Over the past two decades, independent director Gregg Araki has emerged as one of the most intriguing auteurs of contemporary U.S. cinema. A leading figure of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Araki is known for his innovative, eye-opening, and at-times-controversial films aimed primarily at queer audiences. Images for a Generation Doomed: The Films and Career of Gregg Araki explores the films and career trajectory to date of this New Queer Cinema pioneer. Offering in-depth analyses of films such as The Living End, Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere, and Splendor, Kylo-Patrick R. Hart demonstrates how, over the course of the 1990s, the director's cinematic offerings became increasingly devoid of their early subversive potential. Hart goes on to argue that as the 1990s progressed, Araki's films were largely irrelevant to the cultural project of providing groundbreaking on-screen representations of non-heterosexual individuals living in the age of AIDS. However, Hart sees Mysterious Skin as evidence of Araki's successful attempt at reestablishing his cinematic and cultural relevancy in relation to the approaches and subject matter of contemporary queer cinema in the new millennium.

Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to co-create the most notoriously successful game franchises in history—Doom and Quake—until the games they made tore them apart. Americans spend more money on video games than on movie tickets. Masters of Doom is the first book to chronicle this industry’s greatest story, written by one of the medium’s leading observers. David Kushner takes readers inside the rags-to-riches adventure of two rebellious entrepreneurs who came of age to shape a generation. The vivid portrait reveals why their games are so violent and why their immersion in their brilliantly designed fantasy worlds offered them solace. And it shows how they channeled their fury and imagination into products that are a formative influence on our culture, from MTV to the Internet to Columbine. This is a story of friendship and betrayal, commerce and artistry—a powerful and compassionate account of what it’s like to be young, driven, and wildly creative. “To my taste, the greatest American myth of cosmogenesis features the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy who, in the insular laboratory of his own bedroom, invents the universe from scratch. Masters of Doom is a particularly inspired rendition. Dave Kushner chronicles the saga of video game virtuosi Carmack and Romero with terrific brio. This is a page-turning, mythopoeic cyber-soap opera about two glamorous geek geniuses—and it should be read while scarfing down pepperoni pizza and swilling Diet Coke, with Queens of the Stone Age cranked up all the way.”—Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams

A collection of essays by Hunter Thompson that chart the high and low moments of his thirty-year career as a journalist

A Collection of Essays

Susan Sontag meets Hanif Abdurraqib in this fascinating exploration of the unexpected connections between how we consume images and the insidious nature of Fascism. Images come at us quickly, often without context. A photograph of Syrian children suffering in the wake of a chemical attack segues into a stranger’s pristine Instagram selfie. Before we can react to either, a new meme induces a laugh and a share. While such constant give and take might seem innocent, even entertaining, this barrage of content numbs our ability to examine critically how the world, broken down into images, affects us. Images without context isolate us, turning everything we experience into mere transactions. It is exactly this alienation that leaves us vulnerable to fascism—a reactionary politics that is destroying not only our lives and our nations, but also the planet’s very ability to sustain human civilization. Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism. Learning how to ethically engage with the world around us is the first line of defense we have against the forces threatening to tear that world apart.

Boulding discusses the image as the key to understanding society and human behavior

With the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe and the related imposition of colonial rule in much of East Asia, both Europe and East Asia have intertwined histories that continue to shape their political thinking and political decision making. The contemporary interactions of the two regions – now once again major trading partners – will both depend upon and facilitate deeper understandings of their respective sets of national pasts. This book compares national pasts as well as the current processes of change taking place in Europe and East Asia, including the dynamics of the European Union in Europe and the re-emergence of the historical centre of China in East Asia. It argues that as the change unfolds in the economic, social and political fields, the various national pasts embedded with the polities of the two regions will also need to be revisited and reworked. This book makes an invaluable contribution to research on comparative politics, as well as studies on South East Asia and Europe.