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  Puccini's Tosca - A Short Guide...

  Michael Steen

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  Tosca's première in Rome in January 1900 was nearly disrupted by a terrorist threat to blow up Italy's King Umberto. Victorien Sardou had written the melodrama for the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. Giacomo Puccini's popular opera is a tale of sadism and brutality, torture, attempted rape, murder, an execution and two suicides. 'Realism' was in vogue: Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana had been a great success, as had Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. With sharp practice, the publisher Giulio Ricordi obtained 'Tosca' for Puccini, who had already composed Manon Lescaut and La Bohème. The story, set in the Napoleonic, era was ideal for Puccini, a chain-smoker who enjoyed women, shooting birds, and high-speed motor cars.
  
  A political prisoner seeks sanctuary in the church where prima donna Floria Tosca's lover Cavaradossi, a role associated with Pavarotti, is painting a picture of Mary Magdalen. In Va, Tosca! the police chief Scarpia fantasises about Tosca during a Te Deum celebrating Napoleon's victory. Tosca stabs Scarpia following the famous operatic aria, Vissi d'arte, immortalised by Maria Callas on stage and in the film produced by Franco Zeffirelli. Awaiting death before dawn in the Castel Sant'Angelo, Cavaradossi sings the well-known arias E lucevan le stelle and O dolci mani. Tosca's attempt to save him comes to nothing.
  
  Written by Michael Steen, author of the acclaimed The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, 'Short Guides to Great Operas' are concise, entertaining and easy to read. They are packed with useful information and informed opinion, helping to make you a truly knowledgeable opera-goer, and so maximising your enjoyment of a great musical experience.
  
  Other 'Short Guides to Great Operas' that you may enjoy include La bohème, Madama Butterfly and Carmen.

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  The Lady in Gold - The...

  Anne-Marie O'Connor

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  The Lady in Gold, considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the twentieth century's most recognizable paintings, made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought it for $135 million a century after Klimt, the most famous Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait. 
  Anne-Marie O'Connor, writer for the Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese Jewish society figure; daughter of the head of one of the largest banks in the Hapsburg Empire, head of the Oriental Railway, whose Orient Express went from Berlin to Constantinople; wife of Ferdinand Bauer, sugar-beet baron. 
  The Bloch-Bauers were art patrons, and Adele herself was considered a rebel of fin de siècle Vienna (she wanted to be educated, a notion considered "degenerate" in a society that believed women being out in the world went against their feminine "nature"). The author describes how Adele inspired the portrait and how Klimt made more than a hundred sketches of her—simple pencil drawings on thin manila paper. 
  And O'Connor writes of Klimt himself, son of a failed gold engraver, shunned by arts bureaucrats, called an artistic heretic in his time, a genius in ours. She writes of the Nazis confiscating the portrait of Adele from the Bloch-Bauers' grand palais; of the Austrian government putting the painting on display, stripping Adele's Jewish surname from it so that no clues to her identity (nor any hint of her Jewish origins) would be revealed. Nazi officials called the painting, "The Lady in Gold" and proudly exhibited it in Vienna's Baroque Belvedere Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi institution. 
  The author writes of the painting, inspired by the Byzantine mosaics Klimt had studied in Italy, with their exotic symbols and swirls, the subject an idol in a golden shrine. We see how, sixty years after it was stolen by the Nazis, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became the subject of a decade-long litigation between the Austrian government and the Bloch-Bauer heirs, how and why the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, and how the Court's decision had profound ramifications in the art world. 
  In this book listeners will find riveting social history; an illuminating and haunting look at turn-of-the-century Vienna; a brilliant portrait of the evolution of a painter; a masterfully told tale of suspense. And at the heart of it, The Lady in Gold—the shimmering painting, and its equally irresistible subject, the fate of each forever intertwined.

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  All the Art That's Fit to Print...

  Jerelle Kraus

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  From the New York Times’s former Op-Ed art director, the true story of the world’s first Op-Ed page, a public platform that prefigured the blogosphere.    Jerelle Kraus, whose thirteen-year tenure as Op-Ed art director far exceeds that of any other art director or editor, unveils a riveting account of working at the Times. Her insider anecdotes include the reasons why artist Saul Steinberg hated the Times, why editor Howell Raines stopped the presses to kill a feature by Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau, and why reporter Syd Schanburg—whose story was told in the movie The Killing Fields—stated that he would travel anywhere to see Kissinger hanged, as well as Kraus’s tale of surviving two and a half hours alone with the dethroned outlaw, Richard Nixon.  All the Art features a satiric portrayal of John McCain, a classic cartoon of Barack Obama by Jules Feiffer, and a drawing of Hillary Clinton and Obama by Barry Blitt. But when Frank Rich wrote a column discussing Hillary Clinton exclusively, the Times refused to allow Blitt to portray her. Nearly any notion is palatable in prose, yet editors perceive pictures as a far greater threat. Confucius underestimated the number of words an image is worth; the thousand-fold power of a picture is also its curse . . .  Features 142 artists from thirty nations and five continents, and 324 pictures—gleaned from a total of 30,000—that stir our cultural-political pot.  “To discover what really goes on inside the belly of the media beast, read this book.” —Bill Maher  “In this overflowing treasure chest of ideas, politics and cultural critiques, Kraus proves that “art is dangerous” and sometimes necessarily so.” —Publishers Weekly

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  Big-Screen Drive-In Theater

  Donald Davis

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  The drive-in is dying. People can blame the demise on cable television, luxury theaters with sound systems so technical NASA engineers are needed to install them, or on a host of other modern conveniences and distractions. In reality, the drive-in operator of the Sulpher Springs Big-Screen Drive-In Theater hired a young Donald Davis to work his high school summers there. Employment at the Sulpher Springs Big-Screen Drive-In Theater consisted of working the concession stand, catching "slip-ins", and patrolling the back row to learn about love and life. The theater survives Davis and his friends' summer hijinks until Labor Day. When the last movie, The Guns of Navarrone, is almost over, and the theater could be closed for the winter, Davis and his crew find a way to close it down forever.
  For Ages 10 to Adult.
  
  An August House audio production.

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  Box Set: Fast Cheap and Under...

  John Gaspard

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  Two classic filmmaking books in one box set:  
  "Fast, Cheap and Under Control: Lessons Learned from the Greatest Low-Budget Movies of All Time" Learn the tricks and pitfalls of low-budget filmmaking from 33 successful independent films and the filmmakers who created them. Includes never before published interviews with low-budget mavericks such as Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, and many more.  
  "Fast, Cheap and Written That Way: Top Screenwriters on Writing for Low-Budget Movies" Hollywood's top screenwriters look back at their early low-budget efforts and provide valuable tips, tricks, and advice on how to create a solid screenplay for a low-budget movie. Includes in-depth interviews with: Tom DiCillo (Living in Oblivion), Whit Stillman (Metropolitan), Richard Glatzer (Grief), Henry Jaglom (Venice/Venice), Dan Futterman (Capote), John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), Coleman Hough (Bubble), Rebecca Miller (Personal Velocity), Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator), Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street), Ali Selim (Sweet Land), Stephen Belber (Tape), Eric Bogosian (subUrbia), George Romero (Martin), Bob Clark (Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things), Roger Nygard (Suckers), Alex Cox (Repo Man), Amy Holden Jones (Love Letters), Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count On Me), Dylan Kidd (Roger Dodger), LM Kit Carson (Paris, Texas), Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou), and Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know).  
  "We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." — Roger Corman, Producer, New Horizons  
  "This terrific little book explains how to make every penny count on the often arduous journey from script to screen." — John Carpenter, Director, Halloween, Starman, Escape from New York 

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  Fraktur - Tips Tools and...

  Ruthanne Hartung

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  Create charming birth certificates and house blessings by mastering the decorative writing of the Pennsylvania Dutch—a folk art that lives on.   The Pennsylvania Dutch are noted for the beautifully designed and hand-lettered documents known as fraktur. These include birth and marriage certificates, family trees, bookplates, awards, and house blessings. Leading fraktur artist Ruthanne Hartung adapts the craft to modern tastes and needs in this practical how-to book, with information on tools, step-by-step instructions, ideas for design, lettering and coloring techniques, and a variety of projects. An assortment of traditional patterns to apply to personal frakturs are included.

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