*That was entertaining.
*I owned that book in its first printing, by the way.
Again, the point of our PRANKS! book was to stimulate everyday people in everyday life to use the most neglected organ in the human body: THE IMAGINATION. When advertising does its job, millions of people fall for ad campaigns and blithely purchase “whatever”—whether or not they need it—if the item is promoted powerfully enough. Thrift stores are full discarded impulse purchases. What PRANKS! tries to do is give you tools and methods to fight these “controls.”
FOR EXAMPLE: Whenever you see ANY kind of advertising (a billboard or bus ad or magazine ad or TV commercial): IMMEDIATELY think how you can “PRANK” it to change the message to something you find either useful or amusing.
Decades ago in San Francisco, individuals started modifying billboards under the name of “SRL” or “Billboard Liberation Front” or no name whatsoever. In the SOMA area, I remember seeing a golden Coppertone billboard featuring a beautifully-suntanned-blonde-in-a-yellow-bikini smiling invitingly (or was she smirking?) under a caption: “Let them think it was FUCK.” Obviously, someone had replaced an “L” with an “F”! Nobody took credit, the modifier/artist just did what everyone was thinking.
Historically, the first billboard alteration I remember seeing was back in the early San Francisco punk rock days,1977. Before he did the SRL (Survival Research Laboratories) block-long huge machine-art-war performances, Mark Pauline climbed a hundred feet up in the air wearing a plain jumpsuit, and modified a gigantic Telly Savalas Black Velvet whiskey-advertisement from saying “Feel the Velvet” to “Feel The Pain,” also giving Telly Savalas a huge distorted mouth full of teeth. This pranked-ad was seen by literally millions of commuters pouring into San Francisco over the Bay Bridge, and read about by millions more readers of the San Francisco Chronicle (pre-internet—people read the paper).
Mark Pauline (SRL) was featured as the lead article in our yellow PRANKS! book, which documented his first big billboard blast, lesser billboard modifications promoting amusingly surrealist messages, as well as other pranks he may have done of questionable legality, such as pouring stinky acid into an ATM receptable.
Then Mark Pauline launched a series of gi-normous “machine performance art” spectacles, which took up a whole city block (or more) and featured the loudest shows on earth: sudden super-shattering explosions, long jets of red-yellow fire, shocking imagery being destroyed, obscured by waves of smoke, various acts of multi-axis mayhem and overall crescendoing chaos. Earplugs and shooting-range headsets were recommended. ALSO you wouldn't wear your best clothes!
Those were the days when San Francisco’s SOMA district boasted long-abandoned, dark city blocks that were available for spontaneous and innovative performance art. The SRL shows were somehow secretly promoted, mostly through word-of-mouth and posters on telephone poles, and this guerrilla publicity worked. Hundreds showed up. But finally, police and firemen began showing up—about an hour into the show, resulting in a big clampdown: no more SRL shows within city limits. However, there have been shows in Seattle, New York, Amsterdam, Japan, San Jose and probably more locations—all over the world, essentially. Surveillance technology everywhere has probably made these shows impossible today!
Amazingly, SRL is now planning to do a (smaller, scaled-down) show in “first week August” (we’re guessing Sat Aug 4 or Sun Aug 5) in Seattle! To us at RE/Search, it seems worthwhile going to Seattle just to see this rare show (book your tickets soon, when the date of the show has been “nailed down”!). After all, Survival Research Laboratories is the single-handededly most ORIGINAL art medium ever invented in the Bay Area: block-long machine-art performances incorporating thunderous explosions, blinding flame-throwing, and much more (the show’s “incredibly strange music” soundtracks have been somewhat overlooked, and the sometimes incredibly-horrifying graphic imagery equally underrated, from the standpoint of "visual curatorial originality”. Hey, not to mention the unique and original posters and promotional language written by Mr. Pauline). Yes, it would definitely be worthwhile to get to Seattle for an SRL Show (we will endeavor to keep you posted as to precise date).
Now many readers who loved the first PRANKS! book have never known that the sequel PRANKS 2 was ever published… But we think that PRANKS! (and its sequel, PRANKS 2) are essential reading to SURVIVE today’s baffling media landscape—which daily bombards and overloads our poor brains with their “logical” marketing campaigns. Make no mistake; all “news” and “politics" is a branch of the advertising industry, as J.G. Ballard so casually remarked fifty years ago.
To quote Ballard, “PRANKS! is a wonderful, marvelous book. It’s much more than a book about practical jokes—it’s profoundly subversive, because it’s a whole new way of looking at reality. It’s amazing."
RE/Search printed only 500 copies of the PRANKS! book in deluxe HARDBACK (with yellow endpapers) on superior glossy paper for sharper photographic reproduction. PRANKS 2 was printed—in paperback only but on the same superior glossy paper. The PRANKS! HARDBACK is normally $60 (PRANKS 2 $20), but for a limited time you can acquire both rare volumes for $70, and V. Vale will autograph both books upon request. Also, we will include a color photographic print of an SRL show taken and autographed by photographer V. Vale.
Take a look at this to find out more: https://www.researchpubs.com/shop/pranks-bundle/
