The first walking guide to London's role in the evolution of horror cinema, inspired by the city's dark histories and labyrinthine architectures.
Death Lines is the first walking guide to London's role in the evolution of horror cinema, inspired by the city's dark histories, labyrinthine architectures, atmospheric streetscapes, and uncanny denizens. Its eight walks lead you on a series of richly researched yet undeniably chilling tours through Chelsea, Notting Hill, Westminster, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, and the East End, along the haunted banks of the river Thames, and down into the depths of the London Underground railway.
Each tour weaves together London's stories and takes the reader to magnificent, eerie, and sometimes disconcertingly ordinary corners of the city, unearthing the literature, legends, and history behind classics like Peeping Tom and An American Werewolf in London, and lesser-known works such as mind-control melodrama The Sorcerers; Gorgo, Britain's answer to Godzilla; tube terror Death Line; and Bela Lugosi's mesmeric vehicle The Dark Eyes of London. Tinged with humor, social critique, and more than a few scares, Death Lines delights in revealing the hidden and often surprising relationship between the city and the dark cinematic visions it has evoked. Whether read on the streets or from the comfort of the grave, Death Lines is a treat for all cinephiles, horror fans, and lovers of London lore.
Victor Segalen (1878-1919) a eu l'une des carrières littéraires les plus curieuses de France, appliquant son imagination à la musicologie, l'ethnographie, l'exploration, la médecine, la synesthésie, l'histoire chinoise et l'occulte. Ce recueil rassemble son essai inédit «Les synesthésiques et l'école symboliste» et son roman In A Sound World, une oeuvre de fantaisie concernant un inventeur perdu dans son propre espace harmonique immersif. La formation médicale de Segalen (il avait une carrière de médecin de navire) a inspiré un intérêt pour le lien entre le symbolisme dominant de l'époque et la synesthésie, la condition par laquelle un sens affecte la perception d'un autre. Cette édition comprend également un essai du musicien et historien de la culture David Toop qui explore le contexte historique des idées de Segalen. On y trouve également le livret de Segalen pour Orpheus Rex, une collaboration avec le compositeur Claude Debussy, qu'il utilisera comme une occasion d'explorer plus avant ses concepts synesthésiques.
Essays that explore the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture.
This book, edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny--a journey whose spaceship you embarked on some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn child prepping to build the next universe? No, you're the superhero. Enjoy the journey.--from the introduction by Ytasha L. Womack Through essays by some of hip-hop's most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective.
Core members of the legendary British experimental band Coil tell its story in the present-tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.
Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established themselves as shape-shifting doyens of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since their untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficult, but often retained a warped pop sensibility, Coil's albums were multi-faceted repositories of esoteric knowledge, lysergic wisdom and acerbic humor. In Everything Keeps Dissolving, core members John Balance and Peter Christopherson tell Coil's story in the present-tense, and from their personal perspectives, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.
Accompanied by their various collaborators, Coil describe the fertile eruption of ideas, inspirations, and stray tangents that informed their lyrical and musical visions--as well as those dead paths and castoff concepts that didn't take root. No only a worm's eye view of Coil, these interviews provide insight into the late twentieth century's evolving British cultural underground as channeled through two of its most astutely mercurial minds.
A work that combines biography and pyschogeography to trace Aleister Crowley's life in London.
I dreamed I was paying a visit to London, Aleister Crowley wrote in Italy, continuing, It was a vivid, long, coherent, detailed affair of several days, with so much incident that it would make a good-sized volume. Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, but the city was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him: Crowley was a post-decadent with deviant Victorian roots in the cultural ferment of the 1890s and the magical revival of the Golden Dawn.
Not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages, this is a biography by sites. A fusion of life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London's social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Great Beast. We follow Crowley as he searches for prostitutes in Hyde Park and Pimlico, drinks absinthe and eats Chinese food in Soho, and find himself down on his luck in Paddington Green--and never quite losing sight of the illumination that drove him: the abiding rapture, he wrote in his diary, which makes a 'bus in the street sound like an angel choir!
Presenting an interdisciplinary selection of twenty-five essays first delivered at Breaking Convention 2015, the third conference on psychedelic consciousness, culture, and clinical research, held at the University of Greenwich, London.
The Bright Labyrinth is a subtle and sometimes disturbing account of how technology has impacted upon human culture. Offering a theoretical map for the future development of communication design, The Bright Labyrinth draws upon architecture and film, avant-garde art and critical theory, military strategy and machine intelligence to guide the reader through the Digital Regime that has shaped a century of human creativity and thought.
In 1954, Jean Mary Townsend was strangled with her own scarf and stripped of her underwear but not sexually assaulted. The subsequent police investigation was bungled, leading to a six-decade cover-up, ensuring that this twenty-one-year-old fashion designer was effectively killed twice: first bodily, and then as her significance and her memory were erased. Fred Vermorel's forensic, troubling (and trouble-making) investigation digs deep into Jean Townsend's life and times, and her transgressive bohemian milieu. It disentangles the lies and bluffs that have obscured this puzzling case for over half a century and offers a compelling solution to her murder and the official secrecy surrounding it.
Delinquent Elementals: The Very Best of Pagan News rassemble certains des meilleurs articles, reportages, interviews et humour qui sont apparus dans cette publication singulière, offrant un aperçu fascinant de la contre-culture païenne. Il trace la chronologie historique du scandale Satanic Panic de la fin des années 1980, documente des informations auparavant non diffusées et fournit des connaissances pratiques et un aperçu de la pratique occulte. Il révèle comment les praticiens occultes ont interagi avec la culture au sens large - provoquant ce que l'on appelle maintenant «occulture» : l'intersection de thèmes ésotériques avec la culture populaire, l'activisme politique et la lutte pour les droits et la reconnaissance des LGBTQ.
De tous les personnages associés à l'histoire du LSD, il n'y en a pas de plus énigmatique que Michael Hollingshead. Semblant venu de nulle part, il a initié Timothy Leary au LSD en 1962 et a exercé une influence pendant les années à Harvard, Millbrook et au-delà. Tel Zelig, Hollingshead était un acteur clé de la scène LSD de Londres. En 1965, il se rend à Londres pour établir une tête de pont culturelle pour la philosophie LSD de Leary au World Psychedelic Centre de Chelsea. Suite à un passage en prison, où il a fourni en LSD l'espion du KGB George Blake, il a continué à poursuivre des aventures avec la Confrérie de l'Amour éternel, a établi une communauté psychédélique, a créé le premier I Ching installation, a publié un magazine underground et a passé du temps au Népal, avant de mourir d'une mort mystérieuse en Bolivie dans les années 1980.
Epiphanies: Life-changing Encounters With Music is a new anthology of essays drawn from The Wire's monthly Epiphanies column, which has been running in the magazine since issue 167 (January 1998). The book includes more than 50 essays in which a wide range of musicians, authors and critics detail their personal experiences of music's transformative powers.
Pourquoi nous trouvons-nous si attirés par le bon marché et le vulgaire, le jeté, le déformé et l'abject? Que voulons-nous vraiment dire quand nous disons que quelque chose est «tellement mauvais que c'est bon», et qu'est-ce que cela dit finalement de nous? À la fois confession personnelle de l'écrivain et théoricien Ken Hollings et feuille de route historique sur le milieu du cinéma underground et d'exploitation en Amérique des années 1960, Inferno emmène le lecteur dans un voyage au coeur de l'esthétique trash.
A unique, stunningly-presented guide to London's past and a treasure trove of information for historians, residents, medical professionals and tourists, Medical London charts the many roles that diseases, treatments and cures have played in the city's sprawling story. It also reveals how London, in turn, has shaped the professions and practices of modern medicine.
The Moons At Your Door collects over 30 tales, both familiar and unknown from : Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, DK Broster, AM Burrage, RW Chambers, Aleister Crowley, Elizabeth Gaskell, WW Jacobs, MR James, LA Lewis, Thomas Ligotti, Arthur Machen, Guy de Maupassant, Perrault, Thomas De Quincey, Saki, Count Stenbock and HR Wakefield. The volume also includes extracts and translations by the author from Babylonian, Coptic and Biblical texts alongside poems and fairy tales.
Between 1967 and 1971 Rose Simpson lived with the Incredible String Band (Mike Heron, Robin Williamson and Licorice McKechnie), morphing from English student to West Coast hippie and, finally, bassist in leathers. The band's image adorned psychedelic posters and its music was the theme song for an alternative lifestyle.
An interdisciplinary selection of 23 essays first presented at Breaking Convention 2013, the 2nd conference on psychedelic consciousness, culture and clinical research, held at the University of Greenwich, London.
100 objects, exuding magic and mystery, emerge from the darkness of Cornwall's much loved Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in this book of haunting photographs. Artist and photographer Sara Hannant has captured the very essence of these carefully selected artefacts, which include wax dolls, wands, statues, daggers, pendants, robes and amulets, all used in the practice of witchcraft and magic. Some have been displayed at the museum for years, others have long been hidden in its archives. Images are accompanied by informative text from museum director Simon Costin.
UFOs, demons, tornadoes, hedgehogs and Mother Earth herself have all been identified as the force behind crop circles, but the reality is perhaps more incredible. The formations are made by ordinary people, working through the night in small teams, usually equipped with nothing more than planks of wood, rope and tape measures. For the first time, the team behind some of the most spectacular crop circles of the past 20 years, whose work has appeared all across the UK, the USA, New Zealand and Continental Europe, reveal their secrets.
