Rushfield Babylon

IMPORTANT LITERARY ANNOUNCEMENT: DISKO by Andrew Miksys

I am interrupting this Tumblr to notify all of the publication of an incredible new book of photographs.

My college classmate Andrew Miksys has spent a few years on an insane mission - he travelled across Lithuania photographing these small town former official buildings and Soviet clubhouses now turned into “Diskos”; the only social outlet for young people in these towns which adopt many of the trappings of American nightclubs of yore.  Andrew funded this project and the publication of the collection via a Kickstarter, which has produced a beautifully bound book of the images.

The yearning and desperation in these pictures is extraordinary to see and old friendship aside, it is one of the most unforgettable collections of photographs I’ve encountered in a very long time. Andrew was kind enough to let me share the 7 images above here as a little sampler of the delights within, but there are many many more and I promise you’ll pick up the book again and again to go over this series.  And it will look great on your coffee table besides that!

But don’t take my word for it.  Here’s a quote by Andrei Codrescu about the book:The discos of Lithuania were once Soviet offices, detention centers, weapons storage, rare Lithuanian mushroom-packing plants… who knows? One can dream of their former incarnations and feel that, no matter how grim, they are being violently shoved into history by the hungry young bodies Andrew photographs. These fashionably thin embodiments are literally the heirs of hunger. Poured into Western jeans and poses, they look like bewildered time-travelers who emerged in these shifting prisons to liberate them for dance. Andrew’s photographs capture a generation born to bewilderment: the disko kids still carry the past in their eyes and hard-to-maintain indifference, but they are the creatures of a very brief moment in time, one that will never ever exist again except in these pictures. Miksys has caught a fleeting world that emanates death and hope in the pulses of ephemeral disco lights.

Find out much more about Andrew here.

And click here to order your copy today. The best money you ever spent.