Life As We Show It: Writing on Film - Softcover

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9780872865259: Life As We Show It: Writing on Film

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872865258 ISBN 13: 9780872865259

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2009

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“Twenty-five writers discuss attachments they formed for certain movies—ET, Shane and Rosemary's Baby acquire new significance and resonance after reading these inspired pieces of narrative nonfiction.”—John McFarland for Shelf Awareness

Feminist critic and award-winning fiction writer Masha Tupitsyn and filmmaker/writer Brian Pera edit this dynamic collection of essays, short stories and poetry that plays with the trope that life imitates art by asking: if movie-watching has become in itself a primary source of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating? A diverse group of acclaimed thinkers, including Lynne Tillman, Rebecca Brown, Wayne Koestenbaum and Stephen Beachy, address topics ranging from the public death of gay porn star Joey Stefano to classic Hollywood Westerns, E.T. and Josef Von Sternberg. Life As We Show It provides a provocative and thoughtful perspective on the relationship between film and watcher and the experience of viewing life through screen-colored glasses.

Other contributors include: Stephen Beachy, Robert Gluck, Fanny Howe, David Trinidad, Lidia Yuknavitch, Veronica Gonzalez, Kevin Killian, Myriam Gurba, Abdellah Ta�a and Dodie Bellamy.

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About the Author

Brian Pera is the author of Troublemaker (St. Martin's Press) and the writer/director of the film The Way I See Things. The Way I See Things was selected as part of Los Angeles Outfest's Four in Focus program, was one of three finalists for the Scion First Time Filmmaker Award, and featured in the Focus section at The 2008 Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece. It continues to tour festivals. Pera has written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Stranger, Make/Shift, Mall Punk, Mirage, Nerve, Nest, Fanzine and The Commercial Appeal, among other publications. Masha Tupitsyn is a fiction writer and cultural critic. In 2004, she worked as the Assistant Literary Editor at BOMB Magazine. She is the author of Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007). She is currently working on her new book, Screen to Screen, a collection of essays. Her fiction and criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in Animal Shelter, Fanzine, Creative Aggression, the anthology Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century, Make/Shift, Bookforum, Fence, Five Fingers Review and San Francisco's KQED's The Writer's Block.

From the Back Cover

"Even in this age of universal cool, we're just as smitten by the movies as the kids who went to see them fifty, sixty, eighty years ago. Indeed, we may be even deeper into them than people used to be; for, as America disintegrates, and our real world(s) collapse and disappear, the movies, more and more, don't just stand out more vividly among our other memories, but permeate those memories, merge with them, become them; so that it's getting harder to be sure exactly where the movies stop and you begin.

So how, in so bewildering a borderland, does one write truthfully about the movies? In this rapturous anthology, many writers demonstrate the possibilities, making bold forays across generic borders of all kinds. Life As We Show It offers dazzling passages of memoir, drama, poetry, fiction and film history, philosophical suggestion and delirious analysis, and other writings that defy a handy name. Thus this remarkable collection helps us see where both we and the movies are today, and where we're going." -Mark Crispin Miller, Professor Media, Culture and Communication at NYU and author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV and Seeing Through Movies