Da Capo Press

Learn to draw in 30 days with public television's favorite drawing teacher. Drawing is an acquired skill, not a talent-anyone can learn to draw! All you need is a pencil, a piece of paper, and the willingness to tap into your hidden artistic abilities. You Can Draw in 30 Days will teach you the rest. With Emmy award-winning, longtime PBS host Mark Kistler as your guide, you'll learn the secrets of sophisticated three-dimensional renderings, and have fun along the way. Inside you'll find: * Quick and easy step-by-step instructions for drawing everything from simple spheres to apples, trees, buildings, and the human hand and face * More than 500 line drawings, illustrating each step * Time-tested tips, techniques, and tutorials for drawing in 3-D * The 9 Fundamental Laws of Drawing to create the illusion of depth in any drawing *75 student examples to help gauge your own progress In just 20 minutes a day for a month, you can learn to draw anything, whether from the world around you or from your own imagination. It's time to embark on your creative journey. Pick up your pencil and begin today!

The engaging, passionate, always-honest, and often-hilarious memoir of actor Ron Perlman--his triumphant story of perseverance and determination navigating the slippery slopes of Hollywood, with a foreword by Guillermo del Toro Ron Perlman was a kid who had a myriad of self-image issues, yet he triumphed in an industry that trades on image and self-confidence. He landed a leading role in Quest for Fire. He won a Golden Globe for Beauty and the Beast. And he played the title role in two Hellboy m ovies, becoming along the way an icon among sci-fi and comic book fans worldwide. Although his name may be unknown to some, most people know Ron Perlman's face, despite the fact that for nearly half his career he's been disguised under feature-alteri ng foam-rubber prosthetics. On his offbeat path to success, Ron has amassed nearly 200 stage, TV, voiceover, and major motion picture credits, including roles in Drive, Pacific Rim, and a six-year gig as the badass biker boss Clay Morrow in Sons of A narchy. In Easy Street (the Hard Way), Ron shares his life story, starting with his up-by-your-bootstraps background in New York's Washington Heights. His father, a Swing Era drummer, gave up his dream in order to feed his sons while his mother worke d as a municipal clerk. Ron's hard-earned road to Easy Street included bouts of abject poverty, heartbreaking familial episodes, and a long, often uncomfortable struggle for self-acceptance. He sheds light on his life as a working actor and also offe rs behind-the-scenes insight into the working styles of internationally famous directors, including Jean-Jacques Annaud, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy and Academy Award-winning Pan's Labyrinth). He provides his own peek into Hol lywood, up close and personal, where he has encountered the likes of Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and others. Plus, he turns his eye on the trajectory of American culture--the good and the bad--as observed by a man wh o started out in a mom-and-pop world where the arts were disseminated by individuals rather than corporations. Easy Street (the Hard Way) will inspire anyone who has ever dared to dream and offers a roadmap to the next generation of dreamers.

A stunningly candid portrait of the Seattle grunge scene of the '90s and a memoir of an addict during the last great era of rock 'n' roll excess, by Hole drummer Patty Schemel Patty Schemel's story begins with a childhood surrounded by the AA meetings her parents hosted in the family living room. Their divorce triggered her first forays into drinking at age twelve and dovetailed with her passion for punk rock and playing the drums. Patty's struggles with her sexuality further drove her notoriously hard playing, and by the late '80s she had focused that anger, confusion, and drive into regular gigs with well-regarded bands in Tacoma, Seattle, and Olympia, Washington. She met a pre-Nirvana Kurt Cobain at a Melvins show, and less than five years later, was living with him and his wife, Hole front-woman Courtney Love, at the height of his fame and on the cusp of hers. As the platinum-selling band's new drummer, Schemel contributed memorable, driving beats to hits like "Beautiful Son," "Violet," "Doll Parts," and "Miss World." But the band was plagued by tragedy and heroin addiction, and by the time Hole went on tour in support of their ironically titled and critically-acclaimed album Live Through This in 1994, both Cobain and Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff had died at the age of 27 With surprising candor and wit, Schemel intimately documents the events surrounding her dramatic exit from the band in 1998 that led to a dark descent into a life of homelessness and crime on the streets of Los Angeles, and the difficult but rewarding path to lasting sobriety after more than twenty serious attempts to get clean. Hit So Hard is a testament not only to the enduring power of the music Schemel helped create but an important document of the drug culture that threatened to destroy it.

Touted by fans for his charisma and scorned by critics for his egomania, Sting is one of the most commercially successful and most controversial rock artists performing today. A schoolteacher from Newcastle, Sting soared to international fame and the top of the seventies rock charts with The Police, one of the most popular bands on the planet. After the band folded, he emerged as a solo start with hit singles, critically acclaimed albums, worldwide sell-out tours, and a host of Grammys, not to mention raves for his work in film and on Broadway. Yet Sting's career has been turbulent-an accomplished jazz bassist and vastly talented musician, he has been charged with playing punk and reggae for careerist convenience. He has been accused of single-handedly breaking up The Police at the peak of its rock band powers. And his much publicized work on behalf of Amnesty International and the Brazilian rainforests has been equally admired and disdained. In this updated edition of the first full-length biography of Sting, Christopher Sandford examines the substance behind the cliche, the creative disagreements--and physical violence--among The Police; the musical intelligence that produced such albums as Nothing Like the Sun and Ten Summoner's Tales; Sting's ecological campaigning and financial dealings; and his numerous sexual entanglements. Here is Sting, the legend, the man, the political activist, the performer who continues to fascinate the world.

The West and Islam--the sword and the scimitar--have clashed since the mid-seventh century, when, according to Muslim tradition, the Byzantine emperor rejected Prophet Muhammad's order to abandon Christianity and convert to Islam, unleashing a centuries-long jihad on Christendom. Sword and Scimitar chronicles the significant battles that arose from this ages-old Islamic jihad, beginning with the first major Islamic attack on Christian land in 636, through the occupation of the Middle East that prompted the Crusades and the far-flung conquests of the Ottoman Turks, to the European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s, when Islam largely went on the retreat--until its reemergence in recent times. Using original sources in Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Turkish, preeminent historian Raymond Ibrahim describes each battle in vivid detail and explains the effect the outcome had on larger historical currents of the age and how the military lessons of the battle reflect the cultural faultlines between Islam and the West. The majority of these landmark battles are now forgotten or considered inconsequential. Yet today, as the West faces a resurgence of this enduring Islamic jihad, Sword and Scimitar provides the needed historical context to understand the current relationship between the West and the Islamic world, and why the Islamic State is merely the latest chapter of an old history.

A loving but take-no-prisoners (grant them full amnesty) send-up of the beloved book and television franchise, Lame of Thrones will do for Game of Thrones what Nightlight and The Hunger Pains did for Twilight and The Hunger Games, offering fans a way of reentering the fictional world they have come to love and exploding all of its conventions-as well as their expectations of the characters-to hilarious ends. This side-splitting gut-busting laugh-tastic rib-tickling make-you-laugh ha-ha parody may just even leave you more satisfied than the actual ending of Game of Thrones. And in addition to fancy-shmancy satisfaction, this book will also leave you with something way more important-something no book ever has been able to achieve: gratuitous sex and violence that is somehow more graphic than the sex and violence on the TV version of Game of Thrones. Lame of Thrones will take you to Westopolis, where several different extremely attractive egomaniacs are vying to be ruler of the realm and sit on the Pointy Chair. Our hero Jon Dough was a likely bet, but the untimely murder of him by his own men of the Night's Crotch has made that seem less likely. However, Smellisandre, a witch who has the uncannily convenient ability to bring people back to life is also conveniently located in the same room as Jon's corpse, so maybe she'll do something about it? Will Dragon Queen Dennys Grandslam escape from her Clothkakhi captors and return to conquer the world? Or will she just get left in the desert for the rest of the books, counting grains of sand? And what about Jon Dough's siblings Bland Snark, who's off training with the Pink Eyed Raven, and Malarya Snark, who's off training with the Tasteless Men? Will they be mentioned? Probably? Almost definitely, yes? It would be weird if they weren't prominent characters in the book, you say? To find out, read the book you wish George R.R. Martin would write, aka the book that brought The Harvard Lampoon out of publishing retirement-after five years of wandering the wasteland of the internet-ready to serve parody notice to Game of Thrones, one of the most popular book and television franchises of the past two decades.

Touted by fans for his charisma and scorned by critics for his egomania, Sting is one of the most commercially successful and most controversial rock artists performing today. A schoolteacher from Newcastle, Sting soared to international fame and the top of the seventies rock charts with The Police, one of the most popular bands on the planet. After the band folded, he emerged as a solo start with hit singles, critically acclaimed albums, worldwide sell-out tours, and a host of Grammys, not to mention raves for his work in film and on Broadway. Yet Sting's career has been turbulent-an accomplished jazz bassist and vastly talented musician, he has been charged with playing punk and reggae for careerist convenience. He has been accused of single-handedly breaking up The Police at the peak of its rock band powers. And his much publicized work on behalf of Amnesty International and the Brazilian rainforests has been equally admired and disdained. In this updated edition of the first full-length biography of Sting, Christopher Sandford examines the substance behind the cliche, the creative disagreements--and physical violence--among The Police; the musical intelligence that produced such albums as Nothing Like the Sun and Ten Summoner's Tales; Sting's ecological campaigning and financial dealings; and his numerous sexual entanglements. Here is Sting, the legend, the man, the political activist, the performer who continues to fascinate the world.

What does E=mc2 actually mean? Dr. Brian Cox and Professor Jeff Forshaw go on a journey to the frontier of twenty-first century science to unpack Einstein's famous equation. Explaining and simplifying notions of energy, mass, and light-while exploding commonly held misconceptions-they demonstrate how the structure of nature itself is contained within this equation. Along the way, we visit the site of one of the largest scientific experiments ever conducted: the now-famous Large Hadron Collider, a gigantic particle accelerator capable of re-creating conditions that existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang. A collaboration between one of the youngest professors in the United Kingdom and a distinguished popular physicist, Why Does E=mc2? is one of the most exciting and accessible explanations of the theory of relativity.