Art-Sites San Francisco: The Indispensable Guide to Contemporary Art-Architecture-Design (Art

Book Description

San Francisco, a city of spectacular topography and cosmopolitan charm, now also boasts a formidable arts scene. A burst of activity centered around the opening of the Museum of Modern Art with its signature building by Mario Botta in 1995. Expansion by other museums, including projects by internationally renowned architects Aulenti, Herzog & de Meuron, Legoretta, Maki, and Polshek has further enhanced the city's profile. In addition, exhibition programs at alternative spaces and art schools have been reinvigorated, a new generation of artists and galleries has had a reenergizing effect, and the arrival of prestigious design stores has significantly enriched the dynamics.

art-SITES San Francisco is an abundant compendium of practical information and in-depth discussions about the best places to see innovative work by local and international talents. Vivid commentaries make exploring the city easy and provide enlightenment about its cultural heritage. Illustrated with neighborhood maps, suggested walking tours, and helpful indexes, this invaluable handbook examines museums, galleries, exhibition spaces, film centers, cutting-edge architecture and interior renovations, public art, parks and gardens, design showrooms and boutiques, bookstores, festivals, and more. Coverage of the surrounding areas of Marin, Napa, Sonoma, the East Bay, the Peninsula, and San Jose makes it a truly comprehensive resource on the region.

Published and distributed by art-SITES Press, San Francisco.

Book Description

This is the perfect jump start for beginners who want to tackle the watercolor medium with speed and success. It presents an easy-to-understand approach that quickly familiarizes aspiring artists with basic materials, tools and techniques for getting started.

Illustrations, exercises and complete step-by-step demos show how to achieve fast results by creating sketches with drawing media as well as watercolor. With this easy "sketching" approach, artists will learn how to plan successful paintings using thumbnail sketches, value sketches, color sketches, sideline sketches, composition adjustments and experiments.

Accessible, affordable and fun, this guide will have beginners developing their skills and on their way to creating satisfying work in no time.

Customer Reviews:

Makes Me Want to Go Sketch and Paint!.......2007-03-07

Good solid teaching methods in this book. I gained insight into the necessary thinking, tools and methods to fill my sketch books with loads of painted sketches....Takes you into the interesting world of composition of multi-viewpoints that are possible for a location, and describes the journey in entertaining ways-lots of very nice artwork examples. Recommended for the artist in everyone! No masterpieces allowed!

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The Art of Persuasion: History of Advertising Photography
Robert A. Sobieszek
Manufacturer: Harry N Abrams
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography

ASIN: 0810914697

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The Art of Persuasion (A History of Advertising Photography)
Robert A. Sobieszek
Manufacturer: Abramns Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000LZJ10Y

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Art of Persuasion: A History of Advertising Photography
Robert A. Sobieszek
Manufacturer: HARRY N ABRAMS INC
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Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OLOG8M

Book Description

As a troupe of shining Starmie race through the cosmos, one takes a spooky shortcut to victory - even zipping past Santa and his sleigh. The prize? Star placement on the tallest Christmas tree.

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Although George Orwell grew up in the relative comfort of the English middle class, his socialist convictions and general sense of fairness led him to hate his country's deeply ingrained class structure. That perspective permeates this book, but the most striking elements are the quotidian details of life that Orwell observes in his first-person account of the lives of coal miners and others in the poor north of England. Wigan Pier is almost too realistic at times, as Orwell brings his unparalleled powers of observation to portray the wretched conditions of the working class. That Orwell may have slanted his reporting to make things look worse than they were is a question that does not lessen the book's interest.

Book Description

In the 1930s Orwell was sent by a socialist book club to investigate the appalling mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. He went beyond his assignment to investigate the employed as well-”to see the most typical section of the English working class.” Foreword by Victor Gollancz.

Customer Reviews:

great book.......2007-10-11

George Orwell is the man. This is for sure one of the top 5 best books i've ever read. Even if I tried, I couldn't come close to doing the book justice with this review.

Orwell's indictment of industrial squalor.......2007-07-08

This work commisioned by the Left Book Club, a socialist group in England in the 1930's contains an incredible description of the miserable working conditions of coal miners in the northern industrial areas of England. Orwell's power of description brings home the awful condiditons to the reader in a very tangible and palpable way. Reminiscent of Jacob Riis' "How The Other Half Lives" or Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", Orwell's account is unforgettable social historical writing.

The remainder of the book is a polemical piece critical of socialists of his day. To the modern reader that will not have as much relevance except as an example of Orwell's pursuasive writing but the earlier sections of the book are incredibly memorable.

Split approach to societal betterment.......2006-11-28

My first and easily least substantial question concerning The Road to Wigan Pier is this: where is the pier? I looked on a map, and Wigan is not a coastal town. Well, no matter I suppose. Orwell himself points out that the pier was gone even by the time he reached the town, and that was seventy years ago.

For more substantial issues, the reader will not be disappointed. George Orwell does not write fluff. What he did write, in this case, is a split work, with the first half covering his observations of life among the very poor of northern England in the thirties and the second half consisting of a lengthy essay on the practice and future of Socialism. This latter section was considered scandalous enough among the book's expected readership that the editors who commissioned the work felt the need to include a foreword saying, in effect, that the opinions expressed by this author do not reflect those of the Left Book Club management.

The first and expected traditional account is about life among the poor. What's life like? Well, it's pretty lousy. Boarding houses are depressing and dirty places to stay in Orwell's account. Mine work is brutal and impossible for all but the fittest of the populace. Slum housing is miserable. The common wage is only sufficient for living off of if one is prepared to live life to the slimmest. Of course Orwell would never just recite these facts, so there's no need to repeat them here. He lived these facts, or something approximating them. Unlike in his earlier life-among-the-people books like Homage to Catalonia or Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell never really provides a chronological narrative. He is much less a participant here, possibly because he's already done that and didn't need a repeat. He also provides more quantitative analysis here than in the others, and blends it with his own personal observations. If he tells about it, he's seen it. Clearly he was wandering around the north a bit, mixing and living and working with the people. Apparently he was even conducting something like semi-formal interviews with various residents of the towns he lived in.

Something that's worth pointing out that I've observed both here and in other works such as Down and Out is this: Orwell takes some of the unknown and hence some of the fear out of his depiction of poverty. He alludes on more than one occasion that the middle class person falling on hard times is far more likely than a lower class sort if suddenly confronted with real poverty in the form of unemployment, and today these probably make up the bulk of Wigan Pier's readership. Put plainly, Orwell provides a blueprint on how to survive. Not well, but well enough to live. Or so it appears.

The latter half of Wigan Pier steps back entirely from his stated purpose of exploring poverty in the industrial north and begins taking a long look at Socialism in practice in Britain. This is where things get interesting, because when one strips away all of Orwell's personal observations and reminiscences, he is essentially saying that the average Socialist is a thoroughly unlikable, unthinking person. Of course Orwell would never strip any of that away, so what the reader gets is a snapshot of how Orwell saw the culture of the political hard left in his day.

I don't know how this section was received in Orwell's day. Certainly the publishers had an idea of how it would come across, and hence the foreword. How should we look at it today? Alas, his political observations were severely limited in time and place and hence limited in intrinsic though not historical value today. Orwell was a student of human nature and was among the more capable of spectators in seeing across class lines and sociological boundaries. There is much to be said for his observations on how people interact with one another and what draws a person to a political identity. Where did he fail then? His was a failure of imagination and a failure of optimism. For all his skill in seeing the present, he could only see the present. He missed the messages of the past, and he was blind to the future. Orwell could never see a society that would improve itself of its own accord without radical change. He called Socialism the only possible solution to society's problems and seemed to genuinely believe that everyone could see it given sufficient prodding (and correct prodding, since he was greatly concerned with how so many people recoiled from Socialism even when he thought they should have no reason to). This is related, I suppose, to his musings in Coming Up for Air that British society could never stop fascism without becoming fascist. When all was stripped away, Orwell could not conceive of a society that would act for its own betterment while remaining the same society.

Did Orwell see the past? He missed the forest for the trees, I'm afraid, and it's evident right in these pages. More than once he made comparisons of his Britain with the Britain of years or decades past. More than once did he say that things had changed and were no longer as bad as in times past (no public dole back then, fewer amenities, lower wages, etc). And this while writing during something called the Great Depression. Did none of this sink in? Was he blind to existing progress? Did he see no improvements in public attitude, to say nothing of technological progress? Was Orwell's man a slave to his class? Sadly, the answer appears to be `yes' on all counts. Does this detract from the value of his work? I suppose it does, but hardly enough to discount it entirely. It would be folly to view Wigan Pier as merely a dated snapshot of a single mind. Not when that mind is Orwell's.

It is not just what you say but how you say it..........2006-08-20

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell is a book requested by the Left Book Club on the issue of poverty and mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. Mr. Orwell does a great job of investigating the harsh job conditions in the coal mines, the foul lodgings, the bad diet, the pitiful wages and the struggle to feed a family. He points out that much of the conditions can easily be changed IF people wanted to change them. The wealth is there it just needs to get to the lower-class.
The other part of the book is Orwell trying to explain why, if Socialism seems to be so logical, so reasonable, everybody is either turning away from Socialism and, in many changes, turning to Fascism. It seems that while people might agree with many ideals of Socialism they don't like the Socialists they meet. Orwell points out that Socialists need to work on the delivery of their message - less about class systems and more about justice and income.
When you attack the middle-class you put them on the defense. Why would they join up in a movement that is insulting them? He says the Socialist should drop the idea of the class war and focus on the basic ideals of increasing incomes, better housing for everybody, justice and liberty. He also says that Socialists are linked to progress which many people link with a machine-civilization and therefore a dark, bland future. Funny I also linked Socialism with slowing down progress and Fascism with speeding it up.
Even while the facts in the book are outdated the problems that many parties today face, such as Libertarians, are the same. How can you take a Libertarian seriously when he is dressed up as a butterfly? In print the ideas of the Libertarians and Socialists and even Democratics look good but sometimes the PEOPLE of these parties make the voters go running to the Republicans. I know many people who did JUST that - they didn't like the Republican's ideas but hated the people the Democratics had picked to run for President. Left-wingers sometimes come out, because of the terms they use or they way their come out as attacking almost everything, as nuts.

Needs a 21st Century Editor.......2006-07-01

A well-written, if dated, account of George Orwell's trip to the industrial north of England to investigate unemployment. The book was important for me to read because I have read many of Mr. Orwell's books previously.

This work is a kind of investigative journalism of the 1930s. Although the main premise is to investigate unemployment, Mr. Orwell covers the class system and the future of socialism, and takes swipes at vegetarians, femininsts, and men with beards. He is delightfully cranky in his treatment of "cranks."

The book is in need of a 21st century editor, someone who can explain the currency (Pounds/Shillings/Pence), who miscellaneous public figures are, and put the work into a context that a non-specialist can understand.

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The Road to Wigan Pier

Manufacturer: Berkley Medallion
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000HLF4FS

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The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell
Manufacturer: Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0000CLB1W

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The Road from Wigan Pier
Richard D. Lewis
Manufacturer: Transcreen Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0953439801

The road from Wigan pier: A biography of Les Cannon,

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The road from Wigan pier: A biography of Les Cannon,
Olga Cannon
Manufacturer: Gollancz
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: 0575014997

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The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell
Manufacturer: Recorded Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette
ASIN: 1556904460

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The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell
Manufacturer: Berkley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000KQK1TO

The Road to Wigan Pier [UNABRIDGED CD] (Audiobook)

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The Road to Wigan Pier [UNABRIDGED CD] (Audiobook)
George Orwell
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD
ASIN: 1402571151

Product Description

This is George Orwells nonfiction exposé of unemployment in the coal mines and foul lodgings of Lancashire and Yorkshire in England during the Depression. He shared the experience of subsisting on a meager diet and went down into the mines. His subjectspoverty, starvation, unemploymentare still with us.

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THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER.
George. Orwell
Manufacturer: Victor Gollancz
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000O6ZS34

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WIGAN PIER REVISITED
BEATRIX CAMPBELL
Manufacturer: VIRAGO PRESS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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So Much He Loved Wandering.......2003-01-01

"As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" [1], author Laurie Lee recounted his first sojourn away from home. At age 19, our narrator-biographer, walked out of his village at Stroud, Gloucestershire, and headed toward London. As Lee himself recalled, he was 'still soft at the edges' when he said farewell to his mother (a poignant scene in the opening chapter). All he had with him that Sunday morning in June 1934 was 'a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese.'

After nearly a year of living and working in London as a cement laborer, Lee decided it was time to move on. He bought a one-way ticket and sailed to Spain. He settled for Spain because he had had an introduction to Spanish. All he could speak then, Lee admitted, was only one Spanish phrase: 'Will you please give me a glass of water?'

In July 1935, Laurie Lee landed in northwestern Spain. For many months he roamed the exotic and history-filled landscape, living off his music and the kindness of the people he came to love. From Vigo, he wandered southward through the New Castile region (Segovia, Madrid, Toledo). By December, he came to the coastal region of Andalusia (Cordova, Seville, Granada). There, Lee holed up at a Castillo hotel until the outbreak of the civil war in July 1936.

This author's second autobiographical sketch could have been subtitled "From Spain With Love." His inimitable poetic description of the Spanish landscape and its inhabitants is sensual as it is lyrical. The warmth and beauty of this passage [no pun], for example, undulates this reviewer's reveries, not of memories but of what has never been: 'When twilight came I slept where I was, on the shore or some rock-strewn headland, and woke to the copper glow of the rising sun coming slowly across the sea. Mornings were pure resurrection, which I could watch sitting up, still wrapped like a corpse in my blanket, seeing the blood-warm light soak back into the Sierras, slowing re-animating their ash-grey cheeks, and feeling the cold of the ground drain away beneath me as the sunrise reached my body.'

Lee's "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" and its third autobiograhy "A Moment In War" have had a farther reach than any of his other celebrated works. These writings have been adapted to music to which Charles Baudelaire could only spoke of metaphorically. In June of 2002, the Allegri String Quartet in The Salisbury Festival (UK) premiered "A Walk Into War." A musical piece which the quartet had commissioned based on the two latter biographies.

The author once wrote that autobiography is 'a celebration of life and an attempt to hoard its sensations...trophies snatched from the dark... to praise the life I'd had and so preserve it, and to live again both the good and the bad'. By all measures he had not done badly. He was and is the one modern author whose memoirs have transcended into the realms of music and visual arts ('Cider With Rosie', a 1998 film by John Mortimer).

1] Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy - Book 1:"Cider with Rosie" (1959); Book 2:"As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" (1969); and Book 3: "A Moment of War" (1991).

On foot, in Spain.......2002-12-09

"As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" is the story of Laurie Lee's travels (mostly on foot) from rural West Country England to London, and then through Spain in 1935-36. It's a joy to read (as was "Cider With Rosie"), and Lee recalls a world now lost due to the rise of the motor car and the arrival of the "global village": for example, I doubt that the arrival of a foreigner in a Spanish village would now be quite the event it was in 1935.

The majority of the book is devoted to Spain, and indeed this for me was the best part. It's a Spain in which Lee sees the faded glory of the past, but at the same time a backwardness reminiscent of descriptions of the Third World countries of today. Lee was no romantic - he devotes space to descriptions of the grinding poverty and social tensions he saw.

I puzzled over some parts of the book, however. Lee does not describe how he managed to pick up a working knowledge of Spanish. I suppose that youth helped (he was 20), and necessity can be the mother of education. If the dialogue was being reconstructed at some distance in time from the actual events, it might be best to consider that it was Lee's recollection of what might have been said rather than a truly accurate account.

Also, I was disappointed that while Lee followed the course of the Guadalquivir to Seville, he fails to mention the city of Cordoba. Did he visit it, or give it a miss?

In all though, a very enjoyable read.

Memorable.......2002-01-03

It's a shame that this fine book is not in print. Those going after used editions--and you should--are encouraged to look for the 1985 reprint stunningly illustrated with classic paintings of Spanish life. But back to why you want to read this: in 1934, a young, naive Englishman who had never been out of his rural neighborhood packed up his violin and went walking, first to London, a hundred miles east and then via boat to Spain where he walked from Vigo in the north down to the southern coast. I'm having trouble shelving the book: is it a straight memoir? Certainly it is very much about the writer's encounter with the world at a historically significant time and about his own growth process. Or is it a travelogue? It is a very accurate account of the unique Spanish culture and countryside. Although written more than 30 years after the actual experience, Lee's account conveys a fresh sense of wonder and discovery and resists overlaying too much foreshadowing and hindsight. His style is lyrical, vivid as the blue Spanish sky and honest. He is refreshingly free of nationalism and prejudice.

Magical........2000-03-10

His admirers have commented, variously, that Laurie Lee 'writes like an angel', a 'poet, whose prose is quick and bright as a snake'. For another writer such praise might seem lavish but not for Laurie Lee. He writes beautifully, producing books that electrify and enchant, exhilarate and mesmerise. 'As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning' is the second volume of a marvellous trilogy. Part autobiography, part evocation of all the bewilderment and uncertainty of the 1930's, it is characterized by the lyricism of its poet author. Leaving his home in the Cotswolds, the young Lee walks to London in 'high, sulky Summer' with high hopes of making his fortune. He settles, happily enough, in a London boarding house with an engagingly eccentric Irish Cockney family, and supports himself by labouring on a building site and by playing the violin. In a life of opposites, we are treated to a first-hand account of the ugliness and tension of the disputes between employees and unions. In the dawn of the first, disquieting signs of dissatisfaction - a feeling in the 30's that led inexorably to the policy of Appeasement, and thus to war - we see through the eyes of a naive adolescent. It is this naivete, coupled with the glorious spontaneity that floods this book, which leads him to Spain. Knowing approximately one Spanish phrase, Lee decides to see Spain and so begins the love affair wtih a country that was to obsess him for the rest of his life. Never has Spain been so vividly painted. From the scorching heat and vivid, voluptous women of Vigo, to the false glamour and dilapidation of Madrid, Laurie Lee writes with a passion to match his captivation. An absolutely unforgettable book with a host of sharply drawn characters. From the sexily confident child, Patsy, to beautiful Cleo, Philip with his 'fine hungry face and a shock of thick obsidian curls' Lee sketches the myriad individuals he meets with a lucidity that stamps them in our minds forever. Who can read this novel and not dream wistfully of the days when cars were a rarity in our country. Or of a Spain unscarred by war, where the laundered, lacy dolls modestly avert their eyes from the gaze of the young men 'pocket dandies, carefully buttoned in spite of the heat.' Truly a book to treasure forever.

Beautiful, evocative writing that will stay with you.......1999-11-20

Laurie Lee's writing is beautiful, simple and elegant: down-to-earth but poetic. I first read this book when I was 14. Twelve years later, it's still in my all-time top three. It is incredibly evocative of Spain before the Civil War - it describes a place and a moment in history seen through the excited eyes of a youth. It is nostalgic but not unrealistic. Read it. You won't regret it!

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AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING
LAURIE LEE
Manufacturer: WORLD BOOKS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000S5Z0E8

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AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING
LAURIE LEE
Manufacturer: PENGUIN
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000S31LSY

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AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING
LAURIE LEE
Manufacturer: PENGUIN
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000S3T4HE

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AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING
LEE
Manufacturer: PENGUIN
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000S6CP2M

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AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING
Laurie Lee
Manufacturer: Andre Deutsch
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MQTT0E

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AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING
LAURIE LEE
Manufacturer: PENGUIN
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000S31M6A

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As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Manufacturer: World Books London
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HDJRU4

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As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
Laurie Lee
Manufacturer: Atheneum
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000KJSPR6

Product Description

Story of his travels in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

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As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
Laurie Lee
Manufacturer: ATHENEUM
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OJV6ZU

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