Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. JESUS COMES TO ME AS JUDY GARLAND explores themes of sexual orientation, spirituality, family, and aging, often using smart humor and sharp observation. These poems are much like the old Cadillacs that Pickering clearly loves, big and powerful and roomy, and they are full of interesting companions kibitzing in the back seat--Bette Davis, Bob Ross, Judy Garland, Lucille Clifton, Marlene Dietrich, Vincent Van Gogh, and yes, Jesus. This collection is an affirmation of spirit and the variety of ways it manifests in the contemporary world. While these poems sometimes navigate dark and complex territories, Pickering is a confident driver, and the reader always feels safe riding shotgun in the front seat. So, settle into the leather-trimmed aqua brocade... and step on it. You're going for a ride.
A touching memoir of life with an alcoholic father who secretly works with the CIA, a dark pilgrimage through the valley of depression and addiction, and finding a faith to redeem and a strength to forgive. "This is a record of my life as I remember it—but more importantly, as I felt it." At the age of sixteen, Ian Morgan Cron was told by his mother that his father, a motion picture executive, worked with the CIA in Europe. This astonishing revelation, coupled with his father's dark struggle with alcoholism, upended the world of a teenager struggling to become a man. Born into a family of privilege and power, Ian's life is populated with colorful people and stories as his father takes the family on a wild roller-coaster ride through wealth and poverty and back again. Decades later, as he faced his own personal demons, Ian realized that the only way to find peace was to voyage back through a painful childhood marked by extremes—privilege and poverty, violence and tenderness, truth and deceit—that he’d spent years trying to escape. A fast-paced, unique memoir about the power of forgiveness from the bestselling author of The Road Back to You Details his father’s struggle with alcohol and Cron’s own journey from addiction to twenty-three years of sobriety Encouragement to see God’s redemptive power through life’s struggles In this surprisingly funny and forgiving memoir, Ian reminds us that no matter how different the pieces may be, in the end we are all cut from the same cloth, stitched by faith into an exquisite quilt of grace.
Originally published in 1973, when it won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award , reprinted and revised several times since, They're Playing Our Song is a classic oral history of American popular music. Now further updated with new material and new photographs, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in the Great American Songbook of the 20th Century, original, classic and timeless songs and lyrics as popular today as ever.
One year before the Little Rock Nine bravely endured threats of violence and death to integrate Central High School, Randy Eddy-McCain was born in Arkansas. He grew up in a conservative Assemblies of God church where he fell in love with Jesus as a little boy. As Randy got older, he felt called by God to go into the ministry, but he had what religion taught him was a problem. He was attracted to men, not women. He hoped he might grow out of it. He prayed he'd grow out of it, but when that didn't happen, he explored what it meant to be gay. Without an example of how a gay man could be a Christian, Randy moved back and forth between what seemed like two conflicting worlds. As a Christian he tried not to be gay, and as a gay man, he tried to ignore how much he still loved Jesus and wanted to minister to people in need. Turmoil turned to peace when Randy was able to embrace both his faith and his sexuality. He committed his life to the love of his life, Gary Eddy, 21 years ago, and for the past 20 years, he's been the openly gay pastor of Open Door Community Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. Too many parents have hurt their children when they thought they were being faithful to their God. Too many LGBTQ kids have committed suicide because they were bullied and were taught that their sexuality made them an abomination to God. Too many men and women have left a faith tradition they really love because they were asked to leave until they could "stop" being gay. Randy Eddy-McCain's life story demonstrates that a person's faith in God can exist without being in conflict with his or her sexuality.
Haley, suicidal after Willi's death, joins a CIA mission, then finds her alive in the hands of slavers. As both face death, his alter ego returns to kill her captors. Then past events intrude. Valen, a Gnostic, forges a letter in Jesus' name, then Cesare Borgia adapts it. Centuries later, the letter involves John McCone, J. Edgar Hoover, four U.S. Presidents, Judy Garland, and Haley's CIA mentor, George Durell. In 2000, Pope John Paul II receives the letter, then asks the U.S. for help. But The Order Of The Gnostic Cross, Church Of Triantology, and Raven H2O have their own plans, as does female spy Jasus al-Mara, who enlists the aid of al-Qaeda terrorist Karbala. Meanwhile, the shadowy Cluster pulls everyone's strings, the unknown Termagant plots to destroy TGC, and a monster carves TINPLUFORPLE on the torsos of little girls. When a letter from George Durell surfaces, Haley and Willi again face violent foes, but this time they have help-serial killers Maxine Kordell and Mena Harling.
Widely known for innovative films like Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, and The Band Wagon, Vincente Minnelli also directed classic film comedies like Father of the Bride and Designing Woman, and melodramas such as The Bad and the Beautiful and Some Came Running. Though his work is beloved by filmmakers and audiences alike, Minnelli has nonetheless received very little critical attention in English. Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment remedies this imbalance, offering the first-ever comprehensive and scholarly examination of Minnelli's career within a variety of discourses and methods. Bringing together a number of previously uncollected and untranslated essays by some of the most important scholars and critics in North America, Australia, and Europe, Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment places Minnelli's cinema in its rightful position at the forefront of film history. In essays written over the last five decades, as well as a number of new essays commissioned especially for this volume, contributors consider Minnelli from a number of perspectives from auteurism to genre studies and psychoanalysis to close textual analysis. The volume is divided into four chronological sections, Minnelli in the 1960s: The Rise and Fall of an Auteur; The 1970s and 1980s: Genre, Psychoanalysis, and Close Readings; The 1990s: Matters of History, Culture, and Sexuality; and Minnelli Today: The Return of the Artist. An introduction by Joe McElhaney addresses the history of the reception of Minnelli's films, situating this reception within larger questions of film theory, criticism, and aesthetics. Too often dismissed as little more than a stylist dependent on the resources of the studio system and the structures of genre, Vincente Minnelli deserves a second look from serious film scholars. Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment demonstrates the remarkable and sustained rigor of Minnelli's vision and will appeal to students and teachers of film studies as well as fans of Minnelli's work.
Traditional jazz studies have tended to see jazz in purely musical terms, as a series of changes in rhythm, tonality, and harmony, or as a parade of great players. But jazz has also entered the cultural mix through its significant impact on novelists, filmmakers, dancers, painters, biographers, and photographers. Representing Jazz explores the "other" history of jazz created by these artists, a history that tells us as much about the meaning of the music as do the many books that narrate the lives of musicians or describe their recordings. Krin Gabbard has gathered essays by distinguished writers from a variety of fields. They provide engaging analyses of films such as Round Midnight, Bird, Mo' Better Blues, Cabin in the Sky, and Jammin' the Blues; the writings of Eudora Welty and Dorothy Baker; the careers of the great lindy hoppers of the 1930s and 1940s; Mura Dehn's extraordinary documentary on jazz dance; the jazz photography of William Claxton; painters of the New York School; the traditions of jazz autobiography; and the art of "vocalese." The contributors to this volume assess the influence of extramusical sources on our knowledge of jazz and suggest that the living contexts of the music must be considered if a more sophisticated jazz scholarship is ever to evolve. Transcending the familiar patterns of jazz history and criticism, Representing Jazz looks at how the music actually has been heard and felt at different levels of American culture. With its companion anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses, this volume will enrich and transform the literature of jazz studies. Its provocative essays will interest both aficionados and potential jazz fans. Contributors. Karen Backstein, Leland H. Chambers, Robert P. Crease, Krin Gabbard, Frederick Garber, Barry K. Grant, Mona Hadler, Christopher Harlos, Michael Jarrett, Adam Knee, Arthur Knight, James Naremore
In the world of magazines, no recognition is more highly coveted than an "Ellie," the National Magazine Award presented by the American Society of Magazine Editors to the best of the American magazines. The Awards are the magazine equivalents to the Pulitzer Prizes of the newspaper industry. Each year, hundreds of editors-in-chief, journalism professors, and art directors winnow more than a thousand submissions to about seventy-five nominees in categories such as Reporting, Feature Writing, Profiles, Public Interest, Essays, Reviews and Criticism. Interest in the nominees is keen, and this collection will allow people both in the magazine world and beyond to find in one place, read, and admire the year's best. It is a wonderful, browsable volume of interest to writers and readers who appreciate magazine writing and journalism at its highest level.
