Drag City US Vinyl & CDs

Notes: If we are somewhat over-inundated with rock biographies right now, then you can trust The Red Krayola's Mayo Thompson to come up with something different. The second part of his 'After Math' series sees us catch up with a plot to smuggle a small erotic bronze out of Tirana and the subsequent plot twists and red herrings are as unexpected and bewildering as any The Red Krayloa recording.

Notes: Funny, what people seem to want. In Art, Mystery, a controversial former footballer, now export agent specializing in chrome, accepts an unusual commission - to find and export a pornographic work of Renaissance art.

"Mr. Thompson has given us the perfect cocktail of suspense and whimsy. Very highly recommended - even the most humourless of art historians will be tickled by Art, Mystery!"
- Dr. Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

"I am impressed with Art, Mystery. Cracking dialogue. I enjoyed reading it. I also thought it was very funny and wore its humour integrally, I mean, like, subtle."
- Josephine Pryde

Notes: Jim Franks is a baker and a poet who's written a love story about bread, which is to say he's written a life story about listening, learning, trying, failing, adapting, and above all, caring. Through humor, history, relentless curiosity, and refreshingly unsentimental poetry, Existential Bread teaches there are many ways to bake a loaf, just as there are many ways to live a life.

Notes: Calling all parents lost in Kids Book Land! Gabba Gabba, We Accept You is a children's picture book telling the story of a misfit kid who grew up to be a punk rock hero. The challenging times that Jeffrey Ross Hyman endured before becoming Joey Ramone speak to young folks navigating the complexities of growing up, via teachable punk stuff: being your own person with your own compass, embracing uniqueness, etc. Jay Ruttenberg & Lucinda Schreiber light the tale righteously with plain-spoken language, lyrical design and colorful illustrations, finding unexpected depths on every page.

About the inspiration for this book, Jay says,

"My daughter just turned 11, so I've spent recent years in children's book land. I think I've read her 97 books about Abraham Lincoln and 12,984 about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It occurred to me that a lot of the life lessons I've been trying to teach her weren't learned through my family or school, but through punk stuff: the importance of being your own person, following your own radar instead of a group's, embracing uniqueness, etc. The Ramones, and in particular Joey, seemed like the perfect embodiment of that. So my big hope for the book is that it tells the story of Joey Ramone, but also, in kind of the biggest way, of what punk rock means, and how it might help a little kid wade through difficult social waters and be their own unique person."

Gabba Gabba We Accept You speaks in well-grounded and wise verbal and visual language to inform and affirm children - young ones and the adult children alike - that their individual personalities have an inspired and inspiring place in the world. In the process of becoming and being a person, there's no one set of rules. The sooner we all know that, the sooner we'll find ourselves in a much better place.

Notes: Until we have a feature film in which Bill Callahan's words are spoken by the true and deep characters who exist within the songs, the best format will be this lyric book - wait, no, the best format will always be the albums featuring the songs, since they are sung by Bill Callahan, the author and singer, in his own inimitable and completely individual fashion. I Drive a Valence, however, which spans two decades of Smog/Bill Callahan songs, is a fairly unforgettable look-see; in fact, it's a definitive-yet-concise trip through the mirror, collecting the lyrics to 70 songs and pairing them with 116 dreamy ink-wash images by the man himself.

The nuances and ambiguities within plain-spoke expression are at the exquisite center of Callahan's gift, and the plain fact of words on paper nails them down in a concrete fashion that signals eternity somehow more concretely than sounds in the air can conjure.

I Drive a Valence does this for the listener - makes him/her a reader, while putting Bill Callahan's songs on another shelf where they sit just as entirely as they do on LP shelves around the world.

Notes: The Letters to Emma Bowlcut, an epistolary novelette, collects 62 letters from a nameless protagonist to a woman he saw at at a party. The letters form the seduction, in sifting the loose, disparate details of his day-to-day, the desires, the frustrations, the joys. The self as depicted through emotional weather updates, social observations, anecdotes, advice and well timed punchlines. The Letters to Emma Bowlcut captures the sensual and esoteric qualities of letter correspondence. There is something in the time it takes the post to deliver and the physicality of the object that eventually arrives, that evokes an intimacy, a depth: a desire to be known and an opportunity to present oneself in the internal fantasy of every day's secret internal dialogue.

Over the course of 9 releases as Smog, Bill Callahan built an international audience for his musical fights and lyrical incites. For the past 3 years, he has presented his music under his own name to. His artwork, which has adorned the covers of all but one of his albums, has been distributed in the form of 3 sketchbooks (Women, The Death's Head Drawings and Ballerina Scratchpad and he has contributed his unique perspective to magazines over the years, but the Letters to Emma Bowlcut is his first published writing. As Bill continues to record and tour, playing concerts throughout Europe, Japan, North and South America and Australia, the Letters to Emma Bowlcut will be disinseminated among his ever-chaging and growing fan-base.

Notes: A charming, often barbed observation of the evolution of American mainstream filmmaking over the course of its first century, this memoir chronicles the unusual, multidecade career trajectory of Curtis Harrington. Conveyed in a witty and campy style, it follows the strange arc of a man who created avant-garde films as part of Kenneth Anger's inner circle, directed critically acclaimed and cult adored horror films like Night Tide and Games, and then descended down the "slippery slope" of television work by directing episodes of Charlie's Angels and Dynasty.

As a fast paced view of Harrington's journey through the kaleidoscope of the movie business, it acts alternately as a personal memoir and cultural history from a veteran of the entertainment business. As Harrington was living as a gay man in Hollywood, the book additionally gives a rare peek into the hidden world of what was then an elite subculture. Doubling as both a serious study of film aesthetics and a gossipy tell-all, this truly unique look at the Hollywood dream includes an unlikely cast of characters, including Dennis Hopper, Christopher Isherwood, Shelley Winters, Marilyn Monroe, Stanley Kubrick, and Aaron Spelling, as it reveals a portrait of the machinations of the film and television business.

Curtis Harrington was a film and television director whose work included experimental films, horror films, and episodic television. He was a close associate of groundbreaking cult film pioneer Kenneth Anger and is considered one of the forerunners of New Queer Cinema.

The book includes a mid section of black and white photographs.

Notes: A deluxe, hardbound, episode-by-episode guide to every aspect of the On Cinema Universe, from the flagship show to all the incarnations of the hit spin-off action series, Decker. Incisive commentary and analysis of the show made famous by its incisive commentary and analysis. Includes rare On Cinema, Decker, and Dekkar documents, photographs, and ephemera. Sure to thrill the rabid fanbase and introduce rabid neophytes as well! Compiled by BRANDON KEARNEY with Forewords by hosts TIM HEIDECKER and GREGG TURKINGTON. 8.5" x 11" / 284pp.

Notes: Projectile is an artist's book by John Sparagana, Reto Geiser and David Grubbs. The book spirals outward from a single source image: a news photograph of chair-throwing at the conclusion of a cancelled rock concert in the early 1980s. Visual artist John Sparagana has long produced sliced and mixed collage works in which a source image is enlarged, copies of the image sliced vertically into 1/8" strips and then sequenced horizontally, followed by a second stage in which the stretched image is sliced horizontally and sequenced vertically. The resulting works stutter, shimmer, extrapolate, and radiate with all manner of dazzling visual effects. Projectile deepens this engagement, with Geiser drawing from multiple works by Sparagana and a work of short fiction by Grubbsia single 2,100-word sentence that wends its way through the entirety of the book.