Night Class

The playground of the rich and the beautiful, downtown New York's nightlife spectacles and power of self-invention incubated pop icons from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga. NYU sociologist Victor P. Corona sought a new education, where night classes held in galleries, nightclubs, bars, apartments, stoops, and all-night diners taught him about love, loss, and the living possibilities of identity. Transforming himself from dowdy professor to glitzy clubgoer, Victor immerses himself among downtown's dazzling tribes of artists and performers hungry for fame. Night Class: A Downtown Memoir investigates the glamour of New York nightlife. In interviews and outings with clubland revelers and influencers, including Party Monster and convicted killer Michael Alig, Night Class exposes downtown's perilous trappings of drugs, ambition, and power. From closeted, undocumented Mexican boy to Ivy League graduate to nightlife writer, Corona shares in Night Class the thrill and tragedy of downtown and how dramatically identities can change.

The playground of the rich and the beautiful, downtown New York's nightlife spectacles and power of self-invention incubated pop icons from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga. NYU sociologist Victor P. Corona sought a new education, where night classes held in galleries, nightclubs, bars, apartments, stoops, and all-night diners taught him about love, loss, and the living possibilities of identity. Transforming himself from dowdy professor to glitzy clubgoer, Victor immerses himself among downtown's dazzling tribes of artists and performers hungry for fame. Night Class: A Downtown Memoir investigates the glamour of New York nightlife. In interviews and outings with clubland revelers and influencers, including Party Monster and convicted killer Michael Alig, Night Class exposes downtown's perilous trappings of drugs, ambition, and power. From closeted, undocumented Mexican boy to Ivy League graduate to nightlife writer, Corona shares in Night Class the thrill and tragedy of downtown and how dramatically identities can change.

The Italian evening class at Mountainview School is like hundreds of others starting up all over the city. But this class has its own special quality - as the focus for the varied hopes and dreams of teacher and pupils alike. Aidan Dunne needs his new evening class project to succeed almost as much as his pupils do. They too are looking for something more: Bill to find a way to keep spendthrift Lizzie at his side, and Fran to make sure that young Kathy finds her way out from behind the kitchen sink. The key to their success lies with the Signora. Her passion has drawn her from Ireland to Italy and back home again with a burning desire to share her love of all things Italian - and a secret hidden in her heart...

"Resentfully the women pulled on hats and gloves. Always after class they wanted to talk, to sit and drink tea, to let the session reach a natural end. This abrupt turfing out thrust them back to a reality they had escaped for a moment. Tanya watched the dark figures in ones and twos disperse along the street. Behind her the door shut with a bang. Semeon turned the lock. That sound, the sound of the bolt shooting home, clutched at her heart. There were two cold places, the physical cold and the cold of her relationship. The ground was rock at 40 below; lakes and streams still and solid; icicles daggering from eaves. A tree could explode like a pistol shot as it’s freezing sap burst out its body. Birds could literally fall out of the sky, their heart muscle finally stiff and cold. In the forest green things had retreated inwards, underground, sleeping, waiting. Like the forest she had retreated deep into herself, trying to keep some of her spirit alive."

In this Night Before book, kids get ready for that all-important moment of the school year: class picture day! It's the night before class picture day, and kids all down the block are getting ready. Everyone wants to look perfect for the photo. They fix their hair, practice smiles, and choose outfits. At school the next day, they try to stay picture-perfect. Will everything look perfect for the big moment when they say, “Cheese?”

Eleven-year-old Dan, whose artist parents have kept him moving around all his life, fears he will lose the friends he has made at his new school, until the class sleepover coincides with a bad winter storm.

The transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises to be as drastic, as disorienting a change as was the original european colonial conquest of the human race. Capitalism is again ripping apart & restructuring the world, and nothing will be the same. Not race, not nation, not gender, and certainly not whatever culture you used to have. Now you have outcast groups as diverse as the Aryan Nation and the Queer Nation and the Hip Hop Nation publicly rejecting the right of the u.s. government to rule them. All the building blocks of human culture-race, gender, nation, and especially class-are being transformed under great pressure to embody the spirit of this neo-colonial age. The definitive analysis of postmodern capitalism, the decline of u.s. hegemony, and the need and possibilities for a revolutionary movement of the oppressed to overthrow it all. -bell hooks: Night-Vision was so compelling to me because it has a spirit of militancy which reformist feminism tries to kill because militant feminism is seen as a threat to the liberal bourgeois feminism that just wants to be equal with men. It has that raw, unmediated truth-telling which I think we are going to need in order to deal with the fascism that's upon us- -- bell hooks

Last year, Wyatt Palmer was the hero of middle school, having foiled a plot against the president of the United States. But now he and his friends are in Coral Cove High School—home of the Fighting Conchs—and Wyatt is no longer a hero: He's just another undersized freshman, hoping to fit in, or at least not be unpopular. Things start to go wrong when Matt Diaz, who is Wyatt's best friend but also unfortunately an idiot, decides to bring his pet ferret, Frank, to school. Through an unfortunate series of events Frank ends up in the hands of the Bevin brothers, who are the most popular boys at Coral Cove High, but are also, as Matt soon discovers, the nastiest. When Wyatt and Matt try to get Frank back, they concoct a plan to attend a party for the cool clique at the Bevin's waterfront mansion and stumble onto the Bevin family's dark and deadly secret. That's when Wyatt learns that some things are worse than being unpopular in high school. MUCH worse.

"Famed director M. Night Shyamalan tells how his passion for education reform led him to the five indispensable keys to educational success in America's high-performing schools in impoverished neighborhoods"--