The Plain of Smokes.
Santa Barbara, CA: Arabesque Books, 1981. Large quarto. (19) folios + 20 serigraph prints, ten in color and ten black-and-white. One of 150 copies, signed by both Mudd and Price, whose chops, along with those of Arabesque Books and Gary Lichtenstein SOMA Fine Art Press, who did the serigraph printing. Mudd has composed a mutable, epic cycle of poems that inherit the scope (and chaos) of Dante and Ezra Pound's earlier longform verses. Like Dante and Pound, Mudd evokes the dynamism, paranoia, and joy of his age, here specifically in that most dream-like of environs, Los Angeles. The poem is thus a meditation on, and confrontation with, the changing cultural, political, and environmental topography of Southern California: the psychosexual pressures of the moment, the post-Vietnam mood of disaffection, the co-dependent arrivals of immigrant communities and gentrification, the incursion of capitialistic realism in the guise of Hollywood. Price's accompanying illustrations depict the urban, and urbane, landscape in noir fashion, with literary images reminiscent of Raymond Chandler or Edward Hopper. Many of the scene feature infamous LA traffic, the cars taking the place of humans who instead usually appear in spotlit in performances on billboards, burlesque stages, ranches, or bathtubs. An immense and immersive opus on the romance of Los Angeles as we imagined it and as it really is. Sheets held in box, which is covered in route-maps of the greater LA area, and house in orange cloth-covered slipcase. Small splits to inner corners of box, else near fine. Two booklets, "A Note on the Text and Images" and "A Note on the Printing," laid in. Item #32586
Price: $7,500.00