In the earliest years of the 20th century, North American ballroom dancers favored the waltz or the polka. But then a new dance, the tango, broke onto the scene when Vernon and Irene Castle performed it in a Broadway musical. Rudolph Valentino, Arthur Murray, and Xavier Cugat popularized it in the 1920s and 1930s, and thousands of people crowded onto dance floors around the country to hear the music and dance the tango. This work chronicles the history of the tango in the United States, from its antecedents in Argentina, Paris and London to the present day. It covers the dancers, musicians, and composers, and the tango's influence on American music.
From Machu Picchu to a cocaine purchase in a Bolivian jail—and beyond! How do you rough it in extreme South American travels and still dare to be different? You Can Run: Gay, Glam, and Gritty Travels in South America follows the intrepid and fantastic—and totally true—adventures of flamboyant gay men through the gritty rough and tough of South America. Author Jesse Archer and his American boyfriend Zane spent nearly two years traveling the continent in search of adventure. And find it they did. Discover incredible individuals like Patricia the pink lady, the Wolfman of Borneo, and Santusa the fanged Chola of a different color. Thrill to the astounding experiences of dodging crocodiles, doing a striptease for a Colombian bathroom bitch, admiring exultant transsexuals caught in a rainstorm, and navigating the most dangerous road in the world. This wild travel chronicle takes you through the real South America with wit, wisdom—and a hot pink wig! An excerpt from You Can Run: Gerardo runs off to buy the meat for baiting piranha and then we're in his tin boat out on the choppy Amazon. The humidity and heat on the earth's surface here seems to bounce back into the sky and burst, returning a downpour of rain. Luckily Gerardo's tin can has a roof. Yet for some reason we aren't headed to the jungle, but downriver to a shantytown along the bank. I ask where we are going and Gerardo feebly utters something in Portuguese. I can't make it out. Zane is now convinced I've employed a waterfront gangster. We pull up to a shoddy pier of three planks supported by timbers that rot in the lapping water. “We should have gone with the other one!” Zane decries my flagrant frugality. “See? There's his accomplice.” When Gerardo reappears outside the shack with another man Zane announces he hates to be killed with a cheapskate like me. “I'm gonna die, washed up over there with all that trash, my body all white and fat and . . . bloated!” zane has exercised too much in his life to die bloated. Dying bloated has just become the worst of all fates. Zane gasps earnestly to his active imagination. “Oh God, please not bloated!” You Can Run is a funny, piercing, and poignant examination of memorable outcasts in the third world. Follow some of travel's most different adventure seekers—extreme travelers with a lot of sparkle!
The 8-volume set, comprising the LNCS books 13801 until 13809, constitutes the refereed proceedings of 38 out of the 60 workshops held at the 17th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2022. The conference took place in Tel Aviv, Israel, during October 23-27, 2022; the workshops were held hybrid or online. The 367 full papers included in this volume set were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the ECCV 2022 workshop proceedings. They were organized in individual parts as follows: Part I: W01 - AI for Space; W02 - Vision for Art; W03 - Adversarial Robustness in the Real World; W04 - Autonomous Vehicle Vision Part II: W05 - Learning With Limited and Imperfect Data; W06 - Advances in Image Manipulation; Part III: W07 - Medical Computer Vision; W08 - Computer Vision for Metaverse; W09 - Self-Supervised Learning: What Is Next?; Part IV: W10 - Self-Supervised Learning for Next-Generation Industry-Level Autonomous Driving; W11 - ISIC Skin Image Analysis; W12 - Cross-Modal Human-Robot Interaction; W13 - Text in Everything; W14 - BioImage Computing; W15 - Visual Object-Oriented Learning Meets Interaction: Discovery, Representations, and Applications; W16 - AI for Creative Video Editing and Understanding; W17 - Visual Inductive Priors for Data-Efficient Deep Learning; W18 - Mobile Intelligent Photography and Imaging; Part V: W19 - People Analysis: From Face, Body and Fashion to 3D Virtual Avatars; W20 - Safe Artificial Intelligence for Automated Driving; W21 - Real-World Surveillance: Applications and Challenges; W22 - Affective Behavior Analysis In-the-Wild; Part VI: W23 - Visual Perception for Navigation in Human Environments: The JackRabbot Human Body Pose Dataset and Benchmark; W24 - Distributed Smart Cameras; W25 - Causality in Vision; W26 - In-Vehicle Sensing and Monitorization; W27 - Assistive Computer Vision and Robotics; W28 - Computational Aspects of Deep Learning; Part VII: W29 - Computer Vision for Civil and Infrastructure Engineering; W30 - AI-Enabled Medical Image Analysis: Digital Pathology and Radiology/COVID19; W31 - Compositional and Multimodal Perception; Part VIII: W32 - Uncertainty Quantification for Computer Vision; W33 - Recovering 6D Object Pose; W34 - Drawings and Abstract Imagery: Representation and Analysis; W35 - Sign Language Understanding; W36 - A Challenge for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Computer Vision; W37 - Vision With Biased or Scarce Data; W38 - Visual Object Tracking Challenge.
Once one of the most popular film genres and a key player in the birth of early narrative cinema, the Western has experienced a rebirth in the era of post-classical filmmaking with a small but noteworthy selection of Westerns being produced long after the genre's 1950s heyday. Thanks to regular repertory cinema and television screenings, home video releases and critical reappraisals by cultural gatekeepers such as Quentin Tarantino, an ever-increasing number of these Westerns have become cult films. Be they star-laden, stylish, violent, bizarre or simply little heard-of obscurities, Reframing Cult Westerns offers a multitude of new critical insights into a truly eclectic selection of cult Western films. These twelve essays present a wide-ranging methodological scope, from industrial histories to ecocritical approaches, auteurist analysis to queer and other ideological angles. With a thorough analysis of the genre from international perspectives, Reframing Cult Westerns offers fresh insight on the Western as a global phenomenon.
Winner, Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular and American Culture, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2016 Known for their violence and prolific profanity, including free use of the n-word, the films of Quentin Tarantino, like the director himself, chronically blurt out in polite company what is extremely problematic even when deliberated in private. Consequently, there is an uncomfortable and often awkward frankness associated with virtually all of Tarantino’s films, particularly when it comes to race and blackness. Yet beyond the debate over whether Tarantino is or is not racist is the fact that his films effectively articulate racial anxieties circulating in American society as they engage longstanding racial discourses and hint at emerging trends. This radical racial politics—always present in Tarantino’s films but kept very much on the quiet—is the subject of Race on the QT. Adilifu Nama concisely deconstructs and reassembles the racial dynamics woven into Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained, as they relate to historical and current racial issues in America. Nama’s eclectic fusion of cultural criticism and film analysis looks beyond the director’s personal racial attitudes and focuses on what Tarantino’s filmic body of work has said and is saying about race in America symbolically, metaphorically, literally, impolitely, cynically, sarcastically, crudely, controversially, and brilliantly.
This book is an ideal and practical resource on the potential impact Artificial Intelligence (AI) can have in space sciences and applications. AI for Space Application presents a hands-on approach to browse in the subject and to learning how to do. AI is not yet fully accepted as a pervasive technology in space applications because they are often mission-critical and the cost of space equipment and modules raises skepticism on any practical use and reliability. However, it is evident that its potential impact on many aspects is dramatic. Starting from either actual or experimental realizations, the book accompanies the reader through such fascinating subjects like space exploration, autonomous navigation and landing, rover control and guidance on rough surfaces, image analysis automation for planet or star classification, and for space debris avoidance without human intervention. This kind of approach may facilitate further investigations on the same or similar subjects, as the future of space explorations is going toward adopting AI. The intended audience of the book are researchers from academia and space industries and practitioners in related start-ups.
Since the transformative 1960s, concert masses have incorporated a range of political and religious views that mirror their socio-cultural context. Those of the long 1960s (c1958-1975) reflect non-conformism and social activism; those of the 1980s, environmentalism; those of the 1990s, universalism; and those of the 2000s, cultural pluralism. Despite utilizing a format with its roots in the Roman Catholic liturgy, many of these politicized concert masses also reflect the increasing religious diversification of Western societies. By introducing non-Catholic and often non-Christian beliefs into masses that also remain respectful of Christian tradition, composers in the later twentieth century have employed the genre to promote a conciliatory way of being that promotes the value of heterogeneity and reinforces the need to protect the diversity of musics, species and spiritualities that enrich life. In combining the political with the religious, the case studies presented pose challenges for both supporters and detractors of the secularization paradigm. Overarchingly, they demonstrate that any binary division that separates life into either the religious or the secular and promotes one over the other denies the complexity of lived experience and constitutes a diminution of what it is to be human.
For decades, the Western film has been considered a dying breed of cinema, yet filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Ethan and Joel Coen find new ways to reinvigorate the genre. As Westerns continue to be produced for contemporary audiences, scholars have taken a renewed interest in the relevance of this enduring genre. In Critical Perspectives on the Western: From A Fistful of Dollars to Django Unchained, Lee Broughton has compiled a wide-ranging collection of essays that look at various forms of the genre, on both the large and small screen. Contributors to this volume consider themes and subgenres, celebrities and authors, recent idiosyncratic engagements with the genre, and the international Western. These essays also explore issues of race and gender in the various films discussed as well as within the film genre as a whole. Among the films and television programs discussed in this volume are The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward, Robert Ford; Django Kill; Justified; Meek’s Cutoff; Tears of the Black Tiger; Appaloosa; The Frozen Limits; and Red Harvest.Featuring a diverse selection of chapters that represent current thinking on the Western. Critical Perspectives on the Western will appeal to fans of the genre, film students, and scholars alike.
The three-act structure is so last century! Unlike other screenwriting books, this unique storytelling guide pushes you to break free of tired, formulaic writing by bending or breaking the rules of storytelling as we know them. This new edition dives into all the key aspects of scriptwriting, including structure, genre, character, form, and tone. Authors Ken Dancyger, Jessie Keyt, and Jeff Rush explore myriad alternatives to the traditional three-act story structure, going beyond teaching you "how to tell a story" by teaching you how to write against conventional formulas to produce original, exciting material. Fully revised and updated, the book includes new examples from contemporary and classic cinema and episodic series, as well as additional content on strategies for plot, character, and genre; an exploration of theatrical devices in film; and approaches to scriptwriting with case studies of prolific storytellers such as Billy Wilder, Kelly Reichardt, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Kathryn Bigelow. Ideal for students of screenwriting and professional screenwriters wishing to develop their craft and write original scripts.
This forward-looking exploration of contemporary American film across the last 40 years identifies and examines the specific movies that changed the film industry and shaped its present and future. Since the mid-1970s, American cinema has gone through enormous changes, such as the birth of the modern summer blockbuster, the rise of the independent film industry, ongoing technological advancements in special effects, and the ever-evolving models for film distribution. Written by a professional film critic and film buff, this book tells the story of contemporary American cinema in a unique and engaging way: by examining 25 key movies that demonstrated a significant creative, technological, or business innovation that impacted the industry at large. Each chapter in this chronological survey of contemporary film is divided into two sections: "The Film," which offers a critical overview of the film in question; and "The First," which describes the specific innovation achieved by that film and places that achievement in the larger historical context. Two additional appendices in each chapter explore other significant aspects of both the film and its groundbreaking nature. The broad coverage—ranging from action movies to horror films to science fiction favorites—ensures the work's appeal to all film fans.
