“See the Seven Wonders of Roadside America from South of the Border to the Cypress Knee Museum… special coast-to-coast Elvis and Atomic tours… leapin’ gators, divin’ horses, bitin’ snakes and performin’ chimps from Gatorama to Parrot Jungle… two Stonehenges, the London Bridge, and a Polynesian Paradise right here in the USA… the TV homes of Fred Flintstone, the Cartwrights and Hee-Haw, open to the public… the 25 most unusual items on display in American museums, from Einstein’s Brain to Edison’s Last Breath… An eminently useful guide to the beautifully tasteless and wonderfully weird leisure-time landscape of America’s tourist attractions.”

Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Paperback: 288 pages
Illustrated

Follow the wacky adventures of White Will and his pals, as they try to get to the bottom of a mysterious wave of “political correctness” that threatens to turn their whole school upside down! When the teacher suddenly claims that Cleopatra, Hannibal and even Beethoven were really black, White Will smells a rat. Despite a ban on “politically incorrect” books, Will and his pals learn the truth about the race-mixers’ evil plan, and when they decide to stand up to the vicious Jews, revisionist Negroes, inscrutable Orientals and race-traitor “wiggers,” get ready for a laff riot!
The fun really begins when that rascally Jew Izzy Rabinowitz uses every trick in the Talmud to turn not only his Negro lackeys but the “wiggers” against Will and the gang. When Izzy and his mudrace mongrels try to stage a bogus “anti-racism” assembly, White Will gives ‘em a taste of their own medicine, and, in a rollicking free-for-all that’ll have you in stitches the Satanic ZOG-meisters find out the hard way that “Race Mixing isn’t Kosher!” New World Order Comix is brought to you by the nice folks of the National Alliance. DB

Publisher: National Vanguard
Pamphlet: 37 pages
Illustrated

“Do you remember seeing or being told about the vast diorama of Democracity representing the theme of the Fair in 1939, ‘Building the World of Tomorrow’; GM’s Futurama ride; the world’s largest mirrored ceiling; 3-D movies; Elektro, a robot seven feet tall; the Town of Tomorrow; Toyland; the Parachute Jump; Billy Rose’s Aquacade?” The fairgrounds were a fantasy of Art Deco and Bauhaus confections, all centered around the pseudo-symbolic Trylon (700 feet tall) and Perisphere (200 feet wide). The pavilions were designed by Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes, among others, and filled with the most modern art by the likes of Dali, Noguchi, and Calder. Johnny Weissmuller showed up to shake your hand, and Sally Rand did her famous fan dance. This was the world of tomorrow! Then came World War II… GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 152 pages
Illustrated

Sweat it out with Nico on her too-small tour bus, surrounded by her dysfunctional and wantonly decrepit backup band, her opportunistic, no-talent crew, her bloated, lovesick manager and her wasted, drugsick fans. The Teutonic diva of doom deserved better—”She should play ze Carnegie ‘All,” claimed her French son Ari. Instead, she endured misery and degradation, lugging her dusty harmonium from one art-house stage to another, continually on the verge of kicking as her entourage siphoned off her dope-reserves, underappreciated by reporters wanting only to know about Andy and the Velvets, and overappreciated by a manager who besieged her with embarrassing sex-poetry in between bouts of explosive masturbation in the adjoining hotel room. This is the rock ‘n’ roll adventure as it veers off into old age-void of glamor, romance, myth—but it remains an adventure nonetheless. JT

Publisher: Penguin
Paperback: 207 pages
Illustrated

Many of us have a tendency to rank Norman Rockwell with apple pie and Mayberry. Yet Rockwell’s vision of a homespun America-that-never-was is important. His work reveals an inherent need to supply the public with a meticulously envisioned, nostalgic vision of a quaint America. These magazine covers range from 1916 to the early 1960s, and display a stubborn reluctance on the artist’s part to adapt to the changes induced by progress and technology. Rockwell remains frozen in his own golden milieu. As with Twain and Dickens, with whom he is at times compared, the artist presents a lovable rogues gallery of classic character types—old musicians, kids dreaming of the sea, hoboes, quaint druggists, spooning sweethearts, small-town soldiers, choirboys, etc. Rockwell’s composition and attention to poignant human details set him apart from other artists who were merely first-rate technicians. CS

Publisher: Abbeville
Paperback: 356 pages
Illustrated

The author traces a series of lines running just slightly afoul of the traditional course of Western musicology, a series of stops and starts, of wrong turns and dead ends, of auspicious experiments and outright failures which have been scattered like crumbs to history. Often unrecognized in their time, they are here reconfigured into a kind of trajectory consistently pointing toward “the way out.” Debussy’s encounter with the Javanese gamelan at the Paris exposition of 1889 sets the ball rolling; yet it is up to Debussy’s friend Erik Satie to really run with it—the outcome being his musique d’ameublement, or furniture music. From there, it’s just a few steps further to Muzak and Brian Eno’s notions of ambience—a music without beginning or end, without progression or narrative development, and without motifs, the plural giving way to a single motif indefinitely sustained. The author grants equal time to the ethnographic, the avant-garde and pop camps, interviewing many of their principal representatives and figureheads along the way. From Lee “Scratch” Perry to Terry Reilly to Kate Bush, the range could not be broader, and with the prose restlessly shuttling backward and forward in time, and from one continent to the next, the point sometimes gets lost in a maze of tenuous connections. Above all, though, Toop sees the current craze for ambience as a resurgence of the kind of sensual sophistication which dominated the Symbolist movement at the turn of the last century. Taking his cue from such Symbolist antiheroes as des Esseintes and Dorian Gray, he attempts to expand his obsessions with exotica and armchair travel into a viable musical program for the next millennium. JT

Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Paperback: 306 pages

Compiled and published by Dr. Reinhold Aman, who since the mid ‘60s has collected all forms of maledicta (Latin for “bad words”), this book is a brilliant appetizer before devouring Aman’s also-brilliant International Journal of Verbal Aggression. Written in a style similar to G. Legman’s classic Rationale of the Dirty Joke, Aman’s compendium covers the scope of the human insult with clarity and wit. The instinctive balance of the writing makes for a highly entertaining read. With just the right amount of scholarship, of populism, of anthropology, of highbrow and low, the Opus Maledictorum will enrich your vocabulary and explain the heritage of malicious slang (which is, of course, as old as mankind). JK

Publisher: Marlowe
Paperback: 364 pages
Illustrated

A scholarly study that exposes the life of P.T. Barnum. The author portrays a grand and mesmerizing figure in the world of entertainment, and includes many insights into the impresario and entrepreneur’s private and social life. This is a tale of success and tragedy and its impact on the world of the carnival, and Saxon cuts Barnum little slack in relating his con-man tendencies and racial attitudes. Illustrated with many photographs of Barnum’s early marketing tactics. OAA

Publisher: Columbia University
Paperback: 439 pages
Illustrated

With a title that reinforces the already indelible “ghost in the radio” image from Cocteau’s Orpheus, Phantasmic Radio explores and expounds on the radio experiments of Artaud, John Cage, Valere Novarina (Theatre por Orielle), Gregory Whitehead, Louis Wolfson and Christoff Migone. A little on the arty and pretentious side (kind of unavoidable when dealing with the likes of Artaud and Cage), but full of information and frighteningly meticulous analysis on a subject that—thanks to the FCC-approved corporate stranglehold on commercial radio, the “family values” funding paranoia that has lobotomized public radio and Pacifica’s pathetic “suicide by political correctness”—most of us will never be able to experience firsthand. Better tape those Joe Frank shows, before he steps out of line and ends up as just another footnote in Phantasmic Radio: Volume 2! DB

Publisher: Duke University
Paperback: 124 pages

“In the first movie in the five-film series, The Planet of the Apes, Hollywood filmmakers fashioned an allegory of racial conflict and the Vietnam War. As the series progressed, the films shifted their focus more and more to domestic racial conflict, demonstrating the effect that the ‘60s riots and the Black Power movement began to have on the movies. In the later films the racial tensions were continually—perhaps prophetically?—depicted as escalating to the point of cataclysmic violence.”

Publisher: McFarland
Hardback: 264 pages
Illustrated