Andrew Lampert - Böcker

Filmmaker, painter, anthropologist, musicologist and occultist--Harry Smith (1923-1991) was an incomparable polymath and seminal figure in the realms of beat culture and avant-garde art. Smith's kaleidoscopic experimental films have influenced generations of artists and cinephiles, while his landmark three-volume compilation, the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), laid the foundation for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to his ecstatic artwork, Smith is renowned for his vast collections of curious objects. The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné series spotlights and indexes his eclectic research obsessions.Volume one features richly detailed photographic documentation of 251 paper airplanes gathered by Smith from the streets of New York City over an approximately 20-year period. Whimsical and weird, the paper airplanes rank among Smith's most mysterious collecting pursuits. This extensive compendium presents the fruits of his extraordinary aeronautic pursuit and highlights the tangled history and myths that accompany them.

Economically downtrodden New York City in the mid-to-late 1970s was like the end of the world, but only if you chose to see it that way. For young artists running amok in the collapsing capital, the possibilities seemed endless. For Manuel DeLanda (born 1952), a Mexican transplant enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, overcrowded sidewalks and decrepit subway stations were blank canvases for inspired mayhem.Widely recognized today as a philosopher, professor and author (of A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Assemblage Theory and The Rise of Realism, among other titles), DeLanda initially came to prominence as one of the premiere experimental filmmakers of his generation. Fueled by the gonzo humor and graphic audacity of Frank Zappa and Zap Comix, DeLanda’s fevered productions were among the most deliriously innovative movies of the punk era. While films like Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller and Incontinence: A Diarrhetic Flow of Mismatches are certified underground classics, DeLanda’s visually striking, virtually unknown graffiti work (signed with the tag Ism Ism) has long remained more urban legend than legendary.ISM ISM presents a comprehensive overview of DeLanda’s ephemeral street collages through a colorful frame-by-frame breakdown of a Super-8 short film made in 1979 to document his sweetly subversive activities. Extensive still images, an expansive interview and copious contextual materials combine to illustrate the story of DeLanda’s aesthetic attack on 23rd St, including his friendly competition with fellow taggers Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

A luminary in more ways than one, celebrated dancer Loïe Fuller studied radium and its potential uses in performanceThe luminous and radical dance performances of Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) at the turn of the 20th century were unlike anything that had ever been staged before. In her Serpentine Dance, she wore a large, diaphanous gown she manipulated with her arms to form undulating waves, while colored lights projected onto the fabric gave the illusion of birds, animals or flowers. While her profound influence on writers and artists such as Mallarmé and Rodin is well documented, less well known is Fuller’s passion for technology and her involvement with the leading scientists of the time.Lecture on Radium spotlights Fuller’s scientific forays in her own words alongside an array of archival documents and photographs of the dancer in action. The centerpiece of the book is her 1907 lecture on the invention of radium, her notes on meeting Marie and Pierre Curie and Thomas Alva Edison, and her literally explosive efforts to create a glow-in-the-dark dance performance. Featuring an introduction by renowned cinema scholar Tom Gunning, this book presents Fuller’s eccentric passions and pioneering pursuits in a fresh light.

Wilfred’s pioneering and strangely prescient musical instrument predates television, video art and psychedeliaInventor, designer, artist and musician Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968) devoted his life to the creation of a new art form—"Lumia," or the art of light. He invented his own version of a color organ (a term he disliked) and dubbed it the Clavilux, from the Latin meaning "light played by key." After a successful international tour in the 1920s, Wilfred reinvented these large-scale performances as self-enclosed light shows for domestic entertainment. While they enjoyed a short commercial life, Wilfred’s aesthetically elegant and interactive Clavilux and Lumia home models soon found their way into storied collections. His work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1952 exhibition 15 Americans, where it was seen by many artists who would work with light as their medium in the 1960s and ’70s.Clavilux and Lumia Home Models presents a stimulating collection of archival material culled from the Wilfred archive at Yale University and other sources, including Wilfred’s never-before-published sketches.

Cryptic, lyrical and philosophical words from a paragon of experimental New York theater, juxtaposed with the haunting maquettes he created for his playsAn avant-garde comrade of Jonas Mekas, George Maciunas, Jack Smith and others, Richard Foreman (born 1937) was at the forefront of downtown New York’s experimental theater scene of the 1960s. He wrote and directed more than 80 verbally and visually singular productions with his Ontological-Hysteric Theater company in a career that spanned 45 years. Foreman’s visually arresting plays made heavy use of static tableaux, frantic choreography, projected text and Foreman himself sitting in front of the stage operating the lights and sound. While Foreman has published many of his scripts, No Title is a text unlike anything preceding it. Handwritten on a series of note cards, these aphoristic declarations and philosophical asides hover between being a stream-of-consciousness dialogue and a message sent from another world. Foreman’s wonderfully elliptical words are counterposed with photographs of the mystifying diorama-like maquettes that he created while staging a number of his plays.

Cult sci-fi author and controversial theorist Richard Sharpe Shaver devoted his life to decoding messages from ancient civilizations left behind in rocksScience fiction writer Richard Sharpe Shaver believed that rocks were books imprinted with valuable information about such mythical ancient races as the Lemurians and Atlanteans. His controversial stories about an advanced prehistoric civilization and a race of evil beings living at the center of the earth appeared in Amazing Stories and other landmark sci-fi publications of the ’40s and ’50s.A decade later, he was living in relative isolation and devoting himself to rock book research, a course of study that he shared with a devoted group of correspondents. Shaver believed that ancient leaders had left behind images embedded into rocks, which he then tried to interpret. Some Stones Are Ancient Books contains a generous selection of Rokfogos accompanied by hand-typed texts in which Shaver explains—not always patiently—all that can be seen in these stones. Also included are facsimiles of his handmade books and publications, all of which he felt to be of incalculable importance to civilization.Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907–75) was an artist and author whose work frequently appeared in 1940s science fiction magazines such as Amazing Stories. He was the center of the Shaver Mystery, a controversy regarding his alleged discovery of a prehistoric civilization, which sparked mass interest and a devoted following that continues to this day.

Ethereal and enigmatic glass slides preserve the resonance of Hughes’ voice in rippling, organic compositions The acclaimed Welsh singer and philanthropist Margaret Watts Hughes (1842–1907) was one of many inventors of her day fascinated by the visual documentation of sound. Her "eidophone" comprised a tube attached to a chamber covered in rubber, or "diaphragm." Hughes covered a glass slide with grains of sand or coarse pigment, then saturated it with water or milk. By singing into the device, the vibrations of her voice would etch out patterns onto the disc: an artistic rendering of the scientific principle of standing-wave resonance. Her "Voice Figures," as she called them, ranged from primitive patterns to designs resembling flowers, seashells and other natural phenomena. While Hughes valued her discovery for both its scientific and spiritual implications, leaders of the Theosophical movement saw her work as a means of making visible the invisible world.Sound May Be Seen presents selections from Hughes’ original 1891 publication of the "Voice Figures" and a rare surviving set of her glass slides, alongside contemporary reactions to her captivating and ultimately enigmatic work.

"I want to make hypnotic therapy and psychology my livelihood when I get out of this racket…And I'm going to spend as much time as possible investigating psychic phenomena." —Jackie Gleason, Parade, 1952Comic legend Jackie Gleason (1916–87) was one of the biggest, most beloved and best paid stars of his time. His role as Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners remains a veritable classic of television's early days. As big as his star was, Gleason never shied away from one of his favorite, nonmainstream topics: the occult. A high school dropout with a photographic memory and a major case of insomnia, he was an avid reader and spiritual searcher who looked for answers in the most unexpected places. Gleason was also a confirmed skeptic who believed that some grand cosmic scheme existed, but he could not say what it might ultimately be.Additionally, Gleason amassed a staggering collection of over 3,000 esoteric books, ranging from scholarly studies to supermarket paperbacks, now part of the holdings of the University of Miami Special Collections Library. Library of the Paranormal lifts the lid on this treasure trove of arcana. A generous selection of colorful and quizzical covers from Charles Fort, L. Ron Hubbard and dozens more are reproduced alongside press excerpts and interviews in which Gleason manages to shoehorn his thoughts on ESP, aliens, life after death and other decidedly off-topic interests, including his failed plans in the early '50s to produce a television show devoted to paranormal experiences.

Children's games, taxi drivers, music from an open window—Schwartz's recordings are an auditory love letter to a bygone New York CityA born and bred New Yorker, Tony Schwartz (1923–2008) was enamored with his city. Though a popular campaign designer for Madison Avenue clients such as Johnson & Johnson and American Airlines, and later creating the sound for hundreds of political advertisements (including the infamous Daisy spot for Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 campaign), his first and truest love was the sounds of the streets around him. Using a reel-to-reel tape recorder, the agoraphobic Schwartz ventured only a few blocks from his Hell's Kitchen apartment yet captured an encyclopedia of sounds. Many of these tapes were broadcast on his perennial WNYC radio show "Around New York" from 1945 to 1976. Though the term may seem an oxymoron, Tony Schwartz truly was an audio visionary.Sampling from Schwartz's voluminous catalog of recordings and coupling them with the poetic descriptions he gave to them, Snapshots in Sound assembles an A–Z of Schwartz's vivid practice. Filled with candid images of his documentation in action, cover art from his many records and his own writings, this charming volume also includes an appreciation of Schwartz's work from the legendary Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff.

From teleportation to spontaneous human combustion, poltergeists and UFOs—Fort's expansive and erratic research forms the basis of modern paranormal studiesCharles Fort (1874–1932) was a true iconoclast who embodied the idea of the "cult writer" in every sense of the term with his wildly entertaining prose and confounding research into the unknown. His early admirers formed the Fortean Society during his lifetime, in 1931, to elevate his work. Since that time, Fort's name has been synonymous with the strange, in large part due to the Fortean Times, published since 1973.While Fort has received sustained attention over the years, Research is the first book to delve into his methodology and source material for his investigations into paranormal phenomena. In addition to Fort's famously small notes that are extensively reproduced here for the first time, the book includes Fort's remarkable letters soliciting information on a wide variety of inexplicable phenomena that appeared in newspapers worldwide, as well as the responses he received. From frogs falling from the sky to sea monsters who inhabit our oceans, it is all here in his inimitable style, along with an appreciation by acclaimed experimental filmmaker and self-proclaimed Fortean Peggy Ahwesh.

An unprecedented exposé of an infamous hoax campaign to clothe animals that, decades later, remains completely uproariousPerpetrated from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA) was a fabricated moralist campaign that received unimaginable amounts of international attention in newspapers, radio and on the TV news. Its goal? To clothe all animals higher than 4 inches and longer than 6 inches. Its leader? G. Clifford Prout, a bespectacled fuddy duddy with an inheritance to burn through and an even better catchphrase: "Decency Today Means Morality Tomorrow." A pioneering prank that lasted way longer than anyone would have expected, SINA was the comedic pipe dream of Alan and Jeanne Abel, a pair of anarchic lovebirds who perpetrated dozens of ambitious hoaxes and hysterical deceptions for well over 50 years. They were joined in this confounding crusade by their friend, Buck Henry, who served as the organization's honorable spokesman in the years before he became an acclaimed actor and screenwriter (The Graduate, To Die For). Together, they put pants on kangaroos, picketed the White House and pulled the wool over the eyes of mystified people everywhere.Inside SINA tells the whole crazy story through Alan Abel's words and an eye-popping array of original documents, news reports, correspondence and photos. As the first publication to compile the complete history of this legendary media hoax, this jam-packed book reveals, at long last, how these three jesters pioneered the perfect prank. SINA was a brilliant lampooning of traditional American values and hypocritical attitudes that remains strangely timely and forever funny.