This is the first book on a quintessential California artist who for over three decades has been an active force in shaping the art and culture of the West, from cast-resin sculpture, through sunset, ocean and airport images, to recent Las Vegas paintings.
· 2013
In this extraordinary work, Peter Alexander Meyers shows how the centerpiece of the Enlightenment—society as the symbol of collective human life and as the fundamental domain of human practice—was primarily composed and animated by its most ambivalent figure: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Displaying this new society as an evolving field of interdependence, Abandoned to Ourselves traces the emergence and moral significance of dependence itself within Rousseau’s encounters with a variety of discourses of order, including theology, natural philosophy, and music. Underpinning this whole scene we discover a modernizing conception of the human Will, one that runs far deeper than Rousseau’s most famous trope, the “general Will.” As Abandoned to Ourselves weaves together historical acuity with theoretical insight, readers will find here elements for a reconstructed sociology inclusive of things and persons and, as a consequence, a new foundation for contemporary political theory.
· 2022
This book introduces polytempic polymicrotonality as a new musical aesthetic. It proposes music with more than one microtonal tuning system and discusses examples from the literature to give an historic framework showing that this tendency has been present throughout human musical history. Polytempo is a tool for which polymicrotonal structures can function in relief from its background, and it acts as a frame, or ground structure, that is multidimensional, akin to the advancement of perspective in Renaissance art. The book has historic significance as it is the only book of its category, or genre, in music that features polymicrotonality in music composition or production. It displays examples of music literature for musical precedence in this area, focusing on Charles Ives’s Universe Symphony, unfinished since 1925.
· 2021
Insufficient Funds: The Financial Life of Frank Lloyd Wright By Peter C. Alexander Dozens of books have been written about architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, aesthetic, and various design achievements; however, no one has looked at his business practices… until now. In this book, Peter Alexander focuses on the financial life of this American architectural genius after more than fifteen years of research. Wright was a spendthrift who earned a considerable fortune over his lifetime, but he was a man who never had sufficient funds to meet his expenses. Most often, his lack of financial stability was because he had an insatiable need to spend money on Japanese art, pianos, cars, and other assorted luxury items. The material in the book comes from a wide variety of sources, including conversations and anecdotes that have been included in the many published works about Mr. Wright’s life and legacy as well as verifiable and apocryphal stories shared by docents conducting house tours. The book is also informed by considerable original material, including archival records about Mr. Wright’s financial life and interviews of two of his grandchildren, his Spring Green, Wisconsin neighbors, former apprentices, students enrolled in the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and homeowners who worked with Wright to build their dream homes.
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· 2009
In this unique book, Peter Alexander Meyers leads us through the social processes by which shock incites terror, terror invites war, war invokes emergency, and emergency supports unchecked power. He then reveals how the domestic political culture created by the Cold War has driven these developments forward since 9/11, contending that our failure to acknowledge that this Cold War continues today is precisely what makes it so dangerous. With eloquence and urgency Meyers argues that the mantra of our time—“everything changed on 9/11!”—is false and pernicious. By contrast, Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen provides a novel account of long-term transformations in the citizen’s experience of war, the constitution of political powers, and public uses of communication, and from that firm historical basis explains how a convergence of these social facts became the pretext for unprecedented opportunism and irresponsibility after 9/11. Where others have observed that our rights are under attack, Meyers digs deeper and finds that today “government by the people” itself is at risk. Sparkling with historical and philosophical insight, this is a dramatic diagnosis of the American political scene that at once makes clear the new position of the citizen and the necessity for active citizenship if democracy is to endure.
· 1960
In the last fifteen years there has been a revolution in the techniques available for the analysis and isolation of proteins. Every time a new technique has been introduced, numerous papers have appeared describing modifications to it and the research worker who wishes to employ these methods is faced with a very serious problem in deciding which particular variant to use. These volumes are intended to provide the fullest practical detail so that any scientist can follow the procedure by using this book alone and without having recourse to the original literature. The techniques which are described in full are ones in which all the authors have had first-hand experience, and the descriptions contain those small but important points which save so much time. In the first volume, separation and isolation procedures are discussed; the second concerns its analysis and reactivity, and the third volume with the measurement of the macromolecular properties of proteins.
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These updated editions of classic plays feature new cover art along with the complete text of each work, full explanatory notes, scene-by-scene plot summaries, a key to famous lines and phrases, and illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books. Reissue. (Plays/Drama)