A crusader for truth, or, as Karl Rove called him: “a nut with internet access”? Jason Leopold wanted to be a part of something, and that quest brought him through a labyrinthine world of decadent glam metal, dangerous mafioso, love, investigative journalism challenging the heights of government and corporate power, and the collisions of past and present. His story is the subject of the season three premiere of the critically-acclaimed Love + Radio podcast.

He also wrote the Process Media book News Junkie.

Presented publicly for the first time in Chicago, this event also celebrates Love + Radio’s debut as a WBEZ podcast. We’ll feature a mind-blowing hour-long audio screening, followed by Q+A and reception. Love + Radio director Nick van der Kolk and producer Sarah Lu will be in attendance, joined via video conference by sound designer Brendan Baker in New York City.

WBEZ’s Love + Radio features intimate interviews with an eclectic range of subjects from the seedy to the sublime, permeated by music and otherworldly production. It won the top prize at the 2011 Third Coast Festival Competition (often described as the “Sundance of public radio”), the first podcast to do so in the competition’s 11-year history.

This is event is brought to you by High Concept Laboratories. High Concept Laboratories is an arts service organization dedicated to supporting working artists and engaging the Chicago community in arts and culture. Partnering with artist on every step of the creative process from experimentation and development to presentation and performance, the organization offers high quality, no-cost support services including administrative assistance, production support and space use to projects of vision and merit. HCL also curates and hosts artist showcases, presents special events, and facilitates community and educational arts partnerships. With a vibrant cycle of events and process-support, High Concept Laboratories grows community alongside culture and fosters new audiences for the arts.

We wanted to share some important websites along with upcoming events and recent news/press/hype:

Purchase from Process!
Video trailer!
Blog!
Facebook!
Website!

Kristy was interviewed by a nice guy in Texas, Steve Howard, for his podcast Growing Your Grub. Listen here!

She will also be on Portland’s AM Northwest on Tuesday, May 22, and has an interviewing coming up from Laura Stanfill’s 7 Questions blog.

GYPO! is touring! The website will be updated constantly but here is what you can look for in the next few months:

May 19 at 2 p.m. Friends of Straub Environmental Learning Center, Salem, Oregon
May 24 at 7:30 p.m.: Powell’s Books on Hawthorne, Portland, Oregon
May 26 (signing) 12:30 to 6 p.m. Quady North Wine Tasting Room, Jacksonville, Oregon

June 16: Nature of Words Center, Bend, Oregon
June 18: Harney County Library, Burns, Oregon
June 19: Betty’s Books, Baker City, Oregon
June 21: Fishtrap’s Coffin House, Enterprise, Oregon
June 28 at 7 p.m.: Broadway Books, Portland, Oregon

July 8 (signing) 12 to 3 p.m.: Lucy’s Books, Astoria, Oregon
July 13 at 7 p.m.: Orca Books, Olympia, Washington
July 14 at 4 p.m.: Village Books in Fairhaven, Bellingham, Washington
July 15 at 4 p.m.: Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, Washington
July 28 (signing) 1 to 3 p.m.: Urban Farm Store, Portland, Oregon

Kristy Athens and Process Media will also be attending Wordstock this year! October 13th and 14th in Portland, Oregon. One side will be Kristy’s ithaka collage art and the other will be Process Media featuring Get Your Pitchfork On!

If you can make it out come to an event, meet Kristy, get the book, go to the after party, and then move to the country!

First stop of the Feral House tour takes place at Powell’s Bookstore on West Burnside, Portland on Thursday May 3. Adam Parfrey will give a visually enhanced talk about secret brotherhoods and Ritual America at 7 pm, and Peter Sotos will discuss his time with Jamie Gillis and the production of his collaborative Pure Filth book that just arrived from the printer.

Throughout the month of May Powell’s will also have a month-long exhibition of fraternal art and weirdness from Parfrey’s collection.

The Feral House tour moves to New York, when Parfrey and Sotos appear at Spoonbill Books in Williamsburg at 7 pm on Monday May 7.

On Tuesday May 8 at 7 pm Sotos and Parfrey mix things up at St. Marks Bookstore, Manhattan.

The last appearance of Parfrey and Sotos together was more than a decade ago with the publication of Apocalypse Culture II, which is currently unavailable due to bans by printers nationally.

Back in the Northwest, Process author Kristy Athens will be doing some events in support of the new Self Reliance Series release Get Your Pitchfork On!

Saturday, May 12 at 12pm GYPO! will debut in Salem, Oregon at Davidson’s Garden Store. See the event page HERE!

Tuesday, May 16 at 6:30 there will be a reading and all you can eat pizza at Solstice Wood Fire Cafe in Bingen, Washington. See the event page HERE!

Thursday, May 24th at 7:30 Kristy Athens will be reading from GYPO! at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne. See the event page HERE!

See all future Get Your Pitchfork On! events HERE!

And don’t forget to watch the trailer HERE!

In the month of June, Stories of Echo Park, Los Angeles, will devote its bookstore to a month-long Feral House / Process Media celebration, with appearances from many FH and Process authors throughout the month.

Authors Craig Heimbichner and Adam Parfrey of Ritual America will also appear at a fabulous Moose Lodge in Glendale, CA that month.

Keep watch!

We hope to see y’all soon!

Yes, Mark Dery, the guy whose review of Apocalypse Culture for the LA Weekly in the early ’90s was more of a personal insult rather than a critique. And then in 2000 he followed this up with a negative portrayal of Apocalypse Culture II, in which he portrayed me as endorsing “wet-brained conspiracy theories about Waco, and his creepy with coziness with one too many neo-Nazis and Odin-worshipping Aryan supremacists.”  Never mind the fact that we never wrote conspiracy theories about Waco, though we have mentioned that we respected the Academy-nominated documentary, Rules of Engagement, which had actual footage revealing government forces murdering children and unarmed adults.

Most of all, why would this social critic try to discourage the fair-minded folks in the publishing business from selling Feral House books created by such a bastard who hates Down Syndrome children and goose-steps with fascist friends? Why does he choose to ignore our publishing history and the publishing of many titles with an investigative, leftist and anarchist slant, including three volumes that the anarchist publisher, AK Press, reprinted in whole?

Could the slime-throwing have something to do with some sort of competitive feeling? Dery’s book The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium was often mentioned in reviews as being oddly reminiscent of  my Apocalypse Culture books, and Dery also expressed with hostility in his L.A. Weekly review that his favorite novelist, J.G. Ballard, gave Apocalypse Culture undeserved plaudits?

What about Dery’s claims that “[Parfrey] insists on a more exalted status than the Charles Kuralt of our psychic badlands: that of a Luciferian Noam Chomsky, speaking the awful truths about The Conspiracy and the Dictatorship of Political Correctness that the lapdog mainstream media dare not utter.” Exalted status? Luciferian Noam Chomsky? When and where did I ever make these claims? This, like a lot of Dery’s testimony, comes without supporting evidence, and is only true because Dery says it is.

The slime is thrown once again in a chapter of the recently published, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts. Says Dery’s friend, 21C blog reviewer Darren Tofts, about Bad Thoughts: “By now he has prepared us for a descent into the rancorous pit of repugnant fucked-up nastiness, an annotated reading of Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture…  His loathing of Parfrey and his self-styled role as ‘pitchman on the pathological midway’ is worn with pride on the cuffs of the leather jacket he is wont to wear in press photographs.” Predictably enough 21C’s editorial reveals that the mag was unable to make it into print when overseen by Mark Dery, and that “the inaugural on-line issue takes as its theme Apocalypse Noir – the trend toward the apocalyptic, or at the least extremely dark – in contemporary writing.” The 21C issue is dedicated to J.G. Ballard.

Critiques are one thing, but slander is another, and I contacted Mr. Dery a decade ago during a trip to Manhattan, and he enthusiastically agreed to discuss his critique face-to-face—in a friendly way, of course. We agreed to meet at Max Fish’s, a bar on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I sat there for an hour nursing a greyhound, but the critic who “loathes” me never appeared.

Though Dery jokes (and in case you missed it, he repeats the joke twice) that  ”Adam Parfrey is the Ron Popeil of fusion paranoia, pop Satanism, bad art, cannibal killers, Jews for Hitler” etc etc. Dery also allows that “he’s got a Meckenesque way with the lacerating one-liner and a nose for great stories.” Could Dery’s loathing also be a form of love?

The Department of Justice served Apple and a few actual publishers with a suit on eBook price-fixing charges.

Here’s the point of view from a small publisher:

The “collusion” accusation mystifies us. We’ve always been at the short end of the deal, and told what to do by the big gorillas in the room, Amazon as well as Apple.

Nevertheless, Amazon is the clear winner of this saga. Somehow its own monopolistic behavior missed the Justice Department crosshairs. Amazon dictates to publishers, and we had better conform to its new fees and procedural dictates, or else.

Though its fees and demands are extortionate, at least Amazon has not dictated the kind of books it would allow to be displayed on Kindle. Or at least not so much as Apple, who has banned the display of a number of Feral House eBooks.

As far as the readability of the Kindle or iPad devices, I’ll have to step out of that conversation. Reading books on a plastic device repels me. That said, I do see a certain benefit to them: a lot more words per pound and possibly less physical waste in the end.

But even the newest version of both the iPad and Kindle does not reproduce image-heavy books half as well as their large offset-printed versions. It’s quite a different experience.

With regrets we announce the new release of eBook versions of the following titles from our brother Feral House:

You Can’t Win by Jack Black with an introduction by William S. Burroughs (eBook version of the 1988 Amok Press edition)

Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (the long out-of-print Feral House book edited by the late and missed Jim Keith)

The Covert War Against Rock by Alex Constantine

Psychic Dictatorship in the USA by Alex Constantine

Apocalypse Culture by Adam Parfrey

Sexuality, Magic and Perversion by Francis King

The above links are for the Kindle edition but you can find these books available for most readers.

In the near future we’ll also be seeing the release of the following eBooks:

Enjoy the digital world. Process Media will continue, as long as it can, the analog editions.

Then the book’s author, David Hoffman, admitted that he no longer possessed a recording of Flight 103′s victims’ attorney asserting that Mr. Revell had told him that he plucked his son from the Pan Am flight just before its ill-fated bombing above Lockerbie, Scotland. This was our evidence. The attorney in question “didn’t want to get involved in this legal case” and author David “recorded over” the tape. Well, that took the piss and fight right out of us. To settle, we were forced to put this book out of print, and FBI men actually appeared at my distributor’s warehouse to watch them incinerate all remaining copies of the book. Mr. Revell claimed that his son changed his flight from Pan Am 103 at least a day or two, and not hours, before its tragic conclusion.

David Hoffman made my life difficult for a while, but his life became even worse. And now he’s dead.

A couple years ago we were sued about a chapter in Alex Constantine’s book, Psychic Dictatorship in the USA. The suit was a strange one: filed in a Utah small claims court by a man unfortunately named Robert Wadman, an ex police chief of Lincoln, Nebraska, where he was accused of various misdeeds that figured highly in the book, The Franklin Cover-Up by John DeCamp. DeCamp’s book was about the use of children from Boys Town as party favors for Republican Party VIPs. What a sordid tale. Author DeCamp, by the way, was a Republican State Senator in Nebraska. Wadman’s evidence against Constantine and Feral House was thin and misleading, and as a result we won that case even among Mormon brothers in the middle of the Mormon state.

We’ve been stalked and intimidated by other folk and organizations at other points throughout the decades. Strange and mystifying things have happened to us due to the subject matter of a coming title.

As a result, we certainly understand why people remain suspicious of commonly-held beliefs broadcast by government officials and the media at large. But it seems that many of the new conspiracy-lovers are handed information to believe by powermongers with ulterior motives.

For example, many doubters are troubled by media reports about George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin. To this moment, Zimmerman has killed a black teenager with impunity. The doubters believe that media interest in this case is all to do with falsely accusing a white man. Or in Zimmerman’s case, non-black.  It’s extremely important for these particular doubters that Trayvon Martin is seen to be a thug and Zimmerman a victim of “lamestream” media. I was told the other day by such an individual that Trayvon Martin didn’t even possess tea or Skittles from a local 7-11. This was yet another “liberal media invention.” Well, unfortunately for this doubter, the disappearance of the Skittles was an invention of a right-wing blogger.

This same morning I was told by another blog poster that media revelations about a fast-melting Antarctic shelf is yet another liberal media invention made to personally enrich Al Gore by overtaxing Americans. Does it matter that satellite images back up this story? Not at all, the USGS is all part of the conspiracy.

For hard-working urban professionals Kristy Athens and husband Michael, living in the country was a romantic dream. After purchasing seven acres in Washington’s beautiful Columbia River Gorge, Athens and her husband were surprised to learn just how challenging rural life could be.

Get Your Pitchfork On! provides the hard-learned nuts-and-bolts of rural living from city folk who were in over their heads. Practical and often hilarious, Get Your Pitchfork On! reads like a twenty-first century The Egg and I.

Get Your Pitchfork On! gives urbanites the practical tools they need to realize their own dreams of getting away from it all, with the basics of home, farm, and hearth. The book enters territory that others avoid—straightforward advice about the social aspects of country living, from health care to schools to small-town politics. Athens doesn’t shy away from controversial subjects, such as owning firearms and hiring migrant workers.

Kristy Athens’ nonfiction and short fiction have been published in a number of magazines, newspapers and literary journals, most recently Jackson Hole Review, High Desert Journal, Barely South Review, and the anthology Mamas and Papas. Athens currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she works for Oregon Humanities and is also an artist and novice fiddle player. She and her husband are plotting their next attempt at rural living.

Kristy Athens’ Website

Get Your Pitchfork On! Website

The pitch began in 2006 and levitated as the result of viral online videos, word of mouth through yoga classes, and appearances on Oprah. The dissatisfied were open to being sold on the idea about how they could become happy and procure all they ever wanted.

The Secret, perhaps the hugest marketing phenomenon of modern times, was the simplest how-to: express gratitude, be positive, and meditate on your wishes until they occurred. Since first released The Secret has become available in young adult, audio and film versions, and various offshoots like The Power and The Magic.

At the center of it all is The Law of Attraction.

This Law was also a phenomenon of the 19th century when a “New Thought” movement meted out the success stories in magazines and many dozens of books, as it is done today. The Secret’s author Rhonda Byrne lets on that she got the idea from a New Thought movement author with the unfortunate name Wallace Wattles.

But the source of these ideas goes a couple millennia further than Mr. Wattles, back to the time of the “Emerald Tablet,” Hermes Trismegistus and Hermetic thought, thousands of mystical years ago.

So, might you ask, does this Law of Attraction work?

Of course it does. Being optimistic and having a more positive frame of mind is certainly more attractive to others than self-sabotaging and unpleasant negative nabobism.

The background on all this, from the ancient wisdom to the modern con man is revealed in The Secret Source: The Law of Attraction and its Hermetic Influence Throughout the Ages by Maja D’Aoust and yours truly.

The Secret Source was originally published in 2007 with a paperback edition, and now it’s been released in an attractive hardcover edition with further material on Sex Magic of the 19th Century.

And who better to tell you about Sex Magic than the delightful and beautiful white magician Maja D’Aoust! See and believe!

Beast wishes,
Adam Parfrey

Adam Parfrey, Jodi Wille, Isis Aquarian & Electricity Aquarian

A reading, presentation and discussion about secret societies, cults, Father Yod, The Source Family and YaHoWa13, The Law of Attraction, sex magic and much more…

Thursday, March 8, 2012
Domy Books – Austin
913 E Cesar Chavez, Austin, TX 78702, FREE
http://bit.ly/ziI6J9

6–7:30pm Jodi Wille, Isis Aquarian & Electricity Aquarian
7:45–9pm Adam Parfrey

Jodi Wille’s documentary on The Source Family will premiere on Sunday, March 11: http://bit.ly/AxN3ex

= – = – = – = – = – = – = – = – = – = – = – = – =

Ritual America:
Secret Brotherhoods and Their Influence on American Society, A Visual Guide
by Adam Parfrey and Craig Heimbichner
Feral House, 2012

The influence of fraternal brotherhoods on this country is vast, somewhat maniacal, and hidden in plain view. Not long ago, as many as one-third of America belonged to a secret society. And though fezzes and tiny car parades are almost a thing of the past, the Gnostic beliefs of Masonic orders are now so much a part of the American mind that the surrounding pomp and circumstance has become faintly unnecessary.

—————–

The Source:
The Untold Story of Father Yod, YaHoWha 13,
and The Source Family
by Isis Aquarian and Electricity Aquarian
Process Books, 2007

1972, it’s a time of social upheaval, radical fervor, and the rise of new religions and communes across the country. The Source Family considers themselves an “Aquarian tribe,” a secretive but outlandish group of 140 beautiful people who stroll Los Angeles in colorful robes and diaphanous gowns, devotees of a controversial Hollywood restaurateur-turned-spiritual leader who has 14 wives, drives a Rolls Royce, has hands registered as lethal weapons, fronts his own rock band, and calls himself “Father Yod.”

The Family are local legends. By day, they operate the Source restaurant on the Sunset Strip, which serves organic cuisine to John Lennon, Warren Beatty, the Laurel Canyon musicians, and many influential figures of the time. With its vegetarian, natural, seasonal menu, The Source becomes wildly popular and inspires a trend of similar restaurants across the country. But their radical lifestyle instigates the authorities. Their demise is spectacular, but Yod’s spirit lives on.

—————–

The Secret Source:
The Law of Attraction and its Hermetic Influence Throughout the Ages
by Maja D’Aoust and Adam Parfrey
Process Books, 2012

Whence did the “Law of Attraction” emerge?

Here is a fascinating and easy-to-understand breakdown on esoteric metaphysics and its odd path to modern day cult. The Secret Source is enhanced by striking visuals largely taken from rare sources housed at The Philosophical Research Society of Los Angeles.