Book Description
Everything from finding a performance space, to creating a first season, to promoting your company and production, to designing a long-term plan is discussed in detail in this engaging guide-a sometimes irreverent, always relevant look behind and beyond the curtain of the modern stage troupe. Through personal experience and the "war stories" of esteemed stage veterans, the author reveals the pitfalls, passions, and practicalities of the theater industry. Chapters include developing business and budget plans, rehearsing, attracting attention with publicity and word-of-mouth, adapting to growth, and more. For everyone from the budding professional to the avid audience member wanting the ultimate back stage tour, no other book contains the unique insight and sound advice found in this indispensable reference.
Customer Reviews:
Find Your Way; We'll Help.......2003-06-09
Please notice the absence of the words "How To" in the title of this book. This is a book of practical advice from the world of experience, not a book of instruction with facts and statistics. You will need to know and learn a great deal to figure out how to start and build a thriving theatre company, and this book will give you only the merest outline of what you need.
That said, this book does glean the best advice from companies like Steppenwolf, Bailiwick, Mixed Blood, and the legendary Pasadena Playhouse, and presents all this advice in a clear, readable manner. Be explaining how these above-average, highly-respected theatre companies built themselves up--their mistakes as well as their successes--we get a glimpse into the world of high motivation, artistic dedication, and pure love that turns something as uncertain as a theatre company into a thriving success.
You'll still have to do the hard work yourself, and you'll still make some nasty mistakes right off the bat. Indeed, this book encourages you to do so early and often, so you get it out of your system. But if you want to get some good pointers and avoid the really egregious errors, this is your book.
Book Description
Early in his career, Judge Dee visits a senior magistrate who shows him a beautiful lacquer screen on which a scene of lovers has been mysteriously altered to show the man stabbing his lover. The magistrate fears he is losing his mind and will murder his own wife. Meanwhile, a banker has inexplicably killed himself, and a lovely lady has allowed Dee's lieutenant, Chiao Tai, to believe she is a courtesan. Dee and Chiao Tai go incognito among a gang of robbers to solve this mystery, and find the leader of the robbers is more honorable than the magistrate.
"One of the most satisfyingly devious of the Judge Dee novels, with unusual historical richness in its portrayal of the China of the T'ang dynasty."-—New York Times Book Review
"Even Judge Dee is baffled by Robert van Gulik's new mysteries in The Lacquer Screen. Disguised as a petty crook, he spends a couple of precarious days in the headquarters of the underworld, hobnobbing with the robber king. Dee's lively thieving friends furnish some vital clues to this strange and fascinating jigsaw."-—The Spectator
"So scrupulously in the classic Chinese manner yet so nicely equipped with everything to satisfy the modern reader."-—New York Times
Robert Van Gulik (1910-67) was a Dutch diplomat and an authority on Chinese history and culture. He drew his plots from the whole body of Chinese literature, especially from the popular detective novels that first appeared in the seventeenth century.
Customer Reviews:
utter refinement.......2005-10-02
Some 1,350 years ago Judge Dee was a real existing magistrate in ancient China. Gaining himself a reputation for solving crimes, he lived on in Chinese folk tales for many decades afterwards. In the mid-20th century Dutch diplomat and China-scientist Robert van Gulik used these tales to write his Judge Dee-novels.
'The lacquer screen' is one of these. At first sight it contains all usual qualities of a Judge Dee-novel. Such as a few complicated & intelligent plots, logically explained to the reader in the course of the story. Such as a chosen setting, its atmosphere penetrating the novel from start to finish. Such as a close cooperation between Judge Dee and his assistents, this time only one of them. Such as a lively picture of ancient Chinese society, from the upper layers down to the poorest.
In this novel the plot shows a refined literary touch, that fully develops at the end. Its story is set in a neighboring district where Judge Dee lacks authority. In compensation his one assistent is both intelligent and physically strong -- in this way influencing the plot's development. And we see Judge Dee intensively communicate with his colleague-magistrate, as well as with the local beggar's community.
What makes 'The lacquer screen' special in the Judge Dee-series, is its refined literary double-bottom emerging at the end. Even surprising an experienced Judge Dee-reader, this development makes another stunning example of Van Gulik's ingenuity. For this reason his Judge Dee should live on in the same way Sherlock Holmes does.
The Lacquer Screen : A Chinese Detective Story (A Judge Dee.......2000-04-27
This is one of the first chronological detective adventures of Judge Dee. The judge is visiting one place and gets involved in several murder cases. It follows the classical structure: independent plots in the traditional Chinese detective story style. The lacquer screen is presented as a supernatural object but Dee manages to return it to everyday world. A book recommended for the Van Gulik followers.
Book Description
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Chinese furniture reached a pinnacle of exceptional design and meticulous workmanship. Beyond the Screen leads the reader on a journey that encompasses not only the evolution of these exquisite furnishings, but also includes the many literary, architectural, and visual contexts in which they were created. Alongside 64 superb color photographs of the furniture itself, numerous Ming woodblock prints and literary excerpts show how furniture was used in daily lifeUas everything from a lover's hiding place to a projectile thrown during arguments. A vital response to the West's increasing interest in traditional Chinese furniture, this beautifully produced volume is both an illustration of the aesthetic possibilities of furniture design and a fascinating look at China during the early modern period.
Customer Reviews:
Fine Book on Fine Furniture.......2000-04-12
BEYOND THE SCREEN is an apt title; it describes this book both literally and metaphorically. Nancy Berliner and fourcontributing writers dissect both the life and furniture of sixtheen and seventeenth China in a work that combines art, craft and social history. My husband, an amateur woodworker, was fascinated with descriptions of workmanship and digrams of joinery. I preferred the sections that talked about the people -- both the craftsmen (usually anonymous) that made the furniture and the elite who commissioned it. But the focus point of the book is undoubtedly the photographs of the furniture itself -- some pieces which are classically simple, others that are intricately carved. Berliner comments at length on each piece. For collectors of antique Chinese furniture -- or reproductions -- this book is an absolute must-have. It gives the story behind the craft and makes sitting down so much more interesting!
Average customer rating:
- Cultural Collisions: Locus, Taipei
- Obsessive Horror
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The Hell Screens
Alvin Lu
Manufacturer: Four Walls Eight Windows
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 United States
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Pamela: A Novel (Atelos (Series), 4.)
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Prime-time Apparitions
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Dogeaters (Contemporary American Fiction)
ASIN: 156858167X |
Book Description
Cheng-Ming, a Chinese American, rummages through the used-book stalls and market bins of Taipei. His object is no ordinary one - he's searching obsessively for accounts of ghosts and spirits, suicides and murders in a city plagued by a rapist-killer and less tangible forces. Cheng-Ming is an outsider trying to unmask both the fugitive criminal and the otherworld of spiritual forces that are inexorably taking control of the city. Things get complicated when the fetid island atmosphere begins to melt his contact lenses and his worsening sight paradoxically opens up the teeming world of ghosts and chimeras that surround him. Vengeful and anonymous spirits commandeer Cheng-Ming's sight, so that he cannot distinguish past from present, himself from another. Images from modern and colonial Taiwan - an island of restless spirits - assail Cheng-Ming even as they captivate the reader.
Customer Reviews:
Cultural Collisions: Locus, Taipei.......2001-04-22
When we in the western world think of China and Chinese spritiual beliefs, we tend to think of the lone sage meditating on the fog-entrenched mountains with lush pine greenery supplying the mist for his mysterious knowledge. Such an image is, of course, more two-dimensional than the brush-paintings we have seen this sage inhabit.
In the noise and chaos and odors of the city--and not just any city, this is the simultaneously more modernly western and traditionally eastern Taipei, Taiwan--and see what "spirit" means to the authentic characters in Alvin Lu's novel "Hell Screens". By the end of the novel, if you've paid attention, you notice that everything has come together in a hodge-podge of past & present, colonialism and nativism, body and spirit, and, yes, life and death.
This is no simple novel. Many times I found myself scratching my head, or my chin, wondering if this book were taking me anywhere I could afford to go. If I had not ever lived in Taipei myself, I probably wouldn't have picked up this novel. But now that I have, and have been forced to read it with both my eyes open & still not know if my contact lenses have been cursed or blessed, I can only recommend this book to anyone who doesn't balk at letting the head swim while the world (oh, but which world?) explodes.
I can't prove it, but I think the narrator's name Cheng-ming is a reference to the Confucian concept of the Rectification of Names. If yours is a world where such alleged rectification has long-ago shattered, leaving you to sweep up the pieces, then buy a plane-ticket to Taipei and bring this book along with you.
Obsessive Horror.......2001-02-14
Alvin Lu has written a first novel that inextricably combines a rich and unnerving spirit world with the very real actions of an elusive serial murderer. The result is the kind of labyrinthine story telling which never fails to entrance.
Set in modern Taipei, the story is ostensibly the tale of Cheng-Ming, a Chinese-American researcher who is drawn into and seduced by the superstitions and myths of the city. We are treated to an ever darker study of of the Oriental spirit world, as we move through layers of myth and malevolence. This world intrudes upon and is intruded on by modern Taipei. We see ceremonies in sneakers and sacred comic books. Signs and portents appear everywhere.
The novel is tremendously atmospheric, gaining momentum as the world he moves thru gradually overwhelms Cheng-Ming's westernized sensibilities. At some point Cheng-Ming ceases to be an academic in search of signs and clues and becomes an obsessive seeker after knowledge which is always just beyond his reach.
The Hell Screens is far more than the typical serial killer horror story, combining the raw action and realities of murderous violence with a refined psychological study of a wanderer in the mist. Prepare for a truly unusual, enjoyable experience.
Book Description
In the first exploration of Chinese paintings as both material products
and pictorial representations, The Double Screen shows how the
collaboration and tension between material form and image gives life to
a painting. A Chinese painting is often reduced to the image it bears;
its material form is dismissed; its intimate connection with social
activities and cultural conventions neglected.
A screen occupies a space and divides it, supplies an ideal surface for
painting, and has been a favorite pictorial image in Chinese art since
antiquity. Wu Hung undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the screen,
which can be an object, an art medium, a pictorial motif, or all three
at once. With its diverse roles, the screen has provided Chinese
painters with endless opportunities to reinvent their art.
The Double Screen provides a powerful non-Western perspective on
issues from portraiture and pictorial narrative to voyeurism,
masquerade, and political rhetoric. It will be invaluable to anyone
interested in the history of art and Asian studies.
Book Description
Global perceptions of China have changed dramatically since the massive student protests that took place in Tian'anmen Square in April 1989. The media spotlight trained on Beijing, and the international uproar over the events of that spring still shape the world's perceptions of the People's Republic and the ways that Chinese people, within and beyond China, see and portray themselves.
In From Tian'anmen to Times Square, leading film scholar Gina Marchetti considers the complex changes in the ways that China and the Chinese have been portrayed in cinema and media arts since the Tian'anmen revolt. Drawing on her interviews with leading contemporary Chinese filmmakers, Marchetti looks at a wide range of work by Chinese and non-Chinese media artists working in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore and on transnational co-productions involving those places. Focusing on the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on global screens, Marchetti traces the momentous political, cultural, social, and economic forces confronting contemporary media artists and filmmakers working within "Greater China."
Average customer rating:
- deeply serious debut from midwestern poet
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Analects on a Chinese Screen
Glenn Mott
Manufacturer: Chax Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Poetry
| Literature & Fiction
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Asian
| Poetry
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ASIN: 0925904619
Release Date: 2007-01-01 |
Product Description
Poems whose subject is China. The foundations of the poetry are not to be sought in the contemporary lyric, with its preoccupation with personal assertiveness and the interior struggles of a single personality. Rather, it is modeled on a form that reaches back to an earlier tradition of narrative and storytelling, one that is classical in structure, and able to speak of "bread and circuses." Glenn Mott engages both sinister and pleasurable aspects of the social, yet throughout, his focus is on China in an era of national renovation, and the insistent connection of poetry with the external world.
Customer Reviews:
deeply serious debut from midwestern poet.......2007-07-25
The old model for the poet's debut was to publish the already published (by little mags) apprenticeship poems, often in received forms (sonnet, sestina, blank verse couplets), as a way to claim one's worthiness to join the tradition. I can count twenty debuts in the last two years that don't follow the model, and Mott's Analects is one. The poet went to China, lived for a time, returned, and now writes about the experience. In this respect, that he writes about an experience, Mott is unlike eighteen of the twenty debuts I've just referred to. The book is in mixed format, again unusual, prose and verse. The prose is notational, quick yet often aphoristic, finely crafted journal squibs: "Like DREAM in the American language, | SOUL in Chinese is inescapable." The verse is in the American Objectivist line, yet it is the interaction of the prose and the verse that matters, and the interaction has the ideographic character that is referred to in the book's title, ANALECTS ON A CHINESE SCREEN. There are two parts to the book, two panels, or screens, within each, some thirty pages, and each page is treated as in itself a screen on which one or some number of ideograms may be displayed, some of these journal entries, some lyrics, many hinged by punctuation half-way across a page to a dropped line that completes the prose print area. The book's theme is the loss of identity immersion in Chinese hyper-modernisation entails for the narrator, who must fall back, in his intercourse with the Chinese, on the constructed typology of the pastoral America he represents, and finds in such collapses both a hollow self and an "authentic" tonality. I found the book both strange and utterly rigorous. I certainly recommend it.
Book Description
Traditional Chinese Medicine is as old as Chinese history. Building a Jade Screen explains this ancient and comprehensive system of health care in clear, accessible language to help patients understand their condition, diagnosis, and treatment. Rooted in the belief that the body is a whole organism, the author prescribes a variety of treatments: Chinese herbs, acupuncture, diet therapy, massage, and exercises such as Tai Chi, Qi Gong, and meditation. Always realistic and practical, Dr. Zhu combines long clinical experience, theory, and simple home remedies to restore health and balance. To read his words is to have a long friendly chat with your TCM practitioner.
Average customer rating:
|
On a Chinese Screen - Sketches
W. Somerset, Maugham
Manufacturer: Hesperides Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Classics
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Chinese
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ASIN: 1406794406 |
Book Description
A collection of sketches of life in China. Mr. Somerset Maugham writes with equal certainty and vigour whether his characters are Chinese or European
Average customer rating:
- Notes of an Englishman in China
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On a Chinese Screen (Rep)
W. Somerset Maugham
Manufacturer: Paragon House Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Chinese
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ASIN: 1557782520 |
Book Description
Maugham spent the winter months of 1919-20 travelling 1500 miles up the Yangtze River. Always more interested in people than places, he gave full rein to a sensitive and philosophical nature. On a Chinese Screen is the refined accumulation of the countless scraps of paper on which he had taken notes. Within the narrow confines of their colonial milieu, missionaries, consuls, army officers and company managers are all gently ridiculed as they persist obliviously with the life they know.
Customer Reviews:
Notes of an Englishman in China.......2000-12-25
William Somerset Maugham was 45 years old when he went on a trip to China in the winter of 1919. Always an astute observer, he jotted down notes, elaborated them, and finally had them published as a book in London. Fortunately, this small volume is now available again as a Vintage Classics paperback in the UK (and in the reviewer's favorite Shanghai bookstore). "On a Chinese Screen" is an appropriate title for the book because it depicts mostly English people against the backdrop of China at the beginning of the century. In 58 short sketches, the longest of which fits on just nine printed pages, Maugham portrays English missionaries, officials, army officers, adventurers and company managers. Maugham gently mocks their narrow-mindedness and indifference towards the country in which they spend a major part of their lives. "On the whole," he remarks, "it made little difference to them in what capital they found themselves, for they did precisely the same things in Constantinople, Berne, Stockholm, and Peking . . . China bored them all, they did not want to speak of that; they only knew just so much about it as was necessary to their business." Their attitude towards the Chinese was one of "mistrust and dislike tempered by optimism," and they did not bother to learn the language.
Whereas Maugham is agreeably malicious in his portraits of the English and their wives, he can get outright scathing and sarcastic when he describes the hypocrisy of protestant missionaries. The Catholics have a better standing with him, which explains why Graham Greene calls Maugham a writer of great dedication. Maugham has a healthy disregard of professedly religious people whose deeds do not live up to their words, no matter whether they are English missionaries who behave as if they were in the civil service or whether they are Chinese farmers who perform the rites "like an old peasant woman in France does her day's housekeeping." Maugham's depiction of the Chinese countryside leaves no lasting impression, yet sometimes he creates images of sheer beauty: "the yellow water in the setting sun was lovely with pale, soft tints, it was as smooth as glass." The focus of his observations are people. Maugham senses the human beings who peek out from behind the roles they play in the scheme of the British Empire. Though he appears to be detached from the hardships of the Chinese, one can feel the effort it takes him to stay aloof when he observes the coolies, the "human beasts of burden", and remarks that their "effort oppresses you. You are filled with a useless compassion." Maugham's most heart-wrenching piece is a story with the innocent title "The Sights of the Town" in which he tells of a so-called baby tower used by the peasants to drop unwanted babies to their deaths. Spanish nuns in the nearby town try to save at least some of the unwanted newborns by paying twenty cents for every one because, as they say, the peasants "have often a long walk to come here and unless we give them something they won't take the trouble."
Maugham, as skeptic and acerbic as he can be, also has a great sense of humor, freshness of observation and unconventionality of comparison. Summing up his impression of an opium den, he writes it reminded him "somewhat of the little intimate beerhouses in Berlin where the tired working man could go in the evening and spend an peaceful hour." Well, I would not compare opium so non-chalantly to beer but his tongue-in-cheek British snobbery is definitely enjoyable. As is his mockingly spiteful aside towards Americans whom he regards to be such extremely practical people "that Harvard is instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers how to suck eggs." My favorite funny piece in the book is Maugham's explanation why democracy gets flushed down by the Western sense of cleanliness. In his words, "it is a tragic thought that the first man who pulled the plug of a water-closet with that negligent gesture rang the knell of democracy." Just check it out. Even if he were not kidding, it would be a side-splitting theory.
Some of the things Maugham observed eighty years ago still apply. For example, "one of the peculiarities of China is that your position excuses your idiosyncrasies." And you can still see people getting their heads shaved on the sidewalk by old barbers. However, I can not report that "others have their ears cleaned, and some, a revolting spectacle, the inside of their eyelids scraped." In general, the life of the Chinese was as impenetrable to Maugham as were the Chinese houses with their monotonous expanse of wall broken only by solid closed doors. Only in the portraits of an old Chinese philosopher (who impotently dreams of the old and better China) and a young drama professor (who lacks any broader vision of China) we get a glimpse of the inner lives of the Chinese.
The back cover of the Vintage Classics paperback edition shows a photo of the middle-aged Maugham. Turning his head to the observer, he has a look of weary curiosity in his eyes and a tiny smile in the corners of his mouth - as if he wanted to say, "that is how it is. What do you think?"
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