Blast Books,U.S. – förlag

The late 1950s and early '60s were the golden age of science fiction, an era when the farthest reaches of imagination were fed by the technological breakthroughs of the postwar years. While science fiction writers expressed the dreams and nightmares of the era in pulp print, real-life rocket engineers worked on making space travel reality. The imaginations of many Cold War scientists were fed by science fiction literature, and companies often promoted their future capabilities with fantastical, colorful visions aimed at luring young engineers into their booming workforce. In between the dry articles of trade journals, a new visual vernacular sprang up. Aerospace industry ads pitched the idea that we lived in a moment where anything was possible -- gravity was history, and soon so would be the confines of our solar system. Another Science Fiction presents nearly 200 entertaining, intriguing, inspiring, and mind-boggling pieces of space-age eye candy.

In 2012 the Center for Land Use Interpretation acquired a set of seven rolodexes from the dispersed collection of former Los Alamos National Laboratory employee Ed Grothus, who operated a salvage company of lab cast-offs, known as The Black Hole. Now part of the Center's Radioactive Archive, the rolodexes contain thousands of business cards kept by some unknown office in the lab over the 1960s and 1970s--the peak of the arms race and its technological development. They are a physical record of everything from major military contractors to obscure high- and low-tech software widget suppliers--many of which are no longer extant, or have evolved. The selection of 150 cards may be viewed as a snapshot of synergies between the business community and America's atomic might. On the one hand, they are a direct indexical connection from the recent past to the sources of creating the most sophisticated and powerful national defense technologies in the world. On the other hand, they are obsolete information, relics of a former usefulness.As a specific printed historical record--superbly reproduced in full color--they are relevant to a potential understanding of the present; they are evocative evidence of the links that formed the secret technology of our nation.

Over the course of three days in 1970, June 5, 6, and 7, simply sitting on a white bench in a Hamburg park, Thomas Bernhard delivered a powerful monologue for Three Days (Drei Tage), filmmaker Ferry Radax’s commanding film portrait of the great Austrian writer. Radax interwove the monologue with a variety of metaphorically resonant visual techniques—blacking out the screen to total darkness, suggestive of the closing of the observing eye; cuts to scenes of cameramen, lighting and recording equipment; extreme camera distance and extreme closeup. Bernhard had not yet written his autobiographical work Gathering Evidence, published originally in five separate volumes between 1975 and 1982, and his childhood remembrances were a revelation. This publication of Bernhard’s monologue and stills from Radax’s artful film allows this unique portrait of Bernhard to be savored in book form.

A sumptuous monograph presenting for the first time the extraordinarily imaginative and delightful work of visionary artist Renaldo Kuhler (American, 1931–2013).The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler catapults a thrilling new discovery into the pantheon of the most accomplished visionary—or “outsider”—artists. Like Henry Darger, Howard Finster, George Widener, and Adolf Wölfli, Renaldo Kuhler was an exceptionally gifted artist and possessed an imagination all his own. By day Kuhler was a self-taught scientific illustrator under the employ of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, for which he created thousands of wonderfully precise illustrations of myriad natural history specimens—reptiles, fish, turtles, and the like. Renaldo Kuhler was an unusual individual, as was instantly clear from his appearance alone. Six-foot-four, with a white beard and ponytail, he wore a custom-tailored uniform consisting of a sleeveless Kelly green suit jacket with wide, black, notched lapels, epaulets, and brass buttons, a matching suit vest, yellow flannel dress shirt, a fleur-de-lis Boy Scout neckerchief, and tight-fitting knee-length shorts (“cotton-blend lederhosen”). However, unbeknownst even to family, friends, and coworkers, Kuhler was more than an eccentric, gifted scientific illustrator. He was a prolific visionary artist, who, as a teenager in the late 1940s, invented an imaginary country he named Rocaterrania—after Rockland County, New York, where he had lived as a child. For the next sixty years, in secret, he illustrated the nation’s entire history and the prominent characters of its populace.Rocaterrania is a fantastical world, a richly illustrated amalgam of Kuhler’s personal cultural and aesthetic fascinations. Situated just north of the Adirondacks in New York, at the Canada–United States border, Rocaterrania is a sovereign nation of immigrants, from Scandinavia to Eastern Europe. Kuhler invented a complete world populated by a royal family and a succession of leaders resembling historical Russian figures, Women reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich and Janet Leigh play important roles as do bearded men of a seeming Hasidic Jewish heritage, men bearing curious physical similarities to American presidents, and neutants—individuals neither male nor female. Amid forests, mountains, lakes, and rivers, Kuhler’s imaginary country is made up of provinces and cities filled with distinctive Rocaterranian architecture and well-planned railroad and metro systems. Its government is unique, and it has its own religion, Ojallism, and its own evolving language and alphabet. With an organized labor service, a prison system (modeled after a New Jersey state penitentiary), a university system, a Rocaterranian Olympics, and an independent movie industry, Rocaterrania is a nation bustling with dozens of characters and their intrigues.Initially meant to be an escape, Kuhler's Rocaterrania became a secret lifelong obsession, an intricately coded, metaphorical account through Rocaterrania’s tumultuous history, which dovetailed with Kuhler’s own struggles for independence and freedom.Renaldo was the son of the German-born industrial designer Otto Kuhler, renowned for his Art Deco–era streamlined trains; his Belgian mother had little patience for her son, who was ostracized and bullied throughout his life for being “different.” The Kuhler family moved in 1948 from Rockland County, New York, to a remote cattle ranch in the Colorado Rockies—an unbearably isolated environment for the teenaged Renaldo. Retreating to his sketchbooks, journals, and watercolors to invent his imaginary nation of Rocaterrania, young Kuhler wrote, “The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive.”The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler is filled with more than 400 illustrations in pencil, ink, acrylic, oil, gouache, watercolor, colored pencils, and markers, demonstrating Kuhler’s phenomenal draftsmanship and wide range of style—from delicately shaded graphite works to comic-book ink drawings. Complementing Kuhler’s impressive artistry is his gift for analogical thinking, which flowered in his appropriation and reimagining of personalities, places, and events from world history to form a cohesive and fully imagined world. After decades of secrecy, Kuhler eventually first shared his work and the story of his imaginary country with filmmaker Brett Ingram, whom he met by chance in the mid-1990s. In 2009 Ingram released Rocaterrania, a feature-length documentary with prized footage of Kuhler at home and at work, and talking about his creation. With The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler Ingram has written the complete story of Rocaterrania as relayed to him over time by Kuhler, resulting in a fascinating, highly entertaining first and major book about this rare, newly discovered, full-blown visionary outsider artist.

Strangely beautiful, utterly unique, "Specimens of Hair" presents the obsessive work of a 19th-century amateur naturalist who collected hundreds upon hundreds of specimens of hair--animal and human, Including thirteen of the first fourteen U.S. presidents--in his quest to understand the mysteries of the natural world.No matter who we are, old or young, fashion conscious or style indifferent, we are all aware of hair. We wash it; we comb it; we cut, curl, and dye it. Hair can be envied or derided, and hair can provide clues to everything from age to culture to genetic identity to health. To a nineteenth-century amateur naturalist named Peter A. Browne, hair was of paramount importance: he believed it was the single physical attribute that could unravel the mystery of human evolution.Thirty years before Charles Darwin revolutionized understanding of the descent of man, Browne vigorously collected for study what he called the “pile” (from the Latin word for hair, pilus) of as wide a variety of humans (and animals) as possible in his quest to account for the differences and similarities between groups of humans. The result of his diligent, obsessive work is a fastidious, artfully assembled twelve-volume archive of mammalian diversity.Browne’s growing quest for knowledge became an all-consuming specimen-collecting passion. By the time of his death in 1860, Browne had assembled samples from innumerable wild and domestic animals, as well as the largest known study collection of human hair. He obtained hair from people from all parts of the globe and all walks of life: artists, scientists, abolitionist ministers, doctors, writers, politicians, financiers, military leaders, and even prisoners, sideshow performers, and lunatics. His crowning achievement was a gathering of hair from thirteen of the first fourteen presidents of the United States. The pages of his albums, some spare, some ornately decorated, many printed ducit amor patriae—led by love of country—are distinctly idiosyncratic, captivating, and powerfully evocative of a vanished world.Browne’s albums have been sequestered in the archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia to which Brown bequeathed them, narrowly escaping destruction in the 1970s. They are a unique manifestation of the avid collecting instinct in nineteenth-century scientific endeavors to explain the mysteries of the natural world.

In the summer of 1971, Michael Lesy and a friend found most of the snapshots in Snapshots 1971–77 in a dumpster behind a gigantic photo-processing plant in San Francisco. The photos were in the trash because the machines that printed them made them so fast — duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates — that the people on the processing line couldn’t stop them.Week after week, Lesy took home thousands of snapshots from the dumpster. He studied them as if they were archeological evidence. By the end of the summer, he’d formed his own collection of images of American life.He took that collection with him when he returned to Wisconsin to finish his graduate work in American history. His understanding of the snapshots from California as reflections of the troubled state of American society influenced the PhD research he was doing in Wisconsin — research that became the American classic Wisconsin Death Trip (1973).Over the next six years, Lesy added to his collection of California snapshots with hundreds of snapshots that had been left unclaimed and then discarded by a photo processor in Cleveland. While Lesy looked through other people’s lives in pictures, the world was coming apart at the seams. The Vietnam War, the murderous rampage of the Manson Family, and the Attica State Prison uprising filled news headlines — and the general public carried on their lives, with hope and abandon and everything in between: chaos, cruelty, familial bonds and breaks, materialism, lawlessness, unwitting humor.Lesy’s collection of snapshots from the 1970s is a time capsule of things familiar and alien. Now, fifty years later, everything and nothing about our lives has changed.In Wisconsin Death Trip Lesy pulled back the curtain of “the good old days” to reveal the stark reality of American life from 1890 to 1910. The anonymous images in Snapshots 1971–77 serve as prophesies of present-day broken dreams, toils, and tribulations.

In 1973, Michael Lesy was a young scholar whose first book had just been published. In the soon-legendary Wisconsin Death Trip he combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a devastatingly tragic epoch, the real-world antithesis of the fanciful "Gay Nineties." It startled readers then and remains a touchstone of modern photographic interpretation.That year Lesy met and became close friends with the great photographer Walker Evans, who in the 1930s had collaborated with writer James Agee to create another towering landmark in the American photo-essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Old, frail, with just two years left to live, Evans was still urgently and obsessively photographing. "Outside the rooms he inhabited," Lesy writes, "the world was scattered with objects on their way to oblivion. He photographed them in their passage." Brief as their friendship was, it was intense and rewarding. Each admired the other; each saw himself reflected in the other: aesthetic visionaries who shared a radical belief that photographs were not flat and static documents—that "the plain truth of the images . . . wasn’t as plain as it seemed," Lesy explains. "Meanings, beliefs, and emotions lay crisscrossed under the surface of the most plainspoken photographs." Throughout his career in the classroom and in more than a dozen books, Lesy has continually inspired us to open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to those many layers of meaning and feeling in photos, from seemingly ordinary snapshots to majestic landscapes.In this unconventional, lyrical biography, Lesy traces Evans’s intimate, idiosyncratic relationships with men and women—the circle of friends who made Walker Evans who he was. "Wonder and scrutiny produced the portraits Walker made in his prime," Lesy writes. Evans’s photographs of Agee, Berenice Abbott, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Lesy’s telling of Evans’s life stories."Wonder and scrutiny, suffused with desire and dread, produced the portraits he made in his last years," Lesy notes. In the 1970s, Evans became enthralled with the Polaroid SX-70 and its colorful instant images, and he used it to take his last photographs—portraits of people, in extreme close up, and portraits of objects."Good clothes and good conversation, wit and erudition, originality and inventiveness, the charms of smart and pretty women—Walker took pleasure in being alive," Lesy writes. "He photographed objects as if they were people and people as if they were souls. All the while, he never forgot Blind Joe Death. The annihilations of the First War, the extinctions of the epidemic that followed it, the pyres and the pits—these he never forgot. The still silence of his images was, to the very last, transcendental, and always he remembered the skull beneath the skin."

Starving Artist Knifed to Death in Village Room… Famous Artist Dies Penniless and All Alone… Deep in the archives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art are two strange scrapbooks packed with century-old newspaper obituaries of painters, illustrators, sculptors, and photographers, famous and forgotten alike. Somber death notices of luminaries like Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin are preserved on their crumbling pages, side by side with tragic and often grisly stories of obscure artists who met their demise as victims of accident, murder, poverty, and disease. Compiled from 1906 to 1929, the scrapbooks not only memorialize the subjects of these obituaries: they also record graphic and sensationalized news reporting from the heyday of yellow journalism. Who collected the artists’ obituaries? What was their purpose for the Met Museum? Were the scrapbooks assembled in a nod to Giorgio Vasari’s bestselling sixteenth-century magnum opus, Lives of the Artists, with its hundreds of gossipy artist biographies? When Met Museum archivist Jim Moske chanced upon these fascinating relics forgotten in museum storage, he set out to unravel the mystery of their creation.Delving into Met employee records, Moske discovered the story of Arthur D'Hervilly, an ex-convict and aspiring artist who was hired in 1894 as a museum guard. By the twilight of his museum career, D’Hervilly had risen to assistant curator of paintings. Occasionally, he was also called upon to serve as the Met media officer. It was apparently in this capacity that in the summer of 1906, he decided to order the National Press Intelligence clipping service to send him any and all U.S. newspaper stories about the deaths of artists. By the time he died thirteen years later, he had assembled a massive chronicle of reportage. D’Hervilly’s colleagues dutifully carried on adding to the scrapbooks until 1929, leaving behind more than three hundred pages crammed with thousands of obituaries.Deaths of Artists intertwines D'Hervilly's peculiar biography with heart-wrenching, bizarre, outlandish, and darkly comic stories of artists, both successful and abject. Moske's meticulously researched narrative is illustrated with full-page images of scrapbook pages, details of shocking obituary headlines, paintings and sculptures by the artist-subjects, and unique documents from the Met archives. The deaths of artists, seen in the light of their uncommon lives, add up to much more than just a litany of sad endings. This eerie glimpse into a dark side of art history and creative practice illuminates the unique challenges artists face, exceptional risks they take, and the cruel turns of fate that often thwart their efforts.

Home to over 20,000 mind-boggling anatomic specimens, plaster casts, wax models, and paintings, the Mutter Museum, founded in 1858, is part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. This book features over 100 photographs by a select group of renowned photographers whose work appears in the award-winning Mutter Museum calendars. Highlights include a bust of an early-19th-century Parisian widow with a six-inch horn protruding from the forehead; the connected livers of Chang and Eng, the world-famous Siamese twins; the skeleton of a 7’6” giant from Kentucky; and a collection of 139 skulls showing anatomic variation among ethnic groups in central and eastern Europe. Historical photographs from the museum’s archives, brief background texts about the collection, stunning photographs by acclaimed photographers including William Wegman and Joel-Peter Witkinand, and an introductory essay on the museum are also included.

The first book on the Mütter Museum contain artful images of the museum's fascinating exhibits shot by contemporary fine art photographers. Here, the focus is on the museum’s archive of rare historic photographs, most of which have never been seen by the public. Featured are poignant, aesthetically accomplished works ranging from Civil War photographs showing injury and recovery, to the ravages of diseases not yet conquered in the 19th century, to pathological anomalies, to psychological disorders. Many were taken by talented photographers between the 1860s and the 1940s as records for physicians to share among colleagues and to track patients’ conditions, and demonstrate various techniques used in medical photography including the daguerreotype, micrography, X ray, and traditional portrait-style photography. As visual documents of what humans endured in the face of limited medical knowledge, these extraordinary and haunting photographs demonstrate how far medicine has advanced.

The author discusses what he sees as "the mutual attraction between presidents and celebrities from Kennedy to Reagan. . . . Kennedy, he argues, took celebrity politics 'to a whole new level'; Nixon learned how to manufacture celebrity; . . . and Reagan combined both men's lessons and became, in the later years of his presidency, 'not so much America's leader as . . . its logo.'

Three quarters of a million people visit Graceland each year--40,000 of them during "Elvis Week", the anniversary of his death in August. Strausbaugh describes the religious fervor of Elvis followers, and places Elvism in the context of many grassroots movements away from traditional churches, and explores parallels to Elvis worship in other cultures past and present.

Between 1945 and 1970, millions of public school students were subjected to hundreds of films designed to keep them on the straight and narrow. These cultural gems "enlightened" the nation's youth about proper dating, good table manners, the evils of dope, and what happens to teens who drive too fast on prom night.Author Ken Smith embarked on an exhaustive nine-year search for these obscure educational films. The result is this fascinating stroll down memory lane. Smith has gathered titles such as Worth Waiting For, Posture Pals, Last Date, Highways of Agony, and Soapy the Germ Fighter. Included are interviews with writers and directors, detailed descriptions of these unintentionally hilarious films, and commentary on the social engineering behind them.

Junk English 2 combines basic advice — peppered with contemporary examples of alarmingly common verbal atrocities — with entertaining invective. Based on the author's uncounted hours of exposure to infomercials, ads, and other dubious cultural forms, the book covers topics like "parasitic intensifiers," "-ize verbs," and the dreaded "weasel words." "Useless cabooses" — as well as frequently abused words like "focus," "factor," and "process" — are examined and put in their proper place, as are the seemingly unstoppable impulses toward vagueness and euphemisms. Written so that the ordinary writer and speaker of English can readily see the manipulations of language, especially in the post-9/11 era, Junk English 2 is useful as a quick reference, a source for further exploration, and a fun read. The book is arranged alphabetically, like a dictionary, providing a compendium of frequently abused words and suggested alternates.

Millions of people in New York and New Jersey consider the Hudson River as familiar as their own backyard yet only have a superficial knowledge of the landscape and land use of this river's waterfront. This beautiful book deepens readers' understanding with an aerial portrait of the river’s shores from the Battery, at the southernmost tip of Manhattan, to the river's origin near Albany. Focusing on man-made sites rarely seen by those who travel along the river’s banks — some of which can only be seen aerially — the book showcases the shore area’s vanishing (or vanished) avenues, prisons, power plants, quarries, parks, condos, and redevelopments. Up River’s photos and accompanying succinct text tell the story of how this river was used in developing industry and modern America from Revolutionary times through 19th-century exploitation of the waterfront to the beginnings of environmental activism that protects famous vistas from the quarriers of the Palisades.

"Cadavers, camera, action!" (The New York Times Book Review). From the advent of photography in the 19th and into the 20th century, medical students, often in secrecy, took photographs of themselves with the cadavers that they dissected: their first patients. Featuring 138 of these historic photographs and illuminating essays by two experts on the subject, Dissection reveals a startling piece of American history. Sherwin Nuland, MD, said this is "a truly unique and important book [that] documents a period in medical education in a way that is matched by no other existing contribution." And Mary Roach said Dissection "is the most extraordinary book I have ever seen--the perfect coffee table book for all the households where I'd most like to be invited for coffee."

Melvin Burkhart the Anatomical Wonder; Zip the Pinhead; Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins; Johnny Eck, the King of the Freaks; Koo Koo the Birdgirl; and 45 more fascinating sideshow freaks both famous and obscure are immortalized in Drew Friedman’s delightful portraits. Before the politically correct impulses of the 1970s squelched the grand American tradition of the sideshow — people born with abnormalities and others, like Jolly Jere the Fat Man, who created their oddity — exhibited themselves to the shock and thrill of millions in sideshows nationwide. As a youth in the late 60s and early 70s, Drew Friedman often visited Coney Island with his family, and he and his brothers always insisted on seeing the "Freak Show." Drew Friedman’s Sideshow Freaks presents 50 of his favorite historic human oddities — famous and obscure — in mesmerizing full-color portraits. As in Warts and All, Old Jewish Comedians, and More Old Jewish Comedians, Drew Friedman once again meticulously, brilliantly, and affectionately brings to life people in the show business, this time focusing on America’s oddest performers.

Eighteenth-century anatomist Honoré Fragonard’s écorchés—preserved dissected real animal and human cadavers—are extraordinary works of virtuosic skill that have survived nearly two and a half centuries in the Fragonard Museum in Alfort, on the outskirts of Paris. Like the superb anatomical preparations made by the renowned seventeenth- to eighteenth-century anatomist Frederik Ruysch, Fragonard’s specimens challenge our understanding of historical science, Western culture, and the display of the dead. A desiccated rider mounted atop a galloping horse, wondrous demonstrations of animal anatomy: these impressive spectacles of permanently preserved bodies are still on display in the stunning collection of the Fragonard Museum. Intriguing, strange, and the rarest of rare, Fragonard’s écorchés are specimens from a realm that exists between art and science and are the historical precursor of modern-day plastinated anatomical specimens popularly exhibited worldwide.