Alex Pappademas's Books

Quantum Criminals

Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan

By: Alex Pappademas,Joan LeMay

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Quantum Criminals

Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan

By: Alex Pappademas,Joan LeMay

Steely Dan was a somewhat unusual band that still inspires unusually strong devotion in its fans. Formed in the late '60s in New York, they released seven albums between 1971 and 1981, two of which were nominated for a Grammy. Part of what's unusual about them is that each of those albums was made by a different group of musicians--founding members Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had no issues swapping players from record to record in order to get the sound they wanted. The band stopped touring in 1974, so the recording studio was the only place they needed their collaborators. Those recordings are legendary, especially among vinyl enthusiasts, for their exquisite production. The precision was necessary, in part, because Steely Dan played with form more than most bands, mixing elements of other genres--especially jazz--with pop and rock. And the lyrics are also distinctive. As the authors put it in their proposal, Steely Dan's songs are "exercises in fictional world-building. Each song features its own cast of rogues and heroes and creeps and schmucks, lovers and dreamers and cold-blooded operators, all tempest-tossed by the ill winds of the '70s." This book consists of sixty-some essays, each devoted to one character, and each essay is accompanied by a painting of the particular character that serves as a jumping-off point for the piece, with additional spot illustrations scattered throughout"--

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Page Count

281

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1477324992

ISBN 13

9781477324998

Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant

The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon

By: Alex Pappademas

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Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant

The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon

By: Alex Pappademas

A tribute to and exploration of the magic behind one of Hollywood's most legendary and unknowable stars, Keanu Reeves, and the profound lessons we can learn from his success There can be no doubt: Keanu Reeves is a phenomenon. He’s at once a badass action star, a hunky dreamboat who People magazine has called “the Internet’s boyfriend,” a vintage motorcycle enthusiast, a niche art book publisher, a living meme, and a legend. He seems to upend every rule governing celebrity in the 21st century. But how? In Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant, cultural critic Alex Pappademas attempts to address Keanu’s unmatched eternality and the other big questions raised by his career arc. Sharp, funny, deeply researched, and fully celebratory of the enigmatic actor, this is the first book to take Keanu’s whole deal as seriously as it deserves. Yes, even Johnny Mnemonic, where Keanu mind melds with a dolphin. Along the way, Pappademas reveals the lessons we can learn from Keanu about Hollywood, our broader culture, and even life itself.

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Page Count

380

Publisher

Abrams

Published Date

ISBN 10

1647001994

ISBN 13

9781647001995

The Road to Resegregation

Northern California and the Failure of Politics

By: Alex Schafran

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The Road to Resegregation

Northern California and the Failure of Politics

By: Alex Schafran

How could Northern California, the wealthiest and most politically progressive region in the United States, become one of the earliest epicenters of the foreclosure crisis? How could this region continuously reproduce racial poverty and reinvent segregation in old farm towns one hundred miles from the urban core? This is the story of the suburbanization of poverty, the failures of regional planning, urban sprawl, NIMBYism, and political fragmentation between middle class white environmentalists and communities of color. As Alex Schafran shows, the responsibility for this newly segregated geography lies in institutions from across the region, state, and political spectrum, even as the Bay Area has never managed to build common purpose around the making and remaking of its communities, cities, and towns. Schafran closes the book by presenting paths toward a new politics of planning and development that weave scattered fragments into a more equitable and functional whole.

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Page Count

447

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520961676

ISBN 13

9780520961678

Song Noir

Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles

By: Alex Harvey

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Song Noir

Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles

By: Alex Harvey

A gritty, smoke-filled, and boozy account of musician Tom Waits’s formative decade in Los Angeles. Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits’s career, when he lived, wrote, and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles: from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time in 1973, to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones in 1983. Starting his songwriting career in the seventies, Waits absorbed Los Angeles’s wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city’s literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, Waits turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic, a vision of Los Angeles as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.

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Page Count

241

Publisher

Reaktion Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

178914664X

ISBN 13

9781789146646

Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant

The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon

By: Alex Pappademas

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Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant

The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon

By: Alex Pappademas

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Page Count

380

Publisher

Abrams

Published Date

ISBN 10

1647001994

ISBN 13

9781647001995

Quantum Criminals

Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan

By: Alex Pappademas,Joan LeMay

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Quantum Criminals

Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan

By: Alex Pappademas,Joan LeMay

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N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

281

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1477324992

ISBN 13

9781477324998

Book's by Alex Pappademas

Quantum Criminals

Quantum Criminals

Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant

Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant

The Road to Resegregation

The Road to Resegregation

Song Noir

Song Noir

Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant

Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant

Quantum Criminals

Quantum Criminals

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