Speed Tribes

Speed Tribes PDF Author: Karl Taro Greenfeld
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062013661
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This foray into the often violent subcultures of Japan dramatically debunks the Western perception of a seemingly controlled and orderly society.

Speed Tribes

Speed Tribes PDF Author: Karl Taro Greenfeld
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062013661
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
This foray into the often violent subcultures of Japan dramatically debunks the Western perception of a seemingly controlled and orderly society.

Low End Theory

Low End Theory PDF Author: Paul C. Jasen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150133591X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Low End Theory probes the much-mythologized field of bass and low-frequency sound. It begins in music but quickly moves far beyond, following vibratory phenomena across time, disciplines and disparate cultural spheres (including hauntings, laboratories, organ workshops, burial mounds, sound art, studios, dancefloors, infrasonic anomalies, and a global mystery called The Hum). Low End Theory asks what it is about bass that has fascinated us for so long and made it such a busy site of bio-technological experimentation, driving developments in science, technology, the arts, and religious culture. The guiding question is not so much what we make of bass, but what it makes of us: how does it undulate and unsettle; how does it incite; how does it draw bodily thought into new equations with itself and its surroundings? Low End Theory is the first book to survey this sonorous terrain and devise a conceptual language proper to it. With its focus on sound's structuring agency and the multi-sensory aspects of sonic experience, it stands to make a transformative contribution to the study of music and sound, while pushing scholarship on affect, materiality, and the senses into fertile new territory. Through energetic and creative prose, Low End Theory works to put thought in touch with the vibratory encounter as no scholarly book has done before. For more information, visit: http://www.lowendtheorybook.com/

Motorcycle

Motorcycle PDF Author: Steven E. Alford
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861894759
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Easy Rider. Motocross Grand Prix. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. The motorcycle is a global icon of untamed freedom, symbolizing a daring and reckless lifestyle of adventure. Yet there are few books that chronicle how and when this legendary vehicle roared down the open road. Motorcycle explores the roots of the rebel’s ultimate ride. After early incarnations as a nineteenth-century steam-powered bicycle and multi-wheeled vehicles, the modern motorcycle came into its own as a cheap, mobile military asset during World War I. From there, it rapidly spread through modern culture as a symbol of rebellion and subversive power, and Motorcycle tracks the symbolic role that the bike has played in literature, art, and film. The authors also investigate the international subcultures that revolve around the motorcycle and scooter. They chart the emergence of American biker culture in the 1950s, when decommissioned fighter pilots sought new ways to satiate their desire for thrill and danger, and explore how the motorcycle came to represent the untamed nonconformity of the American West. In contrast, smaller scooters such as the Vespa and moped became the utilitarian vehicle of choice in space-starved metropolises across Europe and Asia. Ultimately, the authors argue, the motorbike is the exemplary Modernist object, dependent on the perfect balance of man and machine. An unprecedented and wholly engrossing account, Motorcycle is an essential reading for the Harley-Davidson roadhog, bike collector, or anyone who’s felt the power of the unmistakable king of the road.

Generation Ecstasy

Generation Ecstasy PDF Author: Simon Reynolds
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136783172
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Traces the continuum of hardcore that runs from the most machinized forms of house music through British and European rave styles like bleep-and-bass, breakbeat house, Belgian hardcore, jungle, gabba, speed garage, and big beat.

Standard Deviations

Standard Deviations PDF Author: Karl Taro Greenfeld
Publisher: Villard
ISBN: 158836206X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
“I was twenty-three and I had set off for Asia to become a writer, intrigued by lurid tales of booms, busts, drugs, sex, violence, magic. There was a wicked sorcery in Asia, in the economic profligacy of the early nineties, in the way financiers and businessmen took a rapidly wiring and developing continent and looted billions, like a titanic parlor trick converting all that wealth into abandoned office complexes and half-completed shopping malls. . . . I wanted it all—the money, the sex, the drugs. And to this day I believe that if I am honest with myself, despite all I have learned the hard way over the past decade, I would still want it all again, the fucking and the getting loaded and the scheming to get enough money to pay for that life.” In the late 1980s, not long out of college, Karl Taro Greenfeld found himself stranded in New York, a failed writer before his career had even begun. His Jewish-American father angrily cut off support; his Japanese mother suggested he go to Japan to teach English. He did, accepting a job with no more promise than he’d had before. But he stayed in Asia for the next several years, working his way through a series of journalistic posts, watching a culture erupt before his eyes and facing his own demons. Through a series of vividly imagistic stories that range from the rigidly journalistic to the deeply intimate, Standard Deviations recounts Greenfeld’s experiences—both professional and personal—during Asia’s wild ride at the end of the twentieth century. Whether drinking Japanese cough syrup to get high with other Western expatriates, visiting a free-sex ashram in Bombay, or watching a former high school pal self-destruct as an equity analyst in Jakarta, Greenfeld evokes the spirit of a continent in flux at an explosive “bubble” economy’s end—and a man confronting his own identity and aspirations. Raunchy, insightful, eloquent and moving, Standard Deviations is an uncompromising work of cultural observation and self-exploration.

Sonic Warfare

Sonic Warfare PDF Author: Steve Goodman
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262266334
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
An exploration of the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe. Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture. Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.

Powerplay

Powerplay PDF Author: Dan Fleming
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719047176
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In an increasingly global media culture, toys are both consumer products and playthings, revealing a complex relationship between capitalism and child psychology. This book analyses the gendered and cultural meanings of toys.

Virtually True

Virtually True PDF Author: Adam L. Penenberg
Publisher: Wayzgoose Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
"A literary thrill ride operated by complex and memorable characters . . . a plot worthy of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Martin Cruz Smith." The murder of a friend. Conspiracy on a global scale. A near-future, dystopic world run by corporations, where nothing is as it seems and everything is part of something else. Technology and everyday life are inseparable, and information is a weapon that can save your life--or kill you. Exiled to a damp Southeast Asian republic, journalist True Ailey relentlessly searches the war-ravaged peninsula for the killers and the truth. Virtually True, by award-winning journalist Adam Penenberg, is a non-stop roller-coaster ride for the mind. Now boarding.

Modern Girls on the Go

Modern Girls on the Go PDF Author: Alisa Freedman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804785546
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This spirited and engaging multidisciplinary volume pins its focus on the lived experiences and cultural depictions of women's mobility and labor in Japan. The theme of "modern girls" continues to offer a captivating window into the changes that women's roles have undergone during the course of the last century. Here we encounter Japanese women inhabiting the most modern of spaces, in newly created professions, moving upward and outward, claiming the public life as their own: shop girls, elevator girls, dance hall dancers, tour bus guides, airline stewardesses, international beauty queens, overseas teachers, corporate soccer players, and even female members of the Self-Defense Forces. Directly linking gender, mobility, and labor in 20th and 21st century Japan, this collection brings to life the ways in which these modern girls—historically and contemporaneously—have influenced social roles, patterns of daily life, and Japan's global image. It is an ideal guidebook for students, scholars, and general readers alike.

The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture

The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture PDF Author: Dolores P. Martinez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521637299
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Dolores Martinez heads an international team of scholars in this lively discussion of Japanese popular culture. The book's contributors include Japanese as well as British, Icelandic and North American writers, offering a diversity of views of what Japanese popular culture is, and how it is best approached and understood. They bring an anthropological perspective to a broad range of topics, including sumo, karaoke, manga, vampires, women's magazines, soccer and morning television. Through these topics - many of which have never previously been addressed by scholars - the contributors also explore several deeper themes: the construction of gender in Japan; the impact of globalisation and modern consumerism; and the rapidly shifting boundaries of Japanese culture and identity. This innovative study will appeal to those interested in Japanese culture, sociology and cultural anthropology.