<TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>Life As We Show It</TitleText> <Subtitle>Writing On Film</Subtitle>

City Lights Books onix@onixsuite.com 20130217 eng

GCDS-9780872865259 03 01 City Lights Books 01 GCOI 87286100680350 02 0872865258 03 9780872865259 15 9780872865259 BC <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>Life As We Show It</TitleText> <Subtitle>Writing On Film</Subtitle> 1 B01 Pera, Brian Brian Pera Brian Pera is the author of Troublemaker (St.Martin's Press) and the writer/director of the film The Way I See Things. The Way I See Things was selected as part of Los Angeles Outfest's Four in Focus program, was one of three finalists for the Scion First Time Filmmaker Award, and featured in the Focus section at The 2008 Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece. It continues to tour festivals. Pera has written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Stranger, Make/Shift, Mall Punk, Mirage, Nerve, Nest, Fanzine, and The Commercial Appeal, among other publications.Visit Brian Pera's blog, <a target="blank" href="http://brianpera.blogspot.com/">Intermittent Movement</a>. 2 B01 Tupitsyn, Masha Masha Tupitsyn Masha Tupitsyn is the author of LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (ZerO Books, 2011) Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007), and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009), which was voted one of the best film books of 2009 by Dennis Cooper, January Magazine, Shelf Awareness, and Chicago's New City. She is currently working on a book of essays on film, Screen to Screen, as well as a book on John Cusack and the politics of acting called Star Notes. Her fiction and criticism has appeared in the anthologies Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century (2008) and the Encyclopedia Project Volume II, F-K (2010) and BOMB Blog, Keyframe, Puerto del Sol, 2nd Floor Projects, Vertebrae Journal, TINA, Venus Magazine, The Rumpus, Animal Shelter, Fanzine, Make/Shift, NYFA Current, Bookforum, Fence, Five Fingers Review, and San Francisco's KQED's The Writer's Block. She regularly contributes video essays on film and culture to Ryeberg Curated Video, which features writers like Mary Gaitskill and Sheila Heti. 3 A24 Tupitsyn, Masha Masha Tupitsyn Masha Tupitsyn is the author of LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (ZerO Books, 2011) Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007), and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009), which was voted one of the best film books of 2009 by Dennis Cooper, January Magazine, Shelf Awareness, and Chicago's New City. She is currently working on a book of essays on film, Screen to Screen, as well as a book on John Cusack and the politics of acting called Star Notes. Her fiction and criticism has appeared in the anthologies Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century (2008) and the Encyclopedia Project Volume II, F-K (2010) and BOMB Blog, Keyframe, Puerto del Sol, 2nd Floor Projects, Vertebrae Journal, TINA, Venus Magazine, The Rumpus, Animal Shelter, Fanzine, Make/Shift, NYFA Current, Bookforum, Fence, Five Fingers Review, and San Francisco's KQED's The Writer's Block. She regularly contributes video essays on film and culture to Ryeberg Curated Video, which features writers like Mary Gaitskill and Sheila Heti. 01 eng 528 01 <a target="blank" href="http://www.citylightspodcast.com/rebecca-brown-robert-gluck-kevin-killian-dodie-bellamy/">Click here</a> to hear Rebecca Brown, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, and Robert Gluck read essays from Life As We Show It: Writing on Film at City Lights. Life As We Show It is a dynamic cross-genre collection that uses short stories, essays, and poetry to explore the cinematic experience. In these innovative writings, the movie-viewer relationship is positioned as protagonist, theme and plot, and most importantly, as a new genre in its own right. The texts play with the trope that life imitates art by asking: If movie-watching has become a primary way of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating?Using different lenses and multiple angles, a diverse group of twenty-five acclaimed writers and thinkers including Lynne Tillman, Rebecca Brown, Wayne Koestenbaum, Stephen Beachy, Robert Gluck, Fanny Howe, David Trinidad, Lidia Yuknavitch, Veronica Gonzalez, Kevin Killian, Myriam Gurba, Abdellah Taïa, and Dodie Bellamy navigate the increasingly fine line between lived experience and representation in contemporary American culture, providing a provocative and thoughtful perspective on the relationship between film and viewer and the experience of viewing life through screen-tinted glasses.<ul> <li>Over the next several months, Brian Pera will focus his blog, Intermittent Movement, on the contributors and ideas of Life As We Show it, extending the collection's conversation with film through interviews, essays, and guest bloggers from the anthology and beyond.</li></ul><ul> <li>Become a fan of Life As We Show It on Facebook.</li></ul>Praise for Life As We Show It: "An engrossing collection of fiction, memory and observation that shifts the creative prerogative from the producers of cinema to the imaginative life of its consumers, from the site of spectacle to the dreamlife of the spectator, from the writerly to the readerly (and Roland Barthes would surely cheer)." -Todd Haynes, director of Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, and I'm Not There"Life As We Show It is a TiVo guide to the soul - whether that takes the form of Rebecca Brown musing on Shane and her father, or Dodie Bellamy fixating on E.T. and her mother; Lynne Tillman narrating the street life out her window like movie plots, or Wayne Koestenbaum recalling Elizabeth Taylor as a personal lesson in gender. The accumulated evidence is indisputable: we are what we watch. This collection of essays offers an early-warning system worth heeding." -B. Ruby Rich, film critic and scholar, University of California, Santa Cruz"Reading this book is like going down a rabbit hole of our collective cinematic imagination. These writers share with us in their own unique voices how watching movies can give us primal access to our fantasies, our histories, our fears, ourselves. Like a poem by Frank O'Hara, this collection erases the distinction between what we've seen on the screen and our own most personal memories. By the time you've finished this book, you have entered a fantasy world of the movies where Elizabeth Taylor and Joey Stefano and Ryan Phillipe and many more are all part of one fevered reverie of cinematic identification and desire." -Ira Sachs, filmmaker (The Delta, Forty Shades of Blue, Married Life)"These passionate, vibrant essays, fragments and meditations burrow energetically into a rich and underexplored subject-how movies intersect with and interfere with and alter and define and sometimes even become our autobiographies. Staking out its turf in the netherland where film criticism meets personal history, Life As We Show It is by turns poignant and raunchy, heartfelt and creepy, and almost always provocative and inspiring. You'll leave its pages with a long list of movies to watch and rewatch, and a wealth of new ways to look at them." -Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood"Even in this age of universal cool, we're just as smitten by the movies as the kids who went to see them fifty, sixty, eighty years ago. Indeed, we may be even deeper into them than people used to be; for, as America disintegrates, and our real world(s) collapse and disappear, the movies, more and more, don't just stand out more vividly among our other memories, but permeate those memories, merge with them, become them; so that it's getting harder to be sure exactly where the movies stop and you begin.So how, in so bewildering a borderland, does one write truthfully about the movies? In this rapturous anthology, many writers demonstrate the possibilities, making bold forays across generic borders of all kinds. Life As We Show It offers dazzling passages of memoir, drama, poetry, fiction and film history, philosophical suggestion and delirious analysis, and other writings that defy a handy name. Thus this remarkable collection helps us see where both we and the movies are today, and where we're going." -Mark Crispin Miller, Professor Media, Culture and Communication at NYU and author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV and Seeing Through Movies 02 Writings about the influence of film on the cultural and individual imagination 08 "Dodie Bellamy immerses herself in thoughts of E.T. while coping with her mother's dying. Wayne Koestenbaum riffs on the gender 'puzzle' that is Elizabeth Taylor. Bard Cole considers both the veiled porn implicit in mainstream movies featuring young men, and the life of erotica icon Joey Stefano. Richard Grayson exhumes the film screens of his Florida youth. Abdellah Taia, sitting with his dozing mother in a darkened Moroccan room, recalls finding sexual self-realization watching a queer French movie on TV. Rebecca Brown overlays her own life with imagery from classic Westerns. In these smart essays, plus a few short stories, a poem and a screenplay, 25 entries in all, contributors - smitten by cinema both contemporary and classic - cast a personal eye on a universal medium. They aren't reviewing films, though. Instead, these writers muse on how film and life are intertwined, how they find themselves on screen and how those screens in turn reflect them. Settle in with a box of Twizzlers and revel in the provocative thinking collected in this fresh take on popular culture."-- Richard Labonte Bookmarks 08  ". . . these writers muse on how film and life are intertwined, how they find themselves on screen and how those screens in turn reflect them. Settle in with a box of Twizzlers and revel in the provocative thinking collected in this fresh take on popular culture." -Gay & Lesbian Times Gay & Lesbian Times 08 "This collection of short stories, essays, and poetry compiled by Pera (Troublemaker) and Tupitsyn (Beauty Talk & Monsters) examines what it means to experience the world through the cinema. . . . Exceedingly personal and usually provocative, the pieces included here represent our collective history with film. VERDICT: Recommended for film studies students and scholars as well as adventurous and creative film buffs." -Pam Kingsbury Library Journal 08 "The movie has long since passed the book as the primary method of American storytelling. Life as We Show It: Writing on Film is a blend of fiction and ponderings on film from many well known writers who offer their ideas on the concept of life imitating art. The result is intruiging, thought-provoking and high entertaining. Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn have put together quite a volume, making Life as We Show It a uniquely recommended read." Midewst Book Review 08 "This cross-genre collection unites 25 writers and thinkers to explore the cinematic experience and the film-viewer relationship via short stories, essays, and poetry. The texts play with the idea that life imitates art by asking: If movie-watching has become a primary way of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating? Pera is an author as well as a film director. Tupitsyn is a fiction writer and cultural critic." Book News 08 "... this collection uses cinema as a literary springboard. Movies are not so much the subject as they are the hook - the departure point for authors with varied credentials (some are poets and novelists, others academics and armchair theorists) to offer up fiction and creative nonfiction . . . all ordered around their personal relationship with films as medium and filmgoing as practice." -John Semley Cineaste 08 "Twenty-five writers discuss attachments they formed for certain movies -- ET, Shane and Rosemary's Baby acquire new significance and resonance after reading these inspired pieces of narrative nonfiction." -John McFarland Shelf Awareness 08 "At the core of Life as We Show It is the paradox of the viewer, who is at once passive and intrusive, detached and yet profoundly affected by the viewed scene. The writers embrace that paradox, using it, Tupitsyn says, 'as an ingredient for narrative impetus - for writing, for imagining, and for thinking.' Taken as a whole, the collection provides a glimpse of where the brave new media-saturated world may be taking the ancient art of storytelling." -Maria Browning Chapter 16 08 "We'd like to note the excellent 'Outtakes' by Lidia Yuknavitch, who offers a rewriting of La Fureur de vivrer by Nicholas Ray; 'Phone Home' by Dodie Bellamy juxtaposes her own fiction with Spielberg's vision for E.T.; . . . 'The Elizabeth Taylor Puzzle' by Wayne Kostenbaum takes apart and puts back together the body of Elizabeth Taylor; 'Hysteresis' by Elizabeth Hatmaker develops around the film Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff by Marvin J Chomsky; and 'Behind the Scenes' (1982) by Masha Tupitsyn focuses on John Travolta in Grease and Blow Out. . . . A cross-genre work to consume without restraint." - Tina Magazine, France Tina Magazine 08 "This is a vibrant collection that uses all of the mediums available to it to tell its vigorous tale. The contributors here pull out all the literary stops: poetry, fiction, essay: you name it. At the heart of things, though, there is a philosophical question at play here. 'Thus, the genre of assemblage and insertion, fictions about fictions, fiction from fictions, or more specifically, fictions affixed and inserted into already existing fictions . . . might be an interesting and useful way to describe what the writers in this collection are doing.' . . . A thoughtful exploration on the art and the influence of film." - David Middleton January Magazine 08 "Life As We Show It is a unique collection of essays, imagined scripts, and personal reflections by more than 20 writers on how film has shaped much of their lives and their opinions. Not all of the cited films are blockbusters, and the influential titles are not meant to gather a 'best of' collection like you'd find on A&E. Rather, these movies are personal touchstones, relevant in ways that are unique and sometimes perplexing."-Amy E. Henry The Black Sheep Dances 08 "Life as We Show It is everything that being published by City Lights suggest it will be: a diverse range of voices from New Queer (mainly West Coast) writing, including fan favourites Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Rebecca Brown, Lynne Tillman, Robert Glück, David Trinidad and Abdekkah Taïa. . . The finest pieces in the book - by Bellamy, Killian, Brown, Taïa and poet Fanny Howe - step beyond that Gen X campness, practised to the highest order in a sonata pathetique on Elizabeth Taylor by Wayne Koestenbaum. . . Not so much Life as We Show It as Cinema as It Shows Us." -Sophie Mayer Chroma 08 ". . . this isn't just a book on film and feelings, it's actually kind of haunting in strange and lingering ways, like a silent, but heavy presence in the room. . . It's all very surreal, and equally disconcerting and concrete. The pieces move like scenes and vignettes themselves, flickering and shimmering in the dark, shining in and out until one can almost hear the lead frames of the film monotonically whipping against the takeup reel in an otherwise silent room." -Michael Louis Fanzine 08 "Life as We Show It, an anthology of essays, screenplays, and stories about watching movies. . . has the virtue of not treating life and cinema as obvious antagonists. . . One of the pleasures of this collection is that writing about movie viewing produces a cheerful and salutary indifference to conventional judgements of a film's 'importance'. . . 'Phone Home,' [is] Dodie Bellamy's story of her preoccupation with E.T. when her mother was dying of lung cancer. To watch as cinema's most famous stranded alien becomes by turns a figure for the narrator's alienation from her mother's body through illness and age, the alienation of the able bodied from boys like Matthew De Meritt, the boy with no legs who helped bring E.T. to life by walking on his hands, and finally an opportunity to reflect on what alien technologies like cinema can do to repair these rifts-is to have one's own ideas about how and why films matter to us completely and productively overturned. " -Nicola Evans Film Comment 23 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100680350/extras/LifeAsWeExcerptCL.pdf 04 02 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100680350/images/87286100680350L.gif 07 02 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100680350/images/87286100680350S.gif http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100680350 City Lights Publishers 01 City Lights Publishers 20090518 08 16 oz City Lights Books 01 WORLD 20 20090518 01 02 18.95 USD