Presidential Puppetry


Book Description

"A century ago, President Wilson warned of danger in his best-selling book. What the Democrat did not reveal was Wall Street's vital help to achieve his election victory in 2012 over Main Street Republicans. Ostensibly a progressive, Wilson faithfully implemented during two terms Wall Street's goals in banking, taxes, Cabinet appointments, and war policy. A parallel situation exists today under President Obama, elected as a progressive but governing for the most part with a Wall Street-friendly deregulatory program and a tough-love austerity agenda. Jobs, savings, homes, health, constitutional rights, and public confidence are even more at risk than in Wilson's era. The federal government and its private overlords exert vastly more control over the nation's war-driven economy than a century ago. We are losing our freedoms and future. More dramatically, needless austerity will kill many Americans, especially those too old or unhealthy to fend for themselves. The scandals reported in Puppetry provide a clear path to reform. The facts sweep away the false histories and partisan posturing that dominates current political discourse. Puppetry is winning praise before publication from experts who understand the stakes."--Provided by publisher.




The Puppet Masters


Book Description

Now in Mass Market. An Epic Battle Against Mind-Controlling Alien Invaders as Only Robert A. Heinlein, the Best-Selling Grand Master of Science Fiction, Could Tell It. “One of the most influential writers in American literature.” —The New York Times Book Review. First came the news that a flying saucer had landed in Iowa. Then came the announcement that the whole thing was a hoax. End of story. Case closed. Except that two agents of the most secret intelligence agency in the U.S. government were on the scene and disappeared without reporting in. And four more agents who were sent in also disappeared. So the head of the agency and his two top agents went in and managed to get out with their discovery: an invasion is underway by slug-like aliens who can touch a human and completely control his or her mind. What the humans know, they know. What the slugs want, no matter what, the human will do. And most of Iowa is already under their control. Sam Cavanaugh was one of the agents who discovered the truth. Unfortunately, that was just before he was taken over by one of the aliens and began working for the invaders, with no will of his own. And he has just learned that a high official in the Treasury Department is now under control of the aliens. Since the Treasury Department includes the Secret Service, which safeguards the President of the United States, control of the entire nation is near at hand .




The Complete Book of Puppetry


Book Description

Expert guide explains how to construct several types of puppets and presents exercises for developing distinctive voices, learning puppet movement. Includes stage design, writing plays, directing productions, more. Over 150 black-and-white illustrations.




Puppet


Book Description

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects—objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature—Collodi’s cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke’s puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth’s Micky Sabbath—as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, Puppet evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.




Kennedy and Oswald


Book Description

Unraveling the many strands of hidden history behind the assassination of President Kennedy is not an easy task. Co-authors Baker and Schwartz guide us toward the conclusion that ultimately, the motivation was total governmental control, a coup d'état, changing us from a democratic republic to a oligopoly – a corporatocracy. With help from new witnesses regarding the "Crime of the Century," we are led to the realization that the "War of Terror" and the Patriot Act were predesigned to undermine our US Constitution and our Bill of Rights. The very moment Kennedy died our own government turned against "We the People." Baker and Schwartz provide a compelling narrative showing Oswald's innocence and a condemnation of the conspirators who planned and carried out the assassination of our 35th president and our Republic.




The Secret Life of Puppets


Book Description

In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.




Making Puppets Come Alive


Book Description

"The best book on hand puppetry we've seen." — The Whole Kids Catalog. Lucid, easy-to-follow book teaches beginners how to create a full working range of puppet motions and emotions. Also covers elements of good puppet theatrical technique: voice use and synchronization, stage deportment and interactions, improvisation, simple staging, lighting effects, and more. All clearly explained and beautifully illustrated.




Presidential Puppetry


Book Description

Presidential Puppetry documents what millions already suspect: that our top government leaders are guided by secretive elites whose agendas harm the vast majority of voters. The startling findings of DC attorney and investigative reporter Andrew Kreig reads like a fast-paced mystery. The revelations culminate in an “Ah-ha!” moment that will surprise and even scandalize some readers. Based on half a decade of research, the author describes clues given him that led, step-by-step, to Presidential Puppetry's timely and explosive findings.




Power Plays


Book Description

Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning twenty years, Power Plays is the first scholarly book in English on wayang golek, the Sundanese rod-puppet theater of West Java. It is a detailed and lively account of the ways in which performers of this major Asian theatrical form have engaged with political discourses in Indonesia. Wayang golek has shaped, as well, the technological and commercial conditions of art and performance in a modernizing society. Using interviews with performers, musical transcriptions, translations of narrative and song texts, and archival materials, author Andrew N. Weintraub analyzes the shifting and flexible nature of a set of performance practices called Padalangan, the art of the puppeteer. He focuses on "superstar" performers and the musical troupes that dominated wayang golek during the New Order political regime of former president Suharto (1966-98) and the ensuing three years of the post-Suharto period. Studies of actual performances illuminate stylistic and formal elements and situate wayang golek as a social process in Sundanese culture and society. Power Plays includes an interactive multimedia CD-ROM of wayang golek. Power Plays shows how meanings about identity, citizenship, and community are produced through theater, music, language, and discourse. While based in ethnographic theory and methods, this book is at the center of a new synthesis emerging among ethnomusicology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Its cross-disciplinary approach will inspire researchers studying similar struggles over cultural authority and popular representation in culture and the performing arts.




The Puppet Masters


Book Description

This report examines the use of these entities in nearly all cases of corruption. It builds upon case law, interviews with investigators, corporate registries and financial institutions and a 'mystery shopping' exercise to provide evidence of this criminal practice.