A lushly illustrated comedy zine geared toward those enlightened souls who understand the genius of Joan Rivers and Adam Sandler. Conceived in 2001 by editor Jay Ruttenberg while he was working as a music critic at Time Out New York, it features the work of moonlighting professionals from the hallowed worlds of journalism, rock music, cartooning and television. A dozen years in the making, the anthology is the finest product to come out of Lowbrow Reader headquarters, gathering together the best writing and drawings from the journal's 8 issues along with new material.
In The Lem Reader, Peter Swirski has assembled an in-depth and insightful collection of writings by and about, and interviews with, one of the most fascinating writers of the twentieth century.
New York City: a battered town left for dead, one that almost a million people abandoned and where those who remained had to live behind triple deadbolt locks. It was reinvigorated and became the capital of wealth and innovation, an engine of cultural vibrancy, a magnet for immigrants, and a city of endless possibility. Since its founding in 1968, New York Magazine has told the story of that city's constant morphing, week after week. This book draws from all that coverage to present an enormous, sweeping, idiosyncratic picture of a half-century at the center of the world. It constitutes an unparalleled history of that city's transformation, and of a New York City institution as well.
This study brings together writings on this controversial genre, spanning the history of horror in literature and film. It discusses texts from the United States, Europe, the Caribbean and Hong Kong.
Swirski begins with a series of groundbreaking questions about the nature of popular fiction, vindicating it as an artform that expresses and reflects the aesthetic and social values of its readers. He follows his insightful introduction to the socio-aesthetics of genre literature with a synthesis of the century long debate on the merits of popular fiction and a study of genre informed by analytic aesthetics and game theory. Swirski then turns to three "nobrow" novels that have been largely ignored by critics. Examining the aesthetics of "artertainment" in Karel Capek's War with the Newts, Raymond Chandler's Playback, and Stanislaw Lem's Chain of Chance, crossover tours de force, From Lowbrow to Nobrow throws new light on the hazards and rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics.
Most Americans have seen or enjoyed Lowbrow art without having even heard of it. Sometimes called the "Pop Surreal" art movement, the images and influence of Lowbrow art are widespread, appearing on album covers, in comics, and galleries across the US and around the world. But not much is known about the origin of the movement, or the stories behind the artist themselves. "Lives of the Lowbrow Artists" seeks to shed some light on the origin story of Lowbrow Art, starting with the artists who created the work. This first volume profiles some of the founding artists (Shag, Tim Biskup, Miles Thompson, Derek Yaniger, Brandi Milne) whose now iconic images gave rise to a movement that remains uniquely symbolic, subversive, and story-based to its core.
The son of writer and satirist Bruce Jay Friedman, Kipp Friedman, wrote a memoir about growing up and getting into hi-jinx on both coasts with his brothers Drew and Josh Friedman (both famous in their own right): with appearances by mobster Joe Gallo, Groucho Marx, and others. Whether shooting pool with the mobster Crazy Joey Gallo, attending a dinner party hosted by an aged but remarkably spry Groucho Marx, or simply playing doctor with a classmate in the former estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kipp Friedman led a colorful childhood. The youngest son of celebrated writer and satirist Bruce Jay Friedman, Kipp looks back fondly on the amusing and sometimes confusing events and encounters that helped shape his early life in this moving tribute to growing up among a family of creative artists―swept up in the whirlwind of the New York arts scene of the 1960s and ’70s. Follow Kipp’s exploits as bystander and willing participant as he joins older brothers Josh (writer and musician) and Drew (renowned cartoonist and illustrator) as three musketeers on a youthful quest to discover the scariest low-budget horror movies along 42nd Street and Times Square. Delight in their search for classic comic books, monster magazines (and the occasional “nudie” magazine) at their beloved, dingy “Back-Issue Store” in midtown Manhattan. Encounter his family’s bizarre Cold War-like relationship with their new neighbors in an updated suburban Jewish version of the Hatfields vs. the McCoys. Witness their Marx Brothers-like antics while on an all-expenses-paid junket at the Beverly Hills Hotel courtesy of CBS. The stage shifts from New York City to the Caribbean to the suburbs of Long Island, and from the South of France to Broadway and Hollywood as Kipp retraces his family’s defining moments―with the backdrop of his father’s meteoric rise from editor of men’s adventure magazines to successful novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Through it all, Kipp paints a loving portrait of a childhood and family life that is both magical and yet familiar and real. Barracuda in the Attic is truly a family affair, written by Kipp, with a cover illustration by Drew Friedman, an introduction by paterfamilias Bruce Jay Friedman, and an afterword by Josh Friedman, and is copiously illustrated with photos of the family and their literati friends and hangers-on.
In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are. For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms—Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow—enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America—housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy—now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between “serious” and “popular,” between “high” and “low” culture came to dominate America’s expressive arts. “If there is a tragedy in this development,” Lawrence Levine comments, “it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period—and many have still not regained—their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.” In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.
This book analyzes the differences in content, reader expectation, and social/moral/ethical functions of the three types of novels in America of the 1950s. It challenges the notion that highbrow novels (Lolita ) do important cultural work while popular novels contribute to personal and social decay, and examines how time periods influence the moral content of novels. The book separates popular fiction into lowbrow (Peyton Place ) and middlebrow (Man in the Grey Flannel Suit ) and explains that lowbrow (like highbrow) evolves from the folklore tradition and contains messages about how to be a good man or good woman and how to find a satisfying niche in the social order. Middlebrow, on the other hand, evolves from myth tradition and relates lessons on what personal adjustments need to be made to succeed in the economic order. Middlebrow novels most reflect the time and place of their writing because conditions for economic survival change more than conditions for social survival. Arguing that what most distinguishes highbrow from lowbrow is the audience, highbrow writers try to separate from the flock; lowbrow writers to include. This study differs from such well-known studies of popular fiction as John Cawelti's and Janice Radway's in looking beyond the surface features of plot, character, and theme. The book also challenges arguments that novels in which marriage is women's highest triumph and aggressive heroism men's reinforce limiting cultural paradigms.
This book, the first one featuring the amazing artwork of Robert Williams, has been unavailable for many years. The book contains an overview of Williams's early work until 1979. It features images from t-shirt designs, comics, posters and oil paintings.
