Party Animals


Book Description

Allan Carr was Hollywood's premier party-thrower during the town's most hedonistic era -- the cocaine-addled, sexually indulgent 1970s. Hosting outrageous soirees with names like the Mick Jagger/Cycle Sluts Party and masterminding such lavishly themed opening nights as the Tommy/New York City subway premiere, it was Carr, an obese, caftan-wearing producer -- the ultimate outsider -- who first brought movie stars and rock stars, gays and straights, Old and New Hollywood together. From the stunning success of Grease and La Cage aux Folles to the spectacular failure of the Village People's Can't Stop the Music, as a producer Carr's was a rollercoaster of a career punctuated by major hits and phenomenal flops -- none more disastrous than the Academy Awards show he produced featuring a tone-deaf Rob Lowe serenading Snow White, a fiasco that made Carr an outcast, and is still widely considered to be the worst Oscars ever. Tracing Carr's excess-laden rise and tragic fall -- and sparing no one along the way -- Party Animals provides a sizzling, candid, behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood's most infamous period.













Front Stoops in the Fifties


Book Description

Olesker's doo-wop portrait of Baltimore is nostalgic, but it has a hard edge.




Topics in Artificial Intelligence


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th Catalonian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, CCIA 2002, held in Castellón, Spain in October 2002. The 37 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on reasoning models, constraint satisfation, machine learning and classification, multi-agent systems, and computer vision and robotics.




Broadway Musical MVPs: 1960-2010


Book Description

(Applause Books). Every year, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League name a Most Valuable Player an MVP. The Broadway musical community doesn't. Oh, there are the Tony Awards, the Drama Desk Awards, and the Theatre World Awards. But what if Broadway selected a MVP each season? In Broadway Musical MVPs: 1960-2010, The Most Valuable Players of the Past 50 Seasons , Peter Filichia names his choices for the MVPs of each of the past 50 Broadway seasons they might be performers, producers, directors, or choreographers. Not surprisingly, many of the featured MVPs are multitaskers, such as directors who also choreographed, or wrote the book, or even designed the costumes! Also included are awards in categories such as Comeback Player of the Year, Reliever of the Year, Rookie of the Year, and Led League in Errors. From Tammy Grimes, MVP of the 1960-61 season for The Unsinkable Molly Brown , to Joe DiPietro, MVP of the 2009-10 season for Memphis , Filichia recognizes the best and the brightest that have appeared on Broadway.




Foundations of Fuzzy Logic and Soft Computing


Book Description

This book comprises a selection of papers from IFSA 2007 on new methods and theories that contribute to the foundations of fuzzy logic and soft computing. Coverage includes the application of fuzzy logic and soft computing in flexible querying, philosophical and human-scientific aspects of soft computing, search engine and information processing and retrieval, as well as intelligent agents and knowledge ant colony.




The Murder of Professor Schlick


Book Description

"On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. Weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of rising extremism in Hitler's Europe, David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle--associated with billiant thinkers like Otto Neurath, Kurt Gödel, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Popper--and of a philosophical movement movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by and unreason."--