Download or read book The Ministry of Nostalgia written by Owen Hatherley and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a "make do and mend" aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prose-with subjects ranging from Ken Loach's documentaries, Turner Prize-shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver's cooking-Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

Download or read book The Ministry of Nostalgia written by Owen Hatherley and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why should we have to “Keep Calm and Carry On”? In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a “make do and mend” aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prose—with subjects ranging from Ken Loach’s documentaries, Turner Prize–shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver’s cooking—Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

Download or read book Selling the Amish written by Susan L. Trollinger and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 19 million tourists flock to Amish Country each year, drawn by the opportunity to glimpse "a better time" and the quaint beauty of picturesque farmland and handcrafted quilts. What they may find, however, are elaborately themed town centers, outlet malls, or even a water park. Susan L. Trollinger explores this puzzling incongruity, showing that Amish tourism is anything but plain and simple. Selling the Amish takes readers on a virtual tour of three such tourist destinations in Ohio’s Amish Country, the world’s largest Amish settlement. Trollinger examines the visual rhetoric of these uniquely themed places—their architecture, interior decor, even their merchandise and souvenirs—and explains how these features create a setting and a story that brings tourists back year after year. This compelling story is, Trollinger argues, in part legitimized by the Amish themselves. To Americans faced with anxieties about modern life, being near the Amish way of life is comforting. The Amish seem to have escaped the rush of contemporary life, the confusion of gender relations, and the loss of ethnic heritage. While the Amish way supports the idealized experience of these tourist destinations, it also raises powerful questions. Tourists may want a life uncomplicated by technology, but would they be willing to drive around in horse-drawn buggies in order to achieve it? Trollinger's answers to important questions in her fascinating study of Amish Country tourism are sure to challenge readers’ understanding of this surprising cultural phenomenon.

Download or read book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness written by Arundhati Roy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post * The Boston Globe * Minneapolis Star Tribune * NPR * Newsday * The Guardian * Financial Times * The Christian Science Monitor The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war. Braiding together the lives of a diverse cast of characters who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love—and by hope, here Arundhati Roy reinvents what a novel can do and can be.

Download or read book Red Metropolis written by Owen Hatherley and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A polemical history of municipal socialism in London - and an argument for turning this capitalist capital red again. A polemical history of municipal socialism in London -- and an argument for turning this capitalist capital red again. London is conventionally seen as merely a combination of the financial centre in the City and the centre of governmental power in Westminster, a uniquely capitalist capital city. This book is about the third London - a social democratic twentieth-century metropolis, a pioneer in council housing, public enterprise, socialist design, radical local democracy and multiculturalism. This book charts the development of this municipal power base under leaders from Herbert Morrison to Ken Livingstone, and its destruction in 1986, leaving a gap which has been only very inadequately filled by the Greater London Authority under Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan. Opposing currently fashionable bullshit about an imaginary "metropolitan elite", this book makes a case for London pride on the left, and makes an argument for using that pride as a weapon against a government of suburban landlords that ruthlessly exploits Londoners.

Download or read book The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay written by Hooman Majd and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With U.S.–Iran relations at a thirty-year low, Iranian-American writer Hooman Majd dared to take his young family on a year-long sojourn in Tehran. The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay traces their domestic adventures and closely tracks the political drama of a terrible year for Iran's government. It was an annus horribilis for Iran's Supreme Leader. The Green Movement had been crushed, but the regime was on edge, anxious lest democratic protests resurge. International sanctions were dragging down the economy while talk of war with the West grew. Hooman Majd was there for all of it. A new father at age fifty, he decided to take his blonde, blue-eyed Midwestern yoga instructor wife Karri and his adorable, only-eats-organic infant son Khash from their hip Brooklyn neighborhood to spend a year in the land of his birth. It was to be a year of discovery for Majd, too, who had only lived in Iran as a child. The book opens ominously as Majd is stopped at the airport by intelligence officers who show him a four-inch thick security file about his books and journalism and warn him not to write about Iran during his stay. Majd brushes it off—but doesn't tell Karri—and the family soon settles in to the rituals of middle class life in Tehran: finding an apartment (which requires many thousands of dollars, all of which, bafflingly, is returned to you when you leave), a secure internet connection (one that persuades the local censors you are in New York) and a bootlegger (self-explanatory). Karri masters the head scarf, but not before being stopped for mal-veiling, twice. They endure fasting at Ramadan and keep up with Khash in a country weirdly obsessed with children. All the while, Majd fields calls from security officers and he and Karri eye the headlines—the arrest of an American "spy," the British embassy riots, the Arab Spring—and wonder if they are pushing their luck. The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay is a sparkling account of life under a quixotic authoritarian regime that offers rare and intimate insight into a country and its people, as well as a personal story of exile and a search for the meaning of home.

Download or read book The Adventures of Owen Hatherley In The Post Soviet Space written by Owen Hatherley and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly thirty years after the fall of the USSR, the word "Soviet" should be as meaningless by now as "Hapsburg" or "Hohenzollern". Strangely, though, it endures, as places both inside and outside the former Soviet Union define themselves for or against what happened when it existed. But does that experience mean anything today, or is it just an enormous cul-de-sac? This book tries to find out, through an itinerary that goes from the Baltic to Belarus, from Ukraine to the Urals, from the Caucasus to Central Asia, and in cities that range from nuclear new towns of the Fifties to gleaming new capitals of the 21st century. In this Eurasian post-Soviet space, we try to find the continuities with Communism - if there are any - and the remnants of revolutions both distant and recent. Instead of a wistful journey through ruins, this intends to be an engaged travelogue, a subjective, personal Marxist Humanist guidebook to somewhere that actually exists, but which is constantly haunted by what it didn't become, whether a real Communist utopia or a successful or fair capitalism. In the course of this transcontinental account of what used to be the Soviet Union and is now a patchwork of EU democracies, neoliberal dictatorships and Soviet nostalgic enclaves (often found in the same countries) we might just find the outlines of a way of building cities that is a powerful alternative, both in the past and present.

Download or read book Militant Modernism written by Owen Hatherley and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2009-04-24 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Militant Modernism is a defence against Modernism's many detractors. It looks at design, film and architecture - especially architecture — and pursues the notion of an evolved modernism that simply refuses to stop being necessary. Owen Hatherley gives us new ways to look at what we thought was familiar — Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, even Vladimir Mayakovsky. Through Hatherley's eyes we see all of the quotidian modernists of the 20th century - lesser lights, too — perhaps understanding them for the first time. Whether we are looking at Britain's brutalist aesthetics, Russian Constructivism, or the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich, the message is clear. There is no alternative to Modernism.

Download or read book Native Nostalgia written by Jacob Dlamini and published by Jacana Media. This book was released on 2009 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the stereotype that black people who lived under South African apartheid have no happy memories of the past, this examination into nostalgia carves out a path away from the archetypical musings. Even though apartheid itself had no virtue, the author, himself a young black man who spent his childhood under apartheid, insists that it was not a vast moral desert in the lives of those living in townships. In this deep meditation on the experiences of those who lived through apartheid, it points out that despite the poverty and crime, there was still art, literature, music, and morals that, when combined, determined the shape of black life during that era of repression.

Download or read book Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances written by Owen Hatherley and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to make a fairer, more just city From the grandiose histories of monumental state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner cafés, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project. This essay collection spans a period from immediately before the 2008 financial crash to the year of the pandemic. Against the business-as-usual responses to both crises, Owen Hatherley outlines a vision of the city as both a venue for political debate and dispute as well as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us. Incorporated here are the genres of memoir, history, music and film criticism, as well as portraits of figures who have inspired new ways of looking at cities, such as the architect Zaha Hadid, the activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs, and thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis. Throughout these pieces, Hatherley argues that the only way out of our difficult circumstances is to imagine and try to construct a better modernity.

Download or read book Consumed Nostalgia written by Gary Cross and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. For many of us, modern memory is shaped less by a longing for the social customs and practices of the past or for family heirlooms handed down over generations and more by childhood encounters with ephemeral commercial goods and fleeting media moments in our age of fast capitalism. This phenomenon has given rise to communities of nostalgia whose members remain loyal to the toys, television, and music of their youth. They return to the theme parks and pastimes of their upbringing, hoping to reclaim that feeling of childhood wonder or teenage freedom. Consumed nostalgia took definite shape in the 1970s, spurred by an increase in the turnover of consumer goods, the commercialization of childhood, and the skillful marketing of nostalgia. Gary Cross immerses readers in this fascinating and often delightful history, unpacking the cultural dynamics that turn pop tunes into oldies and childhood toys into valuable commodities. He compares the limited appeal of heritage sites such as Colonial Williamsburg to the perpetually attractive power of a Disney theme park and reveals how consumed nostalgia shapes how we cope with accelerating change. Today nostalgia can be owned, collected, and easily accessed, making it less elusive and often more fun than in the past, but its commercialization has sometimes limited memory and complicated the positive goals of recollection. By unmasking the fascinating, idiosyncratic character of modern nostalgia, Cross helps us better understand the rituals of recall in an age of fast capitalism.

Download or read book Uncommon written by Owen Hatherley and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If we remember them at all, the Sheffield pop group Pulp are remembered for jolly class warfare ditty 'Common People', for the celebrity of their interestingly-named frontman, for the latter waving his arse at Michael Jackson at the Brit awards, for being part of a non-movement called 'Britpop', and for disappearing almost without trace shortly after. They made a few good tunes, they did some funny videos, and while they might be National Treasures, they're nothing serious. Are they? This book argues that they should be taken seriously —very seriously indeed. Attempting to wrest Pulp away from the grim jingoistic spectacle of Britpop and the revivals-of-a-revival circuit, this book charts the very strange things that occur in their records, taking us deep into a strange exotic land; a land of acrylics, adultery, architecture, analogue synthesisers and burning class anger. This is book about pop music, but it is mainly a book about sex, the city and class via the 1990s finest British pop group.

Download or read book Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life written by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle and published by . This book was released on 2021-08 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the discomfort of my own home I buy dresses, look up recipes, do online surveys. In Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, an unnamed young woman in her late twenties navigates unemployment, boredom, chronic illness and online dating. Her activities are banal -- applying for jobs, looking up horoscopes, managing depression, going on Tinder dates. 'I want to tell someone I love them but there is no one to tell,' she says. 'Except my sister maybe. I want to pick blackberries on a farm and then die.' She observes the ambiguities of social interactions, the absurd intimacies of sex and the indignity of everyday events, with a skepticism about the possibility of genuine emotion, or enlightenment. Like life, things are just unfolding, and sometimes, like life, they don't actually get better. Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle's novella-in-fragments blends artifice with sincerity, is darkly funny, and alive to the incongruous performance that constitutes getting by. 'Written in a fragmentary form reminiscent of Renata Adler, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, Zarah Butcher-McCunningle's deadpan fiction debut, documents an unnamed young protagonist's listless existence in an unnamed city. The book's droll dispatches from daily life under late capitalism recall the writing of the author's New Zealand contemporaries Hera Lindsay Bird and Eamonn Marra, but Butcher-McCunnigle's distinctive voice is her own... Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life is a grimly funny rendering of the absurdity of life in the 2020s--an era in which, with nowhere to turn, the hopeless millennial turns in on herself.' -- Kelsey Oldham, Books+Publishing Praise for Autobiography of a Marguerite: 'Workbook for surviving illness, guide to familial dysfunction and an intersection between fact and fiction...one of the most innovative New Zealand books published in recent years.' -- Booknotes 'Books of the Year' 'The writing goes to the aching heart of disconnection and of longing for repair...Butcher-McGunnigle has created a crooked beauty out of shards.' -- takahē magazine

Download or read book The Promise of Nostalgia written by Nicola Sayers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-08 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Promise of Nostalgia analyses a range of texts – including The Virgin Suicides, both the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides’ and Sofia Coppola’s screen adaptation, photography of Detroit’s ‘abandoned spaces’, and blogger Tavi Gevinson's media output – to explore nostalgia as a prominent affect in contemporary American cultural production. Counter to the prevalent caricature of nostalgia as anti-future, the book proposes a more nuanced reading of its stakes and meanings. Instead of understanding it as evidence of the absence of utopia it contends that there is a masked utopian impulse in this nostalgia ‘mode’ and critical potential in what has typically been dismissed as ideological. This book will be of interest to scholars, graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students interested in contemporary culture, cultural theory, media studies, the Frankfurt School, utopian studies and American literature and culture.

Download or read book Intimations of Nostalgia written by Hviid Jacobsen, Michael and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-11-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nostalgia, a complex and multi-layered emotion, has gained interest since the turn of the century in both society and academic circles. Written by an international group of scholars, this volume investigates the relationship between nostalgia and contemporary social issues from a multidisciplinary perspective. From history and political theory to marketing and media, each chapter discusses the way nostalgia has been presented within a disciplinary context and shows how it has evolved over time as a topic of research. Casting light on many recent changes in society and culture, this is an important contribution to the study of nostalgia and emotions.

Download or read book Screening American Nostalgia written by Susan Flynn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-07-26 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines American screen culture and its power to create and sustain values. Looking specifically at the ways in which nostalgia colors the visions of American life, essays explore contemporary American ideology as it is created and sustained by the screen. Nostalgia is omnipresent, selling a version of America that arguably never existed. Current socio-cultural challenges are played out onscreen and placed within the historical milieu through a nostalgic lens which is tempered by contemporary conservatism. Essays reveal not only the visual catalog of recognizable motifs but also how these are used to temper the uncertainty of contemporary crises. Media covered spans from 1939's Gone with the Wind, to Stranger Things, The Americans, Twin Peaks, the Fallout franchise and more.

Download or read book Lost Nostalgia written by Mohamed Latiff Mohamed and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: