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The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.

Despite a genuine admiration for Native Hawaiian culture, white Californians of the 1930s ignored authentic relationships with Native Hawaiians. Surfing became a central part of what emerged instead: a beach culture of dressing, dancing, and acting like an Indigenous people whites idealized.

Patrick Moser uses surfing to open a door on the cultural appropriation practiced by Depression-era Californians against a backdrop of settler colonialism and white nationalism. Recreating the imagined leisure and romance of life in Waikīkī attracted people buffeted by economic crisis and dislocation. California-manufactured objects like surfboards became a physical manifestation of a dream that, for all its charms, emerged from a white impulse to both remove and replace Indigenous peoples. Moser traces the rise of beach culture through the lives of trendsetters Tom Blake, John “Doc” Ball, Preston “Pete” Peterson, Mary Ann Hawkins, and Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison while also delving into California’s control over images of Native Hawaiians via movies, tourism, and the surfboard industry.

Compelling and innovative, Waikīkī Dreams opens up the origins of a defining California subculture.

The entertaining and inspiring story of a stubbornly independent promoter and club owner 

This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus at UW–Milwaukee, booking thousands of concerts across Wisconsin and the Midwest, and opening Shank Hall, the beloved Milwaukee venue named after a club in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap.

This funny, nostalgia-inducing book details the lasting friendships Jest established over the years with John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, and Milwaukee’s own Violent Femmes, among others. It also shines a light into the seldom-seen world of music promotion, as Jest attempts to manage a turbulent band on the road, negotiates with agents, deals with fires (both real and metaphorical), struggles through a pandemic, and takes pleasure in presenting music of all kinds—from world-famous acts to up-and-coming local bands. In addition to photos of celebrated musicians, the book includes concert posters, tickets, and backstage passes documenting decades of rock, folk, and alternative shows that helped put Milwaukee on the live music map.

As the music industry has become dominated by profit-driven corporations, We Had Fun and Nobody Died chronicles the career of a one-of-a-kind independent promoter whose hardheadedness and love of music have helped him keep it real and make it in the music business for more than forty years. 



"[An] adventure-filled biography of music promoter Peter Jest. . . . Reflecting decades of changes to the music business, We Had Fun and Nobody Died is a fascinating biography of a passionate promoter’s work to transform Milwaukee’s music scene." 
—Foreword Reviews 

“Amy Waldman and Peter Jest weave a thrilling tale of fanhood gone pro. Dreams followed, dragons slain, and the roof of a venerable venue repeatedly blown sky-high. We’re proud to have provided the name [for Shank Hall]; it took men and women of sterner stuff to do the heavy lifting.”  
—Michael McKean, actor and comedian, This Is Spinal Tap 

“We Had Fun and Nobody Died is a fantastic journey of a Midwest boy, his love of music, and his excitement to be part of it all.” 
—Kevn Kinney, lead singer and guitarist of Drivin N Cryin 

“Peter Jest’s story is one that conveys a winning combination of friendship, determination, and entrepreneurial insights that led him to a lifelong career in support of the live music industry and the community that comes together in common appreciation of it.” 
—Shana Morrison, singer-songwriter 

 

The entertaining and inspiring story of a stubbornly independent promoter and club owner 

This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus at UW–Milwaukee, booking thousands of concerts across Wisconsin and the Midwest, and opening Shank Hall, the beloved Milwaukee venue named after a club in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap.

This funny, nostalgia-inducing book details the lasting friendships Jest established over the years with John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, and Milwaukee’s own Violent Femmes, among others. It also shines a light into the seldom-seen world of music promotion, as Jest attempts to manage a turbulent band on the road, negotiates with agents, deals with fires (both real and metaphorical), struggles through a pandemic, and takes pleasure in presenting music of all kinds—from world-famous acts to up-and-coming local bands.

As the music industry has become dominated by profit-driven corporations, We Had Fun and Nobody Died chronicles the career of a one-of-a-kind independent promoter whose hardheadedness and love of music have helped him keep it real and make it in the music business for more than forty years. 



"[An] adventure-filled biography of music promoter Peter Jest. . . . Reflecting decades of changes to the music business, We Had Fun and Nobody Died is a fascinating biography of a passionate promoter’s work to transform Milwaukee’s music scene." 
—Foreword Reviews 

“Amy Waldman and Peter Jest weave a thrilling tale of fanhood gone pro. Dreams followed, dragons slain, and the roof of a venerable venue repeatedly blown sky-high. We’re proud to have provided the name [for Shank Hall]; it took men and women of sterner stuff to do the heavy lifting.”  
—Michael McKean, actor and comedian, This Is Spinal Tap 

“We Had Fun and Nobody Died is a fantastic journey of a Midwest boy, his love of music, and his excitement to be part of it all.” 
—Kevn Kinney, lead singer and guitarist of Drivin N Cryin 

“Peter Jest’s story is one that conveys a winning combination of friendship, determination, and entrepreneurial insights that led him to a lifelong career in support of the live music industry and the community that comes together in common appreciation of it.” 
—Shana Morrison, singer-songwriter 

 

Intercollegiate athletics is under assault from all sides. Its economic model is yielding increasing and unsustainable deficits and widening inequality. Coaches and athletic directors are the highest paid employees at FBS universities (NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision) by factors of five to ten, or more. Athletes are being cheated on their promised education, do not receive adequate medical care, and are not allowed to receive cash income. Substantial change, either toward reasserting the intended primacy of education for intercollegiate athletes or a further surrender to commercialism, is coming. This book lays out the starkly different paths that college sports reform can follow and what the ramifications will be on the athletes and on the institutions in which they are enrolled.
 

A clear, accessible, and fun guide on everything it takes to land a job.
 
Searching for a job can be hard and demoralizing work. In Why You, Why Me, Why Now, Rachel Toor delivers some good news. The most important thing is within your control—a mindset that shows you know the goals of the organization you want to work for and that you’re ready and eager to contribute. Toor provides, with compassion and enthusiasm, strategies to make it easy for hiring managers to say “yes.” Through useful and funny anecdotes, she offers advice from professionals across industries and focuses on the attitude applicants can adopt to find success. Revealing traits employers seek, Toor shows how to craft winning cover letters, ways to tailor resumes for each job, and practical tips to get past AI screening. She also explains how to use LinkedIn and gives tips on preparing for interviews. Throughout, the book features Toor’s notes on writing well to help in landing a first job and beyond. Encouraging, entertaining, and blunt, this is a job-search guide like no other.

          
 

In Working Musicians Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the labor of the mostly unknown composers, music editors, orchestrators, recording engineers, and other workers involved in producing music for films, television, and video games. Drawing on dozens of interviews with music workers in Los Angeles, Taylor explores the nature of their work and how they understand their roles in the entertainment business. Taylor traces how these cultural laborers have adapted to and cope with the conditions of neoliberalism as, over the last decade, their working conditions have become increasingly precarious. Digital technologies have accelerated production timelines and changed how content is delivered, while new pay schemes have emerged that have transformed composers from artists into managers and paymasters. Taylor demonstrates that as bureaucratization and commercialization affect every aspect of media, the composers, musicians, music editors, engineers, and others whose soundtracks excite, inspire, and touch millions face the same structural economic challenges that have transformed American society, concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.

A Grammy and Tony Award–winning conductor, John DeMain has been a fixture of Madison, Wisconsin, for more than three decades, serving as music director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the Madison Opera. Before and since then, he has been an internationally recognized conductor, equally at home in the worlds of classical music, opera, and Broadway.

In Working with My Heroes, written with the late Greg Hettmansberger, DeMain recounts incredible experiences—from his days studying piano in Youngstown, Ohio, to his years as an undergraduate and graduate student at Julliard, to his early jobs in summer stock productions, to numerous acclaimed productions—without ever losing sight of the wonder and awe he felt as a young musician first learning his way in the world. With warmth and humor, he provides valuable insight into the business of music making, while also sharing behind-the-scenes stories of entertaining situations he found himself in throughout the years—from playing piano at a gangster’s wedding to an unexpected dressing room encounter with a Broadway star to conducting an opera with circus elephants.

DeMain has had many career-defining moments behind the podium, conducting world premieres of Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place, John Adams’s Nixon in China, and Jeanine Tesoro’s Blue, as well as the U.S. premiere of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, among others. He guest-conducted symphonies and operas in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. DeMain cemented his reputation with the 1976 Houston Grand Opera performances of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, establishing its stature as a quintessentially American opera. The singers, musicians, and composers DeMain has worked with over the past six decades are a veritable Who’s Who of American classical music. This memoir places readers by his side, allowing them to experience all the wonders and joy of a life spent making music.