The New York Times:

Mel Gordon, an unorthodox and widely published drama scholar who taught a course in the history of bad acting and wrote books about the ghastly Grand Guignol theater of Paris and the deviant sexual world of Weimar Berlin, died on March 22 in Richmond, Calif. He was 71.

Sheila Gordon, his former wife, said the cause was complications of renal failure. His only immediate survivor was his brother Norman.

Professor Gordon, who taught at New York University and then the University of California, Berkeley, indulged a medley of singular enthusiasms.

He wrote a two-volume history of the Stanislavsky method of acting — and the libretto to a Yiddish opera. He collaborated on a study of Funnyman, a Jewish shtick-wielding comic book superhero who was conjured up in 1948 by the creators of Superman — and wrote a biography of Hitler’s so-called Jewish clairvoyant. He wrote about commedia dell’arte — and about Madonna’s interest in kabbalah, the mystical Jewish tradition of interpreting the Bible… (continue)

San Francisco Chronicle:

Mel Gordon, a drama scholar who penned unconventional and eclectic writings on theater history, died March 22 in Richmond. He was 71.

The cause of death was complications related to renal failure, said Gordon’s former wife Sheila Gordon.

Gordon is perhaps best known for “The Grand Guignol,” about the graphic genre of theater in 20th century Paris, and “Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin,” on sex culture and prostitution during the Weimar Republic. He also directed more than 20 productions in Frankfurt, New York City, Paris, Zurich and San Francisco… (continue)

If you were lucky enough to spend time with Mel Gordon, you were treated to the man’s generous and infectious love of theater history, cabaret, and the dark corners of Twentieth Century culture.  At heart, Mel was a teacher and we are comforted that we played a role in sharing his expertise. Beginning with the 1988 edition of Grand Guignol, Theatre of Fear and Theater, his encyclopedic history of the Grand Guignol of Paris that the New York Times noted was, “Bloodcurdling shrieks, fiendish schemes, deeds of darkness, mayhem and mutilation – we all have a rough idea of what Grand Guignol stands for. But until now it has been hard to find out much more about it than that. According to the American theater historian Mel Gordon, no major history of the theater so much as mentions it, although it is a form of entertainment that held its own on the Paris stage for more than half a century.”

Mel was a gregarious soul who loved pushing boundaries with his writing and performances.  He shared this memory with Heathen Harvest Magazine in this 2016 interview, “The original publishing house [Feral House precursor, Amok Press] was so poor that they couldn’t afford to give me a book party when The Grand Guignol was released. I felt sorry for them, so I told them I’d do a Grand Guignol play, we’d charge five bucks, and that would pay for the book party. We performed A Crime in the Madhouse, where the eyeball gets scooped out and the face gets burnt away. It was the only time in forty-five productions or more that I’d done where the audience got up on their chairs afterwards and demanded to see it again.”

Mel’s learned explorations took him from New York University to a long-tenured position teaching theater history at Berkeley.  He was a catalyst in San Francisco’s performance culture, staging both popular productions of Grand Guignol plays and his thoroughly modern and transgressive “Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Museum of Sex”, (which was shut down after a performance art piece where a dominatrix penetrated her boyfriend with a bottle of Wild Turkey to illustrate the treatment of native Americans by western expansionists in the 1800s).  Mel Gordon took impish glee in sharing his research and exposing the hypocrisy of modern sexual politics and taboos.

More than anything, Mel was a friend.  Adam shares these thoughts:

Mel Gordon’s passing is a heartbreaker for Feral House and me personally.

I first met Mel when I worked as a typesetter and layout artist for PAJ Publications in 1979. At that time Mel taught at NYU and spoke to me then of his fascinating research labors.  Creating Amok Press (with Ken Swezey) in the late 1980s allowed me to publish Mel Gordon, and the first book he did together was The Grand Guignol: Theater of Fear and Terror.  Expanded editions of this book have been published since then by Da Capo and Feral House.

Mel’s extensive knowledge of theater coincided with that of my own family, whose New York days in the 1950s hooked them up with the famed German director Erwin Piscator, who created “epic theater” in the 1920s with Bertolt Brecht, and later directed plays and taught at the New School of Social Research where my mother Rosa also taught and directed, and my father took courses following his days as a prisoner during World War II.

For the past couple decades Mel taught a multitude of courses at UC Berkeley and also labored on a number of book projects, some published by Feral House. In his late days Mel was writing a book called “Fascist Love Cults” which he may not have completed. Mel Gordon had a wide range of unorthodox interests, and he demonstrated them well in his many publications, including Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris 1920 – 1946, Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman: The First Jewish Superman from the Creators of Superman, The Seven Addictions and Five Careers of Anita Berber: Weimer Berlin’s Priestess of Depravity, and Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant.

We will continue to have fond memories of Mel Gordon, and will miss his friendship for as long as I live.

We encourage you to learn more about Mel and his work in these interviews Mel did with Tenebrous Kate at Heathen Harvest Magazine in 2016.

• https://heathenharvest.org/2016/03/24/in-search-of-the-extraordinary-an-interview-with-mel-gordon/
• https://heathenharvest.org/2016/09/20/theatre-of-fear-and-horror-the-grisly-spectacle-of-the-grand-guignol-of-paris-review-interview/
• New York Times review of Grand Guignol, Theatre of Fear and Terror (Amok, 1988)
• https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/11/books/books-of-the-times-how-the-grand-guignol-made-fear-popular.html
• San Francisco Chronicle review of “Magnus Hirschfield’s Museum of Sex” (August 2, 1997)
• https://www.sfgate.com/performance/article/Sex-Museum-Beats-A-Path-to-the-Erotic-2831440.php

At the time when all political parties had their conventions, cases of the new Process Media publication arrived at our front door. The book is Dr. Joseph P. Farrell and Gary Lawrence’s Rotten to the (Common) Core: Public Schooling, Standardized Tests, and the Surveillance State. Yes, we’ve heard doctrinaire Christians complain of the content of textbooks, and taking the trouble to pass state laws restricting the content of historical or religious studies. These sorts of complaints are not the focus of this book. Rotten to the (Common Core) uncovers the way the State instructs children more than the pedagogy of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The revelations here are both astonishing and troubling, particularly in light of the restrictive discourse on display at both the Republican and Democratic conventions.

Today you can purchase this book here: http://feralhouse.com/rotten-to-the-common-core/

This bright and dry summer we’ve sent books to the printer: coloring books about David Bowie and Lemmy Kilmister. We’ve also announced the upcoming publication of two additional coloring books to the series, highlighting the lives of the recently deceased Muhammad Ali and Prince. We invite all of you to contribute. We’re very pleased to say that the great Darius James, author of Negrophobia: An Urban Parable and That’s Blaxploitation! is along for the ride as editor of these two new Feral House coloring books.

If you’re interested in contributing to these coloring books, look over here: https://www.facebook.com/TheFeralHouseColoringBook/notes

We’re also pleased to announce that Feral House / Process Media will be vending once again on September 10 and 11 at the great Esoteric Book Conference, which meets in Seattle. Master of the Mysteries author Louis Sahagun is presenting his riveting and entertaining discoveries about proto-spiritualist researcher, Manly P. Hall. Read this interview with Sahagun to learn more about Hall and his Secrets of All Ages.

Visiting the book venders and art galleries are free of charge. Here’s further information: http://esotericbookconference.com/

We’ve taken this before on many occasions. The train from Seattle to Portland. The slowness of it, the views through the morning gray, the terrible coffee. It was always kind of wonderful, despite not being able to open windows like Amtrak’s European cousins.

This recent trip, though… oh, the humanity!

I was seated in Car 7 on the aisle in front of a yowling Polish family… how did Amtrak cram so many people on one aisle? Where I was sitting, a very nice but P.T. Barnum-sized woman also took up half of my seat. Could this have been some sort of reality show?

The restroom on this and surrounding cars were flooded with urine, diarrhea and soiled toilet paper … even the car with stale bagels and bad coffee was packed tight with passengers trying to escape the bad scene.

We finally arrived some four and a half hours later at the Portland destination. Everyone speaks of the gentrification attacking Portland, but as yet, it has not seemed to reach the train station’s surrounding blocks where homeless beggars wreak vengeance on passersby as retribution for their poor life experience.

This trip to Portland did not start off well, but picked up after we met with four different Feral House authors. Why so many writers this town? It’s unplanned, I can promise you that…

Markus Wolff and I spoke about his coming book about the remarkable German artist Fidus and his back to the land compatriots. Can’t wait for this.

Then Phil Stanford (of White House Call Girl fame) brought up his research for his coming title about the time in Portland when it was run by corrupt cops and mobsters. Now that’s the true Portlandia.

Then the delightful Jennifer Robin took me around to dive bars downtown as we spoke of her book describing conspicuous human traffic in all areas of Portland.

The next morning long-time friend Jerry A. (of Poison Idea) caught me up on his long-gestating memoir of rock and roll weirdness. He gave me two pins. One says “Pig and Jerry, Not Fred and Carrie”… I put that on immediately in respect of Tom “Pig” Roberts and the remarkable Jerry Lang who offered vocals for some of my SWAT and Tards recordings.

The train ride back North to Seattle wasn’t much better than the one South. Why has Amtrak become the new Greyhound?

The nasty reality of the publishing business was revealed to me when I labored for New York’s Strand Bookstore. My job involved hauling “review copies” downstairs to the book buyer. It was overwhelming to see all the garbage launched onto the planet in the form of a printed book. This was the publishing and resale business up close and ugly, and I could not help but become cynical and dispirited by it all.

Is this where my fellow humans received profound helpings of information and creativity? God, I hope not. I owned remarkable examples of the printed book, and knew they had the possibility of being far more interesting.

Fortunately we were introduced to friend of a friend (thanks Georganne Deen!) who I convinced to assist me with publishing more intriguing titles than the horrible norm. For the next couple years we began an imprint called “Amok Press.” After Amok Press had its run, I moved to the West Coast from NYC and started Feral House in 1989.

Feral House became identified as a company that largely did dark, nasty, and conspiratorial stuff, and became a kind of publishing testing ground. In time other publishers —big and small — started to do Feral House variants once we proved that it was possible to do so. One of the founders of another firm said his company was founded to be a “better branded” Feral House.

Still, there’s a wide world out there, and most of the time Feral House was first and best. Throughout the years, when Feral House showed its wares at publishing conventions, many bookstore owners would look at our table, and give us the hairy eyeball as they moved on down to get their Suzanne Somers cookbooks signed.

Few people might believe this, but my interests run further afield than death, corruption, violence and insanity. A decade ago we founded the imprint Process Media with Jodi Wille as a forum for other sorts of books, many those in the realm of self-reliance, unorthodox lifestyles and books that undemonized the idea of “cults” and drug-taking. Though Jodi is now primarily involved with filmmaking (you should see the remarkable documentary, The Source Family, that she co-directed with Maria Demopoulos), Process Media continues on strong as ever.

Process’ most recent title, Power of the Seed, by Port Townsend native Susan M. Parker, is an amazingly clear Self-Reliance Series book on the true idea of what “essential oils” are and their creation (it’s decidedly not what you purchase at the supermarket or Body Shop).

The book has just rolled in from the printer, and is now available here.  A great video for it is coming next week!

Next week we also will introduce the new Feral House book, Pulp Macabre: The Art of Lee Brown Coye’s Final and Darkest Era edited by Mike Hunchback and Caleb Braaten (and co-published by the great Sacred Bones Records). The books have finally rolled in despite the strike at US’ West Coast ports!

This morning we heard the sad news of the passing of actor Leonard Nimoy who worked, non-Spock like, with my own long-gone father in The Man From UNCLE (The Project Strigas Affair) and a Henry Fonda tv-movie called The Alpha Caper. My father enjoyed acting with him a great deal. May he rest in peace.