Considered an important photographer of his generation, Glen E. Friedman has been a unique documentarian since the age of 12, and soon thereafter his first published photo appeared in SkateBoarder magazine. Over the past 25 years he has photographed some of the most idealistic, interesting and rebellious cultural icons around, documenting the rise of the hard-core punk rock scene in the late 70's/early 80's with such bands as Black Flag, Dead Kennedy's, Minor Threat and even producing the 1st album for Suicidal Tendencies (also from DogTown) and later the rise of rap music in the mid 1980's with groups such as Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and the Beastie Boys. He was one of the first to publicize these groups nationally and many of his photographs are recognized as the subjects' definitive portraits. Glen E. Friedman has compiled images from his 25-year involvement within the rebelious cultures of skateboarding, punk and hip-hop music into two collections, Fuck You Heroes (1994) and Fuck You Too (1996). Selections from these books became the Fuck You All photography exhibit, which has toured internationally since 1997. In 1998 Friedman released The Idealist which showcases his unique perspective and asthetic.
The definitive monograph of Glen E. Friedman, a pioneer of skate, punk, and hip-hop photography, including much never-before-published work. Glen E. Friedman is best known for his work capturing and promoting rebellion in his portraits of artists such as Fugazi, Black Flag, Ice-T, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, The Misfits, Bad Brains, Beastie Boys, Run-D.M.C., and Public Enemy, as well as classic skateboarding originators such as Tony Alva, Jay Adams, Alan "Ollie" Gelfand, Duane Peters, and Stacy Peralta, and a very young Tony Hawk. Designed in association with celebrated street and graphic artist Shepard Fairey, this monograph captures the most important and influential underground heroes of skateboarding, punk, and hip-hop cultures. My Rules is an unprecedented window into the three most significant countercultures of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and Friedman’s photographs define those important movements that he helped shape. A remarkable chronicle and a primer about the origins of radical street cultures, My Rules is also a statement of artistic inspiration for those influenced by these countercultures.
A beautifully curated collection from celebrated photographer Glen E. Friedman's early years. The Idealist is a retrospective collection of Friedman's aesthetics, [featuring] some of the images for which he is justly acclaimed and many others that will be new to his fans, ranging from DogTown skateboarders, and hard-core heroes to hip-hop icons, cityscapes to portraits, public intellectuals to historical monuments. --BOMB The Idealist showcases the photography of Glen E. Friedman, who the Washington Post calls, One of the greats of his generation. The Idealist is the work of a true visionary, effortlessly mixing landscapes, still life, and documentary photography in an exploration of his own innate idealism. The images are enhanced with original comments from some of the most progressive and politically controversial thinkers of our time--Ralph Nader, Reverend Al Sharpton, Ian MacKaye, Cornel West, and Ian F. Svenonius. This collection of photographs from 25 years (1976-2001) of Friedman's work concentrates on his visual aesthetic and is the public introduction to his striking fine-art photography. Though he continues a heavy focus on both imagery and message, only a few of his traditional photographs of legendary people in the hip-hop, punk, and skate communities will be recognized. The Idealist traces Friedman's development as a fine artist as his subject matter includes a breathtaking international scope of landscapes, still life, and documentary, highlighting his capacity to capture essential moments of most anything he sets his eyes on, to help us open ours.
Renowned photographer Glen E. Friedman's breathtaking and ambitious exploration of clouds. Recognize your humility, recognize the power of nature, recognize the beauty of the world. It is rare to find a photography book like this, one that genuinely and with total directness conveys the spiritual qualities of the material world. --LA Weekly This incredible book was the first of all of Glen E. Friedman's works to not use anything from his past archives of infamous iconic images. Recognize is based solely upon his artistic studies and ambition. A hand sewn, extra wide book of photographs of clouds from inside the clouds themselves, Recognize has far reaching implications on the world of modern art. From the afterword by Ian F. Svenonius: Just as Renaissance artists reintroduced the classical world's honesty and discipline to art making, Friedman restores picture taking to its primary and vital function: composition of the natural world, combined with a sense of wonder at the magnificence of what is all around us. From the preface by Peter Lamborn Wilson: These photos are more pleasurable than one might expect because they are secretly more painful. They hide an aesthetic shock behind what first appears to be more picturesque nebulosity. They sneak up on you, gradually becoming more and more sexual, more uncomfortable. It's customary nowadays to claim we 'distrust beauty' because it has betrayed us. In fact, the reverse is true: our culture betrays beauty and then blames it for its lack of depth. On this edge Glen's work is dancing--hence its vertiginousness, its touch of vertigo. Real beauty is always serious.
From the deepest depths of punk rock's 1970s primordial wastelands, through the stygian goth swamps of the 1980s, and on into the bloodstained arenas of 1990s heavy metal, Eerie Von witnessed it all. Beginning as the unofficial photographer for punk legends The Misfits and later taking charge of the bass guitar as a founding member of underground pioneers Samhain and metal gods Danzig, the evil eye of Eerie Von's camera captured the dark heart of rock's most vital and bleeding-edge period, a time when rock and roll was not only dangerous, but downright menacing. Eerie Von's lens has documented everything from The Misfits' humble beginnings in Lodi, New Jersey, to the heights of Danzig's stadium-rock glory alongside metal superstars Metallica. As well as an essential visual document of music history, Eerie's road stories of triumph and damnation bring to life an era the likes of which will never again be seen.
With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
A man shouldn’t die with no understanding of why he’s been murdered Renowned throughout the land of Ankhana as the Blade of Tyshalle, Caine has killed his share of monarchs and commoners, villains and heroes. He is relentless, unstoppable, simply the best there is at what he does. At home on Earth, Caine is Hari Michaelson, a superstar whose adventures in Ankhana command an audience of billions. Yet he is shackled by a rigid caste society, bound to ignore the grim fact that he kills men on a far-off world for the entertainment of his own planet—and bound to keep his rage in check. But now Michaelson has crossed the line. His estranged wife, Pallas Rill, has mysteriously disappeared in the slums of Ankhana. To save her, he must confront the greatest challenge of his life: a lethal game of cat and mouse with the most treacherous rulers of two worlds . . .
They say Black Dow's killed more men than winter, and clawed his way to the throne of the North up a hill of skulls. The King of the Union, ever a jealous neighbour, is not about to stand smiling by while he claws his way any higher. The orders have been given and the armies are toiling through the northern mud. Thousands of men are converging on a forgotten ring of stones, on a worthless hill, in an unimportant valley, and they've brought a lot of sharpened metal with them. Bremer dan Gorst, disgraced master swordsman, has sworn to reclaim his stolen honour on the battlefield. Obsessed with redemption and addicted to violence, he's far past caring how much blood gets spilled in the attempt. Even if it's his own. Prince Calder isn't interested in honour, and still less in getting himself killed. All he wants is power, and he'll tell any lie, use any trick, and betray any friend to get it. Just as long as he doesn't have to fight for it himself. Curnden Craw, the last honest man in the North, has gained nothing from a life of warfare but swollen knees and frayed nerves. He hardly even cares who wins any more, he just wants to do the right thing. But can he even tell what that is with the world burning down around him? Over three bloody days of battle, the fate of the North will be decided. But with both sides riddled by intrigues, follies, feuds and petty jealousies, it is unlikely to be the noblest hearts, or even the strongest arms that prevail. Three men. One battle. No Heroes.
