About this product: The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
About this product: In the twentieth century, avant-garde artists from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean created extraordinary and highly innovative paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mixed-media works, and installations. This innovative book presents more than 250 works by some seventy of these artists (including Gego, Joaquín Torres-García, Xul Solar, and José Clemente Orozco) and artists’ groups, along with interpretive essays by leading authorities and newly translated manifestoes and other theoretical documents written by the artists. Together the images and texts showcase the astonishing artistic achievements of the Latin American avant-garde.
The book focuses on two decisive periods: the return from Europe in the 1920s of Latin American avant-garde pioneers; and the expansion of avant-garde activities throughout Latin America after World War II as artists expressed their independence from developments in Europe and the United States. As the authors explain, during these periods Latin American art was fueled by the belief that artistic creations could present a form of utopia—an inversion of the original premise that drove the European avant-garde—and serve as a model for a new society.
As an insightful source for new ideas about the nature and function of modern art, Inverted Utopias is an essential book that will become a classic text in the field.
About this product: This book was excellent, a great read, I am an airmail collector and when i heard about this book i decided to pick up a copy on Amazon, once I started reading it i could not put it down, the book is amazing in it's detail about this these rare inverted Jenny stamps, their journey from collector to investor and back again makes for a fun and informative read, the book lacks a bit in it's layout which is why i only gave it 4 out of 5 stars, but other than that it is a must read in my opinion.
Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"?
Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level.
Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come.
Based on the simple premise that good writing is good writing whether a features story or news, this book teaches students to entertain and inform with style.
About this product: The 74 woodblock engravings that make up The Inverted Line are only a small selection of what George A Walker has produced over the years. Each engraving, regardless of its size or shape, appears on a single page, with the facing page used to provide short anecdotal comments.
About this product: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Cindy Sherman were born in different countries, in different generations--Cahun in France in 1894, Deren in Russia in 1917, and Sherman in the United States in 1954. Yet they share a deeply theatrical obsession that shatters any notion of a unified self. All three try out identities from different social classes and geographic environments, extend their temporal range into the past and future, and transform themselves into heroes and villains, mythological creatures, and sex goddesses. The premise of Inverted Odysseys is that this expanded concept of the self--this playful urge to "try on" other roles-is more than a feminist or psychological issue. It is central to our global culture, to our definition of human identity in a world where the individual exists in a multicultural and multitemporal environment. This book is an "odyssey" through historical, theoretical, critical, and literary perspectives on the three artists viewed in the context of these issues. Contributors include Lynn Gumpert, Lucy Lippard, Jonas Mekas, Ted Mooney, Shelley Rice, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Central to the book is Claude Cahun's "Heroines" manuscript, a series of fifteen stream-of-consciousness monologues written in the voices of major women of literature and history, such as the Virgin Mary, Sappho, Cinderella, Penelope, Delilah, and Helen of Troy. Translated by Norman MacAfee, these perverse and hilarious vignettes make their English-language debut here. This is also the first time that Cahun's text has appeared in its entirety. The book accompanies an exhibit cocurated by Lynn Gumpert and Shelley Rice at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. Published in cooperation with the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. EXHIBITION SCHEDULE: Grey Art Gallery New York, New York November 16, 1999 - January 29, 2000Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Florida March - May 2000
About this product: How relevant and timely is ancient mysticism in addressing the spiritual malaise of the modern man? Can it resurrect awareness of his true inner self? As the world reels feverishly from socio-economic and political turmoil, Master Choa Kok Sui draws from the wellspring of the Tree of Life. With incisive simplicity, he offers very practical and, in many instances, provocative answers to the seemingly complex problems of our time. Here is a book that breathes life into the spiritual dimensions of wealth, sex, war, alchemy and other mundane preoccupations. These teachings are infused with an amazingly fresh perspective that may yet restructure, if not alter, the paradigm of many global leaders, politicians, businessmen, religious people and just about anybody sincerely searching for more balanced mode of existence. Set against a multi-cultural backdrop are the syntheses of various esoteric systems. The chakras, the sephiroth, the triple cross and other symbols are like pearls of wisdom beautifully strung together, bestowing to the ardent seeker a most effective strategy for living a blessed life. The Tree of life is an alternative path towards reclaiming and redeeming spirituality.
About this product: This massive collection of original stories and articles inspired by the 'Cthulhu Mythos' created by H.P. Lovecraft was published in Japan in 2002 as a two-volume set under the name Hishinkai. The list of contributing authors is a who's-who of Japanese horror fiction, featuring some of the finest writers in Japan today. In cooperation with Tokyo Sogensha, the Japanese publishers, and the anthology editor, Mr. ASAMATSU Ken, we are proud to present this second volume of the series. Here you will find new vistas of horror – some stories with shock you, others force you to look at your daily life through new eyes. Each story is accompanied by a thought-provoking introduction by Robert M. Price, the recognized master of the Mythos. The cover is by Yamada Akihiro, who handled the cover of Vol. 1 of the series, "Night Voices, Night Journeys," and many of the covers for the Japanese-language editions of Lovecraft and other Mythos works. He has built up a loyal following in the States as well for his work.
About this product: It is hard to imagine nowadays that, for many years, France and Germany considered each other as "arch enemies." And yet, for well over a century, these two countries waged verbal and ultimately violent wars against each other. This study explores a particularly virulent phase during which each of these two nations projected certain assumptions about national character onto the other - distorted images, motivated by antipathy, fear, and envy, which contributed to the growing hostility between the two countries in the years before the First World War. Most remarkably, as the author discovered, the qualities each country ascribed to its chief adversary appeared to be exaggerated or negative versions of precisely those qualities that it perceived to be lacking or inadequate in itself. Moreover, banishing undesirable traits and projecting them onto another people was also an essential step in the consolidation of national identity. As such, it established a pattern that has become all too familiar to students of nationalism and xenophobia in recent decades. This study shows that antagonism between states is not a fact of nature but socially constructed.
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