Böcker utgivna av Hat & Beard Press

A deep archive of the secret histories of Chicago’s countercultural milieus over 30 years of community and artistic engagement.Way back in 1991, a freely-circulated zine called The Lumpen Times was born in Champaign, Illinois. The creators would go on to relaunch it in Chicago in 1993. Over time, the underground magazine would lead to building a Community of the Future.Through the certainty of chance, collective engagement, casual encounters, and accidental actions, The Lumpen Times became the hub for a series of cultural platforms spawning hundreds of projects, spaces, happenings, exhibitions, and initiatives. Some were short-lived, but each project fueled a new one in its wake. As an example, they started a record label, which spawned other publications. Other projects include engaging in dot-communism, opening community art spaces, hosting international art and activism festivals, and producing thousands of exhibitions and events. They also built an FM radio station, opened a bar, restaurants, launched a brewery, built another beverage company, created an artists’ retail shop, and started community kitchens. This range of passions has become an interconnected and deeply inclusive set of ventures now called The Buddy System.The Lumpen Times: 30+ Years of Radical Media and Building Communities of the Future shares stories from a few dozen of the thousands of Lumpen collaborators over the years. It contains a visual survey of the printed matter they produced over the past three decades, illustrating the evolution of the xeroxed-and-stapled zine into an internationally recognized cultural periodical.  The book is also a catalog of strategies, highlighting dozens of “case studies” demonstrating how artists, activists, educators, and creative entrepreneurs of all stripes have built community and culture in their beloved city of Chicago via the printed word, physical spaces, and over the airwaves and digital networks. Each study includes the reason it started, examples of its production, and the reasons it failed, mutated, or continues to this day.

Psychedelic Psalms: Reflections from an Offline World by Josh Rogers is a thought-provoking collection of poems, aphorisms, essays, quotes, and illustrations written over the first 23 years of the 21st century. Psychedelic Psalms, written in very short snippets for the attention spans of today’s readers, is a contemporary stew of poetry, essays and aphorisms, seeking to explain our shared current experience and to give us guidance on how we should proceed.A synthesis of Rumi’s Spiritual Poems, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet—this is an easy to read, entertaining analysis of human existence. At times the book is poetic and spiritual; at other points the author offers the reader hard-hitting pragmatic critiques of culture and education.Addressing topics ranging from technology, revolutionary new education policies, to spirituality… Psychedelic Psalms seeks to awaken all humans to a more evolved future and to remember the truths of existence which we already know in our immortal souls.

Embark on a mesmerizing journey into surreal and transcendent realms. Published in a captivating Franco-English format, Psychodessins invites you on a visual odyssey through the depths of the subconscious and the very act of artistic creation.Léon, a daring visionary and polymath extraordinaire, beckons you into a world where chaos and order perform an intricate dance, and logic gracefully yields to disruption. Psychodessins unveils a hypnotic ensemble of 67 figurative watercolor drawings, each born from the serendipitous convergence of watercolor puddles, offering a glimpse into the profound recesses of the artist’s psyche.The foreword, a captivating composition by the eminent artist and researcher Graham Burnett, delves into the very nature of attention itself. Burnett’s eloquent words set the stage for a riveting encounter with Léon’s creations, prompting profound contemplation on the essence of perception and interpretation.Following Burnett’s thought-provoking prelude, Psychodessins treats the viewer to an enthralling conversation between Léon and the enigmatic New York poet and divination anthropologist, Enrique Enriquez. This dialogue plunges into the unique artistic process, drawing intriguing connections to Surrealism, ancient divination practices, and the mystical Language of the Birds, unveiling the profound interplay between the act of creation and the unfolding tapestry of reality.With Psychodessins, Sébastien Léon challenges you to shed preconceptions, surrender to the intricate choreography of spontaneity and order, and bask in the hypnotic allure of the subconscious mind. This book is a jubilant celebration of art’s extraordinary power to transcend intuition, awaken the depths of your psyche, and liberate you from the shackles of rational thought.Prepare to be captivated, provoked, and transported beyond the ordinary. Psychodessins is not merely a book; it serves as a portal to an extraordinary, otherworldly experience that will undoubtedly leave you spellbound.

A culmination of nearly six decades of writing from the mind of iconoclastic film, literary, and music critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.Looking back at his more than 50 years of writing, where many flights of fancy and fantasy prove to suggest certain duties as well as privileges, Jonathan Rosenbaum has teased out three threads in particular: the film criticism he is mainly known for (especially during his 20-year stint at the Chicago Reader), the literary criticism he has also been publishing over the past half-century, and the jazz criticism he has been writing during the same period.Believing that these three art forms are interrelated and have often been intertwined in his perceptions of them, he builds a manifesto out of a hundred of his best pieces, arranged chronologically, taking on such disparate figures as Stanley Kubrick, Thomas Pynchon, Sonny Rollins, Michael Snow, Philip Roth, Duke Ellington, Spike Lee, Roland Barthes, Keith Jarrett, Jean-Luc Godard, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ahmad Jamal, and such diverse subjects as Adam Curtis documentaries, Mad, Peanuts, Louis Armstrong, Italo Calvino, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Shoah, Johnny Guitar, PlayTime, Chantal Akerman, Kelly Reichardt, Kira Muratova, William Faulkner’s Light in August, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and, in a final essay dealing with all three art forms, a film of a jazz cantata by André Hodeir derived from a passage in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

The eagerly anticipated new volume of poetry by acclaimed author and artist John Tottenham.Tottenham's previous collections—The Hate Poems; Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment; The Inertia Variations (a multi-media interpretation of which was released by Matt Johnson, otherwise known as The The, in 2017)—established him as this day’s leading contemporary poet maudit.Fresh Failure features a deepening and broadening of Tottenham’s trademark Magical Cynicism and Magnanimous Misanthropy. With hilariously ruthless ruminations on the artistic ego and the romantic id, Tottenham gives voice to the kind of thoughts most people prefer not to express but will automatically relate to and be entertained by.  It's the kind of poetry that is accessible to people who don't read poetry (i.e., everybody). Fresh Failure is ultimately a Triumph of Failure, and proves, as Jean-Luc Godard said, that poetry really is “a game of loser take all.”

The first monograph of the life and work of Jun Fujita.Poet, artist, and photographer Jun Fujita was born in a village near Hiroshima and immigrated to Canada as a teenager. By 1915, he was in Chicago, where he worked for the Evening Post until 1929, photographing disasters such as the Eastland capsizing, notorious celebrities such as Al Capone, and U.S. presidents. As one of the only Japanese-American photographers working in the United States at the time, Fujita was commissioned to photograph federal works projects between the wars. He co-owned a cabin on a remote island near Rainer, Minnesota, and spent long periods there, painting and writing poetry, mostly haiku and tanka. His first book of poems was called Tanka: Poems in Exile (1923). The Art Institute of Chicago holds some of Fujita's color photographs of natural landscapes. His cabin, now located within Voyageurs National Park, still stands. This publication is the first monograph of the artist's life and work.