Dave Hickey 30th Anniversary Package + Gift

The Invisible Dragon

An expanded edition of Dave Hickey‘s controversial and exquisitely written apologia for beauty―championed by artists and reviled by academicians—is as powerful as ever 30 years on.

The 30th Anniversary edition includes:

• Four Essays on Beauty (originally published in 1993)

• Profile of Dolly Parton, written 50 years ago

• Elegiac tribute to comedian Richard Pryor

• Witty “Listener’s Guide” to word art by Ed-werd Rew-shay

• Review of John Rechy’s experimental gay novel Numbers

• Personal essay on the art of writing

An afterword by Hickey’s friend and Dragon’s editor "queers" the brash, heterosexual gambler. It situates the creation of Dragon squarely within the traumatic time of the AIDS plague. The book’s original four essays on beauty are revelatory. Hickey’s coupling of Caravaggio’s 1601 Incredulity of St. Thomas and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph Lou, NYC still has the ability to shock. His gloss on art by Bellini, Velázquez, Raphael, and others provides urgent lessons for contemporary art and gender politics. In today’s fraught culture wars, Hickey’s prescient diagnosis of the “therapeutic institution” resonates anew. Artists respond by harnessing beauty as a source of meaning and of joy.

Life As We Know It

Dave Hickey’s long-lost album of pop-country-jazz-inflected songs has been remastered to celebrate the 30th Anniversary Edition of his groundbreaking book on beauty, The Invisible Dragon. This is Hickey as you never heard him before. Witness the frivolity of “What Did You Do On Your Summer Vacation,” the languid stylings of “Spur of the Moment,” and Hickey’s rockin’ paean to a new generation, “Flaming Youth.” Listen for Natalie Maines, lead of the Dixie Chicks, singing background vocals on “Baby Vampires” when she was 12 years old. The album’s first eight songs were written as the soundtrack for an exhibition and series of photographs by Nic Nicosia, also entitled “Life As We Know It.” A ninth song, Hickey’s self-revelatory ode “The Ballad of Billy and Oscar,” has been added for this release. It’s a rip-roaring tale of the outlaw Billy the Kid and the effete Oscar Wilde traveling in concert through the Wild West. Billy and Oscar visit a whorehouse, smoke French cigarettes, go out looking for love, and give advice to assholes, bureaucrats, critics and cops. All songs were composed by Hickey, who plays guitar and sings on the album. At last, fortissimo!

Tracks

1. What Did You Do On Your Summer Vacation

2. Life As We Know It

3. Baby Vampires

4. Spur of the Moment

5. Put It Out of Your Mind

6. The Eye Is a Camera

7. I Don’t Need a Picture

8. Flaming Youth

9. The Ballad of Billy and Oscar