"P.O.P.", better known as "Pacific Ocean Park", opened on July 22, 1958 on South Barnard Way, Venice, California. This project was a co-venture of the "Los Angeles Turf Club", (a.k.a. Santa Anita and the Lake Arrowhead resort) and "C.B.S.", (Colombia Broadcasting Systems) in reaction to the overwhelming success of "Disneyland" which had opened just 3 years prior. This concept required the joining of two completely separate piers, in two different cities, Santa Monica and Los Angeles, and the rehabilitation of an existing "Amusement Zone" that dated back to the turn of the 19th century! "P.O.P", unfortunately succumbed, and closed, due to bad management and changing demographics in 1967. Presented here are series of paintings and simple phrases. Which I hope will inspire an understanding of the difference between the directly honest "P.O.P." contribution of an experience that is "Here and Now" as opposed to its competitors that rely on Nostalgia or "Remember when" as their theme and selling base.
Despite its sparse population, Kansas is well represented in the annals of music history. The state claims some of the most popular acts from the past century, including Kansas, Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Martina McBride, Melissa Etheridge and Charlie Parker. A wide variety of genres plays and prospers here, from blues to bluegrass. Beloved venues from mega-festivals like Walnut Valley to jam sessions just off the front porch preserve the state's tuneful heritage. Join Deb Bisel in celebrating this lyrical legacy, from "Home on the Range" to "Dust in the Wind" and beyond.
"A warm and expansive portrait of a woman’s mind that feels at once singular and universal," this collection of essays interweaves commentary on modern life, feminism, art, and sex with the author's own experiences of obsession, heartbreak, and vulnerability (BuzzFeed). Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go. Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love—with a place, or a painting, or a person—and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss—from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde—Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself. Pop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed. Pop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham's electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness. "Each of the essays in this debut collection reads like a mini-memoir . . . in which the author reflects on her experiences of young love, trauma, and transcendence through discussions of art and music . . . with an intimacy that is at once tender and expansive." —New York magazine
How have architecture and design been represented in popular culture? How do these fictional reflections feed back into and influence 'the real world'? Archi.Pop: Architecture and Design in Popular Culture offers the first contemporary critical overview of this diverse and intriguing relationship in cultural forms including television, cinema, iconic buildings and everyday interiors, music and magazines. Bringing the study of architecture and culture firmly to the contemporary world, Archi.Pop offers a unique critical investigation into how this dynamic relationship has shaped the way we live and the way we interact with the constructed world around us.
Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars—from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies—whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers. Proceeding from their deep political commitment to a new kind of populist grassroots politics, these writers challenge old modes of studying the everyday. As they rework traditional scholarly language, they search for new ways to write about our complex and compelling engagements with the politics and pleasures of popular culture and sketch a new and lively vocabulary for the field of cultural studies. The essays cover a wide and colorful array of subjects including pro wrestling, the computer games Myst and Doom, soap operas, baseball card collecting, the Tour de France, karaoke, lesbian desire in the Wizard of Oz, Internet fandom for the series Babylon 5, and the stress-management industry. Broader themes examined include the origins of popular culture, the aesthetics and politics of performance, and the social and cultural processes by which objects and practices are deemed tasteful or tasteless. The commitment that binds the contributors is to an emergent perspective in cultural studies, one that engages with popular culture as the culture that "sticks to the skin," that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. By refusing to deny or rationalize their own often contradictory identifications with popular culture, the contributors ensure that the volume as a whole reflects the immediacy and vibrancy of its objects of study. Hop on Pop will appeal to those engaged in the study of popular culture, American studies, cultural studies, cinema and visual studies, as well as to the general educated reader. Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O’Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi
A serial killer is scouring Brooklyn, and a team of hipster friends plan to stop him in this darkly humorous tale for fans of Bret Easton Ellis. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is the center of the hipster universe, and the members of the Whole Sick Crew are its shining stars. The gang includes Wolfgang, a heavy metal musician and high school guidance counselor who supplies coke to his charges; Rad, a doctor obsessed with obscure new wave songs who has a bad habit of cutting himself when he's stressed; Beth Ann, the neighborhood's queen knitter who's slowly going blind and Harrison, a museum curator moonlighting as a writer of highly prized porn. Collectively, they're the arbiters of taste for every vinyl-loving, Gap-spurning, thrift store regular in town. But lately someone has been laying waste to Brooklyn's uber-hipsters, dispatching them in gruesome fashion. The cops are dragging their heels, but the Whole Sick Crew knows that a serial killer dubbed Doctor Jeep is responsible. They have a plan to stop him and it's about to go spectacularly awry. Before the week is over, they'll be up to their skinny-jeaned waists in mayhem, manipulation, contract killers, raw sewage, and murderous monkeys. Something is rotten in the state of Billyburg, and the last hipsters standing will discover just how rotten it really is.... “Thoroughly amusing and utterly demented.”—Owen King, New York Times–bestselling author of We’re All In This Together “A wild, poignant, twisted, bitterly fun page turner.”—Jason Starr, author of Cold Caller
Ever wish you could just go? Give up everything and hit the road? That's what Troy Paddock did. Following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, this Colorado college kid grabbed one willing best friend, Vinny del Sparrow, and shot off in every direction of the U.S. Their only purpose was to party like rock stars. A desert rave, New York clubs, Mardi Gras in the Big Easy were all part of the duo's wild ride. But such an adventure-filled romp does not go without a tiny bit of misadventure and mishap. Extreme weather, car troubles, and cash shortages make the search for the party interestingly challenging. Told through Paddock's eyes, the reader is let into the thoughts and insights of someone whirling through life without a single care for reality and an intense lust for excitement. At points the endless partying catches up with our spontaneous hero but only briefly before he is able to wrestle away from its grasp.
The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī, a three volume set, contains a fully annotated translation of the extant writings of Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Yaʿqūbī, a Muslim imperial official and polymath of the third/ninth century, along with an introduction to these works and a biographical sketch of their author. The most important of the works are the History (Ta’rikh) and his Geography (Kitab al-buldan). It also contains a new translation of al-Yaʿqūbī’s political essay (Mushakalat al-nas) and a set of fragmentary texts drawn from other Arabic medieval works. Al-Yaʿqūbī’s writings are among the earliest surviving Arabic-language works of the Islamic period, and thus offer an invaluable body of evidence on patterns of early Islamic history, social and economic organization, and cultural production. Contributors: Laila Asser, Paul Cobb, Lawrence I. Conrad, Elton Daniel, Fred Donner, Michael Fishbein, Matthew S. Gordon, Sidney H. Griffith, Wadad Kadi (al-Qāḍī), Lutz Richter-Bernberg, Chase F. Robinson, Everett K. Rowson The hardback edition of this title is also available as part of a 3-volume set (hardback, ISBN 978-90-04-35608-5), click here.
Filled with wry, dark humor, unparalleled imagination, unforgettable characters, and exquisitely crafted storytelling, Sam Shepard’s plays have earned him enormous acclaim over the past five decades. In these fifteen one-acts, we see him at his best, displaying his trademark ability to portray human relationships, love, and lust with rare authenticity. These fifteen furiously energetic plays confirm Shepard's status as our most audacious living playwright, unafraid to set genres and archetypes spinning with results that are utterly mesmerizing. Included in this volume: Ages of the Moon Evanescence; Shakespeare in the Alley Short Life of Trouble The Unseen Hand The Rock Garden Chicago Icarus’s Mother 4H Club Fourteen Hundred Thousand Red Cross Cowboys #2 Forensic & The Navigators The Holy Ghostly Back Bog Beast Bait Killer’s Head
If you read the first book about this family entitled Emily, you will recognize most of these characters and be introduced to more as the saga continues. Fate brings Emily Jones to a farmhouse outside of Perryville, Kentucky in the heart of the great Depression when her car breaks down on the way to her sisters home in Virginia. She and her children have no money and no food. They are prepared to beg for something to eat and to be allowed to sleep in the barn. They stay on by making themselves indispensable to a household that has recently lost its wife and mother. There they make an amazing discovery. This is a story of people adapting to hard situations and decisions in hard times. It is a story of misplaced people and some of the things they had to do to survive. It is the story of a country in turmoil. It starts in 1931 and goes through to 1982. This book, All Of Us, starts out with Emily in 1904, when she is 2 years old and is told in the first person by each character. It is indicative of individual views on some of the same situations. The history of our country factors into this book, also. The Brown family extends into a loving, caring family of a hundred people from Kentucky, North Carolina, New York, Texas, Georgia, and Michigan who decide to have a family reunion after World War II. It ends with a tragedy in 1950. The next book will be More About the Rest of Us and will cover 1950 to 1986 with some flashbacks to earlier times.
