Book picks similar to
The See-Through House by Shelley Klein
memoir
non-fiction
architecture
biography
100 Unhip Albums: That We Should Learn to Love
Ian Keith Moss - 2019
100 Unhip albums contains mini-essays on a selection of the uncoolest (but musically superb) records ever released. From famous albums which have since become uncool such as Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band to unhip bands such as Status Quo and Queen who became crap at some point in the past few decades. Then there are the unfavoured folk, soul and jazz artists who are criminally overlooked in favour of bigger names and the downright obscure bands who put out superb records only to disappear without trace. Ian’s amusing and fact-drenched book is a must for anyone in need of new sounds to spice up their listening pleasure!
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel
Sherill Tippins - 2013
Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House, delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there, among them John Sloan, Edgar Lee Masters, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Sam Shepard, Sid Vicious, and Dee Dee Ramone. Now as legendary as the artists it has housed and the countless creative collaborations it has sparked, the Chelsea has always stood as a mystery as well: Why and how did this hotel become the largest and longest-lived artists’ community in the known world? Inside the Dream Palace is the intimate and definitive story.Today the Chelsea stands poised in limbo between two futures: Will this symbol of New York's artistic invention be converted to a profit-driven business catering to the top one percent? Or will the Chelsea be given a rebirth through painstaking effort by the community that loves it? Set against these two competing possibilities, Inside the Dream Palace could not be more fascinating or timely.
Best Wishes, Warmest Regards: The Story of Schitt's Creek
Daniel LevyDustin Milligan - 2021
This beautifully produced, keepsake coffee-table book is the ultimate celebration of the series, the town, the characters, and the state of mind that is Schitt's Creek. Capturing the essence and alchemy of all six seasons of what is now considered to be one of the most groundbreaking comedy television series of the last decade, Best Wishes, Warmest Regards is a gift to fans everywhere who have made the show their own.Included are character profiles from the cast of Johnny, Moira, David, and Alexis, and all of the characters that populate the town, major moments from Moira's endorsement of Herb Ertlinger Winery, to Patrick and David's first kiss, to Cabaret and the Rose Family Christmas episode. Also included are special features, such as the complete, illustrated catalogs of David's knits and Moira's wigs, Moira's vocabulary, Alexis's adventures, and behind-the-scenes moments from Dan and Eugene Levy and the cast of Schitt's Creek.
Breaking Ground
Daniel Libeskind - 2004
Drawing on his uncommon background and global perspective, in Breaking Ground Daniel Libeskind explores ideas about tragedy and hope, and the way in which architecture can memorialize-and reshape-human experience. Born in 1946 to Holocaust survivors in Poland, Daniel Libeskind eventually emigrated to New York City in 1959. A virtuoso musician before studying architecture, Libeskind has designed iconic buildings around the world, including the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England. In February 2003, Libeskind was chosen as the Master Plan Architect for the World Trade Center reconstruction. Full of the vitality, humor, and visionary spark that helped win him the Trade Center Commission, Breaking Ground invites readers to see architecture-and the larger world-through new perspectives.
Untitled
Blaine Hogan - 2011
The blank page.It has so much power.Some days it's terrifying, sometimes thrilling, but mostly it's just plain old scary.It is the reason many people never finish that novel, or complete that project, or follow through with that one thing they used to dream about.Sadly, it is the reason many people never even begin.Blaine Hogan's manifesto, UNTITLED: Thoughts on the Creative Process is here to change all that.As an artist who has designed t-shirts, made light fixtures, created performance art in alleyways, performed on big and small stages all across the country, acted on network television, and is now a creative director at one of the largest churches in North America, Blaine walks you through the creative process of attacking the blank page, executing vision, finding the importance of contemplation, fighting the battle with resistance, and learning from your failures.Blank pages be gone!Read UNTITLED and get ready to fill those suckers with good and meaningful work.
Widow Basquiat: A Love Story
Jennifer Clement - 2000
A hotbed for hip hop, underground culture, and unmatched creative energy, it spawned some of the most significant art of the 20th century. It was where Jean-Michel Basquiat became an avant-garde street artist and painter, swiftly achieving worldwide fame. During the years before his death at the age of 27, he shared his life with his lover and muse, Suzanne Mallouk. A runaway from an unhappy home in Canada, Suzanne first met Jean-Michel in a bar on the Lower East Side in 1980. Thus began a tumultuous and passionate relationship that deeply influenced one of the most exceptional artists of our time. In emotionally resonant prose, award-winning author Jennifer Clement tells the story of the passion that swept Suzanne and Jean-Michel into a short-lived, unforgettable affair. A poetic interpretation like no other, Widow Basquiat is an expression of the unrelenting power of addiction, obsession and love.
The Hungover Games: A True Story
Sophie Heawood - 2020
It's about what happens when Mr. Right isn't around so you have a baby with Mr. Wrong, a touring musician who tells you halfway through your pregnancy that he's met someone else, just after you've given up your LA life and moved back to England to attempt some kind of modern family life with him. So now you're six months along, sleeping on a friend's sofa in London, and waking up in the morning to a room full of taxidermied animals who seem to be staring at you. The Hungover Games about what it's like raising a baby on your own when you're more at home on the dance floor than in the kitchen. It's about how to invent the concept of the two-person family when you grew up in a traditional nuclear unit of four, and your kid's friends all have happily married parents too, and you are definitely not, in any way, ticking off the days until all those lovely couples get divorced. Unflinchingly honest, emotionally raw, and surprisingly sweet, The Hungover Games is the true story of what happens if you've been looking for love your whole life and finally find it where you least expect it.A Sunday Times Bestseller (UK)
The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship
Roger Friedland - 2006
Yet, as this landmark new book reveals, that estate also gave rise to one of the most fascinating and provocative experiments in American cultural history: the Taliesin Fellowship, an extraordinary architectural colony where Wright trained hundreds of devoted apprentices, while using them as the de facto architectural practice where all of his late masterpieces -- Fallingwater, Johnson Wax, the Guggenheim Museum -- were born. A decade in the making, The Fellowship draws on hundreds of new and unpublished interviews, along with countless unseen documents from the Wright archives, to create a captivating portrait of Taliesin and the three mercurial figures at its center: Wright, his imperious wife Olgivanna Hinzenberg, and her spiritual master, the Greek-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff. Authors Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman reveal how the idealistic community of Taliesin became a kind of fiefdom, where young apprentices were both inspired and manipulated by the architect and his wife. They trace the decades-long war of wills between Wright and Olgivanna, in which organic architecture was pitted against esoteric spiritualism in a struggle for the soul of Taliesin. They chronicle Wright's perennial battles with clients, bankers, and the government, which suspected him of both communist and fascist sympathies. And through it all they tell the stories of Wright's devoted apprentices -- many of them gay men -- who found an uncertain refuge in the architect s Wisconsin and Arizona compounds, and who helped the master realize his dreamlike architectural visions, often at great personal cost. Epic in scope yet intimate in its detail, The Fellowship is an unforgettable story of genius and ego, sex and violence, mysticism and utopianism -- a magisterial work of biography that will forever change how we think about Frank Lloyd Wright and his world.
My Inner Sky: On Embracing Day, Night, and All the Times in Between
Mari Andrew - 2021
In this insightful and warm book, writer and illustrator Mari Andrew explores all the emotions that make up a life, in the process offering insights about trauma and healing, the meaning of home and the challenges of loneliness, finding love in the most unexpected of places--from birds nesting on a sculpture to a ride on the subway--and a resounding case for why sometimes you have to put yourself in the path of magic.My Inner Sky empowers us to transform everything that's happened to us into something meaningful, reassurance that even in our darkest times, there's light and beauty to be found.
A Lot Like Me: A Father and Son's Journey to Reconciliation
Larry Elder - 2018
I hated working for him and I hated being around him. I hated it when he walked through the front door at home. And we feared him from the moment he pulled up in front of the house in his car.” So writes conservative firebrand and popular radio host Larry Elder. For ten years Elder and his father did not talk to each other. When they finally did, the conversation went on for eight hours—eight hours that took Elder on his father’s journey from the Jim Crow South, to service in the Marine Corps, to starting a business in Southern California. Elder emerged not just reconciled with his dad, but admiring him, and realizing that he had never fully known him or understood him. Heartfelt, beautifully written, compulsively readable, A Lot Like Me—originally published as Dear Father, Dear Son—is both a powerfully affecting memoir and a personal, provocative slice of American history.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Heather Morris - 2018
When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners.Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism—but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion. Risking his own life, he uses his privileged position to exchange jewels and money from murdered Jews for food to keep his fellow prisoners alive.One day in July 1942, Lale, prisoner 32407, comforts a trembling young woman waiting in line to have the number 34902 tattooed onto her arm. Her name is Gita, and in that first encounter, Lale vows to somehow survive the camp and marry her.A vivid, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful re-creation of Lale Sokolov's experiences as the man who tattooed the arms of thousands of prisoners with what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is also a testament to the endurance of love and humanity under the darkest possible conditions.
The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Amanda Palmer - 2014
Performing as a living statue in a wedding dress, she wordlessly asked thousands of passersby for their dollars. When she became a singer, songwriter, and musician, she was not afraid to ask her audience to support her as she surfed the crowd (and slept on their couches while touring). And when she left her record label to strike out on her own, she asked her fans to support her in making an album, leading to the world's most successful music Kickstarter.Even while Amanda is both celebrated and attacked for her fearlessness in asking for help, she finds that there are important things she cannot ask for-as a musician, as a friend, and as a wife. She learns that she isn't alone in this, that so many people are afraid to ask for help, and it paralyzes their lives and relationships. In this groundbreaking book, she explores these barriers in her own life and in the lives of those around her, and discovers the emotional, philosophical, and practical aspects of The Art Of Asking.Part manifesto, part revelation, this is the story of an artist struggling with the new rules of exchange in the twenty-first century, both on and off the Internet. The Art Of Asking will inspire readers to rethink their own ideas about asking, giving, art, and love.
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin
Lawrence Weschler - 1982
Traces the life and career of the California artist, who currently works with pure light and the subtle modulation of empty space.
Giving Up the Ghost
Hilary Mantel - 2003
Once married, however, she acquired a persistent pain that led to destructive drugs and patronizing psychiatry, ending in an ineffective but irrevocable surgery. There would be no children; in herself she found instead one novel, and then another.