Alan Dikty Books

Explore the craft of distilling with the greatest micro-distillers of today in The Art of Distilling, Revised and Updated.

Since the 1960s, the occult in film and television has responded to and reflected society's crises surrounding gender and sexuality. In Desire after Dark, Andrew J. Owens explores media where figures such as vampires and witches make use of their supernatural knowledge in order to queer what otherwise appears to be a normative world. Beginning with the global sexual revolutions of the '60s and moving decade by decade through "Euro-sleaze" cinema and theatrical hardcore pornography, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the popularity of New Age religions and witchcraft, and finally the increasingly explicit sexualization of American cable television, Owens contends that occult media has risen to prominence during the past 60 years as a way of exposing and working through cultural crises about the queer. Through the use of historiography and textual analyses of media from Bewitched to The Hunger, Owens reveals that the various players in occult media have always been well aware that non-normative sexuality constitutes the heart of horror's enduring appeal. By investigating vampirism, witchcraft, and other manifestations of the supernatural in media, Desire after Dark confirms how the queer has been integral to the evolution of the horror genre and its persistent popularity as both a subcultural and mainstream media form.

Altamont 1969 by Bill Owens presents a new and unpublished series of work, black and white photographs documenting the unique moment of the first large Rolling Stones concert at Raceway Altamont in California. This was the period of protest movements in San Francisco. Bill Owens captured the young generation's desire to stand up and raise their voice against the war in Vietnam, against segregation and racial discrimination, and against authority in general. Slogans and billboards, sit-ins and demonstrations are evidence of the cultural agitation of those years. Together with the Stones, other major rock bands appeared on stage, including Grace Slick, Jefferson Airplane, Carlos Santana and many others, while the Hells Angels were employed as security. Bill Owens has always been involved in socio-anthropological aspects of American culture and in the rise of the collective movement of protest and criticism against the misuse of power. Here, he uses photography as a kind of 'visual anthropologist', painting a fresco' of the cultural revolution that marked the entire world during the 1960s.