Teary, big-eyed orphans and a multitude of trashy knockoffs epitomized American kitsch art as they clogged thrift stores for decades.When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane—the credited artist of the weepy waifs, for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992—he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a con man than an artist, and that he forced his wife Margaret to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result, those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.Parfrey's story was reprinted in Juxtapoz magazine and inspired a Margaret Keane exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. And now director Tim Burton is filming a movie about the Keanes called Big Eyes, and it's scheduled for release in 2014. Burton's Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp, was based upon the Feral House book edited and published by Parfrey about the angora sweater-wearing B-film director.Citizen Keane is a book-length expansion of Parfrey's original article, providing fascinating biographical and sociological details, photographs, color reproductions, and appendices with legal documents and pseudonymous essays by Tom Wolfe inflating big eye art to those painted by the great masters.

Product Description: James Shelby Downard, who died at the age of eighty-three in 1996, is one of the most compelling conspiracy theorists of the twentieth century.Robert Anton Wilson wrote that Downard’s “King-Kill” essay, regarding the involvement of Freemasons in the murder of John F...read more

Traces the evolution of Muslim extremism from its earliest stirrings to today's violent acts of terrorism.

A sequel to the ground-breaking 1987 analysis of apocalypse culture continues to explore this fascinating and trenchant topic, focusing on biological warfare, taboo art, sexual fetishism, corporate manipulation, sexual slavery, creepy pop stars, and other evidence that the old order is rapidly crumbling. Original. Tour.

Full-color reproductions by contemporary visionary artists complement a collection of provocative essays--by Stephen Jay Gould, the Dalai Lama, Roger Manley, Adam Parfrey, and others--on the inspired imagery reflecting the millennial obsession of visionary and outsider art.

Product Description: A sobering, occasionally amusing, and altogether compelling look at the impulses that have fueled the rising pitch of Armageddon, this startling book explores the arcane but significant phenomena of contemporary American cults--from survivalists and white supremacists to UFO cultists, satanists, and the most far-flung New Agers...read more

Gathers essays that depict radical political positions from John Knox and Jean Paul Marat to Timothy Leary and Hakim Bey