Nothing Ever Just Disappears
Nothing Ever Just Disappears

Author: Diarmuid Hester

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2024-02-06

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1639365567

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An exploration of artistic freedom, survival, and the hidden places of the imagination, including James Baldwin in Provence, Josephine Baker in Paris, Kevin Killian in San Francisco, and E. M. Forster in Cambridge, among other groundbreaking queer artists of the twentieth century. Nothing Ever Just Disappears is radical new history of seven queer lives and the places that shaped these groundbreaking artists. At the turn of the century, in the shade of Cambridge's cloisters, a young E. M. Forster conceals his passion for other men, even as he daydreams about the sun-warmed bodies of ancient Greece. Under the dazzling lights of interwar Paris, Josephine Baker dances her way to fame and fortune and discovers sexual freedom backstage at the Folies Bergère. And on Jersey Island, in the darkest days of Nazi occupation, the transgressive surrealist Claude Cahun mounts an extraordinary resistance to save the island she loves, scattering hundreds of dissident artworks along its streets and shorelines. Nothing Ever Just Disappears brings to life the stories of seven remarkable figures and illuminates the connections between where they lived, who they loved, and the art they created. It shows that a queer sense of place is central to the history of the twentieth century and powerfully evokes how much is lost when queer spaces are forgotten. From the suffragettes in London and James Baldwin's home in Provence, to Kevin Killian's San Francisco and Derek Jarman’s cottage in Kent, this is both a thrilling new literary history and a celebration of freedom, survival, and the hidden places of the imagination.

Fandom as Methodology
Fandom as Methodology

Author: Catherine Grant

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 191268523X

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An illustrated exploration of fandom that combines academic essays with artist pages and experimental texts. Fandom as Methodology examines fandom as a set of practices for approaching and writing about art. The collection includes experimental texts, autobiography, fiction, and new academic perspectives on fandom in and as art. Key to the idea of “fandom as methodology” is a focus on the potential for fandom in art to create oppositional spaces, communities, and practices, particularly from queer perspectives, but also through transnational, feminist and artist-of-color fandoms. The book provides a range of examples of artists and writers working in this vein, as well as academic essays that explore the ways in which fandom can be theorized as a methodology for art practice and art history. Fandom as Methodology proposes that many artists and art writers already draw on affective strategies found in fandom. With the current focus in many areas of art history, art writing, and performance studies around affective engagement with artworks and imaginative potentials, fandom is a key methodology that has yet to be explored. Interwoven into the academic essays are lavishly designed artist pages in which artists offer an introduction to their use of fandom as methodology. Contributors Taylor J. Acosta, Catherine Grant, Dominic Johnson, Kate Random Love, Maud Lavin, Owen G. Parry, Alice Butler, SooJin Lee, Jenny Lin, Judy Batalion, Ika Willis. Artists featured in the artist pages Jeremy Deller, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Anna Bunting-Branch, Maria Fusco, Cathy Lomax, Kamau Amu Patton, Holly Pester, Dawn Mellor, Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Women of Colour Index Reading Group, Liv Wynter, Zhiyuan Yang

Sabu
Sabu

Author: Michael Lawrence

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1838717900

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The first Indian to become an international film star, Sabu rose to fame as a child actor in Elephant Boy (1937), and subsequently appeared in a succession of British pictures before relocating to Hollywood, where he died in 1963. Repeatedly cast in orientalist extravaganzas and jungle thrillers, he was associated with the 'exotic' and the 'primitive' in ways that reflected contemporary attitudes towards India and 'the East' more generally. In this captivating study, Michael Lawrence explores the historical, political, cultural contexts of Sabu's popularity as a star, and considers the technological and industrial shifts that shaped his career – from the emergence of Technicolor in the late 1930s to the breakdown of the studio system in the 1950s. Attending to the detail of Sabu's distinctively physical performances, Lawrence shows how his agency as an actor enabled him to endure, exceed and exploit his unique star image.

The American Play
The American Play

Author: Marc Robinson

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2009-05-26

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 030015612X

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In this brilliant study, Marc Robinson explores more than two hundred years of plays, styles, and stagings of American theater. Mapping the changing cultural landscape from the late eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first, he explores how theater has--and has not--changed and offers close readings of plays by O'Neill, Stein, Wilder, Miller, and Albee, as well as by important but perhaps lesser known dramatists such as Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, and many others. Robinson reads each work in an ambitiously interdisciplinary context, linking advances in theater to developments in American literature, dance, and visual art. The author is particularly attentive to the continuities in American drama, and expertly teases out recurring themes, such as the significance of visuality. He avoids neatly categorizing nineteenth- and twentieth-century plays and depicts a theater more restive and mercurial than has been recognized before. Robinson proves both a fascinating and thought-provoking critic and a spirited guide to the history of American drama.

Flaming Creatures
Flaming Creatures

Author: Constantine Verevis

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-11-26

Total Pages: 86

ISBN-13: 0231851308

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Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, the prints seized and the organizers arrested, Jack Smith’s incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. Championed and defended by Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag, among others, the film wildly and gleefully transgresses nearly every norm of Hollywood morality and aesthetics. In a surreal and visually dense series of episodes, the titular “creatures” reenact scenes drawn from the collective cinematic unconscious, playing on mainstream film culture’s moral code in a way that is at once a love letter to classical Hollywood and a searing send-up of its absurdities. Tracing the film’s production and reception history, Constantine Verevis argues that it embodies a unique type of cinematic rewriting, one that combines Smith’s multifaceted artistic work with exotic fragments drawn from the cinematic past. This study of Smith’s magnum opus explores its status as a cult film that appropriates the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of old Hollywood exoticism.

Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture
Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture

Author: Powers

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 019768338X

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The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture. By reasserting the physicality of the body in making time-lapse and kinesthetic sequences with the Bolex, filmmakers conversed with other art forms and integrated broader spheres of humanistic and scientific inquiry into their artistic process. Drawing from the photographic qualities of stocks such as Tri-X and Kodachrome, they discovered pliant metaphors that allowed them to connect their artistic practice to metaphysics, spiritualism, and Hollywood excess. By framing film labs as mystical or adversarial, they cultivated an oppositionality that valorized control over the artistic process. And by using the optical printer as a tool for excavating latent meaning out of found footage, they posited the reworking of images as fundamental to the exploration of personal and cultural identity. Providing a wealth of new detail about the making of canonized avant-garde classics by such luminaries as Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage, as well as rediscovering works from overlooked artists such as Chick Strand, Amy Halpern, and Gunvor Nelson, Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture uses technology as a lens for examining the process of making: where ideas come from, how they are put into practice, and how arguments about those ideas foster cultural and artistic commitments and communities.

The Taylor Mac Book
The Taylor Mac Book

Author: David Roman

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2023-02-13

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0472220020

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This is the first book to dedicate critical attention to the work of influential theater-maker Taylor Mac. Mac is particularly celebrated for the historic performance event A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, in which Mac, in fantastical costumes designed by collaborator Machine Dazzle, sang the history of the United States for 24 straight hours in October 2016. The MacArthur Foundation soon thereafter awarded their “genius” award to a “writer, director, actor, singer, and performance artist whose fearlessly experimental works dramatize the power of theater as a space for building community . . . [and who] interacts with the audience to inspire a reconsideration of assumptions about gender, identity, ethnicity, and performance itself.” Featuring essays, interviews, and commentaries by noted critics and artists, the volume examines the vastness of Mac’s theatrical imagination, the singularity of their voice, the inclusiveness of their cultural insights and critiques, and the creativity they display through stylistic and formal qualities and the unorthodoxies of their personal and professional trajectories. Contributors consider the range of Mac’s career as a playwright, performer, actor, and singer, expanding and enriching the conversation on this much-celebrated and deeply resonant body of work.

The First Traitor
The First Traitor

Author: R. S. Twells

Publisher: FriesenPress

Published: 2022-09-29

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 1039140866

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Heading into his final year at the secret spy school known as the Orphanage, Bennet is hoping to get through to graduation with no hiccups. With the help of his classmate, Darcy, Bennet has moved on from the death of his brother, Collin, last fall. He's successfully started training as a field agent, and he's managed to earn the respect of the agents at the Orphanage with his successful assignment against an oil tyrant last June. He’s confident nothing can stop him from having a terrific final year. But events soon prove him wrong. The Orphanage is frantically on the hunt for the mysterious person known as the Shepherd, who they are convinced is set on wreaking havoc in the world. Bennet and Darcy have been kicked off the assignment and told to focus on their training. But during a routine assignment to Google headquarters, Bennet encounters the last person he expected to see—and barely survives. In the aftermath, Bennet feels like someone is shadowing him every time he leaves the Orphanage. No one believes him except Oliver, the new kid from the organization’s British location. He teams up with Bennet to try to find and stop this unknown shadow. On a class assignment, Bennet and Oliver risk everything to catch Bennet’s shadow and come face to face with a ghost from Bennet's past who forces him to make some difficult decisions. Who is his family? Whom can he trust? Will he become a traitor? Or . . . is a traitor already among them?

Debts and Vows: The Deirdre and Elio Duet Box Set
Debts and Vows: The Deirdre and Elio Duet Box Set

Author: Vero Heath

Publisher: Peace Weaver Press Inc.

Published: 2024-05-29

Total Pages: 717

ISBN-13:

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The epic dark mafia duet now in one single volume... A Debt So Ruthless At the stroke of midnight on my twentieth birthday, he comes in darkness and in blood. Elio Titone, heir to Toronto’s most brutal Cosa Nostra famiglia. Elio has come for one thing and one thing only – to claim what he is owed. And what he’s owed is me. My captor is dangerous and demanding. Tortured, possessive, and wealthy beyond belief. He traps me in his gilded, violent world and offers me no hope of escape. But the longer I spend with him, with his dark eyes and scarred hands, the less I want to claw my way out of his cage. When new enemies threaten me, I see a side of Elio I didn’t know existed – a ruthlessly protective side. He forces me to do the one thing that guarantees my safety, even if it means I’ll forever be his prisoner. I’ll no longer be shackled by debt, but by marriage vows. Because he’ll make me his bride. A Vow So Soulless I’ve taken everything from my Songbird. Her freedom. Her innocence. Even her name. She’ll no longer be known as Deirdre O’Malley, but Deirdre Titone. My wife. Whether she wants to be or not. It’s the only real way to show this city who she belongs to. The only way to tell the world that she’s as protected as she is possessed. I’ll keep her safe, even if there’s no one left to keep her safe from me. My Songbird made me believe in souls again. And maybe I don’t have one. Maybe I never did. But she does. And I won’t stop until I’ve taken it along with everything else. Debts and Vows is the complete Deirdre and Elio dark mafia duet collection boxset. It contains the novels A Debt So Ruthless and A Vow So Soulless by Vero Heath. It is a dark, steamy, age-gap mafia romance ideal for fans of Jill Ramsower, BB Easton, and SJ Tilly.