Download or read book Totally Tenderly Tragically written by Phillip Lopate and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1998-10-20 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phillip Lopate has been obsessed with movies from the start. As an undergraduate at Columbia, he organized the school's first film society. Later, he even tried his own hand at filmmaking. But it was not until his ascent as a major essayist that Lopate found his truest and most lasting contribution to the medium. And, over the past twenty-five years, tackling subjects ranging from Visconti to Jerry Lewis, from the first New York Film Festival to the thirty-second, Phillip Lopate has made film his most cherished subject. Here, in one place, are the very best of these essays, a joy for anyone who loves movies.
Download or read book Totally Tenderly Tragically Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair written by Phillip Lopate and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1998-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects the best of award-winning essayist Phillip Lopate's pans and praises, criticisms and ruminations of a variety of films, in a book that no cinema fan will want to miss.
Download or read book Portrait Inside My Head written by Phillip Lopate and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of essays on a life well lived, sharing provocative observations on topics ranging from the challenges of a Brooklyn childhood and the pleasures of baseball to movies and friendship.
Download or read book Against Joie de Vivre written by and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ?Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live,? begins the title essay by Phillip Lopate. This rejoinder to the cult of hedonism and forced conviviality moves from a critique of the false sentimentalization of children and the elderly to a sardonic look at the social rite of the dinner party, on to a moving personal testament to the ?hungry soul.? ø Lopate?s special gift is his ability to give us not only sophisticated cultural commentary in a dazzling collection of essays but also to bring to his subjects an engaging honesty and openness that invite us to experience the world along with him. Also included here are Lopate?s inspiring account of his production of Chekhov?s Uncle Vanya with a group of preadolescents, a look at the tradition of the personal essay, and a soul-searching piece on the suicide of a schoolteacher and its effect on his students and fellow teachers. ø By turns humorous, learned, celebratory, and elegiac, Lopate displays a keen intelligence and a flair for language that turn bits of common, everyday life into resonant narrative. This collection maintains a conversational charm while taking the contemporary personal essay to a new level of complexity and candor.
Download or read book The Golden Age of the American Essay written by Phillip Lopate and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form—from Normal Mailer to James Baldwin to Joan Didion—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America—racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them—proved fruitful topics for America's best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time.
Download or read book Mad to be Saved written by David Sterritt and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film critic David Sterritt presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the Beat Generation, its intersections with main-stream and experimental film, and the interactions of all of these with American society and the culture of the 1950s. Sterritt balances the Beat countercultural goal of rebellion through both artistic creation and everyday behavior against the mainstream values of conformity and conservatism, growing worry over cold-war hostilities, and the "rat race" toward material success. After an introductory overview of the Beat Generation, its history, its antecedents, and its influences, Sterritt shows the importance of "visual thinking" in the lives and works of major Beat authors, most notably Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. He turns to Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic theory to portray the Beat writers-who were inspired by jazz and other liberating influences-as carnivalesque rebels against what they perceived as a rigid and stifling social order. Showing the Beats as social critics, Sterritt looks at the work of 1950s photographers Robert Frank and William Klein; the attack against Beat culture in the pictures and prose of Life magazine; and the counterattack in Frank's film Pull My Daisy, featuring key Beat personalities. He further explores expressions of rebelliousness in film noir, the melodramas of director Douglas Sirk, and other Hollywood films. Finally, Sterritt shows the changing attitudes toward the Beat sensibility in Beat-related Hollywood movies like A Bucket of Blood and The Beat Generation; television programs like Route 66 and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; nonstudio films like John Cassavetes's improvisational Shadows and Shirley Clarke's experimental The Connection; and radically avant-garde works by such doggedly independent screen artists as Stan Brakhage, Ron Rice, Bruce Connor, and Ken Jacobs, drawing connections between their achievements and the most subversive products of their Beat contemporaries.
Download or read book Drivel written by Julia Scott and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The writing in this book is so bad, it deserves its own taxonomy of suckitude. Gillian Flynn, Mary Roach, Dave Eggers, Rick Moody, Chuck Palahniuk, Amy Tan, A.J. Jacobs, Daniel Clowes, Jeff Greenwald, Po Bronson…the list goes on. They all sucked once, and they all have the guts to share some of their crappiest early work in Drivel: an uplifting bit of voyeurism, based on the sold-out “Regreturature” stage shows in San Francisco, and brought to you by Litquake and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Within these pages you’ll find abstruse and esoteric poetry (bad); incoherent and illogical short stories (worse); bumfuzzling proto-journalism (shameful); and pretentious, overwrought journal entries (we’ll not speak of this again). Thanks to these courageous but foolhardy writers, the world now knows the real meaning of a work-in-progress.
Download or read book The Subway Chronicles written by Jacquelin Cangro and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-08-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some seven million people board the New York City subway every day, each one with a story to tell. The Subway Chronicles collects twenty-seven of the tales, dramas and comedies that unfold during the daily commute. From the “mole people” living in the subway tunnels, to the transit employees working behind the scenes, to the locals and tourists riding shoulder-to-shoulder in harmony, discord, or indifference, The Subway Chronicles offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives on this most public of spaces. Prominent New York writers weigh in: Jonathan Lethem confesses his childhood subway sins Colson Whitehead offers mass-transit tips for newcomers to the city Francine Prose recalls the thrill and apprehension of riding alone as a teenage girl Calvin Trillin pokes fun at the classic New York tendency to be skeptical about everything Stan Fischler delights in memories of riding the open-air train cars to Coney Island as a boy Equal parts hilarious, poignant, and heartbreaking, The Subway Chronicles is a journey into New York’s underground with some of today’s most loved writers.
Download or read book Totally Tenderly Tragically written by Alison D. Dunn and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Accidental Genius written by Marshall Fine and published by Miramax. This book was released on 2005 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cassavetes was the prototypical outsider who rebelled against all conventions even as he established the foundations for a new one: seemingly improvisory cinema of emotional truth and immediacy. Fine looks at the life and impact of Cassavetes, based largely on interviews from the people who knew the man and his work best: his wife Gena Rowlands and their children; Peter Falk; Ben Gazzara; Martin Scorsese; John Sayles; Seymour Cassel; Sean Penn; Sidney Lumet; Robert Altman; Jon Voight and many others who shed light on this illustrious cinematographer.
Download or read book The Robbers and Wallenstein written by F. Lamport and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1979-11-22 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) was one of the most influential of all playwrights, the author of deeply moving dramas that explored human fears, desires and ideals. Written at the age of twenty-one, The Robbers was his first play. A passionate consideration of liberty, fraternity and deep betrayal, it quickly established his fame throughout Germany and wider Europe. Wallenstein, produced nineteen years later, is regarded as Schiller's masterpiece: a deeply moving exploration of a flawed general's struggle to bring the Thirty Years War to an end against the will of his Emperor. Depicting the deep corruption caused by constant fighting between Protestants and Catholics, it is at once a meditation on the unbounded possible strength of humanity, and a tragic recognition of what can happen when men allow themselves to be weak.
Download or read book The Breath of Dawn A Rush of Wings Book 3 written by Kristen Heitzmann and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kristen Heitzmann Delivers Powerful New Romantic Suspense Morgan Spencer has had just about all he can take of life. Following the tragic death of his wife, Jill, he retreats to his brother's Rocky Mountain ranch to heal and focus on the care of his infant daughter, Olivia. Two years later, Morgan begins to make plans to return to his home in Santa Barbara to pick up the pieces of his life and career. Quinn Riley has been avoiding her past for four years. Standing up for the truth has forced her into a life of fear and isolation. After a "chance" first meeting and a Thanksgiving snowstorm, Quinn is drawn into the Spencer family's warm and loving world, and she begins to believe she might find freedom in their friendship. The man Quinn helped put behind bars has recently been released, however, and she fears her past will endanger the entire Spencer family. As the danger heightens, she determines to leave town for the sake of the people who have come to mean so much to her. Fixing problems is what Morgan Spencer does best, and he is not willing to let Quinn run away, possibly into the clutches of a man bent on revenge. But Morgan's solution sends him and Quinn on an unexpected path, with repercussions neither could have anticipated.
Download or read book It s Only a Movie written by Raymond J. HaberskiJr. and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once derided as senseless entertainment, movies have gradually assumed a place among the arts. Raymond Haberski's provocative and insightful book traces the trajectory of this evolution throughout the twentieth century, from nickelodeon amusements to the age of the financial blockbuster. Haberski begins by looking at the barriers to film's acceptance as an art form, including the Chicago Motion Picture Commission hearings of 1918–1920, one of the most revealing confrontations over the use of censorship in the motion picture industry. He then examines how movies overcame the stigma attached to popular entertainment through such watershed events as the creation of the Museum of Modern Art's Film Library in the 1920s. The arguments between Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris's heralded a golden age of criticism, and Haberski focuses on the roles of Kael, Sarris, James Agee, Roger Ebert, and others, in the creation of "cinephilia." Described by Susan Sontag as "born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other," this love of cinema centered on coffee houses, universities, art theaters, film festivals, and, of course, foreign films. The lively debates over the place of movies in American culture began to wane in the 1970s. Haberski places the blame on the loss of cultural authority and on the increasing irrelevance of the meaning of art. He concludes with a persuasive call for the re-emergence of a middle ground between art and entertainment, "something more complex, ambiguous, and vexing—something worth thought."
Download or read book Still the Same Hawk written by John Waldman and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012-12-17 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking new book, Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature and New York brings into conversation diverse and intriguing perspectives on the relationship between nature and America’s most prominent city. The volume’s title derives from a telling observation in Robert Sullivan’s contribution that considers how a hawk in the city is perceived so much differently from a hawk in the countryside. Yet it’s still the same hawk. How can a hawk nesting above Fifth Avenue become a citywide phenomenon? Or a sudden butterfly migration at Coney Island energize the community? Why does the presence of a community garden or an empty lot ripple so differently through the surrounding neighborhood? Is the city an oasis or a desert for biodiversity? Why does nature even matter to New Yorkers, who choose to live in the concrete jungle? Still the Same Hawk examines these questions with a rich mix of creative nonfiction that ranges from analytical to anecdotal and humorous. John Waldman’s sharp, well-crafted introduction presenting dualism as the defining quality of urban nature is followed by compelling contributions from Besty McCully, Christopher Meier, Tony Hiss, Kelly McMasters, Dara Ross, William Kornblum, Phillip Lopate, David Rosane, Robert Sullivan, Anne Matthews, Devin Zuber, and Frederick Buell. Together these pieces capture a wide range of viewpoints, including the myriad and shifting ways New Yorkers experience and consider the outdoors, the historical role of nature in shaping New York’s development, what natural attributes contribute to New York’s regional identity, the many environmental tradeoffs made by urbanization, and even nature’s dark side where “urban legends” flourish. Still the Same Hawk intermingles elements of natural history, urban ecology, and environmental politics, providing fresh insights into nature and the urban environment on one of the world’s great stages for the clash of these seemingly disparate realms—New York City.
Download or read book To Show and to Tell written by Phillip Lopate and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long-awaited and illuminating book on personal writing from Phillip Lopate—celebrated essayist, professor of writing at Columbia University, and editor of The Art of the Personal Essay. Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” (Dallas Morning News). Here, combining more than forty years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction. A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone and immense gift for storytelling, To Show and To Tell reads like a long walk with a favorite professor—refreshing, insightful, and encouraging in often unexpected ways.
Download or read book Best in Show written by John Kenneth Muir and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2004 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Applause Books). Best in Show is the first in-depth look at the method behind film director and actor Christopher Guest's madness and genius. John Kenneth Muir focuses his attention on the acclaimed Guest-directed trilogy of what some call "mockumentaries": Waiting for Guffman , Best in Show and A Mighty Wind . In these films Guest has escorted rapt audiences into the purportedly real worlds of a small-town theatrical company, dog show competition, and folk music festival. Muir also details the events that lead to Rob Reiner's influential and legendary This Is Spinal Tap , which Rolling Stone called the best rock and roll movie of all time, and in which Guest played the part of guitarist Nigel Tufnel. Much of Best in Show exemplifies the unique process by which Guest directs films. He employs a common repertory company, improvises scenes often without any rehearsal, and does not use any screenplay with dialogue, instead following a detailed outline often co-authored with his ace actor/writer Eugene Levy. Company members that have been interviewed for this book include Fred Willard, Harry Shearer, Bob Balaban and Michael Hitchcock. Guest's influences Saturday Night Live , National Lampoon as well as his more conventional comedies, such as The Big Picture and Almost Heroes , are studied. Best in Show is general enough to bring new fans to the table, yet detailed enough to satisfy the most in-the-know Guest fan and film student. A complete filmography with Guest's directing, acting and writing credits is included, as is the appendix, "You Know You're in a Christopher Guest Film When ..." Guest once commented, "I am drawn to people who have dreams that are slightly out of reach." Now, thanks to John Kenneth Muir, the fascinating world of Christopher Guest and company is substantially more within reach.
Download or read book Freedom to Offend written by Raymond Haberski and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2007-03-16 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the postwar era, the lure of controversy sold movie tickets as much as the promise of entertainment did. In Freedom to Offend, Raymond J. Haberski Jr. investigates the movie culture that emerged as official censorship declined and details how the struggle to free the screen has influenced our contemporary understanding of art and taste. These conflicts over film content were fought largely in the theaters and courts of New York City in the decades following World War II. Many of the regulators and religious leaders who sought to ensure that no questionable content invaded the public consciousness were headquartered in New York, as were the critics, exhibitors, and activists who sought to expand the options available to moviegoers. Despite Hollywood’s dominance of film production, New York proved to be not only the arena for struggles over film content but also the market where the financial fates of movies were sealed. Advocates for a wider range of cinematic expression eventually prevailed against the forces of censorship, but Freedom to Offend is no simple homily on the triumph of freedom from repression. In his analysis of controversies surrounding films from The Bicycle Thief to Deep Throat, Haberski offers a cautionary tale about the responsible use of the twin privileges of free choice and free expression. In the libertine 1970s, arguments in favor of the public’s right to see challenging and artistic films were twisted to provide intellectual cover for movies created solely to lure viewers with outrageous or titillating material. Social critics who stood against this emerging trend were lumped in with the earlier crusaders for censorship, though their criticism was usually rational rather than moralistic in nature. Freedom to Offend calls attention to what was lost as well as what was gained when movie culture freed itself from the restrictions of the early postwar years. Haberski exposes the unquestioning defense of the doctrine of free expression as a form of absolutism that mirrors the censorial impulse found among the postwar era’s restrictive moral guardians. Beginning in New York and spreading across America throughout the twentieth century, the battles between these opposing worldviews set the stage for debates on the social effects of the work of artists and filmmakers.
