The early and formative years of the L.A. painter. From Ed “Big Daddy” Roth to Zap Comix to the death of the underground. PH

Publisher: Last Gasp
Paperback: 96 pages
Illustrated

An exploration of the mythology of Lucifer in art and literature, seguing to an examination of the “applied mythology” of filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Lucifer Rising 2 is a recent interview which gets to the heart of questions relating to Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, Bobby Beausoleil and the missing Lucifer Rising footage, L. Ron Hubbard and the thelemic connection to Scientology, and other mysteries swirling around Kenneth Anger’s magickal and artistic pursuits. SS

Publisher: Aorta
Pamphlet: 24 pages
Illustrated

The Jazz Age Bettie Page: A corn-fed Kansas beauty in ebony bangs who radiated good clean sex on the screen. Seven autobiographical essays that follow the celebrated dancer-actress-writer through her short but spectacular career. Brooks kissed off Hollywood in the ‘20s and made herself a legend in European cinema. Through her portrayals of independent, liberated souls, Brooks’ star flamed a decade ahead of Dietrich’s and Garbo’s. Lulu is the lesbian-loving, man-eating German girl she played in G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, a bewitching vixen who flirts fatally one last time—with Jack the Ripper! Oddly enough, in many of her European art films, Brooks’ amoral characters are killed off in the last reel. Returning to Hollywood, she was seen as tainted goods, too risqué for America. GR

Publisher: Limelight
Paperback: 109 pages
Illustrated

Giving insight to Pound’s work during his period in Italy, this book documents his diverse aesthetic, which concerned everything from Machine Art, and its new criterion for beauty, to his search for a type of writing ruled by mathematical rather than grammatical laws. SC

Publisher: Duke University
Paperback: 232 pages
Illustrated

Here’s where the reader gets to the wisdom of Blake: “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained,” “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity.” These are a few of the “Proverbs of Hell” and they are sublime. Blake was purported to be a visionary, but it’s not until this book that his raging vision really shone through. It is a subversion of all that is thought to be good and evil. Blake’s been to hell… and he likes it! MDH

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 43 pages
Illustrated

More than 240 black-and-white photographs of brilliantly conceived African masks, intense with “the psychic power projected from the depths of human experience,” including animal heads, faces, grotesques, beaded and tufted images, headdresses made of wood, ivory and brass. One of the great influences on 20th-century Modern art, prominently as uglified in the works of Picasso. Features “the psychology behind the masks, the roles of the dancer, the dance and the audience, naturalism vs. abstraction as applied to the masks, the carving styles of various tribes, and the place of the carver in tribal society.” GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 248 pages
Illustrated

Known to some as the initiator of Surrealism, de Chirico wrote vast memoirs which complement his stunning paintings. With vivid descriptions of Italian tradition, de Chirico relates his life story through his heavy egocentrism and rich imagination, and includes anecdotes about his artistic community. He attacks the Surrealist movement because its practitioners lived comfortably, dressed very well, ate excellent meals washed down with fine wines,” above all they worked as little as possible, or not at all.” De Chirico examines his obsessions and inner conflicts that eventually convinced him of his artistic supremacy. Also included: “The Technique of Painting,” a chronological table, and a bibliography of his writings. OAA

Publisher: Da Capo
Paperback: 278 pages
Illustrated

“The famous Düsseldorf photographers’ formal investigation of industrial structures displays their serenely cool, rigorous approach to the structures they photograph as variations on an ideal form. The Bechers make no attempt to analyze or explain their subjects. For more than 35 years, the Bechers have been creating a monument to the most venerable buildings of the industrial era through their photographic art. They have re-awoken the forgotten or unnoticed beauty of water towers, gas holders, lime kilns and blast furnaces, and their photographs have told the story of the process of industrialization. Their head-on, deadpan photographs express an almost Egyptial sense of man’s heroic effort to put his mark on the landscape. Mineheads shows the winding towers used to extract the coal and iron ore from the mines, and to transfer miners back and forth from underground.”

Publisher: MIT
Hardback: 200 pages

Third in the series of memoirs by late filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman, Modern Nature is the journal he kept during 1989 and 1990 with the awareness that one day it would be published. Written during the period Jarman was at work on The Garden and Edward II, he here juxtaposes his planning and cultivation of his famous garden in Dungeness with his declining health due to the ravages of AIDS. JAT

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 154 pages

“Every morning the night’s ‘catch’ of persons arrested is brought down from the different police stations to Manhattan Police Headquarters where they are booked for their various crimes, fingerprinted and ‘mugged,’ in the rogues’ gallery… and then paraded in the police lineup… where they are questioned by police officials on a platform with a strong light on their faces… as detectives in the darkened room study them… and make mental notes for future reference… The parade never ceases as the ‘Pie’ wagons unload. I’ve photographed every one of importance from gangsters, deflated big-shot racketeers, a president of the N.Y. Stock Exchange, a leader of Tammany Hall and even Father Divine, who kept muttering as he was booked, ‘Peace, brother, peace.’ The men, women and children who commit murders always fascinate me… and I always ask them why they killed… the men claim self defense, the women seem to be in a daze… but as a rule frustrated love and jealousy are the causes… the kids are worried for fear the picture might not make the papers… I will say one thing for the men and women who kill… they are Ladies and Gentlemen… cooperating with me so I will get a good shot of them…”

Publisher: Da Capo
Paperback: 248 pages
Illustrated