Every action is a mistake. Every meal is a waste. Reality is delusion. Life is death. Death by dumb luck, or by dumb choice. The end is nigh, and that's exactly the way it should be. This is A Manifesto of Contradiction, and it's all lies. A record from an alternate universe, Meta-Dream does not exist. Should not exist. And yet, here it is. Suffering with isolation, drudgery and depression, delivery driver James drives himself insane, and his car into a time-warp, trapping him in a nightmare of his own creation. Now he must rebuild the life he destroyed, and face his own worst enemy... Himself. Ride along with a blue-collar philosopher and journey through an all-too-real and present America, where War is Peace, Debt is Wealth, Corporations are People, and God's Money rules over a nation of drunkards, machines, and slaves.

Liquid Metal brings together 'seminal' essays that have opened up the study of science fiction to serious critical interrogation. Eight distinct sections cover such topics as the cyborg in science fiction; the science fiction city; time travel and the primal scene; science fiction fandom; and the 1950s invasion narratives. Important writings by Susan Sontag, Vivian Sobchack, Steve Neale, J.P. Telotte, Peter Biskind and Constance Penley are included.

Foreword by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Vincent Scully.

This book is a collective effort on the authors' part to remember KISS, one of the most important hard-rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s. Influenced by the glam-rock movement which preceded its rise, arguably KISS was the first major act in rock music history to present rock music as Entertainment Product firstly and music only secondarily. We discuss the original, democratic concept of the Fab Four - Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter - as well as Gene Simmons' and Paul Stanley's subsequent American Dream ideology. We go on to analyse the current version of the band in the light of the original line-up and appearance. We find that the KISS fan base is divided with some fans accepting Simmons' current view that the four personas can be utilized by anyone chosen by the band's leadership; a second group which tries to correct the alleged historical injustices committed against Frehley and Criss; and a third group which is cynical about the current version of KISS but finds it fruitless to rehash old debates.

Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. "The Manifesto of Futurism" written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, initiated an artistic philosophy, Futurism, that was a rejection of the past, and a celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry; it also advocated the modernization and cultural rejuvenation of Italy. Marinetti wrote the manifesto in the autumn of 1908 and it first appeared as a preface to a volume of his poems, published in Milan in January 1909. It was published in the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dell'Emilia in Bologna on 5 February 1909 then in French as Manifeste du futurisme (Manifesto of Futurism) in the newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. Translated by Jason Forbus

World War II in Contemporary German and Dutch Fiction: The Generation of Meta-Memory offers a comparative study of the construction of World War II memory in contemporary German, Flemish, and Dutch literature. More specifically, it investigates in what ways the large temporal distance to the historical events has impacted how literary writers from these three literatures have negotiated its meaning and form during the last decades. To that end, this book offers analyses of nine novels that demonstrate a pronounced reflexivity on the conditions of contemporary remembering. Rather than a dig for historical truth or a struggle with historical trauma, these novels reflect on the transmission, the narrative shapes, the formation processes, and the functions of World War II memory today, while asserting a self-conscious and often irreverent approach toward established mnemonic routines, practices, and rules. As the analyses show, this approach is equally articulated through the novels’ poetics, which are marked by a large formal diversity and a playfulness that highlights mnemonic agency, a posttraumatic positioning, and the ascendency of the literary over the historiographical. Based on these findings, this book proposes the emergence of a new paradigm within the postwar cultural assessment of World War II: the generation of meta-memory.

Computer Architectures is a collection of multidisciplinary historical works unearthing sites, concepts, and concerns that catalyzed the cross-contamination of computers and architecture in the mid-20th century. Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, this book paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development. The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi-material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives. Constructing the common ground between design and computing, this collection addresses audiences working at the nexus of design, technology, and society, including historians and practitioners of design and architecture, science and technology scholars, and media studies scholars.

Gaines is a self-described "bourbon-guzzling, pill-popping, penis-addicted, workaholic, tattooed Jew" with a Ph.D. and a pistol permit. "A Misfit's Manifesto" is about living with the contradictions. This is how she did it, and found God in all the unlikely places--like Ramones songs.

Twenty-first century fashion practice has become increasingly borderless and diverse in the digital era, calling into question the very boundaries that define fashion in the Western cultural context. Borderless Fashion Practice: Contemporary Fashion in the Metamodern Age principally engages the work of four fashion designers -- Virgil Abloh, Aitor Throup, Iris Van Herpen, and Eckhaus Latta -- whose work intersects with other creative disciplines such as art, technology, science, architecture, and graphic design. They do their work in what Vanessa Gerrie calls the metamodern age -- the time and place where the polarization between the modern and the postmodern collapses. Used as a framework to understand the current Western cultural zeitgeist, Gerrie's exploration of the work of contemporary practitioners and theorists finds blurred borders and seeks to blur them further, to the point of erasure.