MESSAGES FROM SPACE

SITES OF IMPACT

Meteorite Craters From Around the World
Stan Gaz

hardcover, 2009

60.00

Earth has 170 documented scars from falling space rocks. A single meteorite can leave a wound as big as 236 miles wide (like South Africa's Vredefort Dome). The best-preserved impact sites are often difficult to access – buried under ice, obscured by foliage, or baking in desert climes. These desolate landscapes are connected to another place outside of our world, and for photographer Stan Gaz they are sites of pilgrimage – steps in a journey begun as a curious young boy accompanying his father on geological expeditions, and culminating in a six-year journey traveling the globe in search of these sites -- resulting in these epic 85 black & white aerial photographs from Namibia, South Africa, Australia, the United States and elsewhere.

THE LONELY DOLL

THE SECRET LIFE OF THE LONELY DOLL
The Search for Dare Wright
Jean Nathans
paper, 2005
7.95........ was 15.00

In 1957, The Lonely Doll made model/actress turned author/photographer Dare Wright famous. The children's book told the story of Edith, a lonely doll until two teddy bears—a father and son—come to live with her.

Nearly forty years later, writer Jean Nathan decided to find out whatever happened to the author of favorite book as a child. What she discovered was a tragic and disturbing tale of family secrets, a mother/daughter relationship like no other, and a creative life gone to waste. Haunting.

THINGS I DID THIS SUMMER...

Has it been nearly two months since my last entry?

Discovered some great new titles over the summer -- Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dave Eggers' wonderful true fiction What is the What (highly recommended), the lurid Stripmall Bohemia by Jethro Paris, and Jean Nathan's The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll, the tragic biography of children's author Dare Wright. In art and photography, highest on the list would have to be Kinsey Photographer featuring the duotone photographs of the Pacific Northwest taken in the first half of the 20th century by Darius and Tabitha Kinsey.

More to come...

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS
Sarah Gruen
paperback, 2007
$13.95

How did I miss this book?!

A terrific, colourful, engrossing page-turner about life and love in a depression-era travelling circus that came highly recommended a few weeks ago from a visitor to the bookstore. A very BIG thank you, whoever you are...

Told in flashback by 90-year-old Jacob Jankowski, who upon the death of his parents drops out of veterinary school and winds up in the employ of The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, tending to their menagerie of exotic animals and falling in love with Marlena, one of the show's star performers—a romance complicated by Marlena's husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for.

Photographs courtesy of our partner Todd/Browning Gallery.

SKIN AND BONES

DISSECTION
Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930
John H. Warner & James M. Edmonson
hardcover, 2009
50.00

A startling window into the education of American doctors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- on both a visceral level and for its revealing cultural record. Two hundred pages filled with cringe-worthy shots of medical students -- barehanded gentlemen and a few ladies in street clothes showing off their scalpels, saws and textbooks -- while their cadavers, mostly poor and black, are awkwardly posed, and exposed.

A BUG'S LIFE

KAFKA
David Z. Marowitz & Robert Crumb
paper, 2007
$14.95

I can't believe I've waited this long to mention Robert Crumb, one of the most influential contemporary artists of the last 40 years. And there is no more perfect way to introduce his work to this blog than with Kafka.

Essentially an illustrated biography and primer -- I will not use the term: Idiots Guide -- to the work of F.K., with Crumb's dark pen and ink drawings providing a window into the writer's inner world.

RETURN TO THE CLASSICS...

DAUGHTER OF BONNIE & CLYDE
Brent Lynton Wright
1971, paperback
$12.95......out of print

Great, hard-to-find vintage paperback - actually, the novelization of a screenplay (a movie tie-in for a film that was never made) - courtesy of one of the most interesting worst novelists of the 50s & 60s whose work spanned nearly every genre of paperback fiction, from westerns to crime, gay pulp, and sleaze. Wright was also a character actor in more than 200 Hollywood films going back to the the original Three Stooges.

As for the book -- a tale of the orphaned child of gangsterdom's most famous couple and her journey into crime is pure pulp. But that's a good thing.

THEY MIGHT AS WELL BE ...

TOY GIANTS
Daniel & Geo Fuchs
2007, hardcover
$45.00

The duo responsible for this eye-popping book spent over three years photographing the 10,000 piece private collection of Selim Varol, bigger-than-life group and portrait shots of toys and celebrity action figures (from George W. Bush to Bruce Willis to Quentin Tarantino).

NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK

CHARLATAN
America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam
Pope Brock
hardcover, 2008
$19.95 (was 24.95)

In 1917, after years of selling worthless patent remedies throughout the Southeast, John R. Brinkley -- America’s most brazen young con man -- arrived in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. He set up a medical practice and introduced an outlandish surgical method using goat testicles to restore the fading virility of local farmers and thousands of paying customers quickly turned “Dr.” Brinkley into America’s richest and most famous surgeon.

Eventually, his notoriety captured the attention of the great quackbuster Morris Fishbein, who vowed to put the country’s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business. Their cat-and-mouse game lasting throughout the 1920s and ’30s.

Despite Fishbein’s efforts Brinkley prospered wildly. When he ran for governor of Kansas, he invented campaigning techniques still used in modern politics. Thumbing his nose at American regulators, he built the world’s most powerful radio transmitter just across the Rio Grande to offer sundry cures, and killed or maimed patients by the score, yet his warped genius produced innovations in broadcasting that endure to this day. By introducing country music and blues to the nation, Brinkley also became a seminal force in rock ’n’ roll.

In short, he was the most creative criminal this country has ever produced.

BANNED FROM BLOCKBUSTER - PART 3

THE BROWN BUNNY
2003
dir. Vincent Gallo
colour, uncut X version
14.95

When originally screened at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, Roger Ebert called this "the worst film in the history of the festival." High praise for this minimalist road movie written and directed by star Vincent Gallo and featuring Chloe Sevigny in her now infamous explicit oral sex scene -- probably the best reason to watch this narcissistic bit of celuloid although it does have a few fans, due mostly to its purity as an example of maverick filmmaking. Also stars Cheryl Tiegs!

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

THE BIG BOOK OF LEGS
Dian Hanson, ed.
hardcover, 2009
59.95

Gams and more gams from the publishers of The Big Penis Book and The Big Book of Breasts. Mammoth pictorial history -- from the Victorian Age to present-day -- and tribute to the female leg featuring photographs by Irving Klaw, Peter Gowland, Bunny Yeager, Elmer Batters, and other great masters of leg art.

BANNED FROM BLOCKBUSTER - PART 2

ILSA, THE WICKED WARDEN
1977
dir. Jess Franco
color, imported
$19.95

Third in the Ilsa series -- she the former She Wolf of the SS and Harem Keeper of the Oil Shieks -- starring Dyane Thorne as the sadistic warden of a Latin American (where else?) prison for women. Legendary b-grade director Franco has included all of the usual elements of this kind of film (cat fights, long shower scenes) and - as one reviewer put it - "although it doesn't quite reach the threshold of violent sadism established by the other two entries, it's no Girl Scout picnic either."

Good clean fun.

THIS WAY COMES...

DREAMS
The Dark Erotic Photographic Visions of John Santerineross
hardcover, 2004
39.95

Disturbing, unique, dreamlike visuals from NY photographer Santerineross, a long overdue follow-up to his highly coveted (and long out of print) Fruit of the Secret God.

note: the author will be holding his first Los Angeles solo exhibition this coming October at Todd/Browning Gallery.