John Powers is a keen observer of pop culture and a critic-at-large for NPR's Fresh Air. His writing delves into the intersection of film and politics, offering sharp insights into contemporary society. Powers's work, featured in numerous prominent publications, provides a thoughtful examination of cultural trends and their broader implications.
Navigating the unique culture of Boston is a central theme in this guide, which offers insights from a local's perspective. John Powers shares over fifty years of experience, highlighting the city's distinct customs, transportation, and culinary scene. Accompanied by lively illustrations from Peter Wallace, the book provides practical tips for visitors, such as understanding local slang and the city's geography. It captures the pride of Bostonians and reveals why Boston is often seen as a trendsetter in the U.S.
"In 1972, the filmmaker John Luther Schofill lured two promising students, Bill Brand and Louis Hock, to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to join the newly inaugurated film department. Brand was tantalized by the prospect of getting his hands on the school's optical printer, which would allow him to submit his images to repetition, multiplication, and other forms of synthetic transformation through rephotography. For several years, the promise of rephotography had inspired Brand to invent one-off devices for his own films and those of Paul Sharits, his mentor at Antioch College. Upon arrival in Chicago, however, Brand learned that, in fact, no printer existed--he had been recruited to build one. Meanwhile, Hock found himself in need of a financial stipend. At Schofill's behest, the pair was charged with fashioning a newly purchased Mauer camera and a heavy industrial lathe bed into a do-it-yourself (DIY) optical printer--"one piece at a time, putting things in place, modified as we went along," Hock recalled. Homemade optical printers (and their mass-produced offshoot, the JK optical printer) were appearing at other schools, too, providing the first generation of experimental film students with easier access to the technology. Within a decade, the optical printer became a mainstay of MFA programs and filmmaker's cooperatives, as fundamental to avant-garde practice as Bolex cameras and reversal stocks. Meanwhile, the practice itself became routinized, a skill that could be acquired. In hindsight, P. Adams Sitney remarked, "just as rapid editing with invisible splice marks had, for many filmmakers, become a mark of aesthetic authority in the early sixties, optical printing represented technical mastery in the seventies." His observation affirms that technical sophistication had become an important distinction in experimental filmmaking, but it also suggests that the optical printer came to instantiate aesthetic, cultural, and even philosophical values. What were these values, and where did they come from?"-- Provided by publisher
Taking a multi-dimensional view, this book synthesizes the main issues and dilemmas facing the economy of the future, seeks to frame the trade-offs in policy terms, while also advancing the discussion towards recommendations and solutions.
Obsáhlý výklad seznamuje s indickou náboženskou tradicí, tibetskými dějinami a kulturou. Tím se postupně dostává k tibetskému buddhismu samotnému, rozebírá tantrické učení, smrt a umírání, a na konci podrobně popisuje jednotlivé řády.
Lucid and economical, this introductory text delivers a brisk, fast-moving survey of Tibetan Buddhism. For many years Powers's nearly 600-page Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism has served as the field's most authoritative and comprehensive overview of Tibet's distinctive Buddhist tradition. A Concise Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism explains the core Buddhist doctrines and the practices of meditation and tantra and provides a survey of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
The National Society of Film Critics Sound Off on the Hottest Movie Controversies
560 pages
20 hours of reading
A collection of essays on the most hotly debated films features discussions on Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, the ratings war, and the war of the sexes by such critics as Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, and Terrence Rafferty. Original.
