Author: John Metcalf File Type: mobi The memoir of the man who has written some of the very best stories ever published in this country.Alice Munro

Author: Lutz Koepnick File Type: pdf Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes we understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporary--a decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the presents velocity.As he engages with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.** Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes to understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporaryNa decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the presentOs velocity. As he engages with late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.

Author: Mary Ann McDonald Carolan File Type: pdf Tracks the influence of Italian cinema on American film from the postwar period to the present.In The Transatlantic Gaze, Mary Ann McDonald Carolan documents the sustained and profound artistic impact of Italian directors, actors, and screenwriters on American film. Working across a variety of genres, including neorealism, comedy, the Western, and the art film, Carolan explores how and why American directors from Woody Allen to Quentin Tarantino have adapted certain Italian trademark techniques and motifs. Allens To Rome with Love (2012), for example, is an homage to the genius of Italian filmmakers, and to Federico Fellini in particular, whose Lo sceicco biancoThe White Sheik (1952) also resonates with Allens The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) as well as with Neil LaButes Nurse Betty (2000). Tarantinos Kill Bill saga (2003, 2004) plays off elements of Sergio Leones spaghetti Western Cera una volta il WestOnce Upon a Time in the West (1968), a transatlantic conversation about the Western that continues in Tarantinos Oscar-winning Django Unchained (2012). Lee Danielss Precious (2009) and Spike Lees Miracle at St. Anna (2008), meanwhile, demonstrate that the neorealism of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, which arose from the political and economic exigencies of postwar Italy, is an effective vehicle for critiquing social issues such as poverty and racism in a contemporary American context. The book concludes with an examination of American remakes of popular Italian films, a comparison that offers insight into the similarities and differences between the two cultures and the transformations in genre, both subtle and obvious, that underlie this form of cross-cultural exchange.

Author: Tom Vanderbilt File Type: pdf On the road to Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt maps the visible and invisible legacies of the cold war, exhuming the blueprints for the apocalypse we once envisioned and chronicling a time when we all lived at ground zero. In this road trip among ruined missile silos, atomic storage bunkers, and secret test sites, a lost battleground emerges amid the architecture of the 1950s, accompanied by Walter Cottens stunning photographs. Survival City looks deep into the national soul, unearthing the dreams and fears that drove us during the latter half of the twentieth century. A crucial and dazzling book, masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating.Dave Eggers A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because [Vanderbilt] is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader.Los Angeles Times A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life.Greil Marcus, Bookforum **From Publishers Weekly Highlighting the Cold War eras obsession with what Vanderbilt (The Sneaker Book) calls constant protection from an invisible threat, this is a fascinating political and cultural analysis of cold war architecture a vast array of structures from missile silos to small towns built to test the effectiveness of an atomic blast, presidential fallout shelters, nuclear waste dumps, monoliths like the windowless PacBell building in Los Angeles, and countless motels and diners named Atomic. The physical structures that resulted from Cold War ideology and politics also had far deeper and extensive psychological and emotional implications and ramifications the domestication of doomsday. Mixing first-person narrative of his travels around the U.S. in search of Cold War sites and objects with an extensive accumulation of provocative historical facts (the U.S. Air Force bombing raids on Tokyo exacted a higher cost in lives and property than the later atomic bombings), Vanderbilt takes great pains to reveal the Cold War policies behind the scattered remnants he encounters. Once-ubiquitous fallout shelter signs were a result of the Kennedy administrations National Fallout Shelter Survey, undertaken by a mobile army of atomic surveyors (many of them architecture students). As far as blastworthiness is concerned, the toughest job is myth control, a NORAD civil engineer tells Vanderbilt during his trip 4,400 feet underground to the North American Aerospace Defense Command Center. This book certainly does its part in debunking the Duck, and Cover mindset. 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Review A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because Vanderbilt is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader. - Los Angeles Times A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life. - Greil Marcus, Bookforum A fascinating political and cultural analysis of cold war architecture a vast array of structures from missile silos to small towns built to test the effectiveness of an atomic blast, presidential fallout shelters, nuclear waste dumps, monoliths like the windowless PacBell building in Los Angeles, and countless motels and diners named Atomic. - Publishers Weekly Exploring buried traces of the cold war in America... Vanderbilt finds a vast, secret, and now largely abandoned landscape. - Architecture Survival City, by taking us on a tour of important places weve probably never seen, is both a call to preserve cold war history and a valuable reminder of the continual impact of nuclear weapons on the American cultural and physical landscape. - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists This is a crucial and dazzling book. Masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating. It reminds us of the absurd and sinister ways humans have attempted to ensure their survival, and, without ever oversimplifying, it manages to be a ridiculously entertaining read. - Dave Eggers.