Download or read book Liberace Extravaganza written by Connie Furr Soloman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known for his spectacular performances, the magnificent Wladziu Valentino Liberace was a world-renowned star in the entertainment industry for more than four decades, and his dazzling, often outrageous costumes are what made him most memorable. In Liberace Extravaganza! the entertainer's sequined, bejeweled, and rhinestone-studded outfits, as well as his extravagant collection of furs, feather capes, sparkling bow ties, and custom-made shoes are exhibited in book form for the very first time. These mesmerizing costumes grew from Liberace's humble beginnings when, as a young man, he would perform in his brother's hand-me-downs. From there, his suits, worth as much as twenty-four thousand dollars, featured layers of silk and satin ruffles, Swarovski crystal rhinestones, and fourteen-karat white-gold, diamond-encrusted buttons, culminating in his "electric" costumes with four thousand light bulbs weighing more than twenty-five pounds. Michael Travis, Liberace's principal designer, has written the foreword for this breathtaking volume. Jim Lapidus, another of Liberace's designers, furrier Anna Nateece, and Ray Arnett, his producer, have contributed original sketches used to design Liberace's costumes. The result is a book that is one of a kind: a celebration of the legendary performer and a visual feast of the most extraordinary costumes ever created. With more than 260 full-color photographs

Download or read book Liberace written by Darden Asbury Pyron and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More people watched his nationally syndicated television show between 1953 and 1955 than followed I Love Lucy. Even a decade after his death, the attendance records he set at Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl, and Radio City Music Hall still stand. Arguably the most popular entertainer of the twentieth century, this very public figure nonetheless kept more than a few secrets. Darden Asbury Pyron, author of the acclaimed and bestselling Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, leads us through the life of America's foremost showman with his fresh, provocative, and definitive portrait of Liberace, an American boy. Liberace's career follows the trajectory of the classic American dream. Born in the Midwest to Polish-Italian immigrant parents, he was a child prodigy who, by the age of twenty, had performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Abandoning the concert stage for the lucrative and glittery world of nightclubs, celebrities, and television, Liberace became America's most popular entertainer. While wildly successful and good natured outwardly, Liberace, Pyron reveals, was a complicated man whose political, social, and religious conservativism existed side-by-side with a lifetime of secretive homosexuality. Even so, his swishy persona belied an inner life of ferocious aggression and ambition. Pyron relates this private man to his public persona and places this remarkable life in the rapidly changing cultural landscape of twentieth-century America. Pyron presents Liberace's life as a metaphor, for both good and ill, of American culture, with its shopping malls and insatiable hunger for celebrity. In this fascinating biography, Pyron complicates and celebrates our image of the man for whom the streets were paved with gold lamé. "An entertaining and rewarding biography of the pianist and entertainer whose fans' adoration was equaled only by his critics' loathing. . . . [Pyron] persuasively argues that Liberace, thoroughly and rigorously trained, was a genuine musician as well as a brilliant showman. . . . [A]n immensely entertaining story that should be fascinating and pleasurable to anyone with an interest in American popular culture."—Kirkus Reviews "This is a wonderful book, what biography ought to be and so seldom is."—Kathryn Hughes, Daily Telegraph "[A]bsorbing and insightful. . . . Pyron's interests are far-ranging and illuminating-from the influence of a Roman Catholic sensibility on Liberace and gay culture to the aesthetics of television and the social importance of self-improvement books in the 1950s. Finally, he achieves what many readers might consider impossible: a persuasive case for Liberace's life and times as the embodiment of an important cultural moment."—Publishers Weekly "Liberace, coming on top of his amazing life of Margaret Mitchell, Southern Daughter, puts Darden Pyron in the very first rank of American biographers. His books are as exciting as the lives of his subjects."—Tom Wolfe "Fascinating, thoughtful, exhaustive, and well-written, this book will serve as the standard biography of a complex icon of American popular culture."—Library Journal

Download or read book The Secret Life of Siegfried and Roy written by Jimmy Lavery and published by Phoenix Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Secret Life of Siegfried and Roy reveals the touching, little-known story of how two youngsters founded a friendship, a franchise, and a tempestuous on-and-off love affair that would last a lifetime.

Download or read book Joy of Liberace written by W. Michael Feder and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This retro cookbook is so totally Liberace. It is the step-by-step guide to Bling Cooking, food with all the panache of the glitziest pianist that ever tinkled a Steinway. It is filled with over 80 recipes that made America swoon in the 50s, including such delights as Salami Bouquet, Tchaikovsky Would Love This Salad, Poofy Spuds and As a Matter of Fact, I am Chopped Liver Pate. These are the culinary classics that kept viewers tuned in to The Liberace Show, pulled together with the Bling Cooking panache that was the signature of the world's greatest entertainer.

Download or read book Elvis in Vegas written by Richard Zoglin and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *The inspiration for the CNN original series Vegas: The Story of Sin City* “Outstanding pop-culture history.” —Newsday The “smart and zippy account” (The Wall Street Journal) of how Las Vegas saved Elvis and Elvis saved Las Vegas in the greatest musical comeback of all time. Elvis’s 1969 opening night in Vegas was his first time back on a live stage in more than eight years. His career had gone sour—bad movies, mediocre pop songs that no longer made the charts—and he’d been dismissed by most critics as over-the-hill. But in Vegas he played the biggest showroom in the biggest hotel in the city, drawing more people for his four-week engagement than any other show in Vegas history. His performance got rave reviews; “Suspicious Minds,” the song he introduced there, gave him his first number-one hit in seven years; and Elvis became Vegas’s biggest star. Over the next seven years, he performed more than 600 shows there, and sold out every one. Las Vegas was changed, too. By the end of the ‘60s, Vegas’ golden age—when the Rat Pack led a glittering array of stars who made it the nation’s premier live-entertainment center—was losing its luster. Elvis created a new kind of Vegas show: an over-the-top, rock-concert extravaganza. He set a new bar for Vegas performers, with the biggest salary, the biggest musical production, and the biggest promotion campaign the city had ever seen. He opened the door to a new generation of pop/rock artists and brought a new audience to Vegas—not the traditional well-heeled older gamblers, but a mass audience from Middle America that Vegas depends on for its success to this day. At once “a fascinating history of Vegas as gambling capital, celebrity playground, mob hangout, [and] entertainment Valhalla” (Rolling Stone) and the incredible “tale of how the King got his groove back” (Associated Press), Elvis in Vegas is a classic feel-good story for the ages.

Download or read book Buyer Cellar written by Jonathan Tolins and published by Diversion Publishing Corp.. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The original script of the award-winning off-Broadway play—“irresistibly entertaining [and] surprisingly moving” (Paul Rudnick). Alex More has a story to tell. A struggling actor in LA, he takes a job working in the Malibu basement of a beloved megastar. One day, the Lady Herself comes downstairs to play. It feels like real bonding in the basement—but will their relationship ever make it upstairs? A winner of the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show, Buyer & Cellar is an outrageous comedy about the price of fame, the cost of things, and the oddest of odd jobs. “Jonathan Tolins has concocted an irresistible one-man play from the most peculiar of fictitious premises . . . This seriously funny slice of absurdist whimsy creates the illusion of a stage filled with multiple people, all of them with their own droll point of view.” —The New York Times “A gorgeous play: funny and beautifully observed and richly insightful.” —Moisés Kaufman “Tolins’s writing is smart, sharp, and hilarious—and he paints a vivid picture that even a perfectionist like Barbra would have to applaud.” —James Lapine

Download or read book Clued In written by Lewis Carbone and published by Pearson Education. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Good, bad, or indifferent, every customer has an experience with your company and the products or services you provide. But few businesses really manage that customer experience, so they lose the chance to transform customers into lifetime customers. In this book, Lou Carbone shows exactly how to engineer world-class customer experiences, one clue at a time. Carbone draws on the latest neuroscientific research to show how customers transform physical and emotional sensations into powerful perceptions of your business... perceptions that crystallize into attitudes that dictate everything from satisfaction to loyalty. And he explains how to assess and audit existing customer experiences, design and implement new ones... and "steward" them over time, to ensure that they remain outstanding, no matter how your customers change.

Download or read book Causing a Scene written by Charlie Todd and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-05-13 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fake U2 concert. A deranged hypnotist. A book signing by a dead author. Welcome to the wild world of Improv Everywhere. From the infamous No Pants! Subway Ride to the legendary Grand Central Freeze, Improv Everywhere has been responsible for some of the most original and subversive pranks of the Internet age. In Causing a Scene, the group's agents provide a hilarious firsthand account of their mischievous antics. Learn how they created a time loop in a Starbucks and gave Best Buy eighty extra employees. Join in on the fun with this irreverent, behind-the-scenes look at Improv Everywhere's world-famous missions, and get inspired to create your own memorable mayhem.

Download or read book The Hidden Persuaders written by Vance Packard and published by Ig Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of how modern advertising attempts to control our thoughts and desires in order to make us buy the products it produces. Exploring the use of consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, including subliminal tactics, this book shows how advertisers secretly manipulate mass desire for consumer goods and products. In addition, Packard also discusses advertising in politics, predicting the way image and personality rapidly came to overshadow real issues in the televised age.

Download or read book Conquest of the Useless written by Werner Herzog and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-07-27 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Hypnotic….It is ever tempting to try to fathom his restless spirit and his determination to challenge fate.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man) is one of the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers of our time, and Fitzcarraldo is one of his most honored and admired films. More than just Herzog’s journal of the making of the monumental, problematical motion picture, which involved, among other things, major cast changes and reshoots, and the hauling (without the use of special effects) of a 360-ton steamship over a mountain , Conquest of the Useless is a work of art unto itself, an Amazonian fever dream that emerged from the delirium of the jungle. With fascinating observations about crew and players—including Herzog’s lead, the somewhat demented internationally renowned star Klaus Kinski—and breathtaking insights into the filmmaking process that are uniquely Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless is an eye-opening look into the mind of a cinematic master.

Download or read book Liberace written by Darden Asbury Pyron and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-06-15 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of "Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell" presents Liberace's life as a metaphor for both good and ill in American culture. In this fascinating biography, Pyron complicates and celebrates the reader's image of the man for whom the streets were paved with gold lame. 49 halftones.

Download or read book Rachel Harrison Life Hack written by Elisabeth Sussman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The work of the sculptor Rachel Harrison is both the zeitgeist and the least digestible in contemporary art. It may also be the most important, owing to an originality that breaks a prevalent spell in an art world of recycled genres, styles, and ideas."--Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker In her sculptures, room-sized installations, drawings, photographs, and artist's books, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) delves into themes of celebrity culture, pop psychology, history, and politics. This publication, created in close collaboration with the artist, explores twenty-five years of her practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a chronology of Harrison's major works, series, and exhibitions. Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates Harrison's complicated, eclectic oeuvre--in which she integrates found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of strangeness. Six accompanying essays cover Harrison's earliest works to her most recent output. The book also includes a handful of photo-collages that the artist created specifically for this project. Published here for the first time, these pieces superimpose found images with reproductions of Harrison's own past work.

Download or read book 100 Symbols That Changed the World written by Colin Salter and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2022-10-13 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 100 Symbols That Changed The World looks at the genesis and adoption of the world’s most recognizable symbols.

Download or read book Arresting Images written by Steven C. Dubin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although contemporary art may sometimes shock us, more alarming are recent attempts to regulate its display. Drawing upon extensive interviews, a broad sampling of media accounts, legal documents and his own observations of important events, sociologist Steven Dubin surveys the recent trend in censorship of the visual arts, photography and film, as well as artistic upstarts such as video and performance art. He examines the dual meaning of arresting images--both the nature of art work which disarms its viewers and the social reaction to it. Arresting Images examines the battles which erupt when artists address such controversial issues as racial polarization, AIDS, gay-bashing and sexual inequality in their work.

Download or read book The Bride In Blue Mills Boon Vintage 90s Modern written by Miranda Lee and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wedlocked! Brotherly love... ?

Download or read book My Girls written by Todd Fisher and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds by the one who knew them best: “A family story, part comedy, part tragedy . . . an homage and a cautionary tale.” —The Wall Street Journal In December 2016, the world was shaken by the sudden deaths of Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds, losses that occurred within twenty-four hours of each other. The stunned public turned for solace to Debbie’s only remaining child, Todd Fisher, who somehow retained his grace and composure under the glare of the media spotlight as he struggled with his own overwhelming grief. The son of “America’s Sweethearts” Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, Todd grew up amid the glamor, wealth, and pretense of Hollywood, but managed to remain grounded thanks to his funny, loving, no-nonsense mother and remained close to his sister through both her meteoric rise to stardom and her personal struggles. Now, Todd shares his memories of Debbie and Carrie with deeply personal stories, from his earliest years to those last unfathomable days. With thirty-two pages of never-before-seen photos and memorabilia from his family’s private archives, Todd’s book is a love letter to a sister and a mother, and a gift to their countless fans. “A frequently hilarious and too often heartbreaking story of life with the women he called ‘my girls’. . . . More than a Hollywood tell-all, Fisher’s memoir of a family’s love and endurance under trying and sometimes outrageous circumstances is a clear-eyed tribute to lives lived to the fullest.” —Publishers Weekly “Fisher’s tribute to these larger-than-life creative ladies is a down-to-earth portrait of a loving mother and supportive sister.” —Booklist

Download or read book Ocean of Sound written by David Toop and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ocean of Sound" begins in 1889 at the Paris Exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed. A culture absorbed in perfume, light and ambient sound developed in response to the intangibility of 20th century communications. David Toop traces the evolution of this culture, through Erik Satie to the Velvet Undergound; Miles Davis to Jimi Hendrix. David Toop, who lives in London, is a writer, musician and recording artist. His other books are "Rap Attack 3 "and "Exotica,"