This notebook features a beautiful cover illustration by acclaimed nature artist Jane Smith. It contains 192 pages of lined paper, head-and-tail bans, a ribbon marker and band to keep it securely fastened.

It started in 1978 with an ordinary coffee shop near Kyoto. Word spread that the waitresses wore no panties under their miniskirts. Similar establishments popped up across the country. Men waited in line outside to pay three times the usual coffee price just to be served by a panty-free young woman. Within a few years, a new craze took hold: the no-panties "massage" parlor. Increasingly bizarre services followed, from fondling clients through holes in coffins to commuter-train fetishists. One particularly popular destination was a Tokyo club called "Lucky Hole" where clients stood on one side of a plywood partition, a hostess on the other. In between them was a hole big enough for a certain part of the male anatomy. Taking the Lucky Hole as his title, Nobuyoshi Araki captures Japan's sex industry in full flower, documenting in more than 800 photos the pleasure-seekers and providers of Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood before the February 1985 New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act put a stop to many of the country's sex locales. Through mirrored walls, bed sheets, the bondage and the orgies, this is the last word on an age of bacchanalia, infused with moments of humor, precise poetry, and questioning interjections. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

This is a sequel to Richard Viladesau's well-received study, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance. It continues his project of presenting theological history by using art as both an independent religious or theological "text" and as a means of understanding the cultural context for academic theology. Viladesau argues that art and symbolism function as alternative strands of theological expression sometimes parallel to, sometimes interwoven with, and sometimes in tension with formal theological reflection on the meaning of crucifixion and its role in salvation history.
This book examines the two great revolutionary movements that gave birth to the modern West: the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. This period was eventful for both theology and art, and thus particularly fruitful for Viladesau's project.
Using individual works of art, over sixty of which are reproduced in this book, to epitomize particular artistic and theological models, he explores the contours of each paradigm through the works of representative theologians as well as liturgical, poetic, artistic, and musical sources. To name a few examples, the theologies of Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, and the Council of Trent, are examined in correlation to the new situation of art in the era of Fra Angelico, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Durer, Cranach, and the Mannerists.
In this book, Viladesau continues to deepen our understanding of the foremost symbol of Christianity.

This volume contains the Syriac text of one of Dionysius bar Salibi's polemical writings, that against the Jews, based on a manuscript now located at the Harvard Semitic Museum. An English translation was promised by the editor, but never appeared.

This notebook features a beautiful cover illustration by acclaimed nature artist Jane Smith. It contains 192 pages of lined paper, head-and-tail bans, a ribbon marker and band to keep it securely fastened.

This notebook features a beautiful cover illustration by acclaimed nature artist Jane Smith. It contains 192 pages of lined paper, head-and-tail bans, a ribbon marker and band to keep it securely fastened.

The Lives of Chinese Objectsis a fascinating book. It is the result of excellent historical research as well as curatorial expertise. The reader is taken on an amazing journey starting with the startling discovery of the image of five Chinese bronzes on display as part of the Great Exhibition in 1851...The stories uncovered are riveting, a mix of curatorial detail and description, historical research and theoretical analysis. This book is beautifully written - clear, detailed and informative. The author is ever present in the text and the book is as much a story of her journey, as it is a story of the lives of the 'Putuo Five'. I just wanted to keep reading." . Suzanne MacLeod, University of Leicester

This is the biography of a set of rare Buddhist statues from China. Their extraordinary adventures take them from the Buddhist temples of fifteenth-century Putuo - China's most important pilgrimage island - to their seizure by a British soldier in the First Opium War in the early 1840s, and on to a starring role in the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the 1850s, they moved in and out of dealers' and antiquarian collections, arriving in 1867 at Liverpool Museum. Here they were re-conceptualized as specimens of the 'Mongolian race' and, later, as examples of Oriental art. The statues escaped the bombing of the Museum during the Second World War and lived out their existence for the next sixty years, dismembered, corroding and neglected in the stores, their histories lost and origins unknown.

As the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum, the author became fascinated by these bronzes, and selected them for display in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. In 2005, quite by chance, the discovery of a lithograph of the figures on prominent display in the Great Exhibition enabled the remarkable lives of these statues to be reconstructed.

We have grown accustomed to the ubiquity of corporate influence in retail outlets, restaurants, and even higher education-but what happens when corporations take over desire? The Naked Result: How Exotic Dance Became Big Business explores the changing world of striptease, tracing its path from the unruly underground to brightly lit, branded "gentlemen's clubs." Drawing on her own experience as an exotic dancer, Jessica Berson examines the ways that striptease embodies conflicting notions of race, class, and female sexuality, and how the exotic dance industry deploys these differences to codify and commodify our erotic imagination. Chain clubs, fitness programs, and music videos are moving exotic dance into the mainstream, and stripping its historical potential to embody and express subversive desires-erotic and otherwise-and generate resistant modes of female erotic subjectivity. Through case studies including Boston's Combat Zone in the 1970s-80s, the development of lap dancing in London in the 1990s, and the triumph of corporate striptease in post-Giuliani New York City in the last decade, The Naked Result reveals an industry that increasingly eradicates individuality and agency in order to increase profits. Ultimately, The Naked Result argues that corporatization has cheerfully smothered the diversity of sexual desire and expression for both dancers and customers, repackaging the most mysterious human emotions into easily branded experiences no more personal or powerful than those to be found in any themed restaurant or coffee mega-chain.

This monograph explores the history of the Coptic tradition of John's gospel, considering when these ancient Egyptian witnesses are profitable for determining the earliest readings of their Greek source text. The standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament cites the Coptic versions no fewer than 1,000 times in John's gospel. For these citations, that edition references six dialectally distinct Coptic translations: the Achmimic, Bohairic, Lycopolitan (Subachmimic), Middle Egyptian Fayumic, Proto-Bohairic, and Sahidic versions. In addition to examining these, this project considers newly published texts from the Fayumic and Middle Egyptian traditions. Apart from a pivotal article on Coptic and New Testament textual criticism by Gerd Mink in 1972, Coptological research has progressed with only limited contact with Greek textual criticism. The discovery of various apocryphal Christian texts in Coptic translations has further diverted attention from Greek textual criticism. This project contributes to this subject area by applying recent advances in Coptology, and exploring the various facets of the Coptic translations. In particular, the monograph investigates (1) translation technique, (2) Greek-Coptic linguistic differences, (3) the reliability of the Coptic manuscript tradition, (4) the relationships between the Coptic versions, and (5) relevant contributions from the scholarly community. John's gospel is extant in more Coptic dialectal versions than any other biblical text. As a result, the gospel offers unique insight into the nature of the ancient Egyptian Christian communities.

Learn how to paint birds in watercolour without even trying! Using a simple ten-step process, learn how to draw a basic outline starting with simple shapes, then add washes of colour and fine details to complete your work. Arranged in three chapters based on skill level, this book features 25 lovely projects, each showing you how to paint a bird in ten steps. There are paint swatches for every bird, showing you the colours you need to mix for each step and the finished painting serves as a reference to guide you. It couldn't be easier! Also included is a useful techniques section at the beginning, and clever painting tips from the author throughout the book. With birds as diverse as an Atlantic puffin, a barn owl, a hummingbird and a bald eagle, there is plenty to choose from and practise with, to develop your skills.

James Cameron's epic blockbuster Titanic enjoyed a wave of popularity like few other films, touching profoundly the hearts and imaginations of millions the world over. Why? What was it about this movie that resonated so deeply with young and old, rich and poor, men and women alike? In her thought-provoking book, Teresa L. Major opens our eyes to the deeper truths behind the movie's success, truths larger than the movie itself, the truths for which every human heart hungers. The love of Rose and Jack reflects that greatest of all loves, the love of Christ for His Church. God's love for us is so unstoppable that He uses even the secular elements of our current culture to convey His everlasting truths. Teresa L. Major and her husband Jim currently reside in Denver with their twelve children.

Ranunculus offers advice on how to care for and propagate these colourful cultivated members of the buttercup family. Naomi Slade explores a wide range of ranunculus species and cultivars, all beautifully photographed by Georgianna Lane in their technicolour glory from palest pink to deep burgundy via white, orange, red and yellow. Pert as a rosebud and blousy as a dahlia, Ranunculus asiaticus is the flower of the moment. From ancestors that grew wild in the eastern Mediterranean, these Persian buttercups have been bred and selected to create fully double blooms; with layers of delicate, tissue-paper petals sculpted to perfection and available in a range of colours to suit any occasion. The buttercup family is a huge and diverse one, however, and the genus Ranunculus contains not just these exotic florists' darlings, but a whole range of their close relatives too. Some are familiar: when fields and lawns are sprinkled with golden meadow buttercups, we can be sure that spring has arrived. Yet there are also rare mountain blooms, perched on crags and fed by the melting snow, and forms of Ranunculus that thrive in pond margins or flourish in fast-flowing streams. Naomi Slade explores the world of buttercups, from their wild origins to their most successfully cultivated and most popular forms. Some are easy to grow, some less so, and this book offers tips and advice to help the reader embrace not just those near-wild forms that lend themselves to naturalistic planting schemes, and the exquisite, collectible alpines, but also the brilliant, desirable, Persian buttercups that are so perfect for cutting and arranging.

Including both narratives and visual texts by and about Latina women, Amador Gomez-Quintero and Perez Bustillo address the question of how women represent themselves. Utilizing paintings, novels, photographs, memoirs, and diaries this work examines the depiction of the female body in 20th-century creative expression. From writers such as Julia Alvarez and Christina Garcia to artists including Frida Kahlo and Ana Mendieta, it provides both a broad outline and a finely detailed exploration of how a largely overlooked community of creative women have seen, drawn, photographed, and written about their own experience.

The authors discuss women as both agent and subject of artistic representation often comparing both fictional and nonfictional versions of the same woman. Not only do they analyze Elena Poniatowska's "Dear Diego," which centers on artist Angelina Beloff, but they also analyze Beloff's own memoirs. Continuing in this style, they make further comparisons between Frida Kahlo's "Diary" and visual images of her body. Connections such as these are what make their work not merely an articulation of imagery but an explanation of ideas.