Stranger things do tend to happen in Schenectady-once a booming metropolis nicknamed the "City That Lights and Hauls the World" thanks to the dominating presence of General Electric and the American Locomotive Company, though those days are ancient history. GE has nearly abandoned the city, and ALCO closed up shot over fifty years ago. Hence, the title of this book: Forget It, Jake, It's Schenectady:The True Story Behind "The Place Behind the Pines", a nod to the bleak conclusion ...

Twin Peaks, the infamously strange, seductive, and confounding murder mystery that made network television safe for surrealism, is returning to the small screen after 25 years. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, the series enjoys a hallowed standing in popular culture and remains a touchstone in the evolution of TV as an artistic medium. For its many intensely devoted fans, Twin Peaks continues to beguile and disturb and delight; it's a bottomless well of allusions, s...

Mark Frost, co-creator of both the original Twin Peaks and The Return, is often lost in the shadow of co-creator David Lynch in the eyes of critics and scholars -- one newspaper even called him the "Other Peak." In fact, Frost played at least as crucial a role in developing the narrative, mythology, and aesthetic of what has come to be revered as one of the most artful and influential shows ever to air on television. This book, comprising a series of interviews with Frost...

Unravel Ten of the New York's Most Interesting Murder Mysteries.David Bushman's and Mark Givens' engaging retellings take readers through the history of the crimes and the personal anecdotes of family and friends who were impacted by the deaths. Breakdowns of the crime scenes, timelines of the victims and the suspects, and various clues give readers a personal guide to the unsolved murders that have rocked New York.

"One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel"-Jean-Antoninette ("Reinette") Poisson, aka Madame de Pompadour, "The Girl in the Fireplace"What a world of demons Doctor Who has presented us with over the past seven decades: from Daleks and Cybermen to Weeping Angels and the Silence, the greatest villains of the Who-niverse have achieved an iconic status all their own, cementing themselves in the minds of millions of viewers (why else would Parker Brothers h...

David Lynch has been accused for decades of sexism and even misogyny in his work, due largely to frequent depictions of violence against women. Yet others see in Lynch's work the deification of the female, and actresses like Laura Dern and Naomi Watts jump at every opportunity to work with him. "He is the master of the juxtaposition of the creepy and the sweet, the sexual and the chaste," wrote W's Lynn Hirschberg. "And at the heart of this tense, intriguing friction, you will always find ...

"Don't be alone, Doctor," Amy Pond tells the Eleventh Doctor in "The Angels Take Manhattan," and of course the irony is that in one sense the Doctor is always alone--a Gallifreyan whose regenerative powers mean he will outlast nearly everyone near and dear to him -- while at the same time he is rarely without one or more trusted companion by his side. This is a book about those companions--those fortunate few who accompany him on his journeys through space and time on--to quote the Ninth D...

A brilliantly researched reinvestigation into the nearly forgotten century-old murder that inspired one of the most seductive mysteries in the history of television and film.In 1908, Hazel Drew was found floating in a pond in Sand Lake, New York, beaten to death. The unsolved murder inspired rumors, speculation, ghost stories, and, almost a century later, the phenomenon of Twin Peaks. Who killed Hazel Drew? Like Laura Palmer, she was a paradox of personali...

In 'primary oral societies', notions of repetition, addition, malleability of characters and agonistic contexts in narrative myths differ markedly from Western notions of time, orthodoxy and tediousness. What Western audiences and image-viewers expect as a consequence of their cultural background does not match the expectations of those who belong to oral societies. In The Language of Myth and Art, Witelson and Lewis-Williams strive to distance the language of Western myth and art...

These essays reveal how the scriptures, prophetic teachings, history, culture, rituals, and traditions of Mormonism have been, are, and can be used as warrants for a wide range of activities and attitudes—from radical pacifism to legitimation of the United States’ use of preemptive force against its enemies. As a relatively young religion that for much of its early history was simply struggling for survival, Mormonism has not yet fully grappled with some of the pressing questions of war an...

How did prehistoric peoples those living before written records think? Were their modes of thought fundamentally different from ours today? Researchers over the years have certainly believed so. Along with the Aborigines of Australia, the indigenous San people of southern Africa among the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth became iconic representatives of all our distant ancestors, and were viewed either as irrational fantasists or childlike, highly spiritual conservationists. Since t...

Few contemporary television shows have been subjected to the critical scrutiny that has been brought to bear on David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks since its debut in 1990. Yet the series, and the subsequent film, Fire Walk With Me, are sufficiently rich that it's always possible for a close analysis to offer something new – and that's what Franck Boulègue has done with Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic. Through Boulègue's eyes, we see for the first time the world of Twin Peaks as a c...