From Latino.foxnews.com:

“Juarez is returning to maps featuring attractions for visitors to the U.S.-Mexico border region around El Paso after two years of being excluded due to a wave of drug-related violence.”

“‘Ciudad Juarez should never have been excluded from the tourist map of El Paso since it’s our main trade partner and we are all one region that cooperates one with the other,’ former city council member and current Democratic congressional candidate Beto O’Rourke told Efe.”

It’s a bummer that Feral House’s Dying for the Truth puts a wrench into that city’s tourism office’s good news. As states Chihuahua tourism office director Demetrio Sotomayor, “The fact that Juarez is appearing once again on the map of tourist attractions in Texas is like a vote of confidence on the safety in the city.”

Tourists, simply ignore the piles of bloody limbs, and skinned and severed heads.

We received the disturbing news that one of the creators of Blog Del Narco and a contributor to Dying For the Truth has been missing for three weeks now, and before he went missing urged co-writer “Lucy” to run from Mexico. This recent Guardian newspaper article provides further information of this disturbing fact.

Will Amato, god bless him, provided crucial documents to the Feral House book, Lexicon Devil, about Darby Crash and the strange elemental days of LA punk rock. That material consisted of a yearbook to the bizarre, influential alternative program of West LA’s University High School called “IPS”, an odd Scientology/EST program that formatively influenced Germs performers Pat Smear and Darby Crash, and also a couple women who later figured largely in my own life.

Today Will posted in Facebook a link to a well-written Believer magazine article about a strange scoundrel, Sadakichi Hartmann, a photogenic German/Japanese crossbreed, a poet and playwright known for being among the first Westerners to write books about Asian art, and providing a new technical innovation known as photography the status of being an art form. This is the Believer article in question.

The Believer magazine’s  author wrote that Sadakichi Hartmann was a friend of the notorious drunk/author John Barrymore, but that’s not all. Hartmann became the iconic buddy of the Hollywood drinking group known as The Bundy Drive Boys, subject of the Feral House book, The Hollywood Hellfire Club, whose cover was drawn by Drew Friedman.

The Bundy Drive Boys loved Sadakichi Hartmann for his iconic weirdness, though he was also hated by the group’s W.C. Fields for being a moocher. The Believer article noted Ezra Pound’s tribute to Hartmann in his Cantos. John Decker, the remarkable portraitist and host of wild Bundy Drive parties, executed a marvelous oversized painting of Sadakichi, now owned by Hollywood Hellfire Club’sco-author Bill Nelson. The Believer article also mentions the strange Sadakichi Hartmann art project pilloreid by New York Times art critics in which a 1905 audience was subjected to a brief concert suffused with perfumes fanned across the audience. I am now the proud owner of the perfume concert’s notebook, annotated by Mr. Hartmann.

The perfume concert was a big fail but also a memorable attempt at greatness.

“More than—rare enough—a damned good book, it is a book of timeless, illuminating truth …This book is one of a kind.

You Can’t Win, the beloved memoir of real lowdown Americana by criminal hobo Jack Black, was first published in 1926, then reprinted in 1988 by Adam Parfrey’s Amok Press, featuring an introduction by William S. Burroughs.

After its Amok Press edition went out of print, You Can’t Win found popularity once again with the AK Press edition.

Feral House’s new version takes this classic American narrative a lot further, including two remarkable nonfiction articles by Jack Black written for Harper’s Magazine in the 1920s. Extraordinary illustrations by Joe Coleman and new biographical revelations by Donald Kennison round out the new edition.

A full-length feature film of You Can’t Win starring Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Pitt is expected to be released in spring 2013.

The must-see Source Family documentary opened at IFC this week after a series of amazing events in New York including a night of Source Family home movies, an afternoon of meditation, white magick, and holistic food and numerous Q&A’s with Electricity and Isis Aquarian, original Source members. If you are in New York City, San Francisco or Seattle, the film is now playing and we highly recommend you see it.

Alex Cox, like most of the American and British public, does not buy into the moth-eaten establishment tale about the regicide. The President and the Provocateur is not the usual conspiracy volume, and is structured almost like the film Rashomon, including varying views of the story with different fonts and sizes.

The Kennedy assassination saga has obsessed filmmaker Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy) for most of his life. The President and The Provocateur is Cox’s informed meditation on the conspiratorial tale, and as such is an imaginative rendering of the parallel structures of the lives of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Frankenstein

The credit for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s authorship first occurred in 1823 when a French edition was published. A year earlier, Mary’s revolutionary husband, the influential poet, dramatist, novelist, and essayist Percy Bysshe Shelley, died.

The same year Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (its full title) was first published, so was another work by Mary’s husband that shares use of the word Prometheus. The dramaPrometheus Unbound was indeed credited to Percy Shelley.

The secret admission of many experts in English literature is that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley did not write a good portion of Frankenstein. In Shelley Unbound, Oxford scholar Scott D. de Hart examines the critical information about Percy Shelley’s scientific avocations, his disputes against church and state, and his connection to the illegal and infamous anti-Catholic organization, the Illuminati.

Scott D. de Hart’s fascinating investigation into Frankenstein and the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley results in an inconvenient truth regarding what we have long believed to be a great early example of the feminist canon.

Scott D. de Hart was born and raised in Southern California. He graduated from Oxford University with a PhD specializing in nineteenth-century English literature and legal controversies.

We are not here in physical form on this planet very long. What do we do and what do we learn while occupying these bodies of ours?

In the late ’60s and early ’70s particularly, fellow souls explored the WTF and What Is It?, and often attached themselves to a larger group of explorers for the purpose of discovering at an accelerated pace.

Elsewhere we published books about The Process Church, communal/tribal living, Future Primitivism, and coming in the not too distant future, The Mel Lyman Family.  Under the Process Media imprint, Jodi Wille and I published this book/cd by Isis Aquarian and Electricity Aquarian, The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, YaHoWha 13, and The Source Family.

The Source Family — whatever one thinks about cults or communes — has been extremely influential in regard to healthy eating and exploratory beliefs.

Now that Jodi has focused her attention to creating films rather than books, she has put together, with the help of Maria Demopoulis and many others, a full-length documentary based upon the Process Media publication.  I must say that this film is an amazing thing, chock full of film from the period, and I’m proud to be acknowledged as its Co-Producer.

There are a lot of not-to-be missed events happening across the states during the month of May. THIS website has information about all the screenings and events, and they begin at the end of April and throughout the coming month.

SEE THE MOVIE TRAILER HERE

Our newest release has gotten some heat lately for exposing the following story about Lindsey Lohan all over the internet this week:

“Lindsay goes straight for the toilet, pulling her dress up and sitting (no underwear) and one of her breasts is hanging out the top of the dress. I start to wash my hands and she asks me, ‘So, what’s your story?’ before doing an uneven line of coke off her wrist.”

You can read the rest of the torrid tale ending in some fight and the trashing of a hotel room here.

Her father had a few choice words to say about the allegations here.

The book’s author also went back on the Dr. Phil show this month to re-hash their long-standing debate on whether his website is responsible for ruining people’s lives. Catch the first clash here.

Just a bit of scandal to bring you into the weekend…

Why would Feral House publish such a book?

You mean, the one written by that Iranian dude from Scottsdale, Arizona, land of rich asshats?

Yeah dude, what’s up with all that?

Are you asking about the guy who does TheDirty.com website? The one that insults women who fuck rich Saudis, get boob jobs and whose thighs might touch?

Yes, that scumbag. Man, why would you publish a book by the guy that Dr. Phil and Anderson Cooper say is the scum of the earth?

Well reader, we’re guilty of doing that.

I can’t believe it. You put out a book by the douchebag on the tv show who somehow snagged that hot blonde wife?

Yes, and Feral House legitimizes him by publishing a book he actually wrote.

Now why, Mr. Feral House, would you do such a thing?

Well, reader, perhaps the book is well-written, and discusses a way of life that evokes our car accident curiosity.

Hey then, has Feral House become tabloid?

Yes, reader, we’ve become tabloid.  This is the earth we live on. Ignore it, stare at it, drown in it. We’re all doomed.

The backlash has begun.

The new Feral House book, Dying for the Truth, consists of new material as well as older but significant posts from the Mexican Drug War blog, Blog Del Narco. This blog is one of the most heavily trafficked in Mexico, and as a result seem to foment a great deal of resentment. Not only from drug cartels who have threatened the lives of Blog Del Narco’s creators, but also from the mainstream media.

Without even reading the book in question, a Mexican “journalist” wrote me about a story he was writing to accuse the book of being nothing but plagiarized material that doesn’t credit the source material.

Well, huh? Blog Del Narco never made the claim of being journalism per se, but an information-gathering resource where readers could find material about the Drug War that wasn’t otherwise available, or if it was available somewhere, not seen by many readers at all. People who wrote for Blog Del Narco included hundreds of individuals who forwarded their posts to Blog Del Narco but had no desire to be “credited” at all, since these credits could inflame cartel anger. As a result, Blog Del Narco often became a repository of material from journalists, police and ordinary citizens who wanted to remain anonymous.

The past few years have seen the murder of many dozens of “credited” journalists and policemen.

Does the “plagiarism” accusation truly fit the threatened truth-sayers at Blog Del Narco?

The Blog Del Narco folks say that not a word of the book Dying For the Truth was written by anyone other than the blog’s actual crew.

But now the smears are being launched. Cui Bono? For whom do they most benefit?