For a few decades now, They Might Be Giants' album Flood has been a beacon (or at least a nightlight) for people who might rather read than rock out, who care more about science fiction than Slayer, who are more often called clever than cool. Neither the band's hip origins in the Lower East Side scene nor Flood's platinum certification can cover up the record's singular importance at the geek fringes of culture. Flood's significance to this audience helps us understand a certain way of being: it shows that geek identity doesn't depend on references to Hobbits or Spock ears, but can instead be a set of creative and interpretive practices marked by playful excess-a flood of ideas. The album also clarifies an historical moment. The brainy sort of kids who listened to They Might Be Giants saw their own cultural options grow explosively during the late 1980s and early 1990s amid the early tech boom and America's advancing leftist social tides. Whether or not it was the band's intention, Flood's jubilant proclamation of an identity unconcerned with coolness found an ideal audience at an ideal turning point. This book tells the story.
Steven Hyden explores nineteen music rivalries and what they say about life in this "highly entertaining" book (Rolling Stone) perfect for every passionate music fan. Beatles vs. Stones. Biggie vs. Tupac. Kanye vs. Taylor. Who do you choose? And what does that say about you? Actually -- what do these endlessly argued-about pop music rivalries say about us? Music opinions bring out passionate debate in people, and Steven Hyden knows that firsthand. Each chapter in Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me focuses on a pop music rivalry, from the classic to the very recent, and draws connections to the larger forces surrounding the pairing. Through Hendrix vs. Clapton, Hyden explores burning out and fading away, while his take on Miley vs. Sinead gives readers a glimpse into the perennial battle between old and young. Funny and accessible, Hyden's writing combines cultural criticism, personal anecdotes, and music history -- and just may prompt you to give your least favorite band another chance.
In the preflood world of unspoiled beauty, a Sethite tree-village is gripped by a strange terror. Lameck, is forced into a desperate rescue journey that turns romantic, until he encounters supernatural opposition unleashed by the angelic adversary, Lucifer.
"Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson's Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the challenging and strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of "now" when time is always moving? How do experiences become memories? This book attends closely to Anderson's artistic voice, detailing its unique capacities for ambiguity and revelation. It traces the sonic histories etched in the record's grooves, from the Cold War to a burning future, from the Manhattan skyline to the empty desert, from the opera house to the pop charts. Ultimately in Big Science, one can hear an invitation to rise above the dualities of parts and wholes, images and essences, the lone individual and the megasystem. The first and most enduring superstar of performance art, Laurie Anderson is recognized here for pioneering philosophically rich techniques within the medium, but is also taken seriously as a musician and composer. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day"--
ROCK FORMATIONS is a non-fiction title covering the origins of music group and artist stage names. The entries (of which there are more than 1,000) are grouped into categories with similar themes, for example, those names which were inspired by movies, those inspired by places, etc. There is a comprehensive index, and hypertext links to all entries within the e-book.
From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
Prehistory's deepest secrets, at long last revealed... Flowing from Genesis Quest's groundbreaking global research, The Flood tells the wondrous but harrowing true story of Atlantis and the celestially caused disaster that laid it low. In The Flood 1: Escape from Atlantis, a beautiful but cheeky longhead Atlantean princess named Nena learns of impending global catastrophe. When her pleas to evacuate the island fall on deaf ears, she hatches an audacious plan to save civilization from the Flood. But then her Alban friend Nata is conscripted into Atlantis's vaunted military, inevitably to die in battle with savage man-eating giants or in the worldwide conflagration to follow. Will she face her deepest fear to save his life? In recreating lost chapters of human experience, this fantastic yet fact-based epic trilogy finally unveils the startling truth behind prehistory's deepest mysteries. Presented in Author's Asides dispersed throughout the storyline, our monumental scientific discoveries will shock the world. Learn the truth! Read the trilogy. Nonfictional sample, from Author's Aside #8: The unutterably horrific ramifications of this twofold theory concerning what happened to our planet during the multiphase disaster enshrined biblically as the Flood will dawn on you as this essentially true story plays out. For what has become clear to us, above all, is this:We do not live within a comforting Uniformitarian reality, an assumption that has undergirded most thinking in the natural sciences ever since Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology shaped these basic perceptions in 1830-33, despite what was even then a world of well-known contradictory evidence. Instead, we live in a Catastrophist reality, in which globally devastating events happen not just every several tens of millions of years, as posited by that theory, but rather every few thousand years. That is, such terrible occurrences not only can, but certainly will, happen again--and not necessarily in the distant future. And were a disaster like what's recreated in Books 2 and 3 to recur today, billions of people would die by tomorrow, and survivors would be left fighting for life in a new Stone Age. It is my firmly held conviction that the world needs to know this, if only so that we can collectively prepare for the next such event. Counterintuitively, the only way sufficiently to drive this point home, in making it "real" for millions of people worldwide, is by fictionally recreating these largely forgotten peoples and events not just in an epic novel, but also in a series of blockbuster 3D films. For it is only through vicariously living the journeys of its characters--including Nata and Nena, who were apparently real people--that audiences the world over can acquire the requisite frame of reference. In employing research-driven fiction to bring lost chapters of history so vividly to life, thereby revealing the latent but very real peril in which we all actually do live, with this work I may, in a sense, be forging a new genre of novelistic and filmic writing, one that transcends Science Fiction per se. Mindful that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells founded that proud genre through their cutting-edge late nineteenth-century novelistic forays into fantastic real-world subjects, the new one I may be said to be creating, in so intimately melding, in the early twenty-first century, these long-forgotten fantastic facts with fiction--in part by attempting to live my own fictional adventure, as told in my modern trilogy about finding Atlantis to follow this one, by forming a global research consortium dedicated to proving these things for real--might best be called Science Fact. Uncomfortably neologistical as this formulation might appear, it seems to me an apt appellation for what I and GQ are attempting to do.
Take a journey with the artist and writer Petar Meseldzija, who tells how he was allowed unparalleled access through the Invisible Curtain and into the land of giants. A year in the making, this book's sixteen paintings and nearly ninety drawings bring to life Petar's experiences on this journey and secrets uncovered, going back to ancient times. He shares stories of new discoveries that free giants from the murky abyss of myth and a forgotten past. Told in three stages, The Book of Giants includes the illustrated stories The Giants Are Coming, recounting a dynamic clash that lasted one hundred years; The Little Kingdom, where a giant befriends a nation of humans and becomes their adamant protector against ferocious invaders; The Northern Giants, who embrace the warrior spirit through countless battles; Giant Velles, the story of ignorance and how the strength of goodness perseveres; and The Great Forest, wherein the author discovers little creatures called the keppetz and relates his experiences spent with ogres while on his quest to meet the Golden One and to determine the purpose of his journey. Through the strength of his own power, he discovers his blessings, his limitations and finally his personal myth. Furthermore, you will discover why giants made a push into the underground, followed by their exodus and deliverance to a new land. You'll also learn why the myth of giants is still alive, why their time spent with humans remains elusive and why giants prefer to remain hidden in their world. Join Petar Meseldzija on his journey of discovery.
The Genesis flood account has been probed and analyzed for centuries. But what might the biblical author have been saying to his ancient audience? In order to rediscover the biblical flood, we must set aside our own cultural and interpretive assumptions and visit the distant world of the ancient Near East. Walton and Longman lead us on this enlightening journey toward a more responsible reading of a timeless biblical narrative.
