SPURL EDITIONS publisher of unusual literature
John Brian King is the photographer of LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84 and Nude Reagan. He is the writer and director of the art house film Redlands (2014) and the short film Model Test (2016). Visit his website here, and check out his latest photography series Sick City.
We will be selling John Brian King’s two photo books at Lit Crawl SF on October 20. Come see us!
Desert Mass is a new short film by John Brian King, art photographer and director of the feature film Redlands. In Redlands, King eschewed typical film editing techniques, featuring instead eight-minute scenes without any camera movement or cutting. Reviewer Angeliki Coconi commented on Redlands: “[It] sits still while everything happens. It doesn’t follow its characters — it watches them. It doesn’t admire or criticize them; it simply looks at them.”
Filmed in Palm Springs, California, King’s latest work Desert Mass focuses on the strange, the disorienting, and the decaying. Its austere style, reminiscent of Redlands, often takes on a dream-like quality, and the accompanying hypnotic organ music underscores the film’s theme of a Satanic mass in an arid, artificial land. Interspersed between alienating landscapes, filmed with the detachment of a wandering traveler, are scenes of two women, each alone in an anonymous hotel room — their distress, which is never explained, surreally related to the unease of the city. It is a brilliant, unconventional work, which you can watch in full above!
John Brian King is the photographer of LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84 and Nude Reagan, both available from Spurl Editions. He is the writer and director of the art house film Redlands (2014) and the short film Model Test (2016). Visit his website here, and check out his latest photography series Sick City.
We will be selling John Brian King’s two photo books at the Philadelphia Art Book Fair on May 5 and 6. Come see us!
Publishing, Photography, Literature
Andy Adams @FlakPhoto
Kim Cooper @kimcooper / Larry Edmunds Bookshop @LarryEdmunds1
Edward Carey @EdwardCarey70 / bought at @MalvernBooksTX
Naomi Fry @frynaomifry
Stephen Sparks @rs_sparks / Point Reyes Books @PointReyesBooks
Alex Maslansky / Stories Books @StoriesEchoPark
Kliph Nesteroff @ClassicShowbiz
Grafiche Morandi
Clare Kelly @NewAgeSext
Denise Enck / Empty Mirror @EmptyMirror
John Coulthart @johncoulthart
Kathleen Graulty and Julian Lucas / Mirrored Society @MirroredSociety
Small Press Distribution @spdbooks / New Museum @newmuseum
John Coulthart @johncoulthart
J. M. Schriber @roughghosts
Ed Turner / Biblioklept @biblioklept
Thank you to all of the wonderful, sensational artists who have taken part in PORTRAITS OF SPURL, and who are are not ashamed to read and sell our misfit books!
The photographer Lorena Turner spoke with John Brian King about his recent and not-so-recent artistic work in a podcast for New Books Network. They discuss everything from Nude Reagan and LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84 to King’s cryptically titled series “Hospital.” Seriously, King’s scathing description of Ronald Reagan is not to be missed, plus King brings up one of his sources of inspiration for Nude Reagan that anyone who is reading this page is sure to love: J. G. Ballard’s short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.”
INCIDENCE OF ORGASMS IN FANTASIES OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH RONALD REAGAN. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with “Reagan” proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects.
