A cultural phenomenon for a decade, Friends ranked in the top ten for every year of its original run, an accomplishment unmatched by any other scripted series. And more than twenty-five years since its theme song promised “I’ll be there for you,� Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, and Ross are still entertaining audiences around the world. As the characters maneuvered their ways through dating, love, and the occasional conflict, their loyalty to each remained steadfast. In Friends: A Cultural History, Jennifer Dunn explores why the show immediately took hold of viewers and how the series remained must-see TV for so long. Dunn examines the cultural landscape that allowed a show not centered on traditional sitcom norms of family and career to become such a critical and commercial success. The author also addresses how the show’s complicated depictions of gender roles and class distinctions—as well as its lack of ethnic diversity—did not detract from its popularity. In addition to exploring memorable plotlines, cherished moments, and the quirks of the principal players, this book analyzes the show’s enduring cultural relevance. Featuring a discussion of the show’s 25 best episodes, Friends: A Cultural History offers an engaging look at the series that has resonated with generations of television viewers.

Reimagining: New Perspectives features more than 120 of the latest acquisitions by the UBS Art Collection, one of the largest and most important corporate collections in the world. Inspired by a recent UBS Art Gallery exhibition of the same title, this book features works by acclaimed artists who offer new and diverse perspectives based on their distinct backgrounds and experiences, inviting us to reimagine our world. With an accompanying essay by Global Head of the UBS Art Collection, Mary Rozell, this unique survey of works acquired in the past seven years provides a rare insight into the acquisition direction of the preeminent global collection. Artworks are displayed in UBS offices globally, serving as an inspiration for employees and a platform for dialogue with clients and the public. It incorporates key works from UBS collections in both Europe and the US as well as new acquisitions—mirroring today’s global business. Artists whose works are featured in the book include: Derrick Adams, Rana Begum, Jose Dávila, Latifa Echakhch, Theaster Gates, Lauren Halsey, Kapwani Kiwanga, Tyler Mitchell, Zanele Muholi, Adam Pendleton, Farah Al Qasimi, Amy Sherald, Shinique Smith, Mika Tajima, Stanley Whitney, Wu Chi-Tsung, Yin Xiuzhen, and Haegue Yang.

Besides the overwhelming amount of visual information that can stand in the way of a pleasant museum visit, there’s another trivial matter: meaning. Many of us aim to understand and categorize everything we see, but what do you truly think when looking at a particular artwork? The activities on these cards help you to establish a connection with an artwork yourself, despite any given information. You can do this in each museum, anywhere in the world. Follow the activities from A-Z, choose one randomly or do the ones who appeal to you most.

One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time * One of The Economist's Best Books of 2022 * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Nominated for The Next Big Idea Club * The Week Magazine Book of the Week From Alec Nevala-Lee, the author of the Hugo and Locus Award finalist Astounding, comes a revelatory biography of the visionary designer who defined the rules of startup culture and shaped America’s idea of the future.  During his lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century. As the architectural designer and futurist best known for the geodesic dome, he enthralled a vast popular audience, inspired devotion from both the counterculture and the establishment, and was praised as a modern Leonardo da Vinci. To his admirers, he exemplified what one man could accomplish by approaching urgent design problems using a radically unconventional set of strategies, which he based on a mystical conception of the universe’s geometry. His views on sustainability, as embodied in the image of Spaceship Earth, convinced him that it was possible to provide for all humanity through the efficient use of planetary resources. From Epcot Center to the molecule named in his honor as the buckyball, Fuller’s legacy endures to this day, and his belief in the transformative potential of technology profoundly influenced the founders of Silicon Valley. Inventor of the Future is the first authoritative biography to cover all aspects of Fuller’s career. Drawing on meticulous research, dozens of interviews, and thousands of unpublished documents, Nevala-Lee has produced a riveting portrait that transcends the myth of Fuller as an otherworldly generalist. It reconstructs the true origins of his most famous inventions, including the Dymaxion Car, the Wichita House, and the dome itself; his fraught relationships with his students and collaborators; his interactions with Frank Lloyd Wright, Isamu Noguchi, Clare Boothe Luce, John Cage, Steve Jobs, and many others; and his tumultuous private life, in which his determination to succeed on his own terms came at an immense personal cost. In an era of accelerating change, Fuller’s example remains enormously relevant, and his lessons for designers, activists, and innovators are as powerful and essential as ever. 

Though best known for its horror films, Hammer produced a wide variety of movies in many genres. The British studio was famous for its exciting stories and expert action--all on very small budgets and short shooting schedules. From The Public Life of Henry the Ninth (1935) to The Lady Vanishes (1978), this is the definitive work on Hammer's 165 films. Complete filmographic data are provided for each film, including release dates in both the United Kingdom and the United States, running time, length, distributor, complete cast and production credits, and alternate titles. These data are followed by an extensive plot synopsis, including contemporary critical commentary and behind-the-scenes information from many of the players and crew members.

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and NPR In this genre-defying “new kind of history� (The New Yorker), the chief film critic of Slate places comedy legend and acclaimed filmmaker Buster Keaton’s unique creative genius in the context of his time. Born the same year as the film industry in 1895, Buster Keaton began his career as the child star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville. Beginning in his early twenties, he enjoyed a decade-long stretch as the director, star, stuntman, editor, and all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The General, and The Cameraman. Even through his dark middle years as a severely depressed alcoholic finding work on the margins of show business, Keaton’s life had a way of reflecting the changes going on in the world around him. He found success in three different mediums at their creative peak: first vaudeville, then silent film, and finally the experimental early years of television. Over the course of his action-packed seventy years on earth, his life trajectory intersected with those of such influential figures as the escape artist Harry Houdini, the pioneering Black stage comedian Bert Williams, the television legend Lucille Ball, and literary innovators like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett. In Camera Man, film critic Dana Stevens pulls the lens out from Keaton’s life and work to look at concurrent developments in entertainment, journalism, law, technology, the political and social status of women, and the popular understanding of addiction. With erudition and sparkling humor, Stevens hopscotches among disciplines to bring us up to the present day, when Keaton’s breathtaking (and sometimes life-threatening) stunts remain more popular than ever as they circulate on the internet in the form of viral gifs. Far more than a biography or a work of film history, Camera Man is a wide-ranging meditation on modernity that paints a complex portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist.

'A wholly delightful novel' Allan Massie, Scotsman Lily Crawford and Jeanie Taylor, from very different backgrounds, are firm friends from their childhoods in Kirkcudbright. They share their ambitions for their futures, Lily to be an artist, Jeanie to be a dancer. The two women's eventful lives are intertwined. In the years before the First World War, the girls lose touch when Jeanie runs away from home and joins a dance company, while Lily attends The Mack, Glasgow's famous school of art designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. A chance meeting reunites them and together they discover a Glasgow at the height of its wealth and power as the Second City of the Empire - and a city of poverty and overcrowding. Separated once again after the war, Lily and Jeanie find themselves on opposite sides of the world. Lily follows her husband to Shanghai while Jeanie's dance career brings her international fame. But the glamour and dissolution of 1920s Shanghai finally lead Lily into peril. Her only hope of survival lies with her old friend Jeanie, as the two women turn to desperate measures to free Lily from danger. Inspired by the eventful and colourful lives of the pioneering women artists The Glasgow Girls, particularly that of Eleanor Allen Moore, Daisy Chain is a story of independence, women's art, resilience and female friendship, set against the turbulent background of the early years of the 20th century.

A stunning photo album exploring the beauty of Australia riding a Ducati.

The urge for travel and adventure, for freedom and discovery has always impelled men to move on, cross oceans and continents, climb mountains and brave deserts. This is a story that celebrates power and grandeur, set on the dirt roads that cross the remote territories of Australia. Two motorcyclists recount in real time their adventures at the wheels of their Ducati Multistrada bikes. Riding along some of the world’s wildest and most beautiful dirt roads, they encounter the kangaroos, parrots, shimmering deserts and the forests of Australia. The motorcyclists – with their bikes, their faces strained by fatigue, their shining eyes and emotion-filled smiles – manage to perform magic, transforming the road into a journey.

Since 1953, the ars viva visual arts prize has been awarded to outstanding young artists living in Germany, whose works of art demonstrate an independent formal language and an awareness of contemporary issues. This year, the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft is distinguishing Rob Crosse (*1985), Richard Sides (*1985), and Sung Tieu (*1987) with the 2021 ars viva prize. Text in English and German.

Drawing was Leonardo da Vinci s primary artistic activity. He used drawing to think, to explore the world around him and to develop his other artistic projects. His drawings are among the most diverse and technically accomplished in the entire history of art, and the Royal Collection holds by far the most important selection of these.

This book provides an authoritative account of Leonardo s work and represents the full breadth of his interests including maps and botanical sketches, anatomical illustrations and studies of the face, scientific drawings and engineering designs.

Francesco Rosi is one of the great realist artists of post-war Italian, indeed post-war world cinema. In this book, author Gaetana Marrone explores the rich visual language in which the Neapolitan filmmaker expresses the cultural icons that constitute his style and images. Over the years, Rosi has offered us films that trace an intricate path between the real and the fictive, the factual and the imagined. His films show an extraordinarily consistent formal balance while representing historical events as social emblems that examine, shape, and reflect the national self. They rely on a labyrinthine narrative structure, in which the sense of an enigma replaces the unidirectional path leading ineluctably to a designated end and solution. Rosi's logical investigations are conducted by an omniscient eye and translated into a cinematic approach that embraces the details of material reality with the panoramic perspective of a dispassionate observer. This book offers intertextual analyses within such fields as history, politics, literature, and photography, along with production information gleaned from Rosi's personal archives and interviews. It examines Rosi's creative use of film as document, and as spectacle). It is also a study of the specific cinematic techniques that characterize Rosi's work and that visually, compositionally, express his vision of history and the elusive "truth" of past and present social and political realities.

'Heart-breaking and uplifting, I defy anyone to read this memoir and not be affected by O'Callaghan's honesty and humanity' Irish Times In 2018, after receiving a life-changing diagnosis, broadcaster Gareth O'Callaghan retired from full-time work and gave up the career that he had loved for decades. In this deeply personal and inspiring memoir he tells that story, from the moments after his doctor uttered the words Multiple System Atrophy - a progressive and incurable neurological disease that ultimately carries a fatal prognosis - to his struggle to come to terms with a life unplanned. Recounted with insight and searing honesty, What Matters Now reveals how, regardless of circumstance, we can choose how we live, to the fullest. A stunning and life-affirming account of the power of the human spirit, and the potential for hope even in the darkest times. "For me, this is not a choice. It's all I want, namely a full and loving life that I strive to choose every day over everything else - considering that maybe the big odds are heavily stacked against that. But I don't care what the odds might be; I'll keep defying them for as long as I can keep fighting and living."

This three-staged memory game invites you to observe masterpieces closely. Historically, a masterpiece was a work of a very high standard, produced in order to obtain membership of a guild or academy. Since the author never went to art school, her untrained eye wondered: "How should I look at art in order to fully appreciate it?" Trying to answer this question, she decided to design a system of observation based on different steps: games and activities following a set scheme that triggers the player to look at a masterpiece on a different scale. Pixel-Art Game allows you to zoom into these Dutch Masterpieces. Match the original image with its pixelated copies by zooming into Van Gogh's famous Cafe Terrace at Night. The painter's colour and use of light are emphasised through the pixels of the digitalised image, taking art into our contemporary digital language. With light packaging, perfect to take along with you, the Pixel-Art Game offers several games in one set. Each of these 3 games is a step towards understanding the artwork better, and they can be played with multiple players.

The treatment—and mistreatment—of women throughout history continues to be a necessary topic of discussion, in order for progress to be made and equality to be achieved. While current articles and books expose troubling truths of the gender divide, modern cinema continues to provide problematic depictions of such behavior—with a few heartening exceptions. The Encyclopedia of Sexism in American Films closely examines the many, pervasive forms of sexism in contemporary productions—from clueless comedies to superhero blockbusters. In more than 130 entries, this volume explores a number of cinematic grievances including: ·the objectification of women’s bodies ·the limited character types available for female performers ·the lack of sexual diversity on the screen ·the limited range of desirable traits for female performers ·the use of gratuitous sex ·the narrow focus on heteronormative depictions of courtship and romance The films discussed here include As Good as It Gets (1999), Beauty and The Beast (2017), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Do the Right Thing (1989), Easy A (2010), The Forty-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Hidden Figures (2016), Lost in Translation (2003), Mulholland Drive (2001), Showgirls (1995), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Star Wars (1977), Thelma & Louise (1991), Tootsie (1982), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), and 9 to 5 (1980). By digging deeply into more insidious forms of sexual/gender discrimination, this book illuminates one more aspect of women’s lives that deserves to be understood. Offering insights and analysis from more than fifty contributors, The Encyclopedia of Sexism in American Films will appeal to scholars of cinema, gender studies, women’s studies, and cultural history.

An eye-opening portrait of a vibrant film culture, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film is the most comprehensive study of the Japanese filmmaking scene yet written. Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp explore the astounding resurgence of Japanese cinema, both live action and animated, profiling 19 contemporary Japanese filmmakers, from the well-known (Kitano, Miike, Miyazaki) to the up-and-coming (Naomi Kawase, Satoshi Kon, Shinya Tsukamoto) and reviewing 97 of their recent films. With 100+ images from behind and in front of the camera, this is a book any film lover will savor. Foreword by Hideo Nakata, director of Ring. Tom Mes (in Paris) and Jasper Sharp (in Tokyo) co-edit Midnighteye.com, the premier English-language website on Japanese cinema.

In recent years, puppetry has enjoyed a huge revival on the stages of our theatres, dance venues and opera houses. Large-scale productions such as War Horse and The Lion King have revitalized age-old techniques to attract new audiences and develop the power of storytelling. Puppetry is now seen not only as a specialist art form that exists on its own, but also as a vital tool in the armoury of theatrical storytellers. A Practical Guide to Puppetry offers a comprehensive overview to this versatile art form, exploring established techniques and offering expert instruction on styles from shadow puppetry to group puppetry. Each method is illustrated with practical and accessible exercises, achievable either individually or in a group workshop or rehearsal. With over eighty exercises for improvising, training, designing and directing puppetry, accompanied by 400 illustrations, this new book gives a complete approach to puppeteering with objects, simple puppets and puppets with mechanisms.

A full color collection of over 325 images- covering ALL the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft arranged in the order in which the stories were written. The book also features notes. sketches and an intro by S. T. Joshi. Pete Von Sholly has storyboarded over 100 films including THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, MARS ATTACKS!, DARKMAN, and THE MIST. His work has also been seen in his satiric magazines as well as Last Gasp's FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE and NEUROCOMICS, which he did with Timothy Leary.

Initially created to counteract broadcasts from Nazi Germany, the BBC’s Eastern Service became a cauldron of global modernism and an unlikely nexus of artistic exchange. Directed at an educated Indian audience, its programming provided remarkable moments: Listeners in India heard James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake on the eve of independence, as well as the literary criticism of E. M. Forster and the works of Indian writers living in London. In Radio Empire, Daniel Ryan Morse demonstrates the significance of the Eastern Service for global Anglophone literature and literary broadcasting. He traces how modernist writers used radio to experiment with form and introduce postcolonial literature to global audiences. While innovative authors consciously sought to incorporate radio’s formal features into the novel, literature also exerted a reciprocal and profound influence on twentieth-century broadcasting. Reading Joyce and Forster alongside Attia Hosain, Mulk Raj Anand, and Venu Chitale, Morse demonstrates how the need to appeal to listeners at the edges of the empire pushed the boundaries of literary work in London, inspired high-cultural broadcasting in England, and formed an invisible but influential global network. Adding a transnational perspective to scholarship on radio modernism, Radio Empire demonstrates how the history of broadcasting outside of Western Europe offers a new understanding of the relationship between colonial center and periphery.

An exciting, unexpected, and beautiful encounter with one collector’s deeply personal assemblage of works. Since the 1980s, Mickey Cartin has assembled a remarkable collection of objects and art—Renaissance and modernist paintings, master prints, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, and more. Exploring the theory behind collecting art and how Cartin’s approach to collecting diverges from common practices, this publication offers a unique perspective on an intimate practice. Unconcerned with hewing to specific categories, time periods, or media, Cartin’s collection—which includes the likes of Josef Albers, Sol Lewitt, and Forrest Bess—creates active combinations and disrupts homogeneity, privileging the drive of curiosity. A documentation of the celebrated exhibition Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection at David Zwirner, New York, in 202, this catalogue includes additional artworks from Cartin’s trove along with views of his home, conveying how he lives with these various types of work. Cartin selected each work in the exhibition and catalogue as a reflection of his deep connections with the many artists represented therein. The conversation between Cartin and David Leiber illuminates the tensions between study and instinct, reading versus experiencing, as well as the influences and figures that inform his personal, curatorial practice. With an introduction by the curator of the Cartin Collection, Steven Holmes, and a text from the art historian Luke Syson, this inspiring volume is a spirited investigation of a very different method of and approach to collecting.

The Twilight Zone has evolved from a groundbreaking speculative television series into a cultural phenomenon. The recently revived series on FOX averaged 4.6 million viewers on its first episode. Indeed, the title itself conjures up thoughts of fantastic stories that bridge several forms of fiction to create a unique genre of morality tales with a touch of irony, unlimited by the boundaries of conventional fiction. Broadcast from 1959 to 1964, the show has run ever since in syndication, making it one of the longest running television shows of all time, creating a new genre of shows similar to the X-Files and Twin Peaks. Five writers created the core of the show, and together these men fashioned the bulk of the 156 original episodes: Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson, and Earl Hamner. All went on to other projects in film, television, theater, and print, but their involvement in the Twilight Zone is well known to fans of the series. The Twilight Zone Scripts of Earl Hamner contains reprints of the eight episodes written by Hamner, along with Albarella's commentary on each story: The Hunt, "" ""A Piano in the House, "" ""Jess-Belle, "" ""Ring-a-Ding Girl, "" ""You Drive, "" ""Black Leather Jackets, "" ""Stopover in a Quiet Town, "" and ""The Bewitchin' Pool."" Also included is a ""lost"" Twilight Zone short story by Mr. Hamner and an interview with Albarella that covers the background details of how Hamner became involved in the series.""