Customer Reviews (1)

Helping the busy Witch keep track of his/her life
Each year Llewellyn provides the busy witch with a pocket sized book to keep all the important dates in his/her life as well as reminders of Sabats, Esbats, planting days and harvest days and so much more.

The Witches' Datebook has become a staple around here, sitting on our desktops with notes scribbled here and there to help us keep track of all sorts of events and deadlines.

The book itself, spiral bound so it lays flat, with a 'by the week' layout makes this the perfect desktop companion. Included information regarding moon signs, planetary retrogrades, and little tidbits (' Saturday February 12 - Gerald Gardner, founder of the Gardnerian tradition, dies of heart failure, 1964' or ' Thursday July 28 - Bake blackberry pies for Lughnasadh in honor of the dying God') make for interesting reading on a day to day basis.

Then there is the artwork. Each year Llewellyn highlights an artist and this year it is Jennifer Hewitson. The cover art is lovely and catches the eye while the block ink drawings on the calendar pages are well thought out to coincide with the season and included tidbits. Which brings me to the bits for reading inside the book.

From the opening article 'Autumn Enchantment' by Ellen Dugan to the recipes on the weekly pages provided by ShadowCat, poems by Elizabeth Barrette, holiday musings by Magenta Griffith and moon lore by Edain McCoy, each bit fills the mind with contemplation and in some cases, places a taste on the tongue for something special. There are more articles in the front of the book by Gerina Dunwich, Emely Flak, James Kambos and Julianna Yau.

The "Back of the Book' contains the usual 'About the Authors', the Appendix with tables of correspondences, moon signs, eclipses, full moons, planetary retrogrades and the Moon Void-of-Course data and finally the abbreviated name and address pages so handy as a quick reference.

A good tool to keep on your desk, to help you track those deadlines and special occasions in your life. boudica ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Calendar   2. Calendars - New Age   3. Non-Classifiable   4. Witchcraft & Wicca   

Subjects:  1. Calabi-Yau manifolds   2. Geometry, Enumerative   3. Mirror symmetry   4. Science   5. Science/Mathematics   6. Waves & Wave Mechanics   

Customer Reviews (1)

Magnificent
My heart swells with pride and admiration. What a wonderful tribute to an artist that completely captures the spirit and nature of the majesic equine beast she loves. The line and content of her work is perfect. How marvelous that her work is across the nation, how poetic and musical is the word that describes her work. A marvelous book. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. 1949-   2. Art   3. Art & Art Instruction   4. Butterfield, Deborah,   5. Catalogs   6. Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions - General   7. Horses in art   8. Individual Artist   9. Sculpture   10. Subjects & Themes - Plants & Animals   11. Art / Individual Artist   

Customer Reviews (1)

Fantastical animals live among us
Trau has been teaching Little Yau the ways of healing. Little Yau is hoping that soon the Wise Ones will take her up into the mountains to continue her education. Her healing skills are put to the test when her friend Trup falls ill. The Wise Ones reveal that Trup has been poisoned (by weed killer sprayed in a human's garden), and the only cure is the thumbfoot leaf. The white furred cat-like Fuzzheads creatively face the dilemma of living in close proximity to humans. When the Wise Ones and Little Yau need to search the nearby human town for the rare thumbfoot plant, they don human clothes to disguise themselves.

The story is complemented by beautifully bright full-color illustrations. The smaller black and white sketches beside the text add details such as how Trup was poisoned and what Trau does to care for Trup while the others search for the thumbfoot leaf. Some of the illustrations are quite comical. Sure to generate giggles is the two-page spread of Little Yau attempting to run on two feet like a human, then giving up the pretense in favor of speed. Similarly delightful is the "Human Phrase Book" the Fuzzheads have studied in order to have (limited) conversations with humans. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Children's 4-8 - Picturebooks   2. Children: Kindergarten   3. Disguise   4. Fiction   5. Health & Medicine - General   6. Herbs   7. Juvenile Fiction   8. Nature & the Natural World - General   9. Social Situations - Friendship   10. Juvenile Fiction / General   

Customer Reviews (7)

private view redux
I hate to post something unenthusiastic about such an exciting photographer, but "Photographs" was somewhat dissapointing for me -- I'd read/viewed with great interested his previous book, "a private view" -- which was fantastic. "Photographs" brings back a lot of those same images in a larger format, on worse paper, without the exciting layout and at twice the price. (Had "private view" not been published or were it out of print, I would have rated this book higher.) I think D'Orazio is one of the most exciting fashion photographers working today and I was ultimately saddened that there's not a whole new books worth of photographs here. If you have the option, buy "a private view" instead.

Relaxed Female Nudes
If photography books were rated by how relaxed, natural, and open the models are, this book would be a five star book. Many of these images have not been published or shown before.

Before going further, be aware that this book contains many tasteful female nudes and one male nude. If this book were a motion picture, it would probably have an "R" rating.

The book has two serious flaws. First, many of the two-page spreads are devastated by the center crease of the binding. The images should be been skipped or reproduced differently. Second, many of the images are vapid. Whenever Mr. D'Orazio moves away from doing a female nude in motion or with a prop, there's often not much there.

The best of the book is outstanding, and if you overlook the spoiled and uninspiring images, you will be very pleased. Mr. D'Orazio at his best has good talent in composition and use of shadows that make his work much more interesting. When he models work with a prop, whether a cigarette or something more substantial like an easel or a skull, magical things usually happen. The book uses a very fine quality matte paper that reproduces the subtle shadings well.

His unadorned and propless female nudes are a tour de force in one sense. He shows you something you haven't seen before in these people (most of whom are celebrities). Few photographers can accomplish so much with so little, but the viewer (unless totally addicted to the celebrity) wants a bit more.

I found Mr. D'Orazio's portraits of men and humanless scenes much less rewarding. Julian Schnabel and Mike Tyson were the exceptions. He captured something there that was quite remarkable.

As Mr. Yau says in his brief essay, "His subjects seem to have stopped for a moment, relaxed and let down their guard." "Some have even transformed themselves into someone unexpected . . . ." For example, you will see a different side of Julia Roberts. "The men . . . project their image of masculinity . . . ." "All of this D'Orazio captures with a painter's eye . . . ." I disagree with that last comment. The images seem to me to be much more sculptural than painterly, and that is to the good.

Here are my favorites:

Kristen McMenamy, 1986, Shelter Island, New York

Eva Herzigova, 1996, Long Island, New York

Sofia Loren, 1999, Milano, Italy

Julia Roberts, 1996, Culver City, California

Frederique, 1996, St. Barth's

Suzanne Lanza, 1986, Peconic Lodge, Shelter Island, New York

Eva Amurri, 1999, New York City (this is quite remarkable and appears on the back of the book's dust jacket)

Mike Tyson (the second one), 1996, Las Vegas, Nevada

Sylvester Stallone, 1996, New York City

Claudia Schiffer, 2000, London

Eva Amurri and Susan Sarandon, 1999, New York City

Polly Mellen and Leilani, 1992, New York City

Kate Moss, 1995, Glen Cove, New York

Julian Schnabel, 1990, (paint splattered with canvas and easel), Montauk, New York

Courtney Love, 1999, Los Angeles, California

Stella Schnabel with Skull, 1999, New York City

Drew Barrymore, 1993, Hollywood, California

After you enjoy this book, I suggest that you think about what the book teaches about relaxation. When do you drop your "social mask" to be relaxed and experience yourself more fully? Those who are most relaxed here, look most alive. How can you achieve this more often and benefit from it?

Take off your cares and worries!

A stellar work!
Finally, a book of celebrity photographs which transcends the formula of merely exposing famous skin! Here is a book of rare and intimate sensuality which brings to the viewer's eye a private and lush sensuality which seems coaxed out of the sitters and never forced. D'Orazio is a genius and this book is one of the most amazing gifts I have received in years. I am buying it for several friends as it is a surefire, sophisticated winner. MORE!! ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Fashion   2. Fashion photography   3. Individual Photographer   4. Individual Photographers And Their Work   5. Nudes & Erotic   6. Photo Techniques   7. Photography   8. Portrait photography   9. Portraits   10. Subjects & Themes - Erotica   11. Subjects & Themes - Fashion   12. Subjects & Themes - Portraits   13. D'Orazio, Sante   

Subjects:  1. Art   2. Art & Art Instruction   3. Fine Arts   4. Individual Artist   5. Art - Individual Artist   

Subjects:  1. Geometry, Differential   2. Science/Mathematics   

Subjects:  1. Asian - Chinese   2. Drama   3. Film & Video - History & Criticism   4. Literary Criticism   5. Modern - 20th Century   6. Pop Arts / Pop Culture   7. 20th century   8. Films, cinema   9. History / Modern / 20th Century   

Joe Coleman is a powerful artist whose paintings in acrylic on Masonite contain within their bizarre decorative borders an astonishing profusion of specific, intensely colorful nightmare images. He does not try to be pretty. He does not flinch from depicting revolting details of body parts and violence. (Click on the cover illustration for a closer look.) Often he places a totemic figure, such as Edgar Allan Poe or Ed Gein in the middle of the canvas, then he explores his fascination with that person by surrounding the figure with vignettes about the individual's life and work.After hours of meticulous labor with tiny brushes, every square millimeter of the canvas is covered with quotations, faces, glyphs, documents, dramatic scenes, and horrifying creatures. His paintings are often compared to illuminated manuscripts. Original Sin contains 48 pages of color plates, many with accompanying detail views, and numerous illustrations in black and white. Essays by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, art historian John Yau, and writer Harold Schechter offer insights into Coleman's psyche and world-view. Detailed keys explain the allegorical and historical references in 19 of the paintings. Warning: this is strong stuff, both gory and sexual. To view more of Coleman's art, see the cover illustration of Coleman's Cosmic Retribution. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Wild Brilliance
Nothing can prepare you for a Joe Coleman painting if you've never seen one before-- the beauty of these works will literally rip your eyeballs from your skull. With a scholarly, yet fierce courage Coleman reinvents the characters and scenes he portrays, with a technical skill which borders on the supernatural. In a recent show in Rotterdam, Coleman's work was hung beside those of Hieronymus Bosch, a deserved honor.

The essays in this book are excellent, describing Coleman's ground-breaking history as a performance artist as well as a painter. The design of the book by Katharine Gates is beautiful, and enhances appreciation of Coleman's work. I recommend this book to anyone who cares about art in the early 21st Century (or the 15th Century for that matter!).

essays from the evil mind
Joe Coleman is represented in other books, but the essays in this book , along with the reproductions, give the viewer an intimate glimpse into the twisted and detailed paintings of joe coleman! a bargain!

serial vision
Unique work that is overlooked. All work has a very narrative-illustrative style. Srong line quality, color and composition. For a viewer with the ability to explore. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Art   2. Art & Art Instruction   3. Coleman, Joe   4. Contemporary Art   5. History - General   6. Individual Artist   7. Themes, motives   

Customer Reviews (2)

Funhouse mirror of American culture
In Ghana, paying cinema customer line up around a glorified TV set and watch the dross of American cinema, striaght-to-video stuff starring Jan Michael Vincent or Chuck Norris. And to publicize these films, artists paint posters in raging, primitive style with images not usually found in the films. The art is just incredible and horrendous (in the best meanings of the term) and one can only speculate on what cultural filters go into their making. THE coffee table book of the year.

The Most Unusual Coffee Table Book You'll Ever See
If you're going to insist on having coffee-table books lying around your house, you might as well have one filled with lurid, hand-painted posters for movies like "Hell Comes to Frogtown," "The Fatal Flying Guillotines," or "Confessions of a Window Cleaner," right? Well, you've come to the right place, 'cause here is just such a book-filled with beautiful color reproductions of posters for these, and many other fine movies, straight outta... Ghana. For a period of about ten years, from the mid-'80s to the mid '90s, entrepreneurs in Ghana ran traveling movie screenings, featuring the latest (or not so latest) videos from America and elsewhere. Their agents would pull into town, rent a public viewing space, set up a TV and VCR running off a little generator, unfurl a poster, and voila-instant movie house. Here, presented for the first time in the West are several hundred of the posters, divided into sections with little one-page celebrity introductions, along with a few art expert essays. It depressingly comes as no surprise that of the 230 pages devoted to the posters, 200 are in the "action/adventure," "war and urban commando," "horror," "science fiction and fantasy," and "martial arts" sections, with only 30 pages on "comedy and drama." Interestingly, this last section is largely filled with homegrown films from Ghana and Nigeria, with very few American entries. Clearly, this is because American humor and drama don't export as well as guns, blood, and sex, which are universal-although this is left unstated.

What is stated in most of the section introductions is fairly bland praise to the tune of "look how movies can cross cultures and have meaning even in Africa" and "see how these movies fit into the rich tradition of storytelling." Screenwriter Walter Hill at least has the honesty to say "many of these posters are more interesting than the films." The essays by the art experts attempting to place these posters in a larger historical context of African art manage to utterly fail. Particularly egregious is Deidre Evans-Pritchard's inane assertion that "Just as British television dramas are culturally repackaged for American audiences, so the hand-painted movie posters serve to claim the movies for the people of West Africa." The notion that one businessman paying an semiprofessional artist to paint an advertising poster for "Leprechaun 2" (page 199) so that other people will pay money to watch it somehow "claims" it, is patently silly. The critical difference with her analogy is that the advertising is slightly repackaged, the content certainly isn't. As I leafed through the book, seeing endless images of guns, bare breasts, blood, Rambo, Van Damme, Delta Force, and the like, I was vaguely unsettled. If, through cultural globalization, this is all they're getting from the U.S., what effect will it have on their cultural production, or on their perception of America? Whatever the answer-this is a great book to leave lying around your coffee table. A great companion to this is What It Is... What It Was, which is a slightly less lavish book on blaxploitation poster art. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Art   2. Art & Art Instruction   3. Commercial - Advertising   4. Film & Video - General   5. Film - History & Criticism   6. History - African   7. Performing Arts   

Customer Reviews (2)

Will delight fans of photography
Hiroshi Sugimoto is known for his long-exposure photos of empty movie theaters and museums: his blurred masterpieces of public places depict both familiar, major structures and lesser-known buildings. Sugimoto: Architecture is an impressive collection of his art offers full-page unsullied black and white reproductions of his finest works and will delight fans of photography, architectural representation, and the Sugimoto style in particular.

The best photo is on the cover
This book is definitivelly for funs of Sugimoto's work. I don't say the photographs are not interesting, but such publication ("Architecture") needs a bit more. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Architectural & Industrial   2. Individual Photographer   3. Photo Essays   4. Photoessays & Documentaries   5. Photography   

Subjects:  1. American - General   2. Poetry   

Subjects:  1. Science/Mathematics   

Customer Reviews (1)

skip the text
Yau is WAY overblown in his writing, but the paintings are GREAT. Moses is really a Los Angeles artist and this is reflected in his drawings of the Venice Boardwalk.

My two favorites: 1963's "Rose #3 (Some Roses Are)" a deeply emotional black & white ink drawing of a field of flowers in a downpour.

And 1953's "Glady McBean" an eye-catching mixed-media work that displays an almost blueprint-like drawing of a hallway (or it a display area in a gallery?) bordered by carefully patterned scraps of paper reading, " Relief Distribution Only."

Damn Cool. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Art   2. Art & Art Instruction   3. Individual Artist   

Subjects:  1. American - General   2. Fiction   3. Literature - Classics / Criticism   4. Short Stories (single author)   

Customer Reviews (1)

Quite a disappointment
A few years ago, I quite enjoyed Corpse and Mirror when I found a paperback copy of it. Nice humor, just enough intellectual pretension, plus the occasional bumrush of interesting language. So Yau's name was one that stuck in my head, and I've read him, in subsequent time, in publications like APR and Conjunctions and the like, and haven't been hugely impressed (but not depressed, either); nevertheless, based on the good will from my first experience with him, I bought his selected, and found myself bored. His early stuff (including Corpse) seems very Ashbery and Robert Kelly-ied, that is, loose and fast, depending on inventiveness and tonal control to hold pieces together. Yau is adequate at this, though without the oommmph of either Ashbery or Kelly. Dean Young does this sort of thing much better: more inventive, riskier, less posing. Yau's more recent work seems to be written right after reading Michael Palmer's "At Passages": austere, restrained, tortured. Yet, for whatever reason, Yau's take on this bores while Palmer's excites: it seems a necessity for Palmer, or almost like an unbearable weight: a hairshirt; it seems like a nice shirt for Yau, something comfortable and stylish to wear in the nicest journals. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. American - General   2. Fiction   3. Poetry   

Subjects:  1. Art   2. Art & Art Instruction   3. Art Criticism   4. Contemporary Art   5. Criticism   6. History - Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945)   7. Individual Artist   8. United States in art   9. Criticism and interpretation   10. Johns, Jasper   

Subjects:  1. China   2. Film & Video - General   3. Film & Video - History & Criticism   4. History   5. Hong Kong   6. Motion pictures   7. Performing Arts   8. Performing Arts/Dance   9. Pop Arts / Pop Culture   

Subjects:  1. Calabi-Yau manifolds   2. High Energy Physics   3. Mathematical Physics   4. Physics   5. Quantum field theory   6. Science   7. Science/Mathematics   8. Supersymmetry   9. Topological manifolds   10. Waves & Wave Mechanics   

Subjects:  1. Film & Video - History & Criticism   2. Performing Arts   3. Performing Arts/Dance   4. Pop Arts / Pop Culture   5. ASIA   6. China   7. Films, cinema   8. Japan   9. Philippines   10. South Korea