Contents include: Jean Rollin, Deep Throat, Barbara Steele, Dario Argento, Blood Feast, Ms. 45, Erzsébet Báthory, and Last Tango in Paris.

Publisher: Creation
Paperback: 192 pages
Illustrated

“Throughout history there have always been forms of art alien to established culture and which ipso facto have been neglected and finally lost without trace.”—Roger Cardinal
As the first of the Rapid Eye books was about to go to press in 1989, editor Dwyer experienced a bit of kismet. He had been looking for a word which might describe the sort of material that these books would be dealing with. A friend called him to say that he was opening a bookstore which he would be calling Occulture. “This new word obviously suggests both culture and the occult,” Dwyer observed. “To me this ‘occulture’ was not a secret culture, as the word might suggest, but a culture that is in some way hidden and ignored, or willfully marginalized to the extremities of our society. A culture of individuality and subcults, a culture of questions that have not been properly identified—let alone answered—and therefore do not get a fair representation in the mainstream media.” Rapid Eyes are a marvelous tonic for people who think that art has run its course, that it’s all been done before and that there’s nothing new under the sun. Perhaps that is so. But Dwyer has scoured the globe and packed these books with a feast for thought.
Rapid Eye 1 contains: “The Fall of Art” by W.S. Burroughs; Psychic TV; Aleister Crowley; information about Brion Gysin’s Dreammachine; C. John Taylor on the Cosmos; Situationism and Death TV; interviews with Hubert Selby Jr., William Burroughs, and Mr. Sebastian; Neoism; Austin Osman Spare; Hitler and Nazi UFOs; Tantra, Derek Jarman, Colin Wilson on sex crimes and the occult; Chinese footbinding; and a memorium to Brion Gysin. SA

Publisher: Creation
Paperback: 248 pages
Illustrated

Book 2 scars a little deeper than the first collection: seriously dense, seriously grave reading for the final reckoning; Carlos Castaneda, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Kern, Jorg Buttgereit, animal mutilations, in addition to illuminations of Lobsang Rampa, mescaline, and possibly the most fevered terror-tirade travelogue committed to print. SK

Publisher: Creation
Paperback: 256 pages
Illustrated

Melancholy can fuel creation. Intellectual looks at Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger, and Brit phenomenon the K Foundation; plus the aesthetics of pornography, an interview with William Gibson, the Process Church, America, and A Clockwork Orange as societal metaphor. SK

Publisher: Creation
Paperback: 256 pages
Illustrated

Volume one of a proposed series of compilations, this is a survey of the work of artists who lie mostly beyond the pale of the gallery world, presented largely in the form of interviews. Sargeant and his contributors make a valiant effort to inject some adrenalin into the quavering carcass of “art” before it completely expires. They do an astounding job of allowing these colorful and focused (if through their own unique prisms) personalities to tell their own stories, all fastidiously footnoted with entertaining explanatory texts in the margins. In most cases, the fiercely individualistic visions of these artists must at this point in history reside by necessity far below the radar of the art flacks and curators, who have just begun to fawn over such stale offerings as brilliant-Black Flag-cartoonist-turned-tedious-high-art-poseur Raymond Pettibon.
Girls (of the Lewis Carroll not the Baywatch variety), dolls, sex and their relationships to each other form an important libidinous undercurrent linking some of the genuinely intriguing artists covered in Suture, from Victorian-absorbed cartoonist/banjo player/cult figure Dame Darcy of Roller Derby and Meat Cake fame to Trevor Brown, who is perhaps best known as graphic designer for the industrial noise-terror unit Whitehouse. Brown relocated to Tokyo and has been churning out a series of highly technically accomplished airbrushed Japanese girls, dolls and war toys in perversely ominous juxtapositions. The remarkable life and career of French collage artist/photographer Romain Slocombe is explored at length; his charm and dedication bring a transcendent grace to his erotic obsession with the collision of Japanese girls and auto accidents, yielding some of the most startling photographic images of our time.
While Suture stumbles out of the opening gate with an extended reminiscence with evergreen bad-girl Lydia Lunch concerning her portrait photography, by the finish line it has explored some truly “world-class” fringe culture production as well as presented some criminally neglected creative territory. Particularly inspiring is the heroic story behind the Australian cold-sweat maximum-security prison flick Ghosts of the Civil Dead, which was directed by John Hillcoat from a script he wrote with Nick Cave (who also appears in the film). Other highlights of Suture include a discussion with painter Joe Coleman about “Devil Anse” Hatfield, leader of the warring Appalachian clan, and Romain Slocombe interviewing the king of manga psych-out Suehiro Maruo (yes, he seems to have a thing for Japanese schoolgirls in uncomfortable situations too). SS

Publisher: Creation
Paperback: 192 pages
Illustrated

Early in his career, John Waters was quoted as saying that if he were given a huge budget for a single movie that he would actually use it to make several. When George Kuchar was asked the same question, he replied that he would stop making movies because he couldn’t work that way. John Waters took the money, suitably tailored his product, and it can be seen at the local multiplex. George Kuchar teaches film, does the lecture circuit and is usually only screened at cinemateques and art museums. In spite of these glaring contrasts, the roots of their aesthetics are surprisingly similar.
George and his twin brother Mike were born in 1942 and have been producing films since their childhood. By their early 20s they were associating with the likes of Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith at the Charles, the Bleeker Street and the Gramercy Arts Theaters, which were then playing host to an exploding “underground” film scene. By the early ‘60s, John Waters had started sneaking up from his home in Baltimore to these screenings and, inspired largely by the Kuchar brothers, began to make films of his own in 1964. In both cases, the auteurs used repertory casts of nonactors. As John Waters has been more tenacious about publicizing himself and his efforts, much more is known to the general public about his body of work. The Kuchars have stayed very underground and prove generally more difficult to chronicle. This book has done an admirable job of presenting its subjects in a serious and scholarly light. The section on Waters includes interviews with such stalwarts as Divine, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pierce and Miss Jean Hill. Despite the oceans of ink devoted to Waters‘ work elsewhere, this is a completely fresh and multidimensional look at the man and the filmmaker.
The book’s real coup is the inclusion of lucid interviews with George and Mike Kuchar, who are notoriously elusive and playful subjects when in the wrong hands. The author gained their trust and did his homework. For possibly the first time, the Kuchars are given the opportunity to discuss their art, their craft, their influences and their lives in a way that shows how their inner machinery works. Marion Eaton, the star of Thundercrack (written by and co-starring George), provides an added dimension to understanding the brothers Kuchar and especially the perils involved when a “legitimate” actress gets stigmatized by her work in underground movies. Most impressive is the exhaustive filmography the author has assembled. Truly underground films are harder to track and catalog than are features and frequently only a single copy of a film survives in a private collection. SA

Publisher: Creation
Paperback: 256 pages
Illustrated

“The last ‘lost’ masterpiece of Surrealist erotica… an intensely poetic account. Aragon charts an inner monologue which is often, in its poetic/surreal intensity reminiscent of the work of Lautréamont and of Artaud in its evocation of physical disgust as the dark correlative to spirtiual illumination.”

Publisher: Creation
Paperback: 96 pages

Hardcore filth by Georges’ wife! And the crowd goes wild! This was originally published by the Paris Olympia Press in 1955 using one of the shortest (and finest) pseudonyms in the history of smut: “XXX.” Why it was written is anybody’s guess. It was published seven years before the death of Georges Bataille, at a point when he had conquered most of the controversy and arrived at the position of a grand old guy of letters, complete with the appropriate financial security, so it wasn’t like they needed the money… .Neither Kearney, De St. Jorre nor Girodias have much more than this to say about the book in any of the tomes on Olympia. JK

Publisher: Creation
Paperback: 192 pages

“Presents Nietzsche’s most prophetic, futuristic and apocalyptic philosophies and traces them against the upheavals of the last century and the current millennial panic. This radical reinterpretation sees Nietzsche as the true guide to the madness in our society which he himself diagnosed a century ago; Nietzsche as a philosopher against society, against both the state and the herd; Nietzsche as philosopher with a hammer.”

Publisher: Creation
Paperback: 256 pages