The Surreal Calder

Book Description

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is a key presence in the history of modern art, and yet he is rarely seen or remembered in the context from which he initially emerged as an artist. When Calder became "Calder" – well known for his signature mobiles and stabiles – it was due to a unique variety of presiding influences. His artistic parentage consisted of Marcel Duchamp, who provided the name of and concept for the mobile; Piet Mondrian, who introduced pure abstraction to him; and Joan Miró, who communicated the central theses of Surrealism. Although Calder went on to play a major role in Surrealist manifestations during the formative years of the movement, including being shown in the defining 1936 "Exposition surréaliste d'objets" in Paris, he has since been separated from those beginnings. Indeed, at this point in time, Calder is never included in exhibitions of Surrealist art, even though he was incubated by that phenomenon and contributed mightily to it.
This book will put the artist back in midst of Surrealism so that his achievement is more profoundly understood within that context. Works by artists such as Miró, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte will delineate the Surrealist milieu and some of its chief aspects. The following theses are also explored: Calder's wit, caricature, and linear flights of fancy; his marvelous personages and fantastic creatures; biomorphic forms from an imaginary vision of nature; and his constellations, apparent views of celestial space.

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The Surreal Calder
Mark (Author) Rower, Alexander S. C. (Others) Rosenthal
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OSM58S

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How to Paint from Photographs: The Artist's Guide to Techniques and Materials
Tony Paul
Manufacturer: New Holland
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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How to Create Light in Your Paintings: The Artist's Guide to Using Tone Effectively

How to Create Texture in Your Paintings: The Artist's Guide to Using Paint Effectively

How to Mix & Use Color: The Artist's Guide to Achieving the Perfect Color in Every Medium

ASIN: 1845372336

Book Description

For many artists, a special photograph sometimes calls out to be translated into a painting. What the photo captured in an instant, you can transform into your own lasting personal statement as you master every stage from original photos to finished painting. Enhance composition, colors, and forms. Crop for close-ups. Add or eliminate features. Alter light and color. Combine the best of several photos. Various media get special treatments—oil, watercolor, pastel, gouache, acrylic, color pencils, egg tempera. So do a range of subjects, including landscapes, seascapes, portraits, animal studies—as well as moods from intimate to historic, romantic to rugged.

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War from the Eyes and Hearts of Medical Workers

An explanation of the perverse way war aids medicine

The Face of Mercy: A Photographic History of Medicine at War
Matthew Naythons
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0679427449
Release Date: 1993-09-28

Book Description

A stunning and unforgettable portrait in words and picture of war's searing aftermath and the struggle to save lives.

Customer Reviews:

War from the Eyes and Hearts of Medical Workers.......2005-03-10

THE FACE OF MERCY: A PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF MEDICINE AT WAR is a powerful compendium of images and responses to the hungry monster of war that still stalks this sadly ignorant planet. For those who need to evaluate the madness and destruction of war unchanged since the beginning of time, this volume forces us to SEE via photographs taken from the time the camera was invented to the present: here is irrefutable evidence, uncensored by the media, that war is a pitiful response to those who fight and those who wait at home and especially those who are called to tend to the wounded and dying on the fronts and in the residual hospitals housing fragments of human lives that always follow war.

The photography is for the most 'amateur' in execution, but that only emphasizes the immediacy of the brutality of the machine of death. From the opening photographs of Mathew Brady who froze the Civil War in the nineteenth century, through the horrors of World Wars I and II, the 'small wars' fought in civil conflicts in smaller countries, the Russo-Japanese War, the Korean War, the Vietnam tragedy, observations captured by Salgado, and the images from Somalia and Croatia which were the most recent wars at the time of publication of this book in 1993 - all are documented visually with enormous power.

Writers of the quality of William Styron, Ward Just, and Stuart Nuland add to the impact of this paean and plea for peace. Yet some of the most touching elements of this important book are the asides from the soldiers and the medical workers in the field captured in utter simplicity by the author Matthew Maythons.

If this book were in the homes of every family on the globe, perhaps the resultant response would be strong enough that mankind might be forced to witness that War is the Enemy, not People. Grady Harp, March 05

An explanation of the perverse way war aids medicine.......1997-10-01

War's usual outcome is warped, maimed and dead men.

'The Face of Mercy' documents medicine's work to counter the cost for the soldiers and civilians who survive. With narrative by several authors, including Dr. Sherwin Nuland, 'Mercy' begins with an introduction by novelist William Styron.

The book straddles the urge to destroy and the desire to heal. 'The body's very tissues reflect this struggle in their constant process of breakdown and repair,' Nuland writes. 'Unfortunately, the ability and impulse to cure have never kept up with the ability and impulse to kill.' The physician's will to save lives so near to battles is a conflict that partially explains why the text is strangely hopeful, given its subject. The large-format photography is matched by lucid writing.

The battleground has yielded some of medicine's great accomplishments Ð mass inoculation, antiseptic surgery, blood and plasma transfusions, plastic reconstruction, and huge leaps in heart and lung surgery. Perhaps more importantly for soldiers, war observation established the relationship between speed of treatment and survival; the casualty statistics bear it out. In World War I, the average time between injury and treatment was 10 to 18 hours; surgeons write of removing battle dressings to discover maggots. In Vietnam, the swiftness and valor of helicopter pilots carved the wait to an average of one to two hours. In that conflict less than 2 percent of the hospitalized died.

But some things are immutable. The psychological impact of war on doctors and the wounded remains. And as our inventiveness in destruction increases, so does the cost to the mind. One doctor who served in Vietnam writes of 'mud, screams and the terrible smell of death.' Napolean's chief surgeon, Dominique-Jean Larrey, is said to have performed more than 200 amputations during a single day of the doomed expedition into Russia. Undoubtedly, men lived because of his extraordinary effort, but what butchering dreams did he live with afterward?

The pictures, largely black and white, range from documentary to editorial. Physicians discovered photography could aid teaching and straightforwardly recorded their methods. But other images are heavy with emotional weight, such as 'A Morning's Work,' a haphazard monument of men's amputated feet and legs, piled outside the door of a Civil War hospital.

The effect of war upon civilians is also represented. Survivors in St. Petersburg are shown delivering their bundled dead aboard a child's sled, to a dynamited mass grave. In Leningrad, an estimated million died from starvation, waiting for the war to end. The city's loss was more than the combined military and civilian death toll for both the United States and Great Britain during all of World War II.

Lisa Ashmore

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THE FACE OF MERCY: A PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF MEDICINE AT WAR.

Manufacturer: Random House (USA)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HG330G

Book Description

The Visual Story offers students and professionals in cinematography, production design, directing and screenwriting a clear view of the relationship between the story/script structure and the visual structure of a film or video. An understanding of the visual components will serve as the guide in the selection of locations, set dressing, props, wardrobe, lenses, camera positions, lighting, actor staging, and editorial choices.

The Visual Story divides what is seen on screen into tangible sections: contrast and affinity, space, line and shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm. The vocabulary as well as the insight is provided to purposefully control the given components to create the ultimate visual story. For example: know that a saturated yellow will always attract a viewer's eye first; decide to avoid abrupt editing by mastering continuum of movement; and benefit from the suggested list of films to study rhythmic control. The Visual Story shatters the wall between theory and practice, bringing these two aspects of the craft together in an essential connection for all those creating visual stories.

*Encourages the filmmaker to develop a "visual vocabulary"

*Shows the filmmaker how to structure visuals, communicating moods and emotions with style and variety

Customer Reviews:

Simply Invigorating.......2007-08-23

After reading this book, I have a greater sense of cinematography and am surprised at how easily this came. Bruce Block explains the visual construction in a simple way by using common concepts to tie every element of a production together in an easy-to-use package. I have not only been able to identify the concepts as I watch film, but apply the concepts in all my design arenas. I highly recomended this book!

A clear and insightful guide to seeing the visual structure of moving images.......2007-08-09

"The Visual Story" really is unlike anything out there for its emphasis on the ways in which the structure of an image or of images in sequence -- its shape, its apparent spatial dimensions, its movement, its complexity, its rhythm and texture, its color dimensions -- can all work together to support the emotional and thematic dimensions of the story it aims to tell. His explanations are simultaneously simple and insightful, and spending time with this book can really open your eyes to the wide range of ways in which moving images can be meaningful at a level that can be independent of the actual content of the image (who is in it, what is being shown). Essential reading for filmmakers who aspire to take advantage of the potentials of the medium, this book would also be enormously revealing and useful for students of film, for film lovers, and even for those who have a broad interest in the visual arts. His chapters on space and on color, and his discussions of their emotional as well as their formal content, are especially valuable and full of insight. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

underwhelming.......2007-07-12

Bruce Block opens his book by claiming that he is drawing upon the teachings of Eisenstein. He isn't. The vast majority of the book is given to analyzing the "hidden lines" within images. Unfortunately, there is a catch. The hidden visual structure within an image may have some kind of resonance - I'm not really sure, but it seems to me to be sister to the kind of "the work of Virginia Wolf analyzed in meta-postmodern-structuralism," analysis that obscures, rather than illuminating, the essential elements that make a given work of art/lit/film succeed.

Film is made of story, sound, image, and cut - I suppose that it isn't Block's fault that he chooses to focus on overanalyzing just one of those categories, but I do wish that the film school grad who recommended that I read this book had not.

Refund.

Better than I thought.......2007-06-26

I had to get this book for a class I'm taking (Visual Language of the Moving Image) at UCF. Like most books that we are required to purchase, I wasn't too happy about it... But, honestly, this one is different. It is very well written and illustrated. I actually love this book. Bruce Block knows his stuff, and, more importantly, he knows how teach it.

A very well thought-out book on symbolism in the media, basically.......2007-06-08

I bought this book along with "If it's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die." This book ("Visual Story") is the more scholarly and useful of the two, while "Purple" is an easier read.

If you are a critic or student of film-making, this book definitely is a must-have. It's got great info on "why." So many books are centered around "how."

"Why" is more important than "how."

Descriptive, though pedestrian illustrations. Clean, honest writing. Easy to understand. Slightly dry. It would be nice to have more real-world examples, but that get's very difficult to get all of those movie and TV show clearances, so I understand why they're not there, but it would have definitely made the book much more interesting.

Book Description

Nineteen scholars from five countries explore significant issues in the history of ethnomusicology and its methodological and theoretical foundations, while providing a critique of the discipline.

"This is a useful and enriching collection of articles of interest to musicologists and ethnomusicologists. . . . The authors manage to cover much ground, presenting fascinating insights into the history of the discipline while also exploring new directions in both theory and analysis. . . . the most sweeping work of this kind to be published since the 1960s."—L. D. Loeb, University of Utah, for Choice

Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music - Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology

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Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music - Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology
Netti Bruno and Bohlman Philip V (Eds)
Manufacturer: Chicago
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000LZK7MU

Book Description

Stephen Harris is a clumsy boy: he spills juice at the dinner table and loses his bag on the bus. How will he cope at high school when he can't even tie his shoelaces? Stephen's school life looks set to be full of trouble until a special needs advisor arrives to help Stephen with his coordination, concentration and organization difficulties.

Taking a light-hearted look at life through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy, this short novel recounts the problems that are faced by children with dyspraxia and contains positive approaches to teaching and parenthood that readers will find hugely supportive.

Book Description

Does the peoples need to believe in the president trump their duty to think critically and to demand truth? Have Americans been conditioned to ignore political frauds and believe the lies perpetuated by presidents and campaign ads? James Bovard, author of the classic Lost Rights, diagnoses a national malady: Attention Deficit Democracy, characterized by a citizenry that is paying less attention to facts, and is less capable of judging when their rights and liberties are under attack. Bovards careful research and characteristically caustic style will give ADD a whole new meaning that pundits, politicians, and we the people will find difficult to ignore.

Customer Reviews:

Think you know all about democracy ?.......2007-09-01

This essay on the negative side of American politics is the handbook for every citizen that votes and does not vote. This book does not favor the Right or the Left. You'll never be an informed voter until you've read James Bovard's masterpiece.

Useful discussion of what democracy would be like.......2007-06-20

American writer James Bovard asserts that US elections have become little better than reverse slave auctions, where the slaves choose their masters. He shows how representative democracy represents the state to the people, not vice versa: our rulers do not represent us. As the White House Chief of Staff unbelievably said to Republican National Convention delegates, "this president sees America as we think about a ten-year old child."

President Reagan lied, "We the people tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us." Did the American people tell him to send troops to Lebanon to be slaughtered, or run up the largest budget deficits in US history or send thousands of anti-tank weapons to Iran?

Hermann Goering cynically advised, "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." As William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, wrote, "Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed." A US poll found, "among those who wrongly believe that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, 81% think going to war was the right decision. Among those who correctly know that Iraq had no WMD, just 8% think the war was right."

The US state use of torture is systematic, widespread and authorised by the President. Rumsfeld and the Justice Department repeatedly approved specific illegal torture techniques. The President continually fought against any legislative ban on torturing prisoners. Officials of the US state proclaimed that the President was above the law and the constitution. When the state gets away with torture, what limits are there on its power?

Bovard asks, "What will it take to awake Americans to the rising political peril? When the government spends the nation into ruin? When the government launches dishonest, unjustified wars around the world? When the government persists in torturing people, and lying about the torture? How many people does the government have to imprison without charges before Americans recognize the threat?" How unlike my own dear country of Britain, where the people really control the government (not)!

Book needs a wider scope of presentation.......2007-05-23

The reader will find some shocking power grabs by the executive branch of the U.S. government. Indeed, as the U.S.A. of Entertainment, we are more concerned with sports scores, the latest outcome of some reality TV show, and not the day-to-day workings of government. Bovard, accurately highlights our culture for a basis on how Americans are forgetting to keep tabs on their political officials, wanting more to be fed pork and taken care of, than to really have their elected officials do what best for the country. The message in the first chapters is concrete and riveting. We are a nation that cannot tell the difference between freedom and democracy, and Bovard points this out nicely. However, much of what's written in the back half is a bash on Bush 43. A left-wing idealogue will be thrilled with the content; someone who is independently minded will be left wanting more. Plenty of examples of executuve power grabs are available for historical analysis in the administrations of Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, VanBuren & Wilson, to name a few, but those details are left out, unfortunately.

Even if the facts are 95% true.......2007-05-11

I found Attention deficit Democracy to be very enlightening. Bovard provided many facts and details that made me aware of my own short comings in following our government. Sadly, all I can say is most people I know do not care to know all the details of just how bad things have gotten for the U.S.. We are the frog in the pot and the stove has been turned on for quite a while. To be critical of the book because of a viewed distortion of a few facts among hundreds in the book that are very accurate reminds me of something Tom Delay would speak of in defending some ludicrous statement.

Informing and Captivating.......2007-03-02

You'll need to read this book if you want to gain a greater understanding of why Americans feel disempowered, don't vote, aren't involved in democracy in general, and seemingly don't care that their government is slowly increasing its tyranny over the populace and how the human lust for power is abusing the fundamentals of the Constitution.

I have mixed feelings about the book. To me, it has 3 voices.

The first voice, "Introduction", is amazingly well-written, and worth the purchase price alone. It summarizes the entire book's thesis: America is becoming an "elective dictatorship" where the voters elect officials and permit them to choose who will violate the laws and the Constitution. Whatever concepts we hold about Democracy, they are allusions to the past and used by modern leaders to fog our thinking about what is actually happening and what our government has become. We hold the most powerful leader of the world sinless when he knowlingly lies and does harm (wars); yet, would send any other person to prison if their fabrications did harm (e.g., CEO's lying about their product that eventually hurt citizens).

The second voice I'll call soundbites. Every couple of pages Bovard reduces a complex set of issues into a 15 word soundbite. These are sprinkled throughout the book, and are wonderfully concise and impactful. Delightful, in fact. If you ever needed to illuminate an argument when discussing politics, Bovard gives you plenty of ammunition. Reporters, journalists, historians, and copy editors will benefit. You could hang an entire 'infotainment' episode around one or two of these delicious zingers. Hosting a dinner party? Impress your friends by dropping a few of Bovard's soundbites into the conversation.

The third voice I'll call Google Journalism or Joogalism. Its the part that I don't care much for and yet is the bulk of the book. Bovard is the victim of the same problem of most current writers: fill the pages with endless factoids, each disconnected to the other, to prove a point that gets lost in minutia. These points are of value, yes. They are needed to illustrate and support an argument, yes. Yet it creates the very problem that the author (and many authors of today) are complaining about: people aren't involved. And no wonder--everywhere an American turns there is a firehose of disconnected pieces of information raining down on the them. These facts are great for those needing supporting evidence, but make lousy reading as a "story".

Overall, a great book and one you'll want to read if you want to understand how our nation is shifting political governance.

Book Description

Observations with X-ray satellite ROSAT over the past 5 years have established supersoft X-ray sources as a new class of objects in our Galaxy and beyond. Optical follow-up observations have revealed the binary nature of several of them. Recent population synthesis calculations have shown that the number of such binaries is expected to be considerably larger than those of the common low- and high-mass X-ray binaries. This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the many recent observational discoveries and theoretical investigations. It describes relations between supersoft sources and other areas in astrophysics. This volume also comprises a complete catalog of presently known supersoft sources including a comprehensive bibliography of observational results.

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