Rock City

Detroit Rock City is an oral history of Detroit and its music told by the people who were on the stage, in the clubs, the practice rooms, studios, and in the audience, blasting the music out and soaking it up, in every scene from 1967 to today. From fabled axe men like Ted Nugent, Dick Wagner, and James Williamson jump to Jack White, to pop flashes Suzi Quatro and Andrew W.K., to proto punkers Brother Wayne Kramer and Iggy Pop, Detroit slices the rest of the land with way more than its share of the Rock Pie. Detroit Rock City is the story that has never before been sprung, a frenzied and schooled account of both past and present, calling in the halcyon days of the Grande Ballroom and the Eastown Theater, where national acts who came thru were made to stand and deliver in the face of the always hard hitting local support acts. It moves on to the Michigan Palace, Bookies Club 870, City Club, Gold Dollar, and Magic Stick -- all magical venues in America's top rock city. Detroit Rock City brings these worlds to life all from the guys and dolls who picked up a Strat and jammed it into our collective craniums. From those behind the scenes cats who promoted, cajoled, lost their shirts, and popped the platters to the punters who drove from everywhere, this is the book that gives life to Detroit's legend of loud.

The year is 1983, and Chuck Klosterman just wants to rock. But he's got problems. For one, he's in the fifth grade. For another, he lives in rural North Dakota. Worst of all, his parents aren't exactly down with the long hairstyle which rocking requires. Luckily, his brother saves the day when he brings home a bit of manna from metal heaven, SHOUT AT THE DEVIL, Motley Crue's seminal paean to hair-band excess. And so Klosterman's twisted odyssey begins, a journey spent worshipping at the heavy metal altar of Poison, Lita Ford and Guns N' Roses. In the hilarious, young-man-growing-up-with-a-soundtrack-tradition, FARGO ROCK CITY chronicles Klosterman's formative years through the lens of heavy metal, the irony-deficient genre that, for better or worse, dominated the pop charts throughout the 1980s. For readers of Dave Eggers, Lester Bangs, and Nick Hornby, Klosterman delivers all the goods: from his first dance (with a girl) and his eye-opening trip to Mandan with the debate team; to his list of 'essential' albums; and his thoughtful analysis of the similarities between Guns 'n' Roses' 'Lies' and the gospels of the New Testament.

Since May 21, 1932, tourists have been making the trip to the top of Lookout Mountain to stroll through what pioneers as far back as the 1820s called "the rock city." This collection of huge boulders in a wild array of shapes and sizes was developed as an attraction by Garnet Carter, the inventor of modern miniature golf, and his wife, Frieda, a devotee of European fairy tales. Rock City Gardens quickly became one of the most famous tourist attractions in the Southeast, especially after Carter started a program of painting advertisements on barn roofs. During the post-World War II baby-boom era, Rock City became even more of a destination with the additions of Fairyland Caverns and Mother Goose Village.

Around two hundred million years ago, geological forces produced an expansive grove of rocky caverns and outcroppings atop Lookout Mountain. It was not until the twentieth century, however, that this awe-inspiring citadel evolved into a nationally recognized tourist attraction when Garnet Carter and his wife, Frieda, developed the natural marvel into the Rock City Gardens we know today, an enchanted tribute to fairytales and a breathtaking homage to nature. Join Rock City expert Tim Hollis as he guides you through the origins of the site's most fascinating spots, including Fairyland Caverns, See Seven States and Lover's Leap. Also learn the story behind the world-famous 'See Rock City' marketing campaign, as well as the steep challenges the landmark has faced in an often volatile tourism industry. Perhaps the only aspect of Rock City more enchanting than its physical beauty is the fairytale story that surrounds it.

OUT OF PRINT

How to survive in style (or not) in the American desert.What kind of habitat will you choose to participate for a week in the unique experiment of Black Rock City, home of the Burning Man?

Each August staff and volunteers begin to construct Black Rock City, a temporary city located in the hostile and haunting Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada. Every September nearly seventy thousand people occupy the city for Burning Man, an event that creates the sixth-largest population center in Nevada. By mid-September the infrastructure that supported the community is fully dismantled, and by October the land on which the city lay is scrubbed of evidence of its existence. The Archaeology of Burning Man examines this process of building, occupation, and destruction. For nearly a decade Carolyn L. White has employed archaeological methods to analyze the various aspects of life and community in and around Burning Man and Black Rock City. With a syncretic approach, this work in active-site archaeology provides both a theoretical basis and a practical demonstration of the potential of this new field to reexamine the most fundamental conceptions in the social sciences.

Enter the basement of Peninsular Plaza, a shopping mall in central Singapore, and you'll descend into rock history. Since the days of the now-legendary group The Straydogs, this area has served as the locus for amateur and semi-professional musicians. For the bands and their fans, rock music defines their lives in Singapore. It is not uncommon to see legends from the 1960s jamming out with new up-and-coming artists, and the basement venue has afforded expected and unexpected opportunities for work, play, and meaning in the contemporary music scene in this Southeast Asian city-state. The emergent quality of this community is simultaneously fiercely cosmopolitan, and entirely Singaporean. Sonic City is an ethnography of the community centered around these musicians, their family, friends, and fans, and the way they make music and a way of life. It considers the aesthetic dispositions, cultural values, ideologies, and identities within the constraints of urban life in the city. Grounded in debates from sound studies and based on five years of deeply participatory sonic ethnography, Steve Ferzacca draws on Bruno Latour's ideas of the social continually emergent, constantly in-the-making, associations of heterogeneous elements of human and non-human mediators and intermediaries to portray a community entangled in vernacular and national heritage projects. What emerges is a vernacular heritage drawing upon Singapore's unique place in Southeast Asian and World history.

Winner of the 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award A powerful debut novel about two refugees starting over after losing everything Jovan and Suzana have fled war-torn Sarajevo. They have lost their children, their standing as public intellectuals, and their connection to each other. Now working as cleaners in a suburb of Melbourne, they struggle to rebuild their lives under the painful hardships of immigrant life. During a hot Melbourne summer Jovan's janitorial work at a hospital is disrupted by mysterious acts of vandalism. But as the attacks become more violent and racially charged, he feels increasingly targeted, and taunted to interpret their meaning. Under tremendous pressure the couple struggle to keep their marriage together, but fear that they may never find peace from the ravages of war . . . Black Rock White City is an essential story of displacement and immediate threat—the new reality of suburban life—and the deeply personal responses of two refugees seeking redemption.