Bøger udgivet af Hat & Beard Press

Embark on a mesmerizing journey into surreal and transcendent realms. Published in a captivating Franco-English format, Psychodessins invites you on a visual odyssey through the depths of the subconscious and the very act of artistic creation.Léon, a daring visionary and polymath extraordinaire, beckons you into a world where chaos and order perform an intricate dance, and logic gracefully yields to disruption. Psychodessins unveils a hypnotic ensemble of 67 figurative watercolor drawings, each born from the serendipitous convergence of watercolor puddles, offering a glimpse into the profound recesses of the artist's psyche.The foreword, a captivating composition by the eminent artist and researcher Graham Burnett, delves into the very nature of attention itself. Burnett's eloquent words set the stage for a riveting encounter with Léon's creations, prompting profound contemplation on the essence of perception and interpretation.Following Burnett's thought-provoking prelude, Psychodessins treats the viewer to an enthralling conversation between Léon and the enigmatic New York poet and divination anthropologist, Enrique Enriquez. This dialogue plunges into the unique artistic process, drawing intriguing connections to Surrealism, ancient divination practices, and the mystical Language of the Birds, unveiling the profound interplay between the act of creation and the unfolding tapestry of reality.With Psychodessins, Sébastien Léon challenges you to shed preconceptions, surrender to the intricate choreography of spontaneity and order, and bask in the hypnotic allure of the subconscious mind. This book is a jubilant celebration of art's extraordinary power to transcend intuition, awaken the depths of your psyche, and liberate you from the shackles of rational thought.Prepare to be captivated, provoked, and transported beyond the ordinary. Psychodessins is not merely a book; it serves as a portal to an extraordinary, otherworldly experience that will undoubtedly leave you spellbound.

The new edition of 2020's sold out first run, including a new cover, additional commentary, and Stehrenberger's latest film posters for Dune, Last of Us, Tár, and more.If you’ve caught a glimpse of a promotional movie poster in the last 15 years, chances are you were taking in the work of Akiko Stehrenberger, the Los Angeles-based artist you didn’t know you knew. Stehrenberger has worked on projects for some of cinema’s most important and influential filmmakers, translating their unique vision from screen to film poster. The list of names includes a long roster of trailblazers, among them Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer, Harmony Korine, The Coen Brothers, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, and dozens of others.Stehrenberger, a California native, imbues her unique brand of surrealism to the art of the movie poster utilizing various techniques, including painting, computers, and traditional forms of graphic design—all while conceptually dissecting the films themselves, which helps to illuminate why Akiko is such a vital visual artist. The book will put readers at the center of her process (from concept to execution), examining how her life and heroes influenced the special vision she brings to the world of film poster design. Akiko’s art making story will be told in a way that mirrors her process, utilizing analog and modern techniques (including film, film photography, and illustration), all in an effort to a better understanding of her creativity.Having become one of the most respected movie poster designers and illustrators of her generation, with 22 Clio awards to her name, she is now on the cusp of a major creative change in her life: She has begun to embrace her own fine art and has branched out into new mediums, with the hope of exhibiting her work in the future. This book will capture what she has so skillfully harvested from just one realm of her imagination so far.

A deep archive of the secret histories of Chicago’s countercultural milieus over 30 years of community and artistic engagement.Way back in 1991, a freely-circulated zine called The Lumpen Times was born in Champaign, Illinois. The creators would go on to relaunch it in Chicago in 1993. Over time, the underground magazine would lead to building a Community of the Future.Through the certainty of chance, collective engagement, casual encounters, and accidental actions, The Lumpen Times became the hub for a series of cultural platforms spawning hundreds of projects, spaces, happenings, exhibitions, and initiatives. Some were short-lived, but each project fueled a new one in its wake. As an example, they started a record label, which spawned other publications. Other projects include engaging in dot-communism, opening community art spaces, hosting international art and activism festivals, and producing thousands of exhibitions and events. They also built an FM radio station, opened a bar, restaurants, launched a brewery, built another beverage company, created an artists’ retail shop, and started community kitchens. This range of passions has become an interconnected and deeply inclusive set of ventures now called The Buddy System.The Lumpen Times: 30+ Years of Radical Media and Building Communities of the Future shares stories from a few dozen of the thousands of Lumpen collaborators over the years. It contains a visual survey of the printed matter they produced over the past three decades, illustrating the evolution of the xeroxed-and-stapled zine into an internationally recognized cultural periodical.  The book is also a catalog of strategies, highlighting dozens of “case studies” demonstrating how artists, activists, educators, and creative entrepreneurs of all stripes have built community and culture in their beloved city of Chicago via the printed word, physical spaces, and over the airwaves and digital networks. Each study includes the reason it started, examples of its production, and the reasons it failed, mutated, or continues to this day.

Psychedelic Psalms: Reflections from an Offline World by Josh Rogers is a thought-provoking collection of poems, aphorisms, essays, quotes, and illustrations written over the first 23 years of the 21st century. Psychedelic Psalms, written in very short snippets for the attention spans of today’s readers, is a contemporary stew of poetry, essays and aphorisms, seeking to explain our shared current experience and to give us guidance on how we should proceed.A synthesis of Rumi’s Spiritual Poems, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet—this is an easy to read, entertaining analysis of human existence. At times the book is poetic and spiritual; at other points the author offers the reader hard-hitting pragmatic critiques of culture and education.Addressing topics ranging from technology, revolutionary new education policies, to spirituality… Psychedelic Psalms seeks to awaken all humans to a more evolved future and to remember the truths of existence which we already know in our immortal souls.

A poetic, behind-the-scenes retrospective of an L.A. cinema classic.Akin to The Godfather in its scope and themes, Blood In Blood Out, which turned 30 this year, stumbled at the box office but was saved from obscurity by fervent Latino audiences, who reclaimed it as a cornerstone of their representation in cinema,” wrote Carlos Aguilar in the LA Times earlier this year.Oscar winner Taylor Hackford’s film, released as Bound by Honor in 1993, tells the story of three members of the fictional East L.A. gang Vatos Locos over 10 years during the 70s and into the 80s. Then up-and-coming Latino actors Jesse Borrego, Benjamin Bratt, and Damian Chapa play the leading roles, their characters inevitably forming a tight bond, yet ultimately embarking on starkly different paths. Borrego’s Cruz is a painter who develops a tragic drug addiction, Bratt’s Paco, a boxer turned police officer, gets viewed as a traitor, and Chapa’s Miklo, an Anglo kid with some Mexican ancestry desperate to fit in, ends up in prison where he becomes an important member of a dangerous Chicano prison gang.“Credit for the lived-in sensibilities of the film goes to Jimmy Santiago Baca, a New Mexico poet who honed his craft in la pinta (slang for prison). Chapa refers to him as a ‘modern-day Chicano Oscar Wilde,’ while Borrego calls him ‘the Chicano Shakespeare’,” writes Aguilar.The film’s wide-ranging portrayal of East Los Angeles Chicano sensibilities and powerful identity struggles have earned it a place in classic L.A. cinema. This limited-edition book is a 30th anniversary tribute to the cult classic film, and features production materials with hundreds of unseen behind-the-scenes photographs and film stills shot by photographer Merrick Morton, paintings by the late San Antonio artist Adan Hernández, whose mural “Carnalismo” is shown in the film’s final scene, and original poems by screenwriter Jimmy Santiago Baca. Blood In Blood Out is a book companion to the film but also a love letter to Los Angeles and the cast and crew of this seminal motion picture classic.To quote Baca in Aguilar’s LA Times piece, “It’s a beautiful panoramic view of who we are as a people, in our abundance rather than our exclusivity.”

Los Angeles is famous for many things: its traffic jams, its taco trucks, the palm trees, the sunshine. Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles explores one of its most overlooked design legacies¿¿its streetlights.Today, we may not give streetlights much thought; after all, they¿re virtually everywhere. But Los Angeles was once known for its breadth of innovative designs: products of an active civic imagination and a well-timed real estate scramble. Much more than devices to illuminate the roads, streetlights helped instill senses of pride and place within a rapidly expanding metropolis, bringing the heavens to human scale. Timeless and modern, venerated and mundane, streetlights connected parochial interests to universal beliefs. They were public art before we had a name for it. In Electric Moons, India Mandelkern examines the art and politics of street lighting in Los Angeles from the 1880s to the present day. Flitting between social history, cultural anthropology, urban studies, and the history of design, she illustrates how street lighting helped frame larger debates about civics and surveillance, infrastructure and traffic, the definition of public space and who should have access to it. Through her own conversations with the politicians, planners, preservationists, artists, and dreamers who have given them meaning, Mandelkern argues for the streetlight¿s vitality to urban life: a totem for the modern era.

A culmination of nearly six decades of writing from the mind of iconoclastic film, literary, and music critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.Looking back at his more than 50 years of writing, where many flights of fancy and fantasy prove to suggest certain duties as well as privileges, Jonathan Rosenbaum has teased out three threads in particular: the film criticism he is mainly known for (especially during his 20-year stint at the Chicago Reader), the literary criticism he has also been publishing over the past half-century, and the jazz criticism he has been writing during the same period.Believing that these three art forms are interrelated and have often been intertwined in his perceptions of them, he builds a manifesto out of a hundred of his best pieces, arranged chronologically, taking on such disparate figures as Stanley Kubrick, Thomas Pynchon, Sonny Rollins, Michael Snow, Philip Roth, Duke Ellington, Spike Lee, Roland Barthes, Keith Jarrett, Jean-Luc Godard, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ahmad Jamal, and such diverse subjects as Adam Curtis documentaries, Mad, Peanuts, Louis Armstrong, Italo Calvino, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Shoah, Johnny Guitar, PlayTime, Chantal Akerman, Kelly Reichardt, Kira Muratova, William Faulkner’s Light in August, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and, in a final essay dealing with all three art forms, a film of a jazz cantata by André Hodeir derived from a passage in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

The eagerly anticipated new volume of poetry by acclaimed author and artist John Tottenham.Tottenham's previous collections—The Hate Poems; Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment; The Inertia Variations (a multi-media interpretation of which was released by Matt Johnson, otherwise known as The The, in 2017)—established him as this day’s leading contemporary poet maudit.Fresh Failure features a deepening and broadening of Tottenham’s trademark Magical Cynicism and Magnanimous Misanthropy. With hilariously ruthless ruminations on the artistic ego and the romantic id, Tottenham gives voice to the kind of thoughts most people prefer not to express but will automatically relate to and be entertained by.  It's the kind of poetry that is accessible to people who don't read poetry (i.e., everybody). Fresh Failure is ultimately a Triumph of Failure, and proves, as Jean-Luc Godard said, that poetry really is “a game of loser take all.”

From leading AI researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas comes an exploration of how biology, ecology, sexuality, history, and culture have intertwined to create a dynamic “us” that can neither be called natural nor artificial.Identity politics occupies the front line in today’s culture wars, pitting generations against each other, and progressive cities against the rural traditions of our past. Rich in data and detail, Who Are We Now? goes beyond today’s headlines to connect our current reality to a larger more-than-human story.At the heart of the book is a set of surveys conducted between 2016 and 2021, asking thousands of anonymous respondents all over the United States questions about their behavior and identity, and especially about gender and sexuality. The resulting window into people’s lives is a bit like that of the Kinsey Reports, which scandalized postwar America more than 70 years ago. Today, the landscape is—in every sense—even queerer. Twentieth century heterosexual “normalcy” is on the wane, especially among young and urban people.The landscape outside has changed too. After millennia of being fruitful and multiplying, we’ve strained, and exceeded, planetary limits. Domesticated animals far outweigh wildlife, and many species are in catastrophic decline. Yet curiously, our own population is poised to begin collapsing this century too, our fertility now curbed by choice rather than by premature death. Is this the end of humanity—or the beginning?

MoonFace is a visitation into a collapsing mind. It¿s a negotiation with a memory thief¿it is a quest into abstraction where we may find ourselves, our thoughts, and our history.The images shared here by Christian Letts allow for individual reflection. Regardless of how this wordless novel presents itself to each viewer, the series of monochromatic images featured in MoonFace will unite their experiences through the reduction of the color palette, the stillness of thought, and the curiosity of what lays within.MoonFace questions the linear function of memory, and explores its maze with new brighter eyes. Memory and its construction are themes Letts often explores. With this project, he has an agendäillumination from the dark, sound from silence, and love from loss. This, his newest chapter, closes the last.

2022 marks the 75th anniversary of Doomsday Clock.Author is an award-winning journalist and author of more than a dozen previous books.Title is an illustrated pop culture compendium of the Doomsday Clock and it's impact on art and culture worldwide.Publication will precede a planned 2023 exhibition at Comic Con.

The first monograph of the life and work of Jun Fujita.Poet, artist, and photographer Jun Fujita was born in a village near Hiroshima and immigrated to Canada as a teenager. By 1915, he was in Chicago, where he worked for the Evening Post until 1929, photographing disasters such as the Eastland capsizing, notorious celebrities such as Al Capone, and U.S. presidents. As one of the only Japanese-American photographers working in the United States at the time, Fujita was commissioned to photograph federal works projects between the wars. He co-owned a cabin on a remote island near Rainer, Minnesota, and spent long periods there, painting and writing poetry, mostly haiku and tanka. His first book of poems was called Tanka: Poems in Exile (1923). The Art Institute of Chicago holds some of Fujita's color photographs of natural landscapes. His cabin, now located within Voyageurs National Park, still stands. This publication is the first monograph of the artist's life and work.