Bøger udgivet af Blast Books,U.S.

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.

The San Francisco Bay can be viewed as a geographic paradox: a place and a void. The collective Bay (composed of San Francisco Bay, San Pablo Bay, and Suisun Bay) both unites and divides the community of the Bay Area, giving identity to the region while separating its populace. The Bay is a backspace, where hardened surfaces of the industrial city crumble into the water—as well as a shorefront, with designed parks and recreational marinas. It is intensely visited in some areas and nearly inaccessible in others; its beauty is acclaimed, its dumping grounds unparalleled. Its sparkling water is refreshed from Sierra snowmelt, its sewer outfalls and urban runoff robust. Once intensely militarized, it is now, just as intensely, demilitarized. In a sense, the Bay is a natural entity, borne of great rivers draining the entire Central Valley of California, however, every inch of its shoreline today is the product of human activity, by either intent or incident.

This is the first book of portraits of android and humanoid robots¿robots made in the likeness of humans. These intriguing, beautiful photographs are by Max Aguilera-Hellweg, a photographer whose work over 40 years has appeared in Life, NYT Magazine, Rolling Stone, Discover, Scientific American, Time, and National Geographic.

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.

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.

No matter who we are, old or young, fashion conscious or style indifferent, we are all aware of hair. To a nineteenth-century amateur naturalist named Peter A. Browne, hair 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 collected hair from 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, all-consuming specimen-collecting passion is a fastidious, artfully assembled twelve-volume archive of mammalian diversity kept in the archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia since the mid-1800s.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 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 are distinctly idiosyncratic, captivating, and powerfully evocative of a vanished world.Browne's albums narrowly escaped destruction in the 1970s and remain a unique and fascinating manifestation of the avid collecting instinct in nineteenth-century scientific endeavors to explain the mysteries of the natural world.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, American corporations commissioned a vast array of lavish, Broadway-style musical shows that were only for the eyes and ears of employees. These improbable productions were meant to educate and motivate the sales force to sell cars, appliances, tractors, soda, and a thousand other products. Though most of these shows were lost to the universe, some were recorded and distributed to convention attendees via souvenir vinyl records. The little-known world of industrial shows is reconstructed through the record collection of author Steve Young, who has spent twenty years finding the extremely rare souvenir albums as well as tracking down and interviewing the writers and performers. Through the records themselves as well as behind-the-scenes stories, a new perspective on American history, culture, and business emerges. Eye-popping visuals, samples of confounding and hilarious lyrics, and witty commentary by Young and co-author Sport Murphy (who also contributes original artwork) bring the topic to vivid, astonishing life. A companion website will offer streaming audio of the songs which seem too crazy to be real-but not only are they real, they're often a revelation.

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.

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 Rocaterraniäafter 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 CanadäUnited 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 Rocaterraniäs 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.

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.

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.

The imaginations of many Cold War scientists were fed by science fiction literature, and companies often promoted their future capabilities with fantastical, colorful visions in ads. This collection presents nearly 200 entertaining, mind-boggling pieces of space-age eye candy.