Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Futurism - A Very Short...

  Ara H. Merjian

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  Modern technology radically transformed urban life by the first decade of the twentieth century. As one of Western Europe's least industrialized countries, Italy appeared impervious to such developments. It was this state of affairs at which the Futurist movement took aim. With its founding in 1909, the poet and impresario F. T. Marinetti called for a revitalization of aesthetic expression by means of "movement and aggression." A growing cadre of Futurist painters, poets, authors, and musicians exchanged Italy's cultural patrimony for new technologies, media, and metaphors, championing machine-propelled speed and its salutary hazards.The movement's challenge to twentieth-century culture lay not in any specific set of images or objects, but a more comprehensive revolution of sensibility. By the mid-1910s there circulated several dozen Futurist proclamations on everything from men's clothing to set design, photography to film, dance to politics. That political impetus proved relentlessly paradoxical in origin and upshot. From its base in Milan, Futurist activity spread throughout the entire peninsula. Prefiguring and then propagandizing Fascist imperialism, Futurism also galvanized a range of progressive modernist phenomena. More than a century later, the "activist model" of the Futurist avant-garde remains deeply fraught in its historical implications.

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  All the Years Combine - The...

  Ray Robertson

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  A Grateful Dead concert, Ray Robertson argues, is life. 
   
   
   
  Like life, it can be alternately compelling and lackluster; familiar and foreign; occasionally sublime and sometimes insipid. Although the Grateful Dead stopped the day Jerry Garcia's heart did, what the band left behind is the next best thing to being there in the third row, courtesy of the group's unorthodox decision to record all of their concerts. Meaning that it's possible to follow the band's evolution (and devolution) through their shows, from the R&B-based garage band at the beginning, to the jazz-rock conjurers at their creative peak, to the lumbering monolith of their decline. 
   
   
   
  In All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows, Robertson listens to and writes ecstatically about fifty of the band's most important and memorable concerts in order to better understand who the Grateful Dead were, what they became, and what they meant—and what they continue to mean.

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  Abba's Abba Gold

  Elizabeth Vincentelli

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  Starting a song with the chorus is the equivalent of drawing your gun too early in a shoot-out, of revealing your hand too hastily in a poker game: Once you’ve given everything you have, where’s the pay off? And yet “Dancing Queen” doesn’t flag after its flamboyant beginning: The chorus acts as both teaser and pay off. Ironically for a band that was supposed to be a bunch of control freaks with a solution to every technical or musical conundrum, it later surfaced that “Dancing Queen” starts with the chorus because Abba just couldn’t figure out how to make it work any other way.Perhaps more than any other Greatest Hits compilation, Abba Gold has come to define a band’s career on one disk. More than that, its release in 1992 heralded the critical rehabilitation of a group which had, since its demise a decade earlier, become little more than a memory of trashy costumes and cheesy tunes to many people. Here, Elisabeth Vincentelli charts the circumstances surrounding the birth of Abba Gold, looks at the impact it had on the music world, and tells the stories behind some of the greatest pop songs ever recorded.

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  Almost Interesting - The Memoir

  Anonimo

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  A hilarious and biting memoir from the actor, comedian and Saturday Night Live alumni David Spade. 
  David Spade is best known for his harsh “Hollywood” Minute Sketches on SNL, his starring roles in movies like Joe Dirt and Tommy Boy,  and his seven-year stint as Dennis Finch on the series Just Shoot Me. Now, with a wit as dry as the weather in his home state of Arizona, the “comic brat extraordinaire” tells his story in Almost Interesting. 
  First Taking fans back to his childhood as a wannabe cool younger brother and recounting his excruciating road-tour to fame—when he was regularly mistaken for a ten year-old, Spade then dishes about his time crisscrossing the country as a comedian, for low-paying gigs and dragging along his mother’s old suitcase full of props. He also covers his years on SNL during the beloved Rock/Sandler/Farley era of the 1990s, including his close working relationship and friendship with Chris Farley and brags about the ridiculous perks that fame has brought into his life, including the constant fear of being fired, a crazy ex-assistant who attacked him while he was sleeping, a run-in with Eddie Murphy on the mean streets of Beverly Hills, and of course an endless supply of hot chicks.   
  Sometimes dirty, always funny, and as sharp as a tack, Almost Interesting reminds you why David Spade is one of our generation’s favorite funny guys.

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  A Classic Interview with Music...

  Marvin Gaye

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  Marvin Pentz Gaye Jr. (April 2, 1939 - April 1, 1984) was an American R&B and soul singer, musician, and songwriter. He helped shape the sound of Motown in the 1960s, first as an in-house session player and later as a solo artist, which earned him the nicknames "Prince of Motown" and "Prince of Soul." With hits like, "How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You)," "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," "What's Going On", "Let's Get It On" and "Sexual Healing," Gaye is often considered one of the greatest singers of all time. The following recording is from a 1983 tv interview.

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  Facing the Music - a Broadway...

  David Loud

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  Unforgettably entertaining and emotionally revealing, Loud is pitch-perfect as he describes his path to the podium, from a stage-struck kid growing up at a school devoted to organic farming and mountain climbing, to the searing formative challenges he faces during adolescence, to the remarkable behind-the-scenes stories of his Broadway trials and triumphs. Skilled at masking his fears, Loud achieves his dream until one fateful opening night, when in the midst of a merry, dressing room celebration, he can no longer deny reality and must suddenly, truly, face the music.

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