november-books

Monday, 16 March 2015

Metal Meltdown (complete run)

From the suburbs of late 80s Baltimore comes.. Metal Meltdown! One of the only fanzine style tributes to the genre. Produced during a transition period in Metal there are interviews with Megadeth, Sepultura, Autopsy, Epedemic, gigs and demo reviews, photographs, notes from a sick mind, grizzly cartoons and more. A whole world in ten volumes. Scarce, and really quite brilliant, complete document of an overlooked genre and subculture.

Quite an incredible book, aside of the essays and texts from all involved the book is packed with photographs, most of which were never published anywhere else, on nights which were also often ignored at the time. From jazz dance crews to drags nights to the early baggy years it's all there!

Cult classic. Superb book on the signifiers of homosexuality. Lots of pictures and diagrams of where handkerchiefs, earrings go, colour codings, keys. Archetypes i.e. leathermen, the urbane, cowboys, retro people, street queers in a variety of guises, military guys etc. Very brilliant! Cited in Parr/Badger vol.3 if that type of thing floats your boat, but really, as a book it's more than strong enough to stand on it's own 2 legs.

A phemomenal pop cultural artefact, and scarce when complete. The stickers were intended to be stuck in an album, and most were, though most albums are also incomplete. Should you need an introduction to Fiorucci itself- it was essentially the pop art wing of the fashion world, in the late 70s and early 80s Marc Jacobs, Jackie O, Calvin Klein and so on shopped there, Maripol worked there (and then became creative director), Kenny Scharf showed there, Keith Haring sprayed the Milan shop, you get the idea. Back to the stickers- there are 200 of them making it a complete set, all un-peeled, and showing the full flush of incredible Fiorucci graphics from their campaigns to their rather irreverent pop statements. All are in near fine condition. Such a baffling and fun part Memphis part disco/new wave part pop art collection, and a complete graphic history of Fiorucci. Fantastic.

Ultra beautiful self published effort from McBride- he of Show Me, Zeig Mal. Based on a friend of Mcbride's- Richard Geldmacher, Mcbride presents poetry and a series of photographs, unseen elsewhere, which depict essentially a new wave teenage diary. Super good, and scarce, particuarly when signed.

An incredible archive or Dries Van Noten invitations, lookbooks and ephemera stretching from the beginning in 1992 until 2006. Various sizes from regular book size (8vo) to folio for S/S 1998, different paper stocks and bindings, spot inks, gilting, special envelopes, invitations in acrylic, felt and more. Most of the work was done by the team themselves but there's a lot of work by Ronald Stoopz and the rest of the Antwerp crack team. Dries Van Noten has managed to sit both outside and right at the centre of the fashion system at the same time, keeping full independance, never advertising and not producing pre collections of diffusion lines. His refusal to participate in the fashion system has led not only to cult status, but has also allowed him, and his designers complete freedom- which means their work quite distinct. The clothes are subtle, perfectly detailed and considered, taking in a dizzying array of influences from Orientalism to New Wave Cinema and Modernist Painting all shot through with a unique sensibility. This archive of material very much distill's the influences and ethos of the designer and his house from the very early days to the mid 2000's.