Books published by Delancey Street Press

Nothing Happened An American Situationist Memoir by Isaac Cronin. While the book chronicles Cronin's life it concentrates on the period of the 1960's and 1970's when he lived primarily in Berkeley and France. The book examines the social realities of the sixties but from a personal point of view. Cronin was there for the demonstrations, the sit-ins, the love-ins and fortunately he not only lived through the sixties but he remembers them. The book is also a portrait of the more radical factions within the left that would fracture and dissipate in the coming decades as the political landscape shifted. Cronin's memoir is an important contribution to the history of the 1960's and helps put that period in a new perspective. As Cronin describes the period: The words we used to describe the social system--the totality, the old world, the spectacle, hierarchical power, the rulers and the ruled, masters and slaves, work and commodity consumption-left no opening for issues, fragments, special interest groups or minorities to divert our attention from our goal of a complete transformation of the world. We believed that our passionate desires could not be reduced to a ten point program but required a new poetic language that would be incomprehensible to our rulers. Our religion was the unity of thought and action. We practiced free love, stole almost everything we ate and wore, shared all of our possessions like cars and clothes and lived communally. We never advocated any act if it could not be practiced by everyone. Most of all we believed that surprise was the key to succumbing to the constraints of what we called... the old world. That "old world" would come back with a fury but Cronin was there everything seemed to hang in the balance. This book tells that story.

A catalog that coincides with an exhibition of photo collage work by George Porcari in 2016 at Haphazard Gallery in Los Angeles titled Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and 50 Years. The work of collage used photographs by Porcari of Los Angeles from 1963 to 2013.

The Antonioni Adventure covers the work of Michelangelo Antonioni from L'Avventura to The Passenger. Antonioni, like other radical filmmakers of the immediate post-war period, most conspicuously Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini, observed society from what we might call an outraged critical perspective that sought to explore the resulting tragic contradictions of communities from inside the society that created them, and thereby establish a new aesthetic paradigm through a critical analysis that was fundamentally poetic. What was understood by these artists - as common ground - was that the post-war utopian promises of universal access - via the computer, electronic communication and media, along with greater high speed mobility - all presumably facilitated a new utopia, but one that by the late sixties was in deep crisis.The Antonioni Adventure traces the Italian director's trajectory through the 1960s as he responded to that crisis in social mores, political/cultural wars, and a new emotional terrain. At the time all of this seemed very much like dangerous, uncertain, and uncharted waters. Longer essays on Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger detail the importance of those films as they explore the new contemporary social and emotional matrix. Antonioni's work fearlessly charted sensitive characters coping under the new postwar realities; conditions that are very much still with us today. What are those circumstances, and how did the characters in those works react to them - how and why did they succeed or fail? While many filmmakers would explore the complex dynamics of relationships in the thorny postwar era, such as Ingmar Bergman, only in Antonioni's work do we see characters attempt to create emotional bonds in a peculiarly hyper-realistic modern context that is fundamentally antithetical to those emotions. The result is a sense of pathos and humor that is profoundly sympathetic to his characters without being sentimental or patronizing. His profound sense of irony and disgust was reserved for those in power, as we see in Zabriskie Point, not those who were searching for how to cope in a difficult new world made in large part by technocrats and their machines. The futility of human endeavors and the permeability and fragility of the flesh were constant themes that found new ways of expression as his work progressed from its neorealist beginnings toward unexplored areas that were new to him and to his audience. The book traces the trajectory of that "adventure" - or that search - for a new means of expression within the context of the feature film.

"If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle," Marilyn Monroe once said of fame, an overriding theme in this collection of essays, profiles, and memoir by showbiz survivor Duke Haney. Fame proved faithful, of course, to Monroe, the book's most iconic subject, while others, like Steve Cochran, a villain in movies and a "hard-drinking, bed-hopping cop magnet" in reality, were widely forgotten before their untimely, often mysterious deaths. Taking an experimental tack in some instances, Haney employs a psychic medium to conduct a séance at Jim Morrison's former residence and an astrologer to interpret the birth chart of an astrology-crazed film star-turned-bank robber. He attends the funeral of the "next James Dean" who became a raggedy street person, performs a cringeworthy nude scene in a movie produced by "King of the Bs" Roger Corman, and searches for the camper van where funk trailblazer Sly Stone has been reduced to living. Painstakingly researched and compulsively readable, Death Valley Superstars offers a kind of midnight tour of Los Angeles past and present, highlighting hidden corridors and seldom-heard anecdotes about a few of the many who, fooled by Hollywood's mirages, found themselves caught in its quicksand.

For almost two decades, rumors have swirled around Jim Cassady, the quasi-legendary punk-rock frontman who disappeared without a trace after his girlfriend's apparent suicide. Though largely written off as dead, some claim to have had brushes with Cassady, now said to be homeless and bumming change on the streets of his native Los Angeles. Intrigued, Jason Maddox, a would-be filmmaker and Cassady fan, decides to investigate. But the man he eventually finds and befriends is damaged in ways he could never have imagined, and Jason's own life begins to unravel as he tries to save the hapless Jim Cassady from himself. A mystery wrapped in a rollercoaster account of the American pop-culture underbelly, Banned for Life has been cited as a "cult-favorite" by the New York Journal of Books, with a reputation that continues to expand. "...[Banned for Life] follows Jason Maddox's serio-comic adventures in the underground punk scene, stretching beyond mosh-pit mayhem and barroom brawls to explore death and obsession and purpose. The author zigzags confidently between a resonant coming-of-age tale in North Carolina, la vie bohème in hardscrabble New York, and a tempestuous L.A. love affair...even readers ambivalent to punk will be drawn in by the peculiarly irresistible voice of Jason..." - The Nervous Breakdown "...this book reaches across the punk divide...[it] captures nostalgia nicely, without whining about the good old days." - Razorcake "Haney's characters are super realistic. They're nuanced and interesting and you actually care about what's going to happen to them...the writing was so spot on that I often thought this book was less made up and more a fictionalized version of the author's life."- Maximum RocknRoll "Every once in a while, I read a book that I think everyone else should read. A book that lovers of all genres can enjoy. A book that I wish I could buy for every single non-reader out there to prove to them what they are missing. [Banned for Life] is one of those books...once I started, I knew I was not going to want it to end. It called to me every time I put it down. It begged. It screamed. I savored every moment of it, and I dreaded reading that final sentence." - The Next Best Book Blog "...[a] powerful and affecting novel that hits all the right notes." - Largehearted Boy "...an engaging page turner...anyone who has an interest in the American punk scene of the 1980s will find plenty in this book to latch onto." - Big Wheel "Banned For Life is about punk rock? Sure, just like Moby-Dick is about whales...like Melville, D. R. Haney has created a world so rich in detail, so authentic, so damned cool, you want to take up a harpoon-or, in this case, a guitar-and join the fray. Banned for Life is literary fiction at its best..." - Greg Olear, author of Totally Killer and Fathermucker "....pitch-perfect, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartrendingly sad...a eulogy to dead friends and those who died trying to transform personal pain into something extraordinary...[this] is one of those rare books that tells the story of a generation." - Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor