I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence. —from The Weight of the EarthArtist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954—4w`1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth. Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987--1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.

    By age six already a regular in the Sears Husky Boys Department. Young Frankie is also gay, and he's trapped in the aluminum-sidinged, lawn-sprinklered, what-exit? wilds of New Jersey suburbia. Imagine Elton John born to an Italian-American Edith and Archie Bunker and you've got the picture. A Boy Named Phyllis is Frank DeCaro's witty gem of a memoir about growing up among working-class Italian folk in Little Falls, New Jersey. There are the usual trials and tribulations between little Frankie and his parents, Marian and Frank Sr., but this is no angst-ridden, coming-of-age gay memoir. Frank is funny, and A Boy Names Phyllis is the antidote to such books. It is the mid-1960s and the DeCaros have it all: a living room that no one is allowed to live in; a complete collection of cardboard cutout decorations for every holiday; an Entenmann's factory around the corner; and a killer lineup of Friday-night TV - The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Room 222, The Odd Couple, and, if you can stay awake long enough, Love, American Style. There's only one problem: instead of developing a crush on Laurie Partridge, Frankie gets a boner for Keith. He perfects a drop-dead Paul Lynde imitation, and ultimately finds liberation through Elton John and Disco.

    Now the charming and unconventional pooch has his own book, filled with more than a hundred all-new photographs and witty commentary to give fans an intimate and hilarious look at the Internet’s most prized pup. Tuna’s cartoonish looks—with an exaggerated overbite, a recessed jawline, and a wrinkly neck—are truly one of a kind. And yet his quirky appearance is no match for his unique perspective on life, overcoming his proclivity for staying in bed all day to keep his eye on the (bacon-flavored) prize. Teaming up with his owner, Courtney Dasher, Tuna shares a behind-the-scenes look at his daily exploits, which include sleeping, sunbathing, wearing bow ties, playing with toys, and melting hearts. Packed with witty and endearing images of this ridiculously adorable pup, Tuna Melts My Heart is sure to delight the underdogs in us all!

    In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queen's tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. Weber's queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion--the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs--was also the means of her undoing. Weber's book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of history's most controversial figures.

    Beginning with the scandalous Astor Place Opera House riot of 1849, Larry Stempel traces the growth of musicals from minstrel shows and burlesques, through the golden age of Show Boat and Oklahoma!, to such groundbreaking works as Company and Rent.Stempel describes the Broadway stage with vivid accounts of the performers drawn to it, and detailed portraits of the creators who wrote the music, lyrics, and stories for its shows, both beloved and less well known. But Stempel travels outside the theater doors as well, to illuminate the wider world of musical theater as a living genre shaped by the forces of American history and culture. He reveals not only how musicals entertain their audiences but also how they serve as barometers of social concerns and bearers of cultural values.Showtime is the culmination of decades of painstaking research on a genre whose forms have changed over the course of two centuries. In covering the expansive subject before him, Stempel combines original research—including a kaleidoscope of primary sources and archival holdings—with deft and insightful analysis. The result is nothing short of the most comprehensive, authoritative history of the Broadway musical yet published.

    Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own. Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—and featuring nearly one hundred images—Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait—a great American novel in the form of a biography.

    Bombs fall in a nearby shopping district. Enemy soldiers terrorize neighboring homes. Crossfire decimates civilian cars at a roadblock. War infuses every quarter of Vietnam. Most Americans long ago have left for safety. The James family remains. Sam James and his wife, Rachel, and their four children sit tight in ravaged South Vietnam to share Jesus when the Vietnamese most need ministry--as the country falls to communism. Even during the frightening Tet Offensive, Sam communicates Christ's love and peace as he helps Vietnamese believers start churches and gird up spiritually for the dark days ahead. What makes one man willing to stare death in the face to obey God's call to serve the Vietnamese? And what becomes of all the seeds planted among these fledgling Christians as communism oppression advances? Servant on the Edge of History describes the Vietnam War from a perspective seldom heard: from a missionary who loved the Vietnamese people, who refused to become an American spy, but who also loved his own country. James offers insights into where and how God was at work in this war-ravanged country, where he risked all for the sake of the Gospel. About the author: Sam James for 43 years has served with the International Mission Board in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. He has been a church planter, administrator and missionary statesman in troubled areas as well as speaker for retreats and conferences in 100 countries. Sam and his wife, Rachel, are parents of four grown children, two of whom are on the mission field. Today, they reside in Richmond, Virginia.

    Hand methods were further eclipsed by the advent of the electronic watch in the 1960s, and many people feared that the mechanical watch would disappear entirely.

    Like an Art of War for design, this slim volume contains guidance, inspiration, and reassurance for all those who labor with the user in mind. If you work on the web, in print, or in film or video, this book can help. If you know someone working on the creative arena, this makes a great gift. Funny, too.Look for fresh aphorisms on our Facebook page.

    What followed was a whirlwind childhood spent among art and artists in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Gabrielle grew up in a home full of the most celebrated artists of the day: Rothko, de Kooning, Tinguely, Giacometti, and Christo, among others.Poignant and candid, Unstill Life is a daughter’s memoir of the art world and a larger-than-life father known to the world as Mr. Modern Art. Selz offers a unique window into the glamour and destruction of the times: the gallery openings, wild parties and affairs that defined one of the most celebrated periods in American art history. Like the art he loved, Selz’s father was vibrant and freewheeling, but his enthusiasm for both women and art took its toll on family life. When her father left MoMA and his family to direct his own museum in California, marrying four more times, Selz’s mother, the writer Thalia Selz, moved with her children into the utopian artist community Westbeth. Her parents continued a tumultuous affair that would last forty years.Weaving her family narrative into the larger story of twentieth-century art and culture, Selz paints an unforgettable portrait of a charismatic man, the generation of modern artists he championed and the daughter whose life he shaped.

    and cultural icon.The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, many of them created by her. Twenty years after her untimely death at age 50, Acker's legend has faded, but her writing has become clearer.A few years ago, the writer Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, found that her own experiences were becoming more and more like Kathy's. She began writing about Acker 'through the distance, but with this incredible frisson of feeling that often I could write "I" instead of "she."'This is 'literary friction': The first fully authorised biography of the avant-garde writer Kathy Acker, by the woman who arrived on the scene straight after her, who shared some of her boyfriends and friends, and her artistic ambitionsUsing exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus traces the woman behind the notorious novels, and places her at the centre of a kaleidoscopic artistic world.

    This title is a snapshot of growing up in Yorkshire in the 1950s - reminisce with Gervase, and share in his personal journey - of school days and holidays as well as his tentative steps into the adult world.

    Whether it’s hearing the wrong name called at her art school graduation ceremony or becoming a National Book Award finalist for her debut graphic novel, Nimona, Noelle captures the little and big moments that make up a real life, with a wit, wisdom, and vulnerability that are all her own.

    Paul Gallagher, the elder brother of Noel and Liam, discusses their childhood, their father, their musical beginnings and their rise to fame, as well as considering their future.

    A charismatic, funny, articulate, and formidably intelligent man, Cassady was also a compulsive womanizer who lived life on the edge. His naturalistic, conversational writing style inspired Kerouac, who lifted a number of passages verbatim and uncredited from Cassady’s letters for significant episodes in On the Road. Drawing on a wealth of new research and with full cooperation from central figures in his life—including Carolyn Cassady and Ken Kesey—this account captures Cassady’s unique blend of inspired lunacy and deep spirituality.