Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s long-running Comedy Central hit cartoon South Park has been equally cheered and reviled for its edgy humor, poited satire of current events and celebrities, and all-around obnoxiousness. But is there more to Kyle, the lonely Jew, Timmy and the Crips, Cartman’s bitchiness, Chef’s inappropriate advice, and Kenny’s continued violent deaths than meets the eye? This collection of es ...
This book is another one of those late-night Grateful Dead inspired dorm room conversations with friends . . . only this time it’s your professors sitting cross-legged on the floor asking if anyone else wants to order a pizza.The Grateful Dead emerged from the San Francisco counter-culture movement of the late 1960s to become an American icon. Part of the reason they remain an institution four decades later is that they and their fans, ...
What explains the huge popular following for Dexter, currently the most-watched show on cable, which sympathetically depicts a serial killer driven by a cruel compulsion to brutally slay one victim after another? Although Dexter Morgan kills only killers, he is not a vigilante animated by a sense of justice but a charming psychopath animated by a lust to kill, ritualistically and bloodily. However his gory appetite is controlled by “Har ...
Lili St. Cyr was, in the words of legendary reporter Mike Wallace, the “highest paid stripteaser in America.” Wallace was so fascinated by Lili that out of all the presidents and celebrities he interviewed over a long career, towards the end of his life, she was the one he remained fixated on. Her beauty had that kind of effect.Lili St. Cyr, the one time queen of burlesque, led an incredible life –six marriages, roman ...
With social networking and reality television, self-help columns and daytime talk shows, there’s an infinite array of platforms to both expose our deepest thoughts and examine the thoughts of others. In this age of non-stop communication, one’s privacy is subject to unrelenting examination, intrusion, and attack from the media, the government, friends, family, and complete strangers.So what are we trying to hide? And what are ...
A Westerner's inside look into the workings of Chinese society.<br /> <br />For six years, from 2005 to 2011, Australian JFK Miller worked in Shanghai for English-language publications censored by state publishers under the aegis of the Chinese Communist Party. In this wry memoir, he offers a view of that regime, as he saw it, as an outsider from the bottom up.<br /> <br />'Trickle-Down Censorship' explores ...
"Brilliantly upsetting and endearing . . . riveting."— Newsday An updated and revised edition of Wallace Shawn's most outlandish work to date.This poetic epic about a scientist, his wife, and his two mistresses as they fend for their lives in a world savagely close to extinction, raises issues of redemption, forgiveness, and responsibility. Grasses of a Thousand Colors is a troubling, erotic adventure that received high cri ...
“[Our Late Night is] a short play, but a savage one…Neurosis, panic and sexual surreality underlie Shawn’s startling vision of New Yorkers at play.”—Guardian Wallace Shawn’s OBIE Award-winning, never before published Our Late Night premiered in New York in 1975 under direction of André Gregory, and was revived in London in 1999 under direction of Caryl Churchill. A Thought in Three Part ...
Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama “A powerhouse drama. . . . Lynn Nottage’s beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports.”—Linda Winer, Newsday “An intense and gripping new drama . . . the kind of new play we desperately need: well-informed and unafraid of the world’s brutalities. Nottage is one of our fi ...