This book explores the underside of America's cult of the automobile and the frequently conspiratorial speculations that arise whenever people die in cars. Looking at fatal celebrity car accidents and other examples of death by automobile through original essays, personal memoir, and forensic reports, cultural critics ponder people's fascination with car crashes. They explore car crash conspiracy theories, the automobile as the site of murder, car crash films, and the notion of the "accident." The book features original essays by such underground icons as Kenneth Anger and Adam Parfrey. Essays cover the deaths of Albert Camus, Jackson Pollock, James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Princess Diana, Princess Grace, Mary Jo Kopechne, and others. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Why are jokes funny? Why do we laugh? In Funny Peculiar, Mikita Brottman demurs from recent scholarship that takes laughter-- and the broader domain of humor and the comical--as a liberating social force and an endearing aspect of self-expression...read more

A scholar, psychoanalyst, and cultural critic explores the multifaceted role dogs play in our world in this charming bestiary of dogs from literature, lore, and life.While gradually unveiling her eight-year love affair with her French bulldog, Grisby, Mikita Brottman ruminates on the singular bond between dogs and humans. Why do prevailing attitudes warn us against loving our pet “too much”? Is her relationship with Grisby nourishing or dysfunctional, commonplace or unique? Challenging the assumption that there’s something repressed and neurotic about those deeply connected to a dog, she turns her keen eye on the many ways in which dog is the mirror of man.The Great Grisby is organized into twenty-six alphabetically arranged chapters, each devoted to a particular human-canine union drawn from history, art, philosophy, or literature. Here is Picasso’s dachshund Lump; Freud’s chow Yofi; Bill Sikes’s mutt Bull’s Eye in Oliver Twist; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel Flush, whose biography was penned by Virginia Woolf. There are royal dogs, like Prince Albert’s greyhound Eos, and dogs cherished by authors, like Thomas Hardy’s fox terrier, Wessex. Brottman’s own beloved Grisby serves as an envoy for sniffing out these remarkable companions.Quirky and delightful, and peppered with incisive personal reflections and black-and-white sketches portraying a different dog and its owner drawn by the enormously talented Davina “Psamophis” Falcão, The Great Grisby reveals how much dogs have to teach us about empathy, happiness, love—and what it means to be human.

Product Description: Contents include: Diary of the 4th Chicago Underground Film Festival. A look at Skywald (70s New York comics publisher). Sexy Girlfriends - a philosophy. Depilation for fun & profit - bald women and body-hair stylists through the ages...read more

Product Description: In High Theory/Low Culture , Brottman uses the tools of 'high' cultural theory to examine many areas of today's popular culture, including style magazines, sport, shopping, tabloid newspapers, horror movies and pornography. In doing so, she not only demonstrates the practical use of 'high' theory as it relates to our everyday world, but she also investigates the kinds of 'low' culture that are regularly dismissed by academic scholars...read more

(view table of contents)

Product Description: For lovers of the Golden Age of Kung-Fu cinema, this is a completely illustrated history of the genre that inspired Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, and more. This new, expanded edition includes many more film stills and film posters, reviews and filmographies, including: * illustrated history of Hong Kong martial arts cinema, stars and directors * analysis of all 5 Bruce Lee movies * Bruce Lee biopics * the Bruce Lee Exploitation genre * Bruce Lee's life, career and mysterious death *8page color section of martial arts poster...read more

Product Description: Contents include: Revealing interview with Maxon Crumb, brother of Underground artist Robert. Dragon Ladies, and their sexy, surreal revue. The five most defining faces of the 20th century. Lowdown on Pam & Tommy Lee: Hardcore & Uncensored...read more

Product Description: Jack Nicholson - charming, charismatic and demonic. Having sustained one of the most successful careers in Hollywood, he is still receiving critical acclaim (Oscar for 'As Good As It Gets') years after his early Oscar-nomination as the drunken, liberal lawyer in Easy Rider...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Violent death, murder, mutilation, eating and defecation, ritualism, bodily extremes: cannibalism combines these crucial themes to represent one of the most symbolically charged narratives in the human psychic repertoire. As a grotesque figure of power, threat, and atavistic appetites, the cannibal has played a formidable role in the tales told by members of all cultures - whether oral, written, or filmic - and embodies the ultimate extent of transgressive behaviour to which human beings can be driven...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Meat Is Murder! is the best-selling study of cannibals in both real life and cinema, with illustrated reports on cannibal killers such as Ed Gein, Albert Fish, Andrei Chikatilo and Issei Sagawa, and reviews of cannibal movies such as Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The films discussed in this book have been labeled cinéma vomitif because they induce a visceral response in their audience. They are an underground hybrid of slasher movies, exploitation films, and shock-u-mentaries. Taking a serious look at a taboo subject, Brottman argues that these scandalous films are of far more substance than has been previously assumed...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: As Freud predicted, there has always been great anxiety about the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary life, particularly in relation to its ambiguous and complicated relationship to the realm of science. There is also a long history of widespread resistance, in both academia and medicine, to anything associated with the world of the supernatural; very few people, in their professional lives, at least, are willing to admit a serious interest in occult phenomena...read more

Product Description: Mikita Brottman wonders, just why is reading so great? It’s a solitary practice, one that takes away from time that could be spent developing important social networking skills. Reading’s not required for health, happiness, or a loving family...read more