Three idiosyncratically macabre cabaret-restaurants in Montmartre, each with its own grotesque portrayal of the afterworlds of Hell, Heaven, and Nothingness.
From 1892 until 1954, three cabaret-restaurants in the Montmartre district of Paris captivated tourists with their grotesque portrayals of death in the afterworlds of Hell, Heaven, and Nothingness. Each had specialized cuisines and morbid visual displays with flashes of nudity and shocking optical illusions. These cabarets were considered the most curious and widely featured amusements in the city. Entrepreneurs even hawked graphic postcards of their ironic spectacles and otherworldly interiors.
Cabarets of Death documents the dinner shows, the character interactions with guests, and the theatrical goings-on in these unique establishments. Presenting original images and drawings from contemporary journals, postcards, tourist brochures, and menus, Mel Gordon leads a tour of these idiosyncratically macabre institutions, and grants us unique access to a form of popular spectacle now gone.
120 vivid "exquisite corpse" drawings made by the outrageous artist, performer, and designer Leigh Bowery with friends and collaborators during the 1980s and 1990s.
In the wild years of the 1980s and early 1990s, when central London was a clubbers' paradise, a circle of young, queer friends, including the celebrated Australian designer, performer, musician, and provocateur Leigh Bowery and his Minty bandmates would get together at Richard Torry's Soho flat before hitting the town.
To pass the time, the troupe would sometimes make «exquisite corpses,» employing a technique popular with the Surrealists to create collaboratively-drawn compound images of often outrageous characters.
The 120 images collected here, assembled from the Richard Torry archive, showcase the acerbic wit, lysergic absurdity, and sometimes cruel gaze of the young friends, while presenting an exaggerated snapshot of the era's styles, fashions, and obsessions.
A new high quality paperback edition, reproducing in its entirety the English mystic and artist's seventy-nine-card, hand-painted tarot deck alongside contemporary essays and archival material.
A new high quality paperback edition of Lost Envoy: the Tarot Deck Of Austin Osman Spare, reproducing in its entirety this seventy-nine-card, hand-painted tarot deck created c.1906 by the English mystic and artist, alongside contemporary essays and archival material.
Austin Spare's lifelong interest in cartomancy is well documented, yet very few of his own fortune-telling cards were thought to have survived. This compelling new example of the artist's early work demonstrates his precocious involvement with the currents that shaped the British Occult Revival at the beginning of the twentieth century, and his interactions with some of the period's artistic and political protagonists including Aleister Crowley, Arthur Ivey, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Pamela Colman Smith.
Magic Circle Museum curator and artist Jonathan Allen set about tracing the deck's provenance, its place in the artist's oeuvre, and within the wider histories of cartomancy, in so doing contributing an unexpected counter narrative to the history of popular Tarot in the early twentieth century. Lost Envoy reproduces Austin Spare's tarot deck in its entirety for the first time, alongside new written and visual contributions from Jonathan Allen, Phil Baker, Helen Farley, Alan Moore, Kevin O'Neill, Sally O'Reilly, and Gavin Semple.
This new edition contains a substantial amount of new and revised material, including a major new discovery about Spare's sources for the attributions on his deck, hitherto unknown.
A forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris.
Two-Headed Doctor is a forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum of critical attention, Gris-gris has accumulated legendary status over subsequent decades for its strangeness, hybridity, and innovative production. It formed the launch pad for Dr. John's image and lengthy career and the ghostly presence of its so-called voodoo atmosphere hovers over numerous cover versions, samples, and re-invocations. Despite the respect given to the record, its making is shrouded in mystery, misunderstandings, and false conclusions. The persona of Dr. John, loosely based on dubious literary accounts of a notorious voodooist and freed slave, a nineteenth-century New Orleans resident known as Doctor John, provided Malcolm "Mac" Rebennack with a lifelong mask through which to transform himself from session musician in order to construct a solo career.
Somewhere between puzzle, experimental rhythm, blues disguised as rock, and elaborate hoax, Gris-gris was a collaborative project between Rebennack and producer/arranger Harold Battiste (at the time musical director for Sonny & Cher). A few brief sessions held at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles brought together many of New Orleans' finest musicians, including Shirley Goodman, John Boudreaux, Plas Johnson, Jessie Hill, Ernest McLean, and Tami Lynn. Along with their complex histories, the cast of characters implicated in the story includes Ornette Coleman, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Cher, Sonny Bono, Sam Cooke, Ishmael Reed, Black Herman, Prince La La, and many others. The story details in discursive style the historical context of the music, how it came together, its literary sources, production and arrangements, and the nature of the recording studio as dream state, but also examines as a disturbing undercurrent the volatile issue of race in twentieth-century music, the way in which it doomed relationships and ambitious projects, exploited great talents, and distorted the cultural landscape.
A compendium of other musics, channelled from the spirit world, the fairy kingdom, outer space, secret societies and occult lodges.
This unique collection of esoteric earworms gathers, and reproduces, music from other worlds. Here you'll find tunes hummed, strummed, and sung by spirits, sprites, and fairies, extraterrestrial elevator music, dreamed ditties, marches for occult ceremonies, secret musical codes and languages, music made by animals, and more.
Each entry contains an explanatory text on its origins and purpose, and also reproduces the musical notation, in facsimile where possible, so that you can play along at home.
An in-depth introductory essay by musician, historian and collector Doug Skinner rounds out this wondrous musical cabinet of curiosities.
Presenting an interdisciplinary selection of twenty-five essays first delivered at Breaking Convention 2015, the third conference on psychedelic consciousness, culture, and clinical research, held at the University of Greenwich, London.
The Bright Labyrinth is a subtle and sometimes disturbing account of how technology has impacted upon human culture. Offering a theoretical map for the future development of communication design, The Bright Labyrinth draws upon architecture and film, avant-garde art and critical theory, military strategy and machine intelligence to guide the reader through the Digital Regime that has shaped a century of human creativity and thought.
In 1954, Jean Mary Townsend was strangled with her own scarf and stripped of her underwear but not sexually assaulted. The subsequent police investigation was bungled, leading to a six-decade cover-up, ensuring that this twenty-one-year-old fashion designer was effectively killed twice: first bodily, and then as her significance and her memory were erased. Fred Vermorel's forensic, troubling (and trouble-making) investigation digs deep into Jean Townsend's life and times, and her transgressive bohemian milieu. It disentangles the lies and bluffs that have obscured this puzzling case for over half a century and offers a compelling solution to her murder and the official secrecy surrounding it.
De tous les personnages associés à l'histoire du LSD, il n'y en a pas de plus énigmatique que Michael Hollingshead. Semblant venu de nulle part, il a initié Timothy Leary au LSD en 1962 et a exercé une influence pendant les années à Harvard, Millbrook et au-delà. Tel Zelig, Hollingshead était un acteur clé de la scène LSD de Londres. En 1965, il se rend à Londres pour établir une tête de pont culturelle pour la philosophie LSD de Leary au World Psychedelic Centre de Chelsea. Suite à un passage en prison, où il a fourni en LSD l'espion du KGB George Blake, il a continué à poursuivre des aventures avec la Confrérie de l'Amour éternel, a établi une communauté psychédélique, a créé le premier I Ching installation, a publié un magazine underground et a passé du temps au Népal, avant de mourir d'une mort mystérieuse en Bolivie dans les années 1980.
Epiphanies: Life-changing Encounters With Music is a new anthology of essays drawn from The Wire's monthly Epiphanies column, which has been running in the magazine since issue 167 (January 1998). The book includes more than 50 essays in which a wide range of musicians, authors and critics detail their personal experiences of music's transformative powers.
A unique, stunningly-presented guide to London's past and a treasure trove of information for historians, residents, medical professionals and tourists, Medical London charts the many roles that diseases, treatments and cures have played in the city's sprawling story. It also reveals how London, in turn, has shaped the professions and practices of modern medicine.
The Moons At Your Door collects over 30 tales, both familiar and unknown from : Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, DK Broster, AM Burrage, RW Chambers, Aleister Crowley, Elizabeth Gaskell, WW Jacobs, MR James, LA Lewis, Thomas Ligotti, Arthur Machen, Guy de Maupassant, Perrault, Thomas De Quincey, Saki, Count Stenbock and HR Wakefield. The volume also includes extracts and translations by the author from Babylonian, Coptic and Biblical texts alongside poems and fairy tales.
Between 1967 and 1971 Rose Simpson lived with the Incredible String Band (Mike Heron, Robin Williamson and Licorice McKechnie), morphing from English student to West Coast hippie and, finally, bassist in leathers. The band's image adorned psychedelic posters and its music was the theme song for an alternative lifestyle.
An interdisciplinary selection of 23 essays first presented at Breaking Convention 2013, the 2nd conference on psychedelic consciousness, culture and clinical research, held at the University of Greenwich, London.
100 objects, exuding magic and mystery, emerge from the darkness of Cornwall's much loved Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in this book of haunting photographs. Artist and photographer Sara Hannant has captured the very essence of these carefully selected artefacts, which include wax dolls, wands, statues, daggers, pendants, robes and amulets, all used in the practice of witchcraft and magic. Some have been displayed at the museum for years, others have long been hidden in its archives. Images are accompanied by informative text from museum director Simon Costin.
The legendary lost novel in which fourteen-year-old Preston Wildey-King must choose between his all-consuming passion for Pepsi Cola and his love for schoolmate Peggy.
"He walked into the turbulent super market. There were people everywhere. His eyes swept over the shelves and stabilised on a large stack of Pepsi-colas. He could almost experience the cool fizzy liquid descending his parched throat." Written by June-Alison Gibbons when she was only 16, The Pepsi Cola Addict is considered one of the great works of twentieth-century outsider literature. More than just a literary curiosity, however, this tale of a teenager whose passion for a well-known cola drink threatens to ruin his life is the uniquely vivid expression of a young woman trying to make sense of the confusing, often brutal world she in which found herself.
Published in 1982 by a vanity press who took £800 from its young author and gave her only a single book in return, it's thought that fewer than ten original copies still exist in the world.
Shortly after its publication, June-Alison and her sister Jennifer would become infamous as "The Silent Twins" and find themselves cruelly incarcerated for over a decade in Broadmoor Hospital. This author-approved edition makes June-Alison Gibbon's remarkable vision widely available for the first time.
An oral history of the UK's soundsystem culture, featuring interviews with Dubmaster Dennis Bovell, Skream, Youth, Norman Jay MBE, Adrian Sherwood, Mala, and others. In the years following the arrival of the Windrush generation, the UK's soundsystem culture would become the most important influence on contemporary pop music since rock and roll. Pumped through towering, home-built speakers, often directly onto the thronged streets of events like the Notting Hill Carnival, the pulsating bass lines of reggae, dub, rave, jungle, trip hop, dubstep, and grime have shaped the worlds of several generations of British youth culture but have often been overlooked by historians obsessed with swinging London, punk, and Britpop. This oral history, consisting of new interviews conducted by respected dance music writer Joe Muggs, and accompanied by dramatic portraits by Brian David Stevens, presents the story of the bassline of Britain, in the words of those who lived and shaped it. Features interviews with Dubmaster Dennis Bovell, Norman Jay MPE, Youth, Adrian Sherwood, Skream, Rinse FM's Sarah Lockhart and many others.
