Seeing Through the Eighties

Seeing Through the Eighties PDF Author: Jane Feuer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822316879
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
With a cast of characters including Michael, Hope, Elliot, Nancy, Melissa, and Gary; Alexis, Krystle, Blake, and all the other Carringtons; not to mention Maddie and David and even Crockett and Tubbs, Feuer smoothly blends close readings of well-known programs and analysis of television's commercial apparatus with a thorough-going theoretical perspective engaged with the work of Baudrillard, Fiske, and others. Her comparative look at Yuppie TV, Prime Time Soaps, and made-for-TV movie Trauma Dramas reveals the contradictions and tensions at work in much prime-time programming and in the frustrations of the American popular consciousness. Seeing Through the Eighties also addresses the increased commodification of both the producers and consumers of television as a result of technological innovations and the introduction of new marketing techniques.

Seeing Through the Eighties

Seeing Through the Eighties PDF Author: Jane Feuer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822316879
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
With a cast of characters including Michael, Hope, Elliot, Nancy, Melissa, and Gary; Alexis, Krystle, Blake, and all the other Carringtons; not to mention Maddie and David and even Crockett and Tubbs, Feuer smoothly blends close readings of well-known programs and analysis of television's commercial apparatus with a thorough-going theoretical perspective engaged with the work of Baudrillard, Fiske, and others. Her comparative look at Yuppie TV, Prime Time Soaps, and made-for-TV movie Trauma Dramas reveals the contradictions and tensions at work in much prime-time programming and in the frustrations of the American popular consciousness. Seeing Through the Eighties also addresses the increased commodification of both the producers and consumers of television as a result of technological innovations and the introduction of new marketing techniques.

Back to Our Future

Back to Our Future PDF Author: David Sirota
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345518802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Wall Street scandals. Fights over taxes. Racial resentments. A Lakers-Celtics championship. The Karate Kid topping the box-office charts. Bon Jovi touring the country. These words could describe our current moment—or the vaunted iconography of three decades past. In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, New York Times bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s—from the “Greed is good” ethos of Gordon Gekko (and Bernie Madoff) to the “Make my day” foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush) to the “transcendence” of Cliff Huxtable (and Barack Obama). Today’s mindless militarism and hypernarcissism, Sirota argues, first became the norm when an ’80s generation weaned on Rambo one-liners and “Just Do It” exhortations embraced a new religion—with comic books, cartoons, sneaker commercials, videogames, and even children’s toys serving as the key instruments of cultural indoctrination. Meanwhile, in productions such as Back to the Future, Family Ties, and The Big Chill, a campaign was launched to reimagine the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. That 1980s revisionism, Sirota shows, still rages today, with Barack Obama cast as the 60s hippie being assailed by Alex P. Keaton–esque Republicans who long for a return to Eisenhower-era conservatism. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” The 1980s—even more so. With the native dexterity only a child of the Atari Age could possess, David Sirota twists and turns this multicolored Rubik’s Cube of a decade, exposing it as a warning for our own troubled present—and possible future.

Scraping by in the Big Eighties

Scraping by in the Big Eighties PDF Author: Natalia Rachel Singer
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803243095
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The author describes how her rejection of the materialism of her generation and her low-budget search for creative fulfillment led her to a duplex in Seattle, a beach hut in Mexico, and a Left Bank convent, but never freed her from her obligations as an American.

Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties

Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties PDF Author: Linda M. Montano
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520919661
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
Performance artist Linda Montano, curious about the influence childhood experience has on adult work, invited other performance artists to consider how early events associated with sex, food, money/fame, or death/ritual resurfaced in their later work. The result is an original and compelling talking performance that documents the production of art in an important and often misunderstood community. Among the more than 100 artists Montano interviewed from 1979 to 1989 were John Cage, Suzanne Lacy, Faith Ringgold, Dick Higgins, Annie Sprinkle, Allan Kaprow, Meredith Monk, Eric Bogosian, Adrian Piper, Karen Finley, and Kim Jones. Her discussions with them focused on the relationship between art and life, history and memory, the individual and society, and the potential for individual and social change. The interviews highlight complex issues in performance art, including the role of identity in performer-audience relationships and art as an exploration of everyday conventions rather than a demonstration of virtuosity.

The Other Eighties

The Other Eighties PDF Author: Bradford Martin
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 142995342X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In this engaging new book, Bradford Martin illuminates a different 1980s than many remember—one whose history has been buried under the celebratory narrative of conservative ascendancy. Ronald Reagan looms large in most accounts of the period, encouraging Americans to renounce the activist and liberal politics of the 1960s and ‘70s and embrace the resurgent conservative wave. But a closer look reveals that a sizable swath of Americans strongly disapproved of Reagan's policies throughout his presidency. With a weakened Democratic Party scurrying for the political center, many expressed their dissatisfaction outside electoral politics. Unlike the civil rights and Vietnam era protesters, activists of the 1980s often found themselves on the defensive, struggling to preserve the hard-won victories of the previous era. Their successes, then, were not in ushering in a new era of progressive reforms but in effecting change in areas from professional life to popular culture, while beating back an even more forceful political shift to the right. Martin paints an indelible portrait of these and other influential, but often overlooked, movements: from on-the-ground efforts to constrain the administration's aggressive Latin American policy and stave off a possible Nicaraguan war, to mock shanties constructed on college campuses to shed light on corporate America's role in supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa. The result is a clearer, richer perspective on a turbulent decade in American life.

Soho in the Eighties

Soho in the Eighties PDF Author: Christopher Howse
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472914813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A fascinating glimpse into 1980s Soho by leading journalist and writer Christopher Howse. In the 1980s Daniel Farson published Soho in the Fifties. This memoir is a sequel from the Eighties, a decade that saw the brilliant flowering of a daily tragi-comedy enacted in pubs like the Coach and Horses or the French and in drinking clubs like the Colony Room. These were places of constant conversation and regular rows fuelled by alcohol. The cast was more improbable than any soap opera. Some were widely known – Jeffrey Bernard, Francis Bacon, Tom Baker or John Hurt. Just as important were the character actors: the Village Postmistress, the Red Baron, Granny Smith. The bite came from the underlying tragedy: lost spouses, lost jobs, pennilessness, homelessness and death. Christopher Howse recaptures the lost Soho he once knew as home, its cellar cafés and butchers' shops, its villains and its generosity. While it lasted, time in those smoky rooms always seemed to be half past ten, not long to closing time. As the author relates, he never laughed so much as he did in Soho in the Eighties.

Living in the Eighties

Living in the Eighties PDF Author: Gil Troy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019972010X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Some see the 1980s as a Golden Age, a "Morning in America" when Ronald Reagan revived America's economy, reoriented American politics, and restored Americans' faith in their country and in themselves. Others see the 1980s as a new "Gilded Age," an era that was selfish, superficial, glitzy, greedy, divisive, and destructive. This multifaceted exploration of the 1980s brings together a variety of voices from different political persuasions, generations, and vantage points. The volume features work by Reagan critics and Reagan fans (including one of President Reagan's closest aides, Ed Meese), by historians who think the 1980s were a disastrous time, those who think it was a glorious time, and those who see both the blessings and the curses of the decade. Their essays examine everything from multiculturalism, Southern conservatism, and Reaganomics, to music culture, religion, crime, AIDS, and the city. A complex, thoughtful account of a watershed in our recent history, this volume will engage anyone interested in this pivotal decade.

The Eighties

The Eighties PDF Author: John Ehrman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300115822
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
John Ehrman offers analysis of the transformation in American politics & society that marked the years of the Reagan presidency during the 1980s. He considers the fundamental shifts in American attitudes & examines the way Reagan built a right wing consensus around key policies.

New York Times: The Times of the Eighties

New York Times: The Times of the Eighties PDF Author: The New York Times
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal
ISBN: 1603763287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1055

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Book Description
From our nation's best source of in-depth daily reporting comes this sweeping retrospective of the news, culture, and personalities of the decade of the 1980s, as told through hundreds of handselected articles and compelling original commentary in this unique and fascinating book. There is no better record of history than the archives of The New York Times. Now, more than 200 articles from the great decade of the 1980s are culled from these archives and carefully curated, by editor and Times writer William Grimes, to create one complete, compelling, historical and nostalgic collection. Organized by sections such as politics, business, science & health, sports, arts & entertainment, food, obituaries, and more, The Times of the Eighties covers the biggest stories that shaped the 1980s. Articles include coverage of historic events like Wall Street's "Black Monday," the Iran-Contra scandal, Tiananmen Square, the Challenger disaster, the Human Genome Project, the collapse of communism, and the introduction of the personal computer by IBM; cultural highlights like the launch of MTV, Ted Turner's establishment of CNN, the Cabbage Patch doll craze, reviews of movies like E.T., Terminator, Raging Bull, and Tootsie, and features on musicians like Michael Jackson, Joan Jett, U2, Wham, Blondie, and more; plus pieces on personalities like Mikhail Gorbachev, Princess Diana, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pete Rose, Bill Cosby, and more. The stories are penned by well-known Times writers like William Safire, Frank Rich, Anna Quindlen, Serge Schmemann, Russell Baker, Nan C. Robertson, Thomas L. Friedman, Linda Greenhouse, Bill Keller, Clyde Haberman, Paul Goldberger, Francis X. Clines, John Noble Wilford, Nicholas Kristof, Fox Butterfield, John Rockwell, Anthony Lewis, and many more. Grimes guides readers through the articles he's selected with commentary that puts the stories into historical context and explores the impact that these events and individuals eventually had on the future. Hundreds of color photographs from the Times and other sources illuminate the stories throughout.

Industrial Evolution

Industrial Evolution PDF Author: Mick Fish
Publisher: SAF Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 9780946719464
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Garbage collection, drum machines, big business, male mascara, militant unions and drugs. The ultimate eighties cocktail.