It would be a challenge to find a potter in the world more widely known and respected than Bernard Howell Leach. Though considered the father of British studio pottery, he is as famous in Japan as he is in Europe and the United States?not only as an artist and craftsman, but also as a philosopher.Though born in Hong Kong, Leach spent his early life in Japan. He moved to England at the age of ten, and he attended art school in London, before returning to live in Japan from 1909 to 1920. During this crucial period of artistic discovery, Leach first established himself as a potter and a master of the raku style. He eventually moved back to England to hone his craft, before traveling throughout most of Europe and Asia. A Potter in Japan is a collection of memoirs and diary entries from the time he returned to Japan to teach and travel in the early 1950s.These accounts provide a unique opportunity to see the important Eastern influence on his craft and will appeal to lovers of ceramics and
An insightful look at how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music's ineffability. The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of musicians of the postwar New York avant-garde: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. It contends that these musicians--all of whom are understudied, and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers--not only challenged the rules by which music is written and practiced but also confounded and reconfigured gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social process of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self.
Exposing the religious roots of our ostensibly godless age, Michael Allen Gillespie reveals in this landmark study that modernity is much less secular than conventional wisdom suggests. Taking as his
