#2017bestof

[awkrecommends]

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (New York Review Books Classics)

Eve Babitz

No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us.

[restylemarketplace]

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[aliceofelia]

100 things that made a difference (2017)

1.     Singing out loud with Pandora during my commutes

2.     Face Painting children

3.     DundraCon in San Ramone – gets a girl out of the house.

4.     Steampunk Bazaar for fun and frivolity

5.     Being asked back from local businesses, for annual events for Henna

6.     10x10 film challenge - makeup

7.     ConQuest Sac

8.     Putting on the Ears! Embodying the Bunny! Building & donating Easter Baskets to the Casa Kids, at Casa de Esperanza

9.     Reading life stories of people that start from nothing and rise to their own greatness.

10. KublaCon fun-ness, Burlingame, CA

11. Making disabled kids smile for the Arts Council event: A Very Special Arts, with color and GLITTER!

12. Golden Coast Adventure Fair; followed by a glorious Berry Festival!

13. Loving astrology and astronomy; looking at the moon.

14. Treasuring the seasons, and turning of the wheel of the year.

15. Meeting new friends, at first time events

16. Premier of long awaited film project: Capps Crossing.

17. Peach Festival

18. Conceptualizing and doing Special FX Makeup for From the Mad Genius Mind of Devin

19. Being lazy. Taking moments doing nothing but chilling marathoning through Movies.

20. Being asked to do makeup on Good Day Sacramento

21. Zombie Walk – Special FX makeup

22. Fight For Your Life – film; Special FX makeup

23. Birthday visits from a Cherished Friend; getting a handmade gift.

24. Kirshners Animal Sanctuary

25. PacificCon, Santa Clara

26. CrawFestival

27. Pagan Pride; visiting with Rescued Animals.  (Crow, specifically was so cool)

28. Harvest the Arts, Arts Council event.

29. Not having negative encounters with people over politics.

30. The Heart Walk, Sacramento

31. Premier of film and Place Called Sacramento, film Festival.  Being apart of a film that won 4 awards.

32. Making the Film poster.

33. Helping a friend with promotion, marketing and profitability, and subsequently seeing his success.

34. Vampire Ball and Sinister Creature con.

35. Having dinner next to Tom Atkins, Actor; Halloween III with my friend Abby.

36. Still studying Elvish, Sindarin. Hannon le!

37. Discovered ‘Si’ the perfume. MMMM

38. Conquest Avalon

39. Alan

40. Sculpting

41. Creature brainstorming

42. Playing with a Mogwi Furby

43. Reading “Steal Like an Artist” again.

44. CSM certification

45. Repairing my Windshield

46. Investing in new tools for the shop

47. Purging un-needed, un-used items from the collection.

48. Letting go

49. Sushi, mmmm Sumo roll is to Die for.

50. Making a blanket after creating a new design/pattern, then giving it away.

51. Making people smile.

52. Helping friends

53. Making Ties

54. Yoga

55. Stranger Things – WTH, but I love it.

56. Starting a new journal

57. Getting a new Surface

58. Studying Makeup

59. Making Art; any kind

60. Writing short stories

61. Watching Making of’s and Behind the Scenes

62. Listening to the music of Pan’s Labyrinth

63. Playing the Piano

64. Realizing why I love the creative mind of Guillermo Del Toro

65. Discovering the genius of paper.

66. Seeing son ‘beam’ when he got a new job

67. Laughter

68. Being there for a friend when in need

69. The Thrill of getting a new job, but knowing you have a family with the old one.

70. Going to the Movies to see a film on the big screen.

71. Star Wars

72. Taking time to breathe, and slow down.

73. Listening to Celtic music

74. Dealing with negative people by imagining something in their teeth or hanging out of their nose.

75. Finding people you can share PB&J

76. Reading Stephen King; The Colorado Kid

77. Discovering Lisa Nichols

78. Watching movies in bed.

79. Re-watching old favorites – The X-Files

80. Putting up the Christmas Decorations for the first time in years.

81. Watching looney tunes on YouTube

82. Digging out the Disney; Mulan, Hunchback of Notre Dame

83. Contemplating the Why of things; such as Extremism??

84. Drawing

85. Moments of silence; doing stuff or just sitting, with nothing on.

86. Pyrography

87. Discovering CashFlow, and finding my son likes learning about it too.

88. Cherry Tomatoes

89. Letting myself be vulnerable to someone

90. Deadpool; I could watch this over and over.

91. Getting a pen with my studio name printed on it.

92. Nautilus Tea Company – Mmm.. Pomegranate Black Tea is the best.

93. The realization that live is more than, “Rinse, Wash and Repeat!”

94. Finding one thing every day that makes me smile.

95. Being positive.

96. Designing a logo for a project at work.

97. Being a Hero to myself, if no one else.

98. Reaching out to old friends. Reconnecting.

99. Taking some good advice.

100. Helping a long distance friend.

[awkrecommends]

Henry David Thoreau: A Life

Laura Dassow Walls

“Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.” That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to “live deliberately” in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.   But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau’s character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, “Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided.” Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls restores Henry David Thoreau to us in all his profound, inspiring complexity.   Walls traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and “America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.” By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated?   Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him.   “The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one,” says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.  

[awkrecommends]

The Importance Of Living

Lin Yutang

The Importance of Living is a wry, witty antidote to the dizzying pace of the modern world. Lin Yutang's prescription is the classic Chinese philosophy of life: Revere inaction as much as action, invoke humor to maintain a healthy attitude, and never forget that there will always be plenty of fools around who are willing-indeed, eager-to be busy, to make themselves useful, and to exercise power while you bask in the simple joy of existence.At a time when we're overwhelmed with wake-up calls, here is a refreshing, playful reminder to savor life's simple pleasures.

[awkrecommends]

Montaigne (Pushkin Collection)

Stefan Zweig

Written during the Second World War, Zweig's typically passionate and readable biography of Michel de Montaigne, is also a heartfelt argument for the importance of intellectual freedom, tolerance and humanism. Zweig draws strong parallels between Montaigne's age, when Europe was torn in two by conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, and his own, in which the twin fanaticisms of Fascism and Communism were on the verge of destroying the pan-continental liberal culture he was born into, and loved dearly. Just as Montaigne sought to remain aloof from the factionalism of his day, so Zweig tried to the last to defend his freedom of thought, and argue for peace and compromise.   One of the final works Zweig wrote before his suicide, this is both a brilliantly impassioned portrait of a great mind, and a moving plea for tolerance in a world ruled by cruelty.

[awkrecommends]

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Neil Postman

**What happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? As our world begins to look more and more like Orwell's 1984, Neil's Postman's essential guide to the modern media is more relevant than ever.

**"It's unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman.” -CNN

Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media—from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs—it has taken on even greater significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of  entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.

“A brilliant, powerful, and important book. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one.” –Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

[awkrecommends]

Arbitrary Stupid Goal

Tamara Shopsin

“Arbitrary Stupid Goal is a completely riveting world****―when I looked up from its pages regular life seemed boring and safe and modern like one big iPhone. This book captures not just a lost New York but a whole lost way of life.” ―Miranda July

In Arbitrary Stupid Goal, Tamara Shopsin takes the reader on a pointillist time-travel trip to the Greenwich Village of her bohemian 1970s childhood, a funky, tight-knit small town in the big city, long before Sex and the City tours and luxury condos. The center of Tamara’s universe is Shopsin’s, her family’s legendary greasy spoon, aka “The Store,” run by her inimitable dad, Kenny―a loquacious, contrary, huge-hearted man who, aside from dishing up New York’s best egg salad on rye, is Village sheriff, philosopher, and fixer all at once. All comers find a place at Shopsin’s table and feast on Kenny’s tall tales and trenchant advice along with the incomparable chili con carne.

Filled with clever illustrations and witty, nostalgic photographs and graphics, and told in a sly, elliptical narrative that is both hilarious and endearing, Arbitrary Stupid Goal is an offbeat memory-book mosaic about the secrets of living an unconventional life, which is becoming a forgotten art.

[awkrecommends]

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David Eagleman

SUM is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered–each presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now.

In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple struggling with discontent, or that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember, or that the hereafter includes the thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been; in others you are re-created from your credit card records and Internet history. David Eagleman proposes many versions of our purpose here; we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together.

These wonderfully imagined tale–at once funny, wistful, and unsettling–are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that exposes radiant new facets of our humanity.

[awkrecommends]

Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching : A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way

Ursula K. Le Guin

No other English translation of this greatest of the Chinese classics can match Ursula Le Guin's striking new version. Le Guin, best known for thought-provoking science fiction novels that have helped to transform the genre, has studied the *Tao Te Ching * for more than forty years. She has consulted the literal translations and worked with Chinese scholars to develop a version that lets the ancient text speak in a fresh way to modern people, while remaining faithful to the poetic beauty of the work. Avoiding scholarly interpretations and esoteric Taoist insights, she has revealed the *Tao Te Ching *'s immediate relevance and power, its depth and refreshing humor, in a way that shows better than ever before why it has been so much loved for more than 2,500 years. Included are Le Guin's own personal commentary and notes on the text. This new version is sure to be welcomed by the many readers of the *Tao Te Ching * as well as those coming to the text for the first time.

[awkrecommends]

In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, 2nd Edition

Walter Murch

In the Blink of an Eye is editor Walter Murch's essay of film editing. Starting with what might seem to be the most basic editing question - Why do cuts work? - he treats the reader to a marvelous "ride" through the esthetics and practical concerns of cutting film. Along the way, he offers his insights on such subjects as continuity and discontinuity in editing, dreaming, and real life; the criteria of a good cut; and the blink of the eye as both an analog to and an emotional cue for the cut. New to this second edition is Murch's lengthy meditation on the current state of digital editing.

[awkrecommends]

Inventing Kindergarten

Norman Brosterman

This is the first comprehensive book about the original kindergarten, a revolutionary educational program for children that was invented in the 1830s by the charismatic German educator Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) and grew to become a familiar institution throughout the world by the end of the nineteenth century. Using extraordinary visual material, it reconstructs the most successful system for teaching young children about art, design, mathematics, and natural history ever devised. Kindergarten - a coinage of Froebel's combining the German words for children and garden - involved not only nature study, singing, dancing, and storytelling, but also play with the so-called Froebel gifts - a series of twenty educational toys, including building blocks, parquetry tiles, origami papers, modeling clay, sewing kits, and other design projects, that became wildly popular in the nineteenth century. Architect and artist Norman Brosterman tells the story of Froebel's life, explains his goals and educational philosophy, and - most remarkably - describes each of the gifts, illustrating them all, as well as many examples of art by nineteenth-century kindergarten teachers and children, and diagrams from long-forgotten kindergarten textbooks. In a section of the book devoted to the origin of abstract art and modern architecture, Brosterman shows how this vast educational program may have influenced the course of art history. Using examples from the work of important artists who attended kindergarten - including Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, among others - he demonstrates that the design ideas of kindergarten prefigured modern conceptions of the aesthetic power of geometric abstraction.

[awkrecommends]

300 Arguments: Essays

Sarah Manguso

**“Jam-packed with insights you’ll want to both text to your friends and tattoo on your skin….A sweeping view of a human mind trying to make order of the world around us.”―Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere **

** There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you. * * Bad art is from no one to no one. * * Am I happy? Damned if I know, but give me a few minutes and I’ll tell you whether you are. * * Thank heaven I don’t have my friends’ problems. But sometimes I notice an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret gratitude. * * I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I’ll escape the worst of it.

―from 300 Arguments

A “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight.

300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in the work of David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature.

[awkrecommends]

How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

Alan Jacobs

"Absolutely splendid . . . essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now."** —David Brooks, *New York Times *

How to Think *is a contrarian treatise on why we’re not as good at thinking as we assume—but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life.**   As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like *The Atlantic and Harper’s, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America’s culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us—political, social, religious—Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we’re doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren’t thinking. *   Most of us don’t want to think. Thinking is trouble. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is *slow, and that’s a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the spin cycle of social media, partisan bickering, and confirmation bias.   In this smart, endlessly entertaining book, Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that act on us to prevent thinking—forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, “alternative facts,” and information overload—and he also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. (For example: It’s impossible to “think for yourself.”)   Drawing on sources as far-flung as novelist Marilynne Robinson, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, and Christian theologian C.S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all. Because if we can learn to think together, maybe we can learn to live together, too.

[awkrecommends]

The Summer Book (New York Review Books Classics)

Tove Jansson

In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. “On an island,” thinks the grandmother, “everything is complete.” In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.

Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in The Summer Book, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world. 

The Summer Book is translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.

[awkrecommends]

The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

Greg Sestero

Note: Pages are cut unevenly as the trim is "gatefold" meaning pages cut at different lengths and is intentionalFrom the actor who somehow lived through it all, a “sharply detailed…funny book about a cinematic comedy of errors” (The New York Times): the making of the cult film phenomenon The Room.In 2003, an independent film called The Room—starring and written, produced, and directed by a mysteriously wealthy social misfit named Tommy Wiseau—made its disastrous debut in Los Angeles. Described by one reviewer as “like getting stabbed in the head,” the $6 million film earned a grand total of $1,800 at the box office and closed after two weeks. Ten years later, it’s an international cult phenomenon, whose legions of fans attend screenings featuring costumes, audience rituals, merchandising, and thousands of plastic spoons. Hailed by The Huffington Post as “possibly the most important piece of literature ever printed,” The Disaster Artist is the hilarious, behind-the-scenes story of a deliciously awful cinematic phenomenon as well as the story of an odd and inspiring Hollywood friendship. Greg Sestero, Tommy’s costar, recounts the film’s bizarre journey to infamy, explaining how the movie’s many nonsensical scenes and bits of dialogue came to be and unraveling the mystery of Tommy Wiseau himself. But more than just a riotously funny story about cinematic hubris, “The Disaster Artist is one of the most honest books about friendship I’ve read in years” (Los Angeles Times).