Charles Krafft's Villa Delirium

Charles Krafft's Villa Delirium
Author: Mike McGee
Publisher: Last Gasp
Total Pages: 100
Release: 2002
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780867195743

Charles Krafft's one-of-a-kind artwork moves in provocative directions, combining the highbrow with the gruesome in such works as his Disasterware (Delft-style painted plates featuring catastrophes) and Sponeware ("the human bone china"). Krafft's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Artforum, and Juxtapoz. With 60 color photographs, the full range of his plates, paintings, and other creations is sampled in this book, which also includes biographical information on this remarkable self-taught painter. The Art of Charles Krafft documents Krafft's major shows and productions.

Villa of Delirium

Villa of Delirium
Author: Adrien Goetz
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1939931819

"Terrific."—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes and Letters to Camondo "Makes you want to travel, do somersaults and stretches, drink champagne in evening dress, read, think ... Intoxicating."—Publishers Weekly Along the French Riviera in the early 1900s, an illustrious family in thrall to classical antiquity builds a fabulous villa—a replica of a Greek palace, complete with marble columns and frescoes depicting mythological gods. The Reinachs--related to other wealthy Jews like the Rothschilds and the Ephrussis—attempt to recreate a "pure beauty" lost in the 20th century. The narrator of this brilliant novel calls the imposing house an act of delirium, "proof that one could travel back in time, just like resetting a clock, and resist the outside world." The story of the villa and its glamorous inhabitants is recounted by the son of a servant from the nearby estate of Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Paris tower, and the two contrasting structures present opposite responses to modernity. The son is adopted by the Reinachs, initiated into the era of Socrates and instructed in classical Greek. He joins a family pilgrimage to Athens, falls in love with a married woman, and survives the Nazi confiscation of the house and deportation to death camps of Reinach grandchildren. This is a Greek epic for the modern era.

The Man and the Snake

The Man and the Snake
Author: Ambrose Bierce
Publisher: Modernista
Total Pages: 11
Release: 2024-06-13
Genre:
ISBN: 918108028X

»The Man and the Snake« is a short story by Ambrose Bierce, originally published in 1893. AMBROSE BIERCE [1842-1914] was an American author, journalist, and war veteran. He was one of the most influential journalists in the United States in the late 19th century and alongside his success as a horror writer he was hailed as a pioneer of realism. Among his most famous works are The Devil's Dictionary and the short story »An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.«

The Vanished Collection

The Vanished Collection
Author: Pauline Baer de Perignon
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1939931991

"Engrossing ... The book reads like a detective story."―The Washington Post It all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss: Renoir, Monet, Degas, Tiepolo, and more. Pauline Baer de Perignon knew little to nothing about Strauss, or about his vanished, precious art collection. But the list drove her on a frenzied trail of research in the archives of the Louvre and the Dresden museums, through Gestapo records, and to consult with Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. What happened in 1942? And what became of the collection after Nazis seized her great-grandparents’ elegant Parisian apartment? The quest takes Pauline Baer de Perignon from the Occupation of France to the present day as she breaks the silence around the wrenching experiences her family never fully transmitted, and asks what art itself is capable of conveying over time.

Pollak's Arm

Pollak's Arm
Author: Hans von Trotha
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1954404018

"Enthralling ... A great read."—Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art October 16, 1943, inside the Vatican as darkness descends upon Rome. Having been alerted to the Nazi plan to round up the city’s Jewish population the next day, Monsignor F. dispatches an envoy to a nearby palazzo to bring Ludwig Pollak and his family to safety within the papal premises. But Pollak shows himself in no hurry to leave his home and accept the eleventh-hour offer of refuge. Pollak’s visitor is obliged to take a seat and listen as he recounts his life story: how he studied archaeology in Prague, his passion for Italy and Goethe, how he became a renowned antiquities dealer and advisor to great collectors like J. P. Morgan and the Austro-Hungarian emperor after his own Jewishness barred him from an academic career, and finally his spectacular discovery of the missing arm from the majestic ancient sculpture of Laocoön and his sons. Torn between hearing Pollak’s spellbinding tale and the urgent mission to save the archaeologist from certain annihilation, the Vatican’s anxious messenger presses him to make haste and depart. This stunning novel illuminates the chasm between civilization and barbarism by spotlighting a now little-known figure devoted to knowledge and the power of artistic creation.

Occupational Therapy for Older People

Occupational Therapy for Older People
Author: Christian Pozzi
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2020-01-31
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 3030357317

This book focuses on evidence-based occupational therapy in the care of older adults in different clinical settings, from home to acute hospital, from intensive care unit to rehabilitation centers and nursing homes. Occupational therapy has progressively developed as a new discipline aiming to improve the daily life of individuals of different ages, from children to older adults. The book first reviews the interaction between occupational therapy and geriatrics and then discusses in depth how occupational therapy interventions are applied in the community, in the acute hospital and in the nursing home. It highlights the key role of occupational therapy in the management of frail patients, including critically ill older patients and persons with dementia, and describes in detail how to maintain occupational therapy interventions across different settings to avoid the fragmentation of care. The ageing population requires new innovative approaches to improve the quality of life, and as such this book provides clinicians with handy, key information on how to implement occupational therapy in the daily clinical care of older adults based on the current scientific evidence.

Tangier

Tangier
Author: Josh Shoemake
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2013-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857733761

An edge city, poised at the northernmost tip of Africa but just nine miles from Europe, Tangier is more than a destination, it is an escape. The Interzone, as William Burroughs called it, has attracted spies, outlaws, outcasts and writers for centuries – men and women breaking through artistic borders. The results were some of the most incendiary and influential books of our time and the list of outlaw originals is long, stretching from Ibn Battuta and Alexandre Dumas to Twain and Wharton and from the darkly brilliant Beats of Bowles, Kerouac, Gysin and Ginsberg to the great Moroccan novelists: Mohamed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet and Tahar Ben Jelloun.

The Darkroom

The Darkroom
Author: Marguerite Duras
Publisher: Contra Mundum Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2021-04-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781940625447

THE DARKROOM contains the script for Duras' 1977 radically experimental film Le camion (The Truck), as well as four manifesto-like propositions in which Duras protests that most movies "beat the imagination to death" because they "are the same every time they are played." She also accuses the gatekeepers of traditional cinema of treating intelligence as if it were a "class phenomenon" and distinguishes her own approach: a cinema based on ideas and sensory experience. In the dialogue with Michelle Porte at the end of the book, Duras further describes her filmmaking style, discussing everything from her biography to her critique of Marxism. Much of the film consists of the sounds and images of a truck rumbling through an industrial landscape dotted with dilapidated, immigrant shantytowns. Periodically, the images of the truck are interrupted by cutaways of Duras and Gérard Depardieu sitting in Duras' living room, reading from a script that includes a dialogue between a staunchly communist truck driver and an anonymous, ethnically-unidentifiable woman who stands in as an alter-ego for Duras and at the same time is a substitute for "everyone." Neither of the characters are ever shown on-screen. Via an afterimage effect, the juxtaposed voice-over text and cutaways help the film's audience members project their own images of the truck driver and hitchhiker onto the screen. The truck driver quickly decides the hitchhiker is "a reactionary" suffering from some kind of "mental disturbance." Using the "mad," uneducated woman (who, is, nevertheless, interested in everything from the position of the earth in the universe to politics to such august personalities as Proust, Corneille, and Marx), Duras criticizes the invasion of Prague by the Soviets in 1968 and its support by the French Communist Party. Between the images of the truck, juxtaposed voice-overs, and cutaways to Duras and Depardieu, the art of film becomes the art of opening audience members to the possibility of engaging multiple faculties-not only the visual and the aural, but also memory, imagination, and desire.