band Castration Squad.
Violence Girl takes us from a violent upbringing to an aggressive punk sensibility; this time a difficult coming-of-age memoir culminates with a satisfying conclusion, complete with a happy marriage and children. Nearly a hundred excellent photographs energize the text in remarkable ways.
Alice Bag's work and influence can be seen this year in the traveling Smithsonian exhibition American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music.
Aleister Crowley is best known today as a founding father of modern occultism. His wide, hypnotic eyes peer at us from the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his influence can be found everywhere in popular culture.
Crowley, also known as the Great Beast, has been the subject of several biographies, some painting him as a misunderstood genius, others as a manipulative charlatan. None of them have looked seriously at his career as an agent of British Intelligence.
Using documents gleaned from British, American, French, and Italian archives, Secret Agent 666 sensationally reveals that Crowley played a major role in the sinking of the Lusitania, a plot to overthrow the government of Spain, the thwarting of Irish and Indian nationalist conspiracies, and the 1941 flight of Rudolf Hess.
Author Richard B. Spence argues that Crowley--in his own unconventional way--was a patriotic Englishman who endured years of public vilification in part to mask his role as a secret agent.
The verification of the Great Beast's participation in the twentieth century's most astounding government plots will likely blow the minds of history buff s and occult aficionados alike.
Author Richard B. Spence can be seen on various documentaries on the History Channel and is a consultant for Washington, DC's International Spy Museum. He is also the author of Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Feral House).
The strange and gruesome crime-scene snapshot collection of LAPD detective Jack Huddleston spans Southern California in its noir heyday. Death Scenes is the noted forerunner of several copycat titles.
In this sequel to Joseph P. Farrell's Babylon's Banksters, the banksters have moved from Mesopotamia via Rome to Venice. There, they have manipulated popes and bullion prices, clipped coins, sacked Constantinople, destroyed rival Florence, waged war, burned heretics, and suppressed hidden secrets threatening their financial supremacy . . . until Giordano Bruno and Christopher Columbus broke the banking cartel's control of information and bullion.
We might wonder--with some justification--how an excursion into such magical mediaeval matters could possibly shed light on the contemporary debate on finance, commerce, credit, and debt taking place around the world.
As will be seen in these pages, the modern global economy, with its bonds, annuities, bills of exchange, alchemical paper fiat money, bullion, wage-slavery, national debts, private central banking, stock brokerages, and commodities exchanges, in a sense began in the Middle Ages, for all these institutions began for quite perceptible and specific reasons during that time.
The centerpiece in this debate is of course money: what, and who, does it really represent? And how did it manage to begin as a purely metaphysical phenomenon, with deep ties to a cosmological and indeed topological and alchemical metaphor of the physical medium, thence to transmute itself into the conception that money is bullion, and thence once again to transmute itself back into a purely metaphysical construct of credit and debt denominated on tokens of paper?
Read it and you will never think of civilization in the same way again.--Kirkpatrick Sale
This anthology about the pathology of civilization offers insight into how progress and technology have led to emptiness and alienation.
You Can't Win, the beloved memoir of real lowdown Americana by criminal hobo Jack Black, was first published in 1926, then reprinted in 1988 by Adam Parfrey's Amok Press, featuring an introduction by William S. Burroughs.
After its Amok Press edition went out of print, You Can't Win found popularity once again with the AK Press edition.
Feral House's new version will take this classic American narrative a lot further, including two remarkable nonfiction articles by Jack Black written for Harper's Magazine in the 1920s. Remarkable illustrations by Joe Coleman and new biographical revelations by Donald Kennison will round out the new edition.
A full-length feature film of You Can't Win starring Boardwalk Empire's Michael Pitt is expected to be released in spring 2013.
Apocalypse Culture is compulsory reading for all those concerned with the crisis of our times. An extraordinary collection unlike anything I have ever encountered. These are the terminal documents of the twentieth century.--J.G. Ballard
Harley Flanagan provides a fascinating memoir: a homeless child prodigy and family friend of Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg, at a young age he became close to many stars of the early punk rock scene like Joe Strummer of The Clash and was taught to play bass by members of the famed black punk band Bad Brains. He went on to start the notorious hardcore band Cro-Mags.
From the memoir's introduction by American Hardcore's Steven Blush: Harley Flanagan is not like you or me. Most of us grew up in relative safety and security. Harley came up like a feral animal, fending for himself in the '70s Lower East Side jungle of crime, drugs, abuse and poverty. By age 10 he was a downtown star at Max's Kansas City and CBGB, drumming in his aunt's punk band The Stimulators, and socializing with Blondie's Debbie Harry and Cleveland's Dead Boys. Everyone thought it was so cute, but it wasn't.
Currently an instructor for the famed Renzo Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, Harley was never shy: making friends with important figures like Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, defending himself in street battles, and, most recently, finding media play and court battles after former band members betrayed their one-time friend and bandmate.
The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is the first contemporary biography of a notorious actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin during the 1920s.
In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber's celebrations of Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy were condemned and censored. She often haunted Weimar Berlin's hotel lobbies, nightclubs and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine. Multi-talented Anita saw no boundaries between her personal life and her taboo-shattering performances. As such, she was Europe's first postmodern woman.
Among those Anita Berber claimed as members of her vast sexual harem were Marlene Dietrich, Magnus Hirschfeld (the founder of modern sexology and gay liberation), Klaus Mann, Conrad Veidt, Lawrence Durrell, and the King of Yugoslavia. Berber acted in Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and starred in the silent epic, Lucifer. Even Leni Riefenstahl credits Berber for inspiring her controversial career. After sated Berliners finally tired of Anita Berber's libidinous antics, she became a carrion soul that even the hyenas ignored, dying in 1928 at the age of 29.
The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber chronicles a remarkable career, including over 150 photographs and drawings that recreate Anita's enduring Repertoire of the Damned.
Hit Girls is the story of local and regional bands whose legacy would be otherwise lost. Despite the modern narrative labeling women as anomalies in rock music, the truth is: women played important roles in punk and its related genres in every city, in every scene, all over the United States. The women and bands profiled by Jen B. share their experiences of sexism and racism as well as their joy and successes from their days on stage as they changed what it meant to be in a band. These pioneering women were more than novelty acts or pretty faces--they were fully contributing members and leaders of mixed-gender and all-female bands long before the call for girls to the front.
The women of Hit Girls are now rightfully exalted to cult status where their collective achievement is recognized and inspiring to new generations of women rockers. Included are interviews with: Texacala Jones, Stoney Rivera, Mish Bondaj, Alice Bag, Nikki Corvette, Penelope Houston, and many more formidable and infamous women who made their voices heard over the screaming guitars.
Hit Girls includes over 100 rare and never-before seen images. Author Jen B. includes a comprehensive playlist of all the artists.