Politics Entertainment

Since 2001, the US Department of State has been sending hip hop artists abroad to perform and teach as goodwill ambassadors. There are good reasons for this: Hip hop is known and loved across the globe, acknowledged and appreciated as a product of American culture. Hip hop has from its beginning been a means of creating community through artistic collaboration, fostering what hip hop artists call building.

அடலஃப ஹடலர எநத ஒர பயரக கடடவடன உஙகள மனதல ஒர வறபப பரவம எனற கடடல, உலகம மழகக அனவரம சலலம பயர இததன. ஏன அபபட? கடககணககன மககளக கனற கவககம வற எபபட ஹடலரகக வநதத? யதரகள ஏன ஹடலர வடடயடனர?

Conventional wisdom holds that John F. Kennedy was the first celebrity president, in no small part because of his innate television savvy. But as Kathryn Brownell shows, Kennedy capitalized on a tradition and style rooted in California politics and the Hollywood studio system. Since the 1920s, politicians and professional showmen have developed relationships and built organizations institutionalizing Hollywood styles, structures, and personalities in the American political process.

Generation after generation, women have faced the devastating reality that Hollywood is a system built to keep them out. The films created by that system influence everything from our worldviews to our brain chemistry. When women's voices are excluded from the medium, the impact on society is immense. Actor, screenwriter, and award-winning independent filmmaker Naomi McDougall Jones takes us inside the cutthroat, scandal-laden film industry, where only five percent of top studio films are directed by women and less than 20 percent of leading characters in mainstream films are female.

In The Grouchy Historian, Ed Asner leads the charge for liberals to reclaim the Constitution from the right-wingers who use it as their justification for doing whatever terrible thing they want to do, which is usually to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. It's about time someone gave them hell and explained that Progressives can read, too.

When Anna Broinowski learned that fracking had invaded downtown Sydney, she had a brilliant idea: she would seek guidance for a kryptonite-powerful, anti-fracking movie from the world's greatest propaganda factory - apart from Hollywood. After two years of trying, she was allowed to make her case in Pyongyang and was granted full permission to film. She worked closely with the leading lights of North Korean cinema, even playing an American in a military thriller.

In Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity, Scott Balcerzak reads the performances of notable comedians such as W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello through humor and queer theory to expose a problematic history of maleness in their personas.

This is a collection of the writings of Tom Thurlow, a conservative columnist, attorney, and blog-master at Napa Whine Country. Produced in an informal and conversational style, the subjects covered include politics, movies and event reviews, "strong opinions on trivial subjects", and various unrelated humorous columns.

There has never been a show business book quite like The Show Won't Go On, the first comprehensive study of a bizarre phenomenon: performers who died onstage. From the comedy magician who dropped dead on live television to the amateur thespian who expired during a play called The Art of Murder, the book is a celebration of lives both famous and obscure, as well as a dramatic and accurate recounting of events leading to the moments they died "doing what they loved."

In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories we tell about celebrities and fans. The result: a high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable.

The Reagans is a penetrating portrayal of one of the most powerful couples of the 20th century. Distinguished biographer Anne Edwards paints the first in-depth, intimate portrait of the man who became our 40th president and the woman without whom he might never have reached such heights. It was a dramatic love story from the start: Nancy was always first in Reagan's thoughts, and he was paramount in Nancy's actions. But this obsessional love had a darker side for the four Reagan children.

Was It Yesterday? explores the impact of nostalgia in 21st-century American film and television. Cultural nostalgia, in both real and imagined forms, is dominant today, but what does the concentration on bringing back the past mean for an understanding of our cultural moment, and what are the consequences for viewers? This book questions the nature of this nostalgic phenomenon, the politics associated with it, and the significance of the different periods, in addition to offering counterarguments that see nostalgia as prevalent throughout film and television history.

Bank Job is a white-knuckle ride into the dark heart of the global financial system. Discover how art hacks life as artist and filmmaker duo Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn bring a community together to buy up and abolish crippling debt by printing their own money in a disused bank in East London. Behind the opaque language of loans and the defunct diagrams of debt, they discover a system flawed by design and ripe for hacking.

In late 1971 John Lennon left London behind and moved to New York, eager to join a youth movement rallying for social justice and an end to the Vietnam War. Lennon was quickly embraced by radicals and revolutionaries, the hippies and Yippies at odds with the establishment. Settling in Greenwich Village, the heart of Manhattan's counterculture, the former Beatle was soon on the frontlines of the antiwar movement and championing a range of causes and issues.

Conversations about gender equity in the workplace accelerated in the 2010s, with debates inside Hollywood specifically pointing to broader systemic problems of employment disparities and exploitative labor practices. Compounded by the devastating #MeToo revelations, these problems led to a wide-scale call for change. The Value Gap traces female-driven filmmaking across development, financing, production, film festivals, marketing, and distribution, examining the realities facing women working in the industry during this transformative moment.

Reality TV's influence is seismic: twenty-five years ago, the concept didn't exist. Yet today, it is one of the most powerful cultural forces on earth; a multi-billion-dollar machine. Despite that, it is often derided as "trash"; a cultural McDonalds not worthy of examination. The truth is that reality TV offers a profound insight into who we are as human beings, questioning the very nature of what we deem to be entertaining. Writer, broadcaster and reality TV-obsessive Jacques Peretti goes behind the scenes of a world that has entranced and consumed him for two decades.

Este libro analiza la metamorfosis del mito desde la leyenda del castillo de Transilvania hasta su reinterpretación animada en el cine. Los niños del pasado temían a los vampiros; los de hoy en día quieren ser uno. Y los adultos encuentran en su promesa de felicidad un refugio ante los empleos precarios, las relaciones tóxicas y las megacorporaciones que nos chupan la sangre a diario.

In a long line of beloved books, Loud Pictures stands as Marc Spitz’s final project. This big, broad, noisy, and expansive exploration of art marries the two things Marc loved most—movies and rock and roll. In many ways, films can become imprinted on our brains because of their soundtracks.

Black Panther is one of the most financially successful and culturally impactful films to emerge from the American film industry in recent years. When it was released in 2018 it broke numerous records and resonated with audiences all around the world. In Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon, author Terence McSweeney explores the film from a diverse range of perspectives, seeing it as not only a comic book adaptation and a superhero film, but also a dynamic contribution to the discourse of both African and African American studies.

After 26 years starring as nurse Lillian Raines on the hit soap opera Guiding Light, Tina Sloan knows a thing or two about surviving the pitfalls of growing older in front of the world. From depleted storylines, to transitioning from sizzling screen diva to a mature grandmother, Changing Shoes shows that even TV grandmothers can have style and flair.