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Author: Norman M. Klein
Publisher:
Published: 2004-01-01
Total Pages: 506
ISBN-13: 9781565848030
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a journey through the lavish special-effects environments from 1550 to the present. It indicates how the Renaissance and early Baroque artists pioneered the interactive, the cinematic and even the digital.
Author: John O'Brien
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Published: 2007-12-01
Total Pages: 174
ISBN-13: 0802197299
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis “brutal and unflinching” novel of fleeting love in Sin City inspired the film starring Nicholas Cage and Elizabeth Shue (Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City). John O’Brien’s debut novel, Leaving Las Vegas, is an emotionally wrenching story of a woman who embraces life and a man who rejects it; a powerful tale of hard luck, hard drinking, and a relationship of tenderness and destruction. An avowed alcoholic, Ben drinks away his family, friends, and, finally, his job. With deliberate resolve, he burns the remnants of his life and heads for Las Vegas to end it all in the last great binge of his hopeless life. On the Strip, he picks up Sera, a prostitute, in what might have become another excess in his self-destructive jag. Instead, their chance meeting becomes a respite on the road to oblivion as they form a bond that is as mysterious as it is immutable.
Author: Sally Denton
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2002-05-07
Total Pages: 366
ISBN-13: 0375414444
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLas Vegas—the name evokes images of divorce and dice, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than ever imagined. The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history. Now this neon maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant “sin city,” but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and worship of money that have come to permeate American life.
Author: F. Rex
Publisher: ICCC Media
Published: 2008-04-01
Total Pages: 135
ISBN-13: 9780978826109
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a Las Vegas casino fashioned after the Vatican, author Thomas Carlyle is as good as dead. Swilling a mortal dose of alcohol, he will perish among the grotesque patrons of Vatican City, Las Vegas as they pursue an elusive jackpot token called The Godhead. Carlyle unwittingly bumbles through corporate mafia intrigue as Vatican City's management, the Medici Crime Family, plots to enslave all the casino patrons to dreams of eternal wealth. As the night deepens and the forces of Vegas evil threaten to rob human existence of all nonmaterial significance, Carlyle dreams a final reckoning that will bring the Medici Crime Family and all of Vatican City's managerial clergy to justice in a shocking cinematic twist.
Author: Rick Jones
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2016-06-11
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 9781534651876
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhile on a visit to the United States, Pope Pius XIII is kidnapped by a terrorist cell calling itself the Soldiers of Islam. If the United States and its allies do not meet their demands, they will execute the pope. So when FBI Specialist Shari Cohen is called to duty to track down the terrorist cell responsible, she learns that she is not alone. Deep behind the Vatican walls a secret order dispatches a clandestine op group of elite commandos known as the Vatican Knights. Their mission: bring the pope back alive. As Cohen and the Knights work in tandem they uncover a White House conspiracy involving high-ranking members on Capitol Hill. When she begins to get too close to the truth about the pope's kidnapping, she becomes the target of indigenous forces trying to keep the conspiracy safe. However, in order to get to her they must go through the Vatican Knights.
Author: Scott A. Lukas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780739121429
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation and Self is the first edited collection focused on the subject of the themed space. Twelve authors address a range of themed spaces, including restaurants, casinos, theme parks and other spaces like airports and virtual reality ones. The text is organized into four sections-theming as authenticity, theming as nation, theming as person and theming as mind.
Author: Edward Hollis
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2009-11-10
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 1429982101
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA strikingly original, beautifully narrated history of Western architecture and the cultural transformations that it represents Concrete, marble, steel, brick: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original contexts and purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shape-shifters. In an inspired refashioning of architectural history, Edward Hollis recounts more than a dozen stories of such metamorphosis, highlighting the way in which even the most familiar structures all change over time into "something rich and strange." The Parthenon, that epitome of a ruined temple, was for centuries a working church and then a mosque; the cathedral of Notre Dame was "restored" to a design that none of its original makers would have recognized. Remains of the Berlin Wall, meanwhile, which was once gleefully smashed and bulldozed, are now treated as precious relics. With The Secret Lives of Buildings, Edward Hollis recounts the most enthralling of these metamorphoses and shows how buildings have come to embody the history of Western culture.
Author: John Van Stry
Publisher:
Published: 2016-03-18
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9781530675418
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn American college student on holiday in India, Rafael fell afoul of a Rakshasa, an old and very powerful tiger-demon. When he finally manages to escape from his captivity, he is left with two small problems; the first is that he is now a Rakshasa himself, the second is that India is deporting him. With a now rather unique physical appearance and a pressing need to find strong emotions that he can feed off of, just where in America can a shape-shifting tiger-demon not only survive, but find acceptance and make a life? Las Vegas of course. But before he can claim his territory, there is the small matter of a vampire infestation that he'll have to deal with, one that the government hasn't been able to clean up since the forties. All while finding or creating enough of those very emotions he needs to survive. For someone skilled in the arts of seduction, with the best Elvis act that the city has ever seen, that may not sound like much of a problem, but just what happens when someone who needs 'love' to survive meets up with the real thing?
Author: Werner Wolf
Publisher: Rodopi
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 388
ISBN-13: 9401209243
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReaders who appear to be lost in a storyworld, members of theatre or cinema audiences who are moved to tears while watching a performance, beholders of paintings who are absorbed by the representations in front of them, players of computer games entranced by the fictional worlds in which they interactively participate – all of these mental states of imaginative immersion are variants of ‘aesthetic illusion’, as long as the recipients, although thus immersed, are still residually aware that they are experiencing not real life but life-like representations created by artefacts. Aesthetic illusion is one of the most forceful effects of reception processes in representational media and thus constitutes a powerful allurement to expose ourselves, again and again to, e.g., printed stories, pictures and films, be they factual or fictional. In contrast to traditional discussions of this phenomenon, which tend to focus on one medium or genre from one discipline only, the present volume explores aesthetic illusion, as well as its reverse side, the breaking of illusion, from a highly innovative multidisciplinary and transmedial perspective. The essays assembled stem from disciplines that range from literary theory to art history and include contributions on drama, lyric poetry, the visual arts, photography, architecture, instrumental music and computer games, as well as reflections on the cognitive foundations of aesthetic illusion from an evolutionary perspective. The contributions to individual media and aspects of aesthetic illusion are prefaced by a detailed theoretical introduction. Owing to its transmedial and multidisciplinary scope, the volume will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: cultural history at large, intermediality and media studies, as well as, more particularly, literary studies, music, film, and art history.
Author: Norman M. Klein
Publisher:
Published: 2009-08
Total Pages: 506
ISBN-13: 9781437968439
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA guided tour through the magical world of illusions, this book takes the reader from lavish Baroque fantasies of the 17th cent. to the Electronic Baroque of today. We journey from architectural illusion in 1580 to the ¿trompe l¿oeil¿ of Las Vegas casinos. Klein takes us from Piranesi¿s labyrinths to the mazes of new computer software, from scrolling panoramas that staged the horror at Gettysburg to the special effects on cinema screens today. The real power in this world of fakery rests with whoever controls the illusion -- be it the pope, the pres., the imagineer, the designer, or the studio exec. ¿Special effects are not only a barometer for politics, myths of identity, and econ. relations, but also a parallel for understanding where our civilization may be headed next.¿ Ill.
