Palm Angels

Featuring large-format photographs of skaters in Venice Beach and Manhattan Beach, Palm Angels is the definitive book on the L.A. skateboarding scene, capturing the style and street culture of the world's most elite communities of skaters. Photographed by Francesco Ragazzi, the Italian art director of Moncler, Palm Angels features a special focus on the look and fashions of skate culture. While it emphasizes dramatic movement through stunning images taken in various Los Angeles neighborhoods, it is less focused on describing tricks as it is about conveying the sensation of men and women engaged in an epic, all-consuming activity. Through art photography, this book hopes to do for skating what Bruce Weber and others did for surf culture, elevating it from what once was an exclusive and localized American pastime to a far-reaching cultural phenomenon. In the spirit of the photography taken of the legendary Z-boys of Dogtown, Ragazzi provides readers with a firsthand glimpse into skateboarding in its modern form, still very much infused with effortless style. Palm Angels includes an introduction by Pharrell Williams (known to the skate community as Skateboard P), who has been instrumental in popularizing the skate look and has propelled it all the way to the high streets of fashion capitals like Paris, New York, and Tokyo.

The Apostle Paul's reference to the "tongues of angels" (1 Cor 13.1) has always aroused curiosity, but it has rarely been the object of a history-of-traditions investigation. Few readers of Paul's words are aware of the numerous references and allusions to angelic languages in Jewish and Christian texts. John C. Poirier presents the first full-length study of the concept of angelic languages, and the most exhaustive attempt to assemble the evidence for that concept in ancient Jewish and early Christian texts. He discusses possible references to angelic languages in the New Testament, pseudepigraphic writings (both Jewish and Christian), the Dead Sea scrolls, rabbinic texts, patristic references, magical writings, and epigraphy. The discussion is divided between those witnesses that understand angels to speak Hebrew, and those that understand angels to speak an esoteric heavenly language.

The Never is on the brink of destruction by the Lady Walker. Wendy, shorn of her Light by the Reapers, must be the one to save it from the beasts between the worlds. Now no more powerful than an average spirit, Wendy reluctantly strikes a balance between Elise, the new Reaper matriarch, and Jane, a Reaper gone rogue. Torn between her duty to her friends, the Riders, and her duty as the Lightbringer, Wendy must rush to learn the secrets left behind. She must make the ultimate sacrifice to bring the worlds into balance once more. . . even if it costs her very soul.

"There is no store-bought redemption pasted to the ends of these poems, but neither will you find hopelessness, self-pity, a turning away from the world. What you will find at the core of all these poems is the timeless North Carolinian's beneficent but ungilded witnessing." - From the Introduction by Ron Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, co-author of True Compass and Flags of Our Fathers

Lisa, an aspiring artist, can’t stop painting what she’s dreaming about…angels. She also starts to see things while awake, like demons trying to kill her. A mysterious man shows up to save her. Joe. He might hold the answers to her paintings…a forgotten past…and a mission to find the divided Angelheart with the help of three angels, before the demons of the Underworld find it, unleashing Hell on Earth.

King John is quite problematic. As the ending is not a satisfying resolution, the audience is left without a sense of completion. It appears everything is left up in the air, unlike the satisfying endings of Lear, Macbeth, or even Hamlet in all of which it is clear that the world will go on despite the tragic events which transpired before. The ending rushes not to closure, as some have suggested, but to another threshold, thus reinforcing the plays overall fluid, mutable temper (Curren-Aquino, 266).

Supernatural phenomena and causalities played an important role in medieval society. Religious practice was relying upon a set of cult images and the sacral status of these depictions of divine or supernatural persons became the object of heated debates and provoked iconoclastic reactions.The miraculous intervention of saints or other divine agents, the wondrous realities beyond understanding, or the manifestations of magic attributed to diabolic forces, were contained by a variety of discourses, described and discussed in religion, philosophy, chronicles, literature and fiction, and also in a large number of pictures and material objects. The nine essays in this collection discusses how supernatural phenomena – especially angels and devils – found visual manifestation in Latin and Eastern Christianity as well as Judaism in the late medieval, early renaissance period.