Ed Wood’s Sleaze Paperbacks

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Yes, it’s that Ed Wood, Mr Plan 9 from Outer Space, who apparently supplemented his erratic film career by penning dubious porn novels and exposés of the erotic underworld. Most of what I know about him is culled from Tim Burton’s biopic so this was news to me. Ed Wood’s Sleaze Paperbacks is an exhibition at Boo-Hooray, New York, curated by Michael Daley and Johan Kugelberg:

The paperbacks are truly rare, even in an age of mass-searchable used book engines, and google ferocity. Ed Wood’s sleaze fiction is also as strange, idiosyncratic and out of step with his times and mores as his infamous movies. Wood would write porn inter-spliced with lengthy philosophical, sociological and psychological discourse, he’d write first person narratives of life as a transvestite in the buttoned up America of the 1950’s. He’d riff on psychosexual themes, and unleash his id, his ego and his superego in turn, sometimes in the same chapter. He’d write about sex and the human condition without veneer or filters, offering up the damaged and anguished voice of a desperately soul-searching drunk with a sense of self-worth that would stand in dichotomy to his self-pity.

Interesting to see Gay Black among the selected titles, a book I’d seen before in a Flickr collection of queer pulps. At the time I thought the credit must be coincidence, or some pseudonymous writer with a double-entendre name. The exhibition opens on November 2nd and runs to December 1st, 2011.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The book covers archive

Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise, 1938–1979

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Artist, poet, percussionist and composer Angus MacLise receives the first proper overview of his work in a series of events presented in New York City throughout May. MacLise has too often been mentioned merely as the original drummer for The Velvet Underground—he famously quit when informed that being in a rock band meant you had to stop playing—but anyone familiar with the history of American underground culture will know that there was a lot more to his life than this. Johan Kugelberg and Will Swofford Cameron are the curators of Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise, and this page has more detail about the events.

For those unable to get to NYC (that would be most of us) there’s always the indispensable Ubuweb where one may find a page of MacLise recordings, and also issue 9 of the amazing Aspen magazine, “the psychedelic issue”, edited by Angus MacLise and Hetty MacLise in 1971.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda