A research astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory, the author is a leading authority on the menace of killer comets and asteroids. He sounds the alarm in unequivocal terms about the likelihood of a devastating astral collision unless we earthlings get mobilized to search and destroy oncoming comets. According to Steel, at least 2,000 objects now orbiting the Earth are large enough to hit with the force of a nuclear weapon. This seems like one scientific funding request worth taking a second look at. SS

Publisher: Wiley
Hardback: 308 pages
Illustrated

Originally published in 1937, this book by a “noted British scientist” explains music, especially Western orchestral music, in terms of sound curves and vibrational theory. Topics covered include: transmission of sound, resonance, free vibrations of a string, harmonic synthesis, acoustics of pipe organs, the Pythagorean scale, “music of the future” and the “threshold of pain.” SS

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 258 pages
Illustrated

Perfect complement to Charles Fort’s anti-scientific crusade and research, from within the scientific community. Looks at how, by its very nature, science is resistant to new ideas about the world, and how shaky the foundations of scientific “fact” actually are at all times. “No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others… The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced. Lifelong resistance, particularly from those whose productive careers have committed them to an older tradition of normal science, is not a violation of scientific standards but an index to the nature of scientific research itself. The source of resistance is the assurance that the older paradigm will ultimately solve all its problems, that nature can be shoved into the box the paradigm provides.” SS

Publisher: University of Chicago
Paperback: 212 pages

According to the New York World-Telegram, Nikola Tesla claimed to have set off an earthquake in the vicinity of his Manhattan laboratory in 1898. The authors have investigated his claim and also his plans to create a worldwide power transmission system based on “tele-geo-dynamics,” the art of producing terrestrial motions at a distance. A new science of vibrational physics is proposed based on Tesla and John Keely’s lost research. Includes reproductions of the original patents for Tesla’s electric generator and plans for building your own mechanical oscillator-generator. SS

Publisher: Message
Paperback: 176 pages
Illustrated

This volume, written by a former member of the Intelligence Briefing Team of the commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, who is already famous on the talk-radio/lecture circuit, has truly become a sensation in the slow-moving world of conspiracy books. At first, Behold a Pale Horse would seem to bring together the strands of Trilateral/Council on Foreign Relations/Bilderberg/New World Order/Illuminati monitoring with Alternative 3/MJ-12 UFO paranoia about “government cover-ups” into one scary scenario.
But at times, Cooper—the man who stared down the Men-in-Black and lived to write a book—leaves the reader in a perilous state of uncertainty by revealing his own doubts regarding extraterrestrial reports. After spinning a fascinating web—which includes forcible depopulation by the Club of Rome through AIDS; fomenting civil wars in high population-growth countries like El Salvador; tobacco fields fertilized with radioactive trailings to increase cancer rates; details of secret moon bases where a hushed-up altercation between Soviet and American personnel actually became violent; the lowdown on Mount Weather where a stand-in federal government is housed in a vast underground city; documentation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s contingency plans to rule the U.S. by martial law and draconian unconstitutional drug-war laws; reports of how Ike foolishly turned to Nelson Rockefeller for help in solving the problem of dealing with alien landings in 1953; and even unmasking Whitley Strieber (author of Communion and Majesty) as a CIA agent— Cooper still seems less than confident about how to interpret his own findings. As he puts it, “There is always the possibility that I was used, that the whole alien scenario is the greatest hoax in history designed to create an alien enemy from outer space in order to expedite the formation of a one-world government… I advise you to consider this scenario as being probable.”
This does not prevent him from accusing Vicki Cooper, editor of UFO magazine, of once being part of the Mayflower Madam’s hooker operation and being forced to move to L.A. and start the magazine in a deal to get out of a long jail term. A firm believer in the premises of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Cooper reprints a version of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in its entirety but then notes that one should substitute “‘Sion’ for ‘Zion’, ‘Illuminati’ for ‘Jews’, and ‘cattle’ for ‘goyim.’”
“Could it be that Congress knows the whole thing and won’t touch it? Are they among the select who have been picked for the Mars Colony when the Earth begins to destruct, if the Earth is going to destruct?” That’s a hard call, Bill. SS

Publisher: Light Technology
Paperback: 500 pages

A Gnostic bishop with 35 years’ experience as a UFOlogist (twice honored as “UFOlogist of the Year”) posits a continuity from the mediumship and magical orders of the 19th century to the UFO contactees and trance-channelers of today. Greenfield suggests that the Book of the Law dictated to Aleister Crowley by the “praterhuman” AIWASS was actually encoded in an English-language cipher based on the classical techniques of the Kabbalah known to the Golden Dawn and other magical orders. Significantly, 1947 was both the year Crowley died and the beginning of the flying saucer sightings. UFO contactee names can be Kabbalistically decoded using the cipher to reveal their spiritual meanings: for example, ORTHON = JESUS. A more elaborate example of the use of the secret cipher is: “QUABALISTIC ALCHEMIST ARCANUM = 345 = LESBIANS + LESBIANISM + SAPPHISM, while FELLOWSHIP OF MA ION = 206 = THE SECRETIONS as well as the alchemical cipher term VERY SHARP VINEGAR. The name FRATER ROBERTUS = 214 = SODOMY SECRETIONS. These terms are consistent with the inner secret teachings of the Great White Brotherhood.” SS

Publisher: IllumiNet
Paperback: 119 pages
Illustrated

This is a bemused and bittersweet look back at his own astounding life by George Antheil, the composer of the scandalous modernist sensation “Ballet Mécanique,” who was hailed as a genius by the likes of Erik Satie, Ezra Pound, and Jean Cocteau. His autobiography is a strange combination of high avant-garde Paris hobnobbing with charmingly populist Saturday Evening Post prose interspersed with lots of music theory and counterpoint presented in an unpretentious, Everyman sort of way. The Trenton, New Jersey-born one-time concert-piano prodigy who at age 21 played his European recitals with a loaded revolver on top of the Steinway, was a protégé of Stravinksy. Antheil escaped Hitler in 1933 and settled into semi-obscurity doing soundtracks in Hollywood. Once in screenland, he went on to introduce Salvador Dali to Cecil B. DeMille (who promptly kissed Dali’s hand and proclaimed him “king of the Surrealists”), supported his composing with a nationally syndicated “Miss Lonelyhearts” column, published books on “endocrine criminology,” and designed a patented radio-control device for torpedoes with Hungarian sex bomb Hedy Lamarr. SS

Publisher: Samuel French
Paperback: 378 pages
Illustrated

Can’s musical experiments demonstrated how fettered to the Blues rock music really was, even in the psychedelic era. From blissed and transcendent, down-shifting to ear-wrenching and ominous, Can are now recognized to have been the bridge between the psychedelic rock era and the now-dormant punk experimentalism of PIL or the Pop Group. Based near Cologne, endlessly laying down improvisational jams in their Inner Space studio, Can incorporated the academic electronic music of Stockhausen, the low-end physical thrust of funk grooves, diverse ethnic musics and countless other sonic inputs into a thoroughly hallucinogenic free-form musical assemblage all their own. Can founder Holger Czukay’s shortwave collage experiments like “Song of the Vietnamese Boat Women” and Can’s world music E.F.S. (Ethnological Forgery Series) predated Byrne and Eno’s “groundbreaking” My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by well over a decade. For those who already know the above to be true, this well-researched history will elucidate numerous bits of vital information such as Damo Suzuki’s arrival on the scene and the conditions under which Tago Mago was recorded. SS

Publisher: SAF
Paperback: 192 pages
Illustrated

“Red velvet sheets, gossamer drapes, scented rooms, and martinis pouring from a bottomless shaker: just the foreplay to this soundscape of misty evenings, postcard perfect sunsets, and aquatic paramours…” —(liner notes quoted in Elevator Music)
Elevator Music drags to the foreground the latent spiritual, unconscious and definitely sexual strivings of 20th-century society imbedded in what is commonly dismissed as “background” music. To cite author Lanza, “moodsong reinforces mounting suspicions that we live inside a dream.” It is no kitsch coincidence, for instance, that Salvador Dali was commissioned to do the cover for Jackie Gleason’s Lonesome Echo album. Elevator Music is also a tribute to the fiendish inventiveness of mood music’s pioneers and their imaginative mind-control experiments such as the “Stimulus Progression” mechanics of programming and Muzak’s musical mood-rating scale from “gloomy-minus 3” to “ecstatic-plus 8.” Mood music becomes the focal point of remarkable parallels between the “invisibility” of post-Cold War global capitalism and fictional, futuristic, totalitarian dystopias such as Brave New World. An all-encompassing survey which reveals Erik Satie’s furniture music manifesto of 1920 as the transitional point from Dada to Muzak, but also includes such juicy tidbits as Jackie Gleason’s plain-talking instruction to his orchestra, “It’s 5 a.m. and you see her body outlined through her dress by the streetlight, and you get that ‘Mmmmm, I want to come’ feeling.”
Elevator Music is loaded with astounding facts and correlations such as the Mormon Church’s corporate sponsorship of the “Beautiful Music” radio format, Angelo Badalamenti’s (Twin Peaks’ composer) secret tenure as staff arranger “Andy Badale” for the Muzak Corp., Seattle’s Sub Pop/Muzak connection, the themes from Dragnet and Captain Kangaroo beginning as music-library stock tunes, Neil Armstrong’s request for Les Baxter’s Music Out of the Moon to be played out the Apollo rocket’s speakers during the moon mission, why Muzak stays with mono, the influence of Pythagorean number theory on Muzak programming, and that Bach’s Goldberg Variations was commissioned by an insomniac Russian count residing in Dresden to be played in an adjoining room while he counted sheep.
Elevator Music also provides in-depth analysis of such thrift store perennials as the Mystic Moods Orchestra, Ray Conniff Singers, Percy Faith, the Swingle Singers, Enoch Light and the Light Brigade, and the like. Lanza supports his bizarre penchant for the 101 Strings with such examples as Exotic Sounds of Love, featuring a leather-clad dominatrix with an eye patch (!) on its album cover and their legendary freak-out album Astro Sounds, featuring tunes like “A Disappointing Love with a Desensitized Robot” and “Bad Trip Back to ‘69.” Less impressive is his treatment of the unsung but truly gifted maestros of “easy listening” like Martin Denny, Les Baxter, Perrey and Kingsley, and Francis Lai in this otherwise thoroughly entertaining chronicle of capitalist social engineering and the interplay of music, technology, mass culture and finance. SS

Publisher: Picador
Paperback: 280 pages
Illustrated

“Flash” is the name for the sheets which tattooists have used to display their designs to prospective customers. Flash From the Past assembles in full color the Old-School designs from the pre-Stray Cats and Modern Primitive era when sailors were still the primary market. Cobras, hula girls, Old Glory, butterflies, “Mom”… could this kick off the retro era in tattooing? The introduction does a good job of associating names and places with the otherwise anonymous designers of this important American folk art. SS

Publisher: Hardy Marks
Paperback: 106 pages
Illustrated