Psychedelic concept art from one of the rides at P.O.P.

Christopher Merritt showing a slide of some of the stranger attractions at P.O.P. during this week’s Barnes and Noble event in NYC.

Just a reminder that we are having a slew of events in Los Angeles this weekend to support our big release Pacific Ocean Park: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles’ Space Age Nautical Pleasure Pier, with a foreword by Brian Wilson, from our sister press Process Media!

The authors Christopher Merritt and Domenic Priore are doing a few very special events over the weekend and Chris flew all the way from Shanghai, where he is currently helping to design a large amusement park, and this will be the ONLY chance to get his signature on the book and to see him give a presentation and slideshow of the park. He and Domenic will be presenting a ton a fascinating information and engaging photographs from this long forgotten institute of human pleasure.

Think psychedelic ballrooms, Dogtown surfers, tiki design extremes, Pink Floyd, and a flaming boardwalk to get an idea…

Check out the video trailer for the book to see some great footage and learn more about the park.

You can also read more about it in last week’s New York Times and see a them live on yesterdays Good Day L.A.

Here are the events:

Friday, July 11 @ 7:30 p.m. Stories Book Store (Echo Park), 1716 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90028 (213) 413-3733 with live music from The Unclaimed and Willow Willow. (Free)

Saturday, July 12 @ 4 p.m. Book Soup (Sunset Strip), 8818 Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, California 90069 (310) 659-3110 with slide show plus special guests TBA, confirmed already are the legendary Skip Engblom and Anthony Friedkin from Dogtown and Z-Boys. (Free)

Sunday, July 13: Micechat brunch, slide lecture and book signing, ESPN Zone at Downtown Disney, Anaheim, California 8-10:30am (Ticketed event –http://www.eventzilla.net/web/event?eventid=2139041485 )

Sunday, July 13 @ 2 p.m. Santa Monica History Museum, 1350 7th Street, Santa Monica, California 90401 (310) 395-2290 with slide show plus Sea Horse from Pacific Ocean Park entrance plus seven Earl Newman silk screen P.O.P. posters on display. (Free)

Jodorowsky’s Dune, the new and great documentary, reveals how one man galvanized other geniuses to dream and think larger, put down everything else in their lives, and join forces with him to create the kind of film meant to change everybody’s life in the manner of a psychedelic experience.

Alejandro Jodorowsky and his fellow “spiritual warriors” never made their hugely ambitious version of Dune. And though he had successfully created Holy Mountain, one of the most challenging and life-changing movies ever made, corporate forces did not trust their money — as Jodo calls it, their “shit” —by investing it into a production decades ahead of everyone else.

And because Jodorowsky did not make his Dune, nay-saying conservatives can safely ridicule him, and call him a Don Quixote sort of madman who tilted at windmills. Jodorowsky’s Dune reveals how much this unmade film actually influenced other sci-fi movies the following decade, the Star Wars and Blade Runner in the mythological treatment of our future.

The fearless Alejandro Jodorowsky inspires me. If he’s Don Quixote, I would have been happy to become his Sancho Panza. Jodorowsky’s Dune reminds me that films are a way to activate collective dreams.

And though it’s not really discussed in this documentary, one can see once again how Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey was such an astonishing accomplishment.

 

We couldn’t be more excited about the upcoming Process Media release of Hashish the Lost Legend: The First English Translation of a Great Oriental Romance! Read more about this beautiful book HERE and check out these photos that speak for themselves.

Thanks to everyone who came out last week to our fantastic Yé Yé Girls of 60’s French Pop release party at Molasses Books! A very special thanks to Mikey IQ Jones, Sheila B. of Cha Cha Charming and the wonderful April March for spinning so many incredible deep Yé Yé cuts.

Thanks again to Matt Win and Molasses Books for hosting what turned out to be a raging party, and for getting us drunk… Here are some pictures from the night:

Other Music’s DJ Mikey IQ Jones and the lovely chanteuse April March

Sheila B. in full Yé-Yé regalia.

Mikey IQ Jones and Sheila B. talking rare 45s.

A devoted FH fan enjoying our temporary tattoos…

And a few crowd shots:

This November 9th and 10th at UFO CON 2013 Kenn Thomas will be speaking on the subject of his book JFK & UFO: Military-Industrial Conspriracy and Cover-up from Maury Island to Dallas

Join Kenn as he examines the connections between the JFK Assassination and the Maury Island incident, first of the post-WWII UFO sightings. In addition to reviewing the facts of each case, including an up close examination of the Zapruder film, Kenn looks at signposts in the media of the time, often seen as coincidence but actually shown to be evidence of conspiracy. If JFK’s assignation was telegraphed ahead of time by the mass media then, what does that say about the mass media of today? Learn how the grassy knoll shooter and one of the first UFO witnesses are the same man. Learn the process by which covert actions are presaged in popular culture.

 

Mystic Sons of Morris Graves’ seance

Morris Graves was the best stuff the Pacific Northwest had to offer… unorthodox mysticism, outrageous humor, distrust of the “scene,”  attachment to the area’s beauty and austerity.

 

If you don’t know this master of the “Northwest Mystics School,” now’s the time to get acquainted.

 

Process Media has just released Morris Graves: His Houses, His Gardens, a limited edition large format hardcover w/ dj book with spectacular duotone images of Graves and the houses and estates he created, which reveals a far more personal and meaningful portrait of the man’s aesthetic than the his art hung in museums across the planet.

 

This project made its way to the rural domain of Feral House / Process in a fittingly strange way. We were introduced to Graves through our Seattle-based friend Charlie Krafft, who helped create the wackadoodle fraternal order, The Mystic Sons of Morris Graves, to lionize the man and the peculiarity of his influence. You can read about the Mystic Sons HERE.

 

After moving to the Port Townsend region of Washington State, we discovered that the former owner of the home we moved into was this dude named Galen Garwood, who had designed this beautiful Graves book, written and edited by his friend, the late Richard Svare. It was all kind of like the Mystic Sons’ seance manifested itself in our very home. How could we not participate in its publication?

Read more about this long-awaited book HERE

 

 

Season’s Greetings!

The Fall Equinox is upon us this Sunday and Feral House will be spending it at the Brooklyn Book Fair along with some of our authors, including Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the authors of Hipster Hitler. You can see more details about the event below. RSVP to the Facebook event HERE.

Our new release Larceny Games made a splash in the media this week when the New York Post ran a front cover story about some of the book’s FBI files that detail the NY Knicks shaving points for cocaine.

That story went viral but is only one of many newsworthy pieces from the book. What about the Hall of Fame quarterbacks that threw games or the mobster who controlled boxing for more than two decades?

Feral House’s new eBook exclusive White House Call Girl reveals the little-known back story in which Watergate felons ran a mob-run call girl ring in a building next door to the Watergate complex.  Why?  Our book’s author Phil Stanford speaks about them here: Huffington Post Live and the Willamette Weekly.

The new Joseph Farrell book has arrived. The Financial Vipers of Venice: Alchemical Money, Magical Physics, and Banking in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is now up for sale on the Feral House website. It is not yet in stores or online but you can buy it from us.

 

We will be rounding this Fall season out with these forthcoming titles, so stay tuned!

– Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult, now available for Pre-Order

– Yé-yé Girls of 60?s French Pop, now available for Pre-Order

 

And this Fall’s Process Media releases as well:

– Morris Graves: His Houses, His Gardens

– Hashish the Lost Legend: The First English Translation of a Great Oriental Romance

 

BROOKLYN BOOK FAIR

SEPTEMBER 22ND

BROOKLYN BOROUGH HALL

More information at the event website here.

This is the largest free literary event in New York City. There will be hundreds of author events and some of the best publishers out there vending.

Feral House will be there offering a 25% discount on tons of books and also hosting 2 great author signings!

FROM 12-1PM JAMES CARR AND ARCHANA KUMAR WILL BE SIGNING COPIES OF THEIR COMIC BOOK HIPSTER HITLER

FROM 1:30-2PM ATON EDWARDS WILL BE SIGNING COPIES OF HIS DOOMSDAY PREP CLASSIC PREPAREDNESS NOW!

FROM 3-4PM GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE WILL BE SIGNING COPIES OFTHEE PSYCHICK BIBLE

 

You may only have the vaguest idea of the 40-year-old political scandal that brought down the Tricky Dick Nixon and his corrupt administration.

But in the early ‘70s Watergate was the biggest freaking deal, and it occupied television broadcasts seemingly forever. Watergate even reached my high school in Santa Monica, CA, when journalists from Europe and Japan come to interview high school students who objected to having a portrait of disgraced Nixon staffer John Ehrlichman hanging in the school’s “Hall of Fame.”

The Watergate saga made the careers of Washington Post junior staffers Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein, who were played in the All the President’s Men film by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.  Suddenly journalism became a huge sensation, but the fad quickly bottomed out once it was discovered that journalists made very little money, did not resemble Robert Redford, that newspapers had no interest in backing difficult stories that brought down bad guys and that it was all about glossy stories that increased ad revenue.

When Phil Stanford, a friend of mine from Portland, brought me White House Call Girl, I was puzzled by the book’s premise—that a call girl ring, in league with mobsters and intelligence operatives, was a blackmail operation and the little-known back story to the Watergate scandal.

“Do you mean,” I asked, “that the famous story made into books and films are wrong?”

“That’s only half the story,” Phil replied. “And it’s partly invented, too.”

“Really? Why?”

“Why don’t you read the book?”

So I read it and was bowled over. Though it’s a fully sourced political non-fiction, it reads like a detective novel, full of whores, mobsters, political operatives, and even football team players. And it’s got plenty of evidence, including photos of an address book owned by the main call girl in question, chock full of very interesting phone numbers and addresses.

Stanford’s book verifies and adds to the controversial Watergate revisionism tomes Secret Agenda by Jim Hougan (who also contributed a piece about Jonestown to Feral House’s Secret and Suppressed II), and Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin.

I read the book cautiously, and a major attorney vetted it.  The book seemed about as legally foolproof as they come. So when Feral House received a five-page legal threat by none other than the huge Watergate figure John Dean, we were amazed. He didn’t even read the book, but he didn’t want it read by anyone else. And he also imagined that this one minute Feral House book trailer done him wrong.

I remember seeing Dean and his wife Maureen from many Watergate TV broadcasts. They were on television so much that the  Deans almost felt like family to me, like the Brady Bunch, or perhaps more accurately, The Munsters.  These past few weeks I learned that Dean has made it difficult for many to publish any sort of  “revisionist” Watergate history. For example, Dean sued authors Colodny and Gettlin, and their publisher St. Martin’s, for their book Silent Coup. His letter, attached here, boasts of costing publisher St. Martin’s $15,000,000. I’m guessing that this is what Dean means when he claims he achieved victory from this settled lawsuit. But was it a real victory? Silent Coup is still in print, and not one word of the book was touched, and the authors received over $400,000 in payments in the settlement.

We read the letter twice. Three times. And more. But it was difficult for us to figure out exactly what this 74-year-old disgraced felon wants, outside of intimidating the shit out of us.

Fortunately, we were able to hire a very well-known D.C. attorney (John B. Williams of Cozen O’Conner) who has already successfully battled John Dean in other legal matters, to reply. I feel that his amusing and knowledgeable letter hits the ball out of the park. Thank you, Mr. Williams for your strike for free speech.

We believe that it’s increasingly important to allow White House Call Girl to reach potential readers. In this first publication as an ebook, Phil Stanford’s fascinating bit of history can now be ordered from Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other sellers of eBooks. You can even order it here, from the Feral House site. If you have PayPal, and want to read it in its ebook form, you can get it instantly here.

If you’re fond of printed pages, this book will be available in an updated edition this coming Spring.

 

Here is a snippet of the kind words from Richard Marcus in his detailed review of our new title The President and  The Provocateur published on BlogCritics.org, The Seattle PI, and Leap in the Dark.

“Depending on who you talk to, JFK was killed because of a communist plot hatched by a combination of KGB and Cuban interests or a rightwing conspiracy of anti-segregationists, the Secret Service, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and rightwing members of the military. Of course there are various offshoots of each and even wilder and more outlandish theories to be heard as well. One goes as far as saying Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the 36th and 37th presidents respectively, were principal movers behind the plot. Trying to the various scenarios straight, let alone judge their credibility, is next to impossible. It’s just too much to sort through on your own. Without some kind of semi-objective overview there’s not even much point in even trying to make sense of it all.

Amazingly enough, that’s exactly what Alex Cox has done with his new book The President And The Provocateur, published by Feral House Press. Best known as the director of the films Repo Man and Sid and NancyCox is also something of a conspiracy theorist himself. However, anybody coming to this book hoping he will reveal some brand new theory on who killed JFK will be disappointed. Instead what Cox has done is do his best to unravel tangled mess of information and weave it into something resembling coherency with an eye towards as an objective a view as possible. The only slightly subjective note he strikes in the whole book is his scepticism of the official view, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy, as expressed by the Warren Commission.”

Concluding:

“Anyone who has seen one of Cox’s films know he is a great story teller, and this book is no exception. He lays out the history of events leading up to and after the assassinations of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald in a clear and easy to understand manner. He not only does a remarkable job of bringing the charged political atmosphere of the late 1950s and early 1960s to life on the page, but does his best to be as objective as possible. However, what I found most impressive was how he concluded the book. He doesn’t end by accusing anyone, or even hinting at where the finger should be pointed. What he does say is the American public deserve the truth. Not just the truth about the Kennedy assassination, but the truth about every contentious issue which has ever captivated the public’s imagination.

The President And The Provocateur is probably not another book postulating some wild and unfounded conspiracy behind the assassinations of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. Instead he has taken the killings and put them into their historical context. He has also assembled what seems like every scrap of information ever reported on or recorded by a human being concerning the murders.”

More about the book:

President John F. Kennedy was said to have been murdered by a lone crazed gunman in a Dallas motorcade a half-century ago. The accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was also murdered under mysterious circumstances just a couple days later.

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.

Cox’s films are available from the renowned distributors Criterion, the BFI, and Microcinema. They include Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, and Walker.