Hunters For Collectors!
They are places never far away on an cosmic scale, but the luminous chunks of NEW YORK, BERLIN and PRAGUE can still play a game of hide-and-seek where you don’t recognize the most sensation-fixated players at first or only find them later – and maybe miss joining the game. Enter “City Primeval, New York, Berlin, Prague”, 552 pages that can jump-start you into a new sport of visual and (con)textual pleasures, and let you in on the all-out amusements. At turns shiny, sinful, sensitive, senseless – it is all of this and more, a romp through three cities that will kill for art and good times, with 72 key figures taking you on a taste-test of their hangouts, hangovers and hang-ups, with vivid imagery lining the path. Weighing in at 2.6 pounds, it qualifies as an underground bible of sorts, showing how these sweat asylums thrive and interconnect, with a cast of enigmatic oddities including Nick Zedd, J.Jackie Baier, Nat Finkelstein, Max Dax, Lydia Lunch, Julia Murakami, Miron Zownir and many more, including previously unpublished pix and up-close stories of cult(ural) icons like Klaus Nomi, Iggy Pop, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Brian Eno to boot.
Put together with pedantic precision in upscale fanzine style by known-everyone-been-everywhere New Yorker Robert Carrithers and partner-in-crime Louis Armand, the volume is following up its New York MoMA presentation earlier this month with among other things this zoom-in encounter. Back on Earth, six of the contributors will present the book close-up in the best way possible: in the flesh, at BuchHafen in the bosom of Neukölln. Besides Robert Carrithers, sidle up to Carola Göllner, Steve Morell, Mark Reeder, Kenton Turk and André Werner. An evening of feral tales and seductive stories from the earthly reaches of the heavens. Meteorites and falling stars welcome.
Location: BuchHafen Berlin, Okerstraße 1, 12049 Berlin
pictured:
“Trans women on Ku’damm” (1985, Kenton Turk), taken from “City Primeval, New York, Berlin, Prague”
