Download or read book The Vatican to Vegas written by Norman M. Klein and published by . This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a journey through the lavish special-effects environments from 1550 to the present. It indicates how the Renaissance and early Baroque artists pioneered the interactive, the cinematic and even the digital.
Download or read book Vatican City Las Vegas written by F. Rex and published by ICCC Media. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a Las Vegas casino fashioned after the Vatican, author Thomas Carlyle is as good as dead. Swilling a mortal dose of alcohol, he will perish among the grotesque patrons of Vatican City, Las Vegas as they pursue an elusive jackpot token called The Godhead. Carlyle unwittingly bumbles through corporate mafia intrigue as Vatican City's management, the Medici Crime Family, plots to enslave all the casino patrons to dreams of eternal wealth. As the night deepens and the forces of Vegas evil threaten to rob human existence of all nonmaterial significance, Carlyle dreams a final reckoning that will bring the Medici Crime Family and all of Vatican City's managerial clergy to justice in a shocking cinematic twist.
Download or read book The Themed Space written by Scott A. Lukas and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation and Self is the first edited collection focused on the subject of the themed space. Twelve authors address a range of themed spaces, including restaurants, casinos, theme parks and other spaces like airports and virtual reality ones. The text is organized into four sections-theming as authenticity, theming as nation, theming as person and theming as mind.
Download or read book The Money and the Power written by Sally Denton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2002-05-07 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Las Vegas—the name evokes images of divorce and dice, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than ever imagined. The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history. Now this neon maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant “sin city,” but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and worship of money that have come to permeate American life.
Download or read book The Vatican Knights written by Rick Jones and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-06-11 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While on a visit to the United States, Pope Pius XIII is kidnapped by a terrorist cell calling itself the Soldiers of Islam. If the United States and its allies do not meet their demands, they will execute the pope. So when FBI Specialist Shari Cohen is called to duty to track down the terrorist cell responsible, she learns that she is not alone. Deep behind the Vatican walls a secret order dispatches a clandestine op group of elite commandos known as the Vatican Knights. Their mission: bring the pope back alive. As Cohen and the Knights work in tandem they uncover a White House conspiracy involving high-ranking members on Capitol Hill. When she begins to get too close to the truth about the pope's kidnapping, she becomes the target of indigenous forces trying to keep the conspiracy safe. However, in order to get to her they must go through the Vatican Knights.
Download or read book Vatican to Vegas written by Norman M. Klein and published by . This book was released on 2009-08 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guided tour through the magical world of illusions, this book takes the reader from lavish Baroque fantasies of the 17th cent. to the Electronic Baroque of today. We journey from architectural illusion in 1580 to the ¿trompe l¿oeil¿ of Las Vegas casinos. Klein takes us from Piranesi¿s labyrinths to the mazes of new computer software, from scrolling panoramas that staged the horror at Gettysburg to the special effects on cinema screens today. The real power in this world of fakery rests with whoever controls the illusion -- be it the pope, the pres., the imagineer, the designer, or the studio exec. ¿Special effects are not only a barometer for politics, myths of identity, and econ. relations, but also a parallel for understanding where our civilization may be headed next.¿ Ill.
Download or read book The History of Forgetting written by Norman M. Klein and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2008-08-17 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an ‘anti-tour’ of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. In this new edition, Norman Klein examines new models for erasure in LA. He explores the evolution of the Latino majority, how the Pacific economy is changing the structure of urban life, the impact of collapsing infrastructure in the city, and the restructuring of those very districts that had been ‘forgotten’.
Download or read book Immersion and Distance written by Werner Wolf and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers who appear to be lost in a storyworld, members of theatre or cinema audiences who are moved to tears while watching a performance, beholders of paintings who are absorbed by the representations in front of them, players of computer games entranced by the fictional worlds in which they interactively participate – all of these mental states of imaginative immersion are variants of ‘aesthetic illusion’, as long as the recipients, although thus immersed, are still residually aware that they are experiencing not real life but life-like representations created by artefacts. Aesthetic illusion is one of the most forceful effects of reception processes in representational media and thus constitutes a powerful allurement to expose ourselves, again and again to, e.g., printed stories, pictures and films, be they factual or fictional. In contrast to traditional discussions of this phenomenon, which tend to focus on one medium or genre from one discipline only, the present volume explores aesthetic illusion, as well as its reverse side, the breaking of illusion, from a highly innovative multidisciplinary and transmedial perspective. The essays assembled stem from disciplines that range from literary theory to art history and include contributions on drama, lyric poetry, the visual arts, photography, architecture, instrumental music and computer games, as well as reflections on the cognitive foundations of aesthetic illusion from an evolutionary perspective. The contributions to individual media and aspects of aesthetic illusion are prefaced by a detailed theoretical introduction. Owing to its transmedial and multidisciplinary scope, the volume will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: cultural history at large, intermediality and media studies, as well as, more particularly, literary studies, music, film, and art history.
Download or read book The Secret Lives of Buildings written by Edward Hollis and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2009-11-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strikingly original, beautifully narrated history of Western architecture and the cultural transformations that it represents Concrete, marble, steel, brick: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original contexts and purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shape-shifters. In an inspired refashioning of architectural history, Edward Hollis recounts more than a dozen stories of such metamorphosis, highlighting the way in which even the most familiar structures all change over time into "something rich and strange." The Parthenon, that epitome of a ruined temple, was for centuries a working church and then a mosque; the cathedral of Notre Dame was "restored" to a design that none of its original makers would have recognized. Remains of the Berlin Wall, meanwhile, which was once gleefully smashed and bulldozed, are now treated as precious relics. With The Secret Lives of Buildings, Edward Hollis recounts the most enthralling of these metamorphoses and shows how buildings have come to embody the history of Western culture.
Download or read book The King of Las Vegas written by John Van Stry and published by . This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American college student on holiday in India, Rafael fell afoul of a Rakshasa, an old and very powerful tiger-demon. When he finally manages to escape from his captivity, he is left with two small problems; the first is that he is now a Rakshasa himself, the second is that India is deporting him. With a now rather unique physical appearance and a pressing need to find strong emotions that he can feed off of, just where in America can a shape-shifting tiger-demon not only survive, but find acceptance and make a life? Las Vegas of course. But before he can claim his territory, there is the small matter of a vampire infestation that he'll have to deal with, one that the government hasn't been able to clean up since the forties. All while finding or creating enough of those very emotions he needs to survive. For someone skilled in the arts of seduction, with the best Elvis act that the city has ever seen, that may not sound like much of a problem, but just what happens when someone who needs 'love' to survive meets up with the real thing?
Download or read book The Icon Project written by Leslie Sklair and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Icon Project argues that the transnational capitalist class mobilizes two forms of iconic architecture--unique icons recognized as works of art, notably designed by global starchitects (such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid); and typical icons copying elements of unique icons--to promote the same ideological message: the culture-ideology of consumerism.
Download or read book Civic Spaces and Desire written by Charles Drozynski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civic Spaces and Desire presents an original and critical appraisal of civic spaces for a novel theoretical intersection of architecture and human geography. The authors address civic spaces that embody a strong moral code, such as a remembrance park or a casino, in various places in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, Australia and Asia. The consecutive chapters of the book present these chosen spaces as the interconnection between the everyday and the ideological. By doing so the book reimagines the socio-political effects of the countercultural assemblages and ontologies of difference that these spaces produce, represent and foster, as presented through outcasts and nomads of various kinds and forms. The book reflects on different interpretations of the key texts from primarily post-linguistic theoreticians, such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Derrida. It will benefit students and academics in architecture, geography, philosophy and urban studies and planning, who seek to understand the politics of space, place and civility. By deconstructing normative ideological constructs, the book uses the concept of desire to explore the tensions between expectations of civic spaces and the disappointment and wonder of their immanent existence. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book The Metainterface written by Christian Ulrik Andersen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the interface has moved from the PC into cultural platforms, as seen in a series of works of net art, software art and electronic literature. The computer interface is both omnipresent and invisible, at once embedded in everyday objects and characterized by hidden exchanges of information between objects. The interface has moved from office into culture, with devices, apps, the cloud, and data streams as new cultural platforms. In The Metainterface, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold examine the relationships between art and interfaces, tracing the interface's disruption of everyday cultural practices. They present a new interface paradigm of cloud services, smartphones, and data capture, and examine how particular art forms—including net art, software art, and electronic literature—seek to reflect and explore this paradigm. Andersen and Pold argue that despite attempts to make the interface disappear into smooth access and smart interaction, it gradually resurfaces; there is a metainterface to the displaced interface. Art can help us see this; the interface can be an important outlet for aesthetic critique. Andersen and Pold describe the “semantic capitalism” of a metainterface industry that captures user behavior; the metainterface industry's disruption of everyday urban life, changing how the city is read, inhabited, and organized; the ways that the material displacement of the cloud affects the experience of the interface; and the potential of designing with an awareness of the language and grammar of interfaces.
Download or read book Paradise Nevada written by Dario Diofebi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Diofebi is an irreverent and audacious new voice.”- Susan Choi, National Book Award-Winning author of TRUST EXERCISE "Vegas has been right there forever, waiting for a great novelist, and Dario Diofebi has come dealing nothing but aces."--Darin Strauss, NBCC Award-Winning author of HALF A LIFE From an exhilarating new literary voice--the story of four transplants braving the explosive political tensions behind the deceptive, spectacular, endlessly self-reinventing city of Las Vegas. On Friday, May 1st, 2015 a bomb detonates in the infamous Positano Luxury Resort and Casino, a mammoth hotel (and exact replica of the Amalfi coast) on the Las Vegas Strip. Six months prior, a crop of strivers converge on the desert city, attempting to make a home amidst the dizzying lights: Ray, a mathematically-minded high stakes professional poker player; Mary Ann, a clinically depressed cocktail waitress; Tom, a tourist from the working class suburbs of Rome, Italy; and Lindsay, a Mormon journalist for the Las Vegas Sun who dreams of a literary career. By chance and by design, they find themselves caught up in backroom schemes for personal and political power, and are thrown into the deep end of an even bigger fight for the soul of the paradoxical town. A furiously rowdy and ricocheting saga about poker, happiness, class, and selflessness, Paradise, Nevada is a panoramic tour of America in miniature, a vertiginously beautiful systems novel where the bloody battles of neo-liberalism, immigration, labor, and family rage underneath Las Vegas' beguiling and strangely benevolent light. This exuberant debut marks the beginning of a significant career.
Download or read book Unmasking L A written by D. Sawhney and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-05-16 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its birth in 1781, Los Angeles has come to define both the material and spiritual force of American civilization. The American dream is realized, experienced, and lost in the City of Angels. Unmasking L.A.: Third Worlds and the City, an interdisciplinary collection of essays, dialogues, and photographs, seeks to reveal the third world geographies, cultures, and populations of Los Angeles. It examines the social, political, cultural, and literary climate of the city, bringing together diverse responses to the complexities facing Los Angeles from respected intellectuals, writers, and artists such as Mike Davis, Deepak Chopra, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. By uncovering the forces that marginalize Los Angeles's ever-shifting populations into internal third worlds, the collection unmasks the raw contradictions, the grim paradoxes, and the understated ironies of the global city.
Download or read book Bouchon Bakery written by Thomas Keller and published by Artisan. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 New York Times Bestseller Winner, IACP Cookbook Award for Food Photography & Styling (2013) Baked goods that are marvels of ingenuity and simplicity from the famed Bouchon Bakery The tastes of childhood have always been a touchstone for Thomas Keller, and in this dazzling amalgam of American and French baked goods, you'll find recipes for the beloved TKOs and Oh Ohs (Keller's takes on Oreos and Hostess's Ho Hos) and all the French classics he fell in love with as a young chef apprenticing in Paris: the baguettes, the macarons, the mille-feuilles, the tartes aux fruits. Co-author Sebastien Rouxel, executive pastry chef for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, has spent years refining techniques through trial and error, and every page offers a new lesson: a trick that assures uniformity, a subtlety that makes for a professional finish, a flash of brilliance that heightens flavor and enhances texture. The deft twists, perfectly written recipes, and dazzling photographs make perfection inevitable.
Download or read book A Reader in Themed and Immersive Spaces written by Scott A. Lukas and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2016 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Themed spaces have, at their foundation, an overarching narrative, symbolic complex, or story that drives the overall context of their spaces. Theming, in some very unique ways, has expanded beyond previous stereotypes and oversimplifications of culture and place to now consider new and often controversial topics, themes, and storylines."--Publisher's website.
