The Vatican to Vegas

The Vatican to Vegas
Author :
Publisher : Transcript Publishing
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 3837661695
ISBN-13 : 9783837661699
Rating : 4/5 (95 Downloads)

Synopsis The Vatican to Vegas by : Norman M. Klein

A guided tour through the nuanced politics of architectural illusion, »The Vatican to Vegas« takes the reader from lavish Baroque fantasies of the seventeenth century to the Electronic Baroque of today. The ›scripted spaces‹ described by Norman Klein are punctuated with devices widely used in special effects since 1500: shocks, surprise twists, grand fakes and copies. Since its publication 2004, »The Vatican To Vegas« has emerged as a classic across many fields, from media, architecture, to the fine arts and urban planning. Its timing was ironic: Klein assumed in 2004 that the future of scripted illusion was about to radically shift. This new edition brings the ironic story up to the present, and into the digitally overwhelmed ›scripted spaces‹ of the future.

Vatican City, Las Vegas

Vatican City, Las Vegas
Author :
Publisher : ICCC Media
Total Pages : 135
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0978826108
ISBN-13 : 9780978826109
Rating : 4/5 (08 Downloads)

Synopsis Vatican City, Las Vegas by : F. Rex

In a Las Vegas casino fashioned after the Vatican, author Thomas Carlyle is as good as dead. Swilling a mortal dose of alcohol, he will perish among the grotesque patrons of Vatican City, Las Vegas as they pursue an elusive jackpot token called The Godhead. Carlyle unwittingly bumbles through corporate mafia intrigue as Vatican City's management, the Medici Crime Family, plots to enslave all the casino patrons to dreams of eternal wealth. As the night deepens and the forces of Vegas evil threaten to rob human existence of all nonmaterial significance, Carlyle dreams a final reckoning that will bring the Medici Crime Family and all of Vatican City's managerial clergy to justice in a shocking cinematic twist.

The Themed Space

The Themed Space
Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages : 352
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0739121421
ISBN-13 : 9780739121429
Rating : 4/5 (21 Downloads)

Synopsis The Themed Space by : Scott A. Lukas

The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation and Self is the first edited collection focused on the subject of the themed space. Twelve authors address a range of themed spaces, including restaurants, casinos, theme parks and other spaces like airports and virtual reality ones. The text is organized into four sections-theming as authenticity, theming as nation, theming as person and theming as mind.

The Money and the Power

The Money and the Power
Author :
Publisher : Vintage
Total Pages : 366
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780375414442
ISBN-13 : 0375414444
Rating : 4/5 (42 Downloads)

Synopsis The Money and the Power by : Sally Denton

Las Vegas—the name evokes images of divorce and dice, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than ever imagined. The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history. Now this neon maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant “sin city,” but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and worship of money that have come to permeate American life.

The Vatican Knights

The Vatican Knights
Author :
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages : 358
Release :
ISBN-10 : 153465187X
ISBN-13 : 9781534651876
Rating : 4/5 (7X Downloads)

Synopsis The Vatican Knights by : Rick Jones

While on a visit to the United States, Pope Pius XIII is kidnapped by a terrorist cell calling itself the Soldiers of Islam. If the United States and its allies do not meet their demands, they will execute the pope. So when FBI Specialist Shari Cohen is called to duty to track down the terrorist cell responsible, she learns that she is not alone. Deep behind the Vatican walls a secret order dispatches a clandestine op group of elite commandos known as the Vatican Knights. Their mission: bring the pope back alive. As Cohen and the Knights work in tandem they uncover a White House conspiracy involving high-ranking members on Capitol Hill. When she begins to get too close to the truth about the pope's kidnapping, she becomes the target of indigenous forces trying to keep the conspiracy safe. However, in order to get to her they must go through the Vatican Knights.

The King of Las Vegas

The King of Las Vegas
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 236
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1530675413
ISBN-13 : 9781530675418
Rating : 4/5 (13 Downloads)

Synopsis The King of Las Vegas by : John Van Stry

An American college student on holiday in India, Rafael fell afoul of a Rakshasa, an old and very powerful tiger-demon. When he finally manages to escape from his captivity, he is left with two small problems; the first is that he is now a Rakshasa himself, the second is that India is deporting him. With a now rather unique physical appearance and a pressing need to find strong emotions that he can feed off of, just where in America can a shape-shifting tiger-demon not only survive, but find acceptance and make a life? Las Vegas of course. But before he can claim his territory, there is the small matter of a vampire infestation that he'll have to deal with, one that the government hasn't been able to clean up since the forties. All while finding or creating enough of those very emotions he needs to survive. For someone skilled in the arts of seduction, with the best Elvis act that the city has ever seen, that may not sound like much of a problem, but just what happens when someone who needs 'love' to survive meets up with the real thing?

Vatican to Vegas

Vatican to Vegas
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 506
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1437968430
ISBN-13 : 9781437968439
Rating : 4/5 (30 Downloads)

Synopsis Vatican to Vegas by : Norman M. Klein

A guided tour through the magical world of illusions, this book takes the reader from lavish Baroque fantasies of the 17th cent. to the Electronic Baroque of today. We journey from architectural illusion in 1580 to the ¿trompe l¿oeil¿ of Las Vegas casinos. Klein takes us from Piranesi¿s labyrinths to the mazes of new computer software, from scrolling panoramas that staged the horror at Gettysburg to the special effects on cinema screens today. The real power in this world of fakery rests with whoever controls the illusion -- be it the pope, the pres., the imagineer, the designer, or the studio exec. ¿Special effects are not only a barometer for politics, myths of identity, and econ. relations, but also a parallel for understanding where our civilization may be headed next.¿ Ill.

The History of Forgetting

The History of Forgetting
Author :
Publisher : Verso Books
Total Pages : 369
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781844672424
ISBN-13 : 1844672425
Rating : 4/5 (24 Downloads)

Synopsis The History of Forgetting by : Norman M. Klein

Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an ‘anti-tour’ of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. In this new edition, Norman Klein examines new models for erasure in LA. He explores the evolution of the Latino majority, how the Pacific economy is changing the structure of urban life, the impact of collapsing infrastructure in the city, and the restructuring of those very districts that had been ‘forgotten’.

Immersion and Distance.

Immersion and Distance.
Author :
Publisher : Rodopi
Total Pages : 388
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789401209243
ISBN-13 : 9401209243
Rating : 4/5 (43 Downloads)

Synopsis Immersion and Distance. by : Werner Wolf

Readers who appear to be lost in a storyworld, members of theatre or cinema audiences who are moved to tears while watching a performance, beholders of paintings who are absorbed by the representations in front of them, players of computer games entranced by the fictional worlds in which they interactively participate – all of these mental states of imaginative immersion are variants of ‘aesthetic illusion’, as long as the recipients, although thus immersed, are still residually aware that they are experiencing not real life but life-like representations created by artefacts. Aesthetic illusion is one of the most forceful effects of reception processes in representational media and thus constitutes a powerful allurement to expose ourselves, again and again to, e.g., printed stories, pictures and films, be they factual or fictional. In contrast to traditional discussions of this phenomenon, which tend to focus on one medium or genre from one discipline only, the present volume explores aesthetic illusion, as well as its reverse side, the breaking of illusion, from a highly innovative multidisciplinary and transmedial perspective. The essays assembled stem from disciplines that range from literary theory to art history and include contributions on drama, lyric poetry, the visual arts, photography, architecture, instrumental music and computer games, as well as reflections on the cognitive foundations of aesthetic illusion from an evolutionary perspective. The contributions to individual media and aspects of aesthetic illusion are prefaced by a detailed theoretical introduction. Owing to its transmedial and multidisciplinary scope, the volume will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: cultural history at large, intermediality and media studies, as well as, more particularly, literary studies, music, film, and art history.

The Icon Project

The Icon Project
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 353
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780190464189
ISBN-13 : 0190464186
Rating : 4/5 (89 Downloads)

Synopsis The Icon Project by : Leslie Sklair

The Icon Project argues that the transnational capitalist class mobilizes two forms of iconic architecture--unique icons recognized as works of art, notably designed by global starchitects (such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid); and typical icons copying elements of unique icons--to promote the same ideological message: the culture-ideology of consumerism.