Twentieth Century Art Theory: Urbanism, Politics, and Mass Culture

Twentieth Century Art Theory: Urbanism, Politics, and Mass Culture

Arts & Photography

Klein, Norman M.

Hertz, Richard

Other Media

Pearson College Div

Seven Minutes is a social and aesthetic history of the “controlled anarchy” of the cartoon, from the first talking Mickeys to the demise of Warners and MGM theatrical productions in 1960. Norman M. Klein follows the scrambling graphics and upside-down ballet of Fleischer’s Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman of the Wolfie cartoons by Tex Avery, of the Bugs and Daffy, Tweetie and Roadrunner cartoons from Warners, of full animation at Disney, of the “whiteness of Snow White”, and of how Mickey Mouse became a logo. Reviewing the graphics, scripts and marketing of each era, he discovers the links between cartoons and live action movies, newspapers, popular illustration, and the entertainment architecture coming out of Disneyland. Klein shows that the cartoon was a perverse juggling act, invaded constantly by economic and political pressures, by marketing for sound, by licensing characters to stave off bankruptcies, by Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II and the first wave of television.

Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon

History & Criticism

Verso

Fiction. "The facts are simple enough: In September, 1909, a relatively unknown Freud spent a week in New York City, en route to a lecture series upstate at Clark University. The air ranged from muggy to stifling. The museum exhibition on antiquities, the one he had high hopes for, proved substandard. The crowds on the street smelled of industrial fluids and sweat. Even friendly faces made him squirm. The conductor on a tram tried to be empathetic: he ordered the crowd to make room for 'the old man.' But Freud did not see himself as old, not yet." Thus begins this off-the-wall collection from the author of The History of Forgetting. Pitched somewhere between fiction and essay, between short story and novella, FREUD IN CONEY ISLAND AND OTHER TALES uses what are possibly actual facts from the eminent psychoanalyst's life to produce beautifully meandering engagements with topics ranging from the work of Lissitzky to laserographic confocal search methods to the ideas of Freud himself.

Freud in Coney Island And Other Tales

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Otis Books | Seismicity Editions

The five-century history of special effects is reviewed from 1550, when Renaissance and early Baroque artists pioneered unique optical illusions, to the present day, describing how they have evolved and how they provide an understanding of where civilization is headed.

The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects

New Press, The

Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Art. Film. Essays. California Interest. This collection reveals shared ironies in the arts and urban culture over the past fifty years. It studies the amnesiac effects of globalization upon the narrative structure of television, video, animation, photography and installation art. It also explores the shapeshifting that has overwhelmed cities and entertainment spaces. Using Los Angeles and the West as one focal point, various case studies trace the growth of the Floating Class. This is an expression from the late nineteenth century about the outliers who would mill around city parks, crowding the rallies, while listening to rabble-rousing public speakers. The sites were also known as bughouse squares because they sponsored extreme haranguing of all sorts. In earlier centuries, many had been fairgrounds for vendors selling artisanal goods. After 1850, they became a sounding board for the new city, even for avant-garde movements across the arts. Today, the Floating Class exists more internally, for example, in vigilante social networks. Its precarious numbers have grown a hundred-fold. They suffer the mad indignities of a gig economy, and neo-feudal indenture. They try not to feel caught like wild salmon in Trump's hair. Klein writes in comic flourishes that layer fact and fiction. That is because the line between the real and the imaginary has radically blurred, inside the comic picaresque that defines our history today. Featured are twenty-two essays and fictions that have been reedited from their original published version.

Tales of the Floating Class, Writings 1982-2017; Essays and Fictions on Globalization and Neo-Feudalism

Golden Spike Press

Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this highly original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in the city. Using a distinctive mixture of fact and fiction, Klein takes us on an “anti-tour” of downtown LA. He investigates the life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, playfully imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. We observe the close up demolition of neighbourhoods by urban planners, TV’s misrepresentation of the Rodney King uprising in1992, the effect on public consciousness of earthquakes, fires and racial panic, and the way in which crime novels make LA slums seem like abandoned cities in the Central American jungle.

The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (Haymarket)

History

Americas

Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this highly original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in the city. Using a distinctive mixture of fact and fiction, Klein takes us on an “anti-tour” of downtown LA. He investigates the life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, playfully imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. We observe the close up demolition of neighbourhoods by urban planners, TV’s misrepresentation of the Rodney King uprising in1992, the effect on public consciousness of earthquakes, fires and racial panic, and the way in which crime novels make LA slums seem like abandoned cities in the Central American jungle.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Fiction. California Interest. In 1901, a woman named Carrie, while traveling in Europe, selects four men to seduce her, each with a version of the coming century. At least this is how the legend comes down to us. Inevitably, the future spills off course. We navigate through the suitors' worlds; follow Carrie on her misadventures; discover what she and her lovers forgot to notice. Gradually, we find out that Carrie's life is implicated in her uncle's world of business and political espionage. For over forty years, Harry Brown was hired by oligarchs to erase crimes that might prove embarrassing. Thus, as he often explains, espionage is a form of seduction. In 1917, Harry sets up a massive archive of his niece's world. In 2004, Carrie's archive was unearthed and assembled in Los Angeles.

The Imaginary 20th Century

Bistis, Margo

Essays & Correspondence

Michael Bielicky: Perpetuum mobile

SLOTERDIJK, Peter

Zielinski, Siegfried

Alexenberg, Mel

Korintenberg, Bettina

Torres, Jorge Fernández

Individual Artists

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Books by Klein, Norman M.