Explosion in the Movie Machine: Essays and Documents on Toronto Artists' Film and Video is an anthology of contemporary reflections, scholarly texts, historical documents and visual documentation that examines the depth, brilliance and contradictions of Toronto's media arts history and ecology. With a focus on artists' film and video organizations, practices, manifestos, and guiding debates, this volume takes stock of where we've been and speculates on where we're headed. Exploring such fundamental issues as censorship, the importance of festivals, the politics of representation, and the longstanding division between film and video aesthetics and institutions, Explosion in the Movie Machine should become a crucial document for artists, students, critics and curators in local, national and international media arts communities. Book jacket.
FINALIST FOR 2018 KIRKUS PRIZE NAMED ONE OF THE "BEST LITERARY FICTION OF 2018' BY KIRKUS REVIEWS "Sci-fi in its most perfect expression…Reading it is like having a lucid dream of six years from next week, filled with people you don't know, but will." —NPR "[Williams’s] wit is sharp, but her touch is light, and her novel is a winner." – San Francisco Chronicle "Between seasons of Black Mirror, look to Katie Williams' debut novel." —Refinery29 Smart and inventive, a page-turner that considers the elusive definition of happiness. Pearl's job is to make people happy. As a technician for the Apricity Corporation, with its patented happiness machine, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion? Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own kind of "pursuit of happiness." As his mother, Pearl wants nothing more than to help Rhett--but is it for his sake or for hers? Certainly it would make Pearl happier. Regardless, her son is one person whose emotional life does not fall under the parameters of her job--not as happiness technician, and not as mother, either. Told from an alternating cast of endearing characters from within Pearl and Rhett's world, Tell the Machine Goodnight delivers a smartly moving and entertaining story about the advance of technology and the ways that it can most surprise and define us. Along the way, Katie Williams playfully illuminates our national obsession with positive psychology, our reliance on quick fixes. What happens when these obsessions begin to overlap? With warmth, humor, and a clever touch, Williams taps into our collective unease about the modern world and allows us see it a little more clearly.
In the 1980s, the Ontario Board of Censors began to subject media artists’ work to the same cuts, bans, and warning labels as commercial film. Ruling Out Art reveals what happens when art and law intersect, when artists, arts exhibitors, and their anti-censorship allies enter courts of law as appellants, defendants, or expert witnesses. The administration of culture during Ontario’s censor wars was not a simple top-down exercise. Members of arts communities mounted grassroots protests and engaged the province in court cases that ultimately influenced how the province interpreted freedom of expression, a fundamental and far-reaching legal right. The language of the law in turn shaped the way artists conceived of their own practices. By exploring how art practices and provincial legislation intertwined during Ontario’s censor wars, this innovative book documents an important moment in the history of contemporary art and cultural activism in Canada, one that helped artists secure their constitutional rights under the law.
Popular Mechanics inspires, instructs and influences readers to help them master the modern world. Whether it’s practical DIY home-improvement tips, gadgets and digital technology, information on the newest cars or the latest breakthroughs in science -- PM is the ultimate guide to our high-tech lifestyle.
MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.
This study looks at the preservation process: newsreel, television, and color preservation; the often controversial issue of colorization; and commercial film archives. It provides detailed histories of the major players in the preservation battle including the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, the American Film Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Library of Congress. This first historical overview of film preservation in the United States is also highly controversial in its exposure and criticism of the politicization of film preservation in recent years, and the rising bureaucracy which has often lost sight of preservation and restoration as the ultimate purpose of film archives.
Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist for The California Book Award in Nonfiction The San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year List Foreign Affairs Best Books of the Year In These Times “Best Books of the Year" Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books List LitHub's “Five Books Making News This Week” From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day. Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization--and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era. Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating--this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing "doomsday machine" and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the future of the world.
Fire Burn is based on diaries kept during World War II by a single, young professional woman, Irene Zarina White. From September 1939 through May 1946 Irene lived under four different governments: the Republic of Latvia, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the United States Occupation. She carefully recorded the details of each government ́s regime, World War II in full swing, and her everyday challenges. She met a remarkable variety of people who became astonishingly candid in her presence. And she documented it all. [For a sample click below to read about her encounter on a crowded train with an undercover Gestapo officer.] Irene survived the Soviet occupation of her home country, Latvia, an ancient multicultural crossroads of East and West at the Baltic Sea. In Fire Burn, she describes that last year of peace while she studied chemical engineering at the University of Latvia. Then in 1940 two days after graduating (the only female among 150 students) the Soviets invaded. Terrible months of terror, torture, arrests, and deprivation followed for the citizens of Latvia. Leaving extended family behind, Irene and her mother were able to escape to Germany where another horror awaited them – the Nazi Regime. Irene endured the long war years, working as a research chemist in a large chemical plant near Frankfurt am Main. She and her mother suffered hunger, cold, and the daily fear of death from continuous Allied bombing. “We survived by the grace of God,” she says. Liberation from this harsh existence came in the form of American Occupation Forces in the spring of 1945, three days before Easter. Finally the bombing raids ended, but hunger persisited. No food was provided or could be bought. Irene found a job working for the U.S. Army - first as a secretary, then a dining hall hostess. She underwent and recorded entirely new and unexpected experiences in these roles. She met and a year later married a young American scientist, Dr. Merit Penniman White, who had previously worked with Albert Einstein on the Atomic Bomb. So in 1946, a new life as wife, mother, college teacher and researcher - as well as a new country - awaited her. Now sixty years after the end of World War II, and after turning ninety herself, Irene Zarina White is ready to impart her war time experiences. She wants to share her story with those few who also remember the war, as well as with new generations who could learn so much from her very personal piece of history.
