Editorial: Tales of Terror
Steve Hutchison reviews 60 of his favorite revenant movies. Each article includes a synopsis, a review, and a rating. The movies are ranked. How many have you seen?
In "Searching for Harry Chapin’s America: Remember When the Music," journalist Pat Fenton describes his road trips to the towns and people that inspired Harry Chapin’s most renowned songs. While Fenton’s account includes exclusive interviews with Chapin’s family and associates, and an excerpt from Chapin’s unpublished writings, the audio adaptation includes actual cuts from Chapin's best-known songs. Composer and multi-instrumentalist David Amram, who narrates Fenton's chronicle, performs his own brief interludes of "incidental music," where he was inspired to do so.Harry Chapin (1942-1981) was a legendary top-charting American songwriter in the 1970s and ’80s. During his lifetime, Chapin was nominated twice for a Grammy Award: in 1972 for Best New Artist, and in 1974 for Best Pop Male Vocal Performance. In 2011, thirty years after his untimely death, Chapin’s Number One-charting song, “Cat’s In the Cradle,” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. "Searching for Harry Chapin’s America" was published on July 16, 2021, and is a fortieth-year commemoration of this musical icon’s tragic death in a car crash on July 16, 1981. The audio adaptation follows a year later, in July, 2022, and extends the tribute to Chapin's legacy of songs and philanthropy."Like 'Don Quixote,' or 'On the Road,' Pat Fenton’s classic book takes you on an unforgettable series of journeys and makes you feel that you are now welcome to be with the people and places that Harry Chapin memorialized in his timeless songs."—David Amram, composer/multi-instrumentalist/author “A portrait of an age as well as an artist. Chapin was an American original who combined Walt Whitman’s lyric realism with Woody Guthrie’s passionate truth-telling. Fenton’s blend of sympathy, honesty, and insight gives us the man in full. Fenton’s talents as a master storyteller have never been on better display.” —Peter Quinn, novelist/political historianVer libro
Donald Fagen will forever be associated with Steely Dan, the band he formed with Walter Becker and four other musicians in 1972. The smooth, radio-friendly veneer of the duo's songs made Steely Dan internationally popular and famous in the 1970s, but the polish glossed over the underlying layers of anger, disappointment, sleaze, and often downright weirdness lurking just beneath the surface. The elliptical lyrics were—and continue to be—an endless source of fascination. What kind of person was capable of writing such songs? Fagen has always kept his true self hidden behind walls of irony, confounding most journalistic enquiries with a mixture of obscurity and sarcasm. Nightfly cracks open the door to reveal the life behind the lyrics and traces Fagen's story from early family life in suburban New Jersey, to his first encounter with Walter Becker at Bard College, their long struggle for recognition as songwriters, and the formation of Steely Dan. The band's break-up in 1981, reformation in 1993, and Fagen's parallel solo career are covered in detail.Ver libro
London has harbored many curious characters, but few more curious than the artist and visionary Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956). A controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, the young Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, while George Bernard Shaw reportedly said "Spare's medicine is too strong for the average man." But Spare was never made for worldly success and he went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity south of the river. Absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions, and surrounding himself with cats and familiar spirits, he continued to produce extraordinary art while developing a magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality. Today Spare is both forgotten and famous, a cult figure whose modest life has been much mythologized since his death. This groundbreaking biographical study offers wide-ranging insights into Spare's art, mind, and world, reconnecting him with the art history that ignored him and exploring his parallel London; a bygone place of pub pianists, wealthy alchemists, and monstrous owls.Ver libro
A visual feast of 49 weird, wonderful and architecturally astounding swimming pools from around the world. This book is a sumptuous celebration of swimming pools as playgrounds of pioneering design and architectural excess. Banish memories of crowded leisure centres and sun lounger-clad lidos, these are pools designed for pleasure, not purpose. Swimming pools are no longer simply places to swim, they are versatile sites of activity and excess. They can be vital lifelines providing communities with safe access to water, domestic symbols of affluence, and the avant-garde spectacle of hotel developers. Naina Gupta uncovers some of the most spectacular swimming pools from around the world, including Berthold Lubetkin's modernist Penguin Pool at London Zoo, the world's largest infinity pool at Marina Bay Sands, Ricardo Bofill's blood-red garden pool in Spain, and London's unparalleled Sky Pool. Extraordinary Pools also includes 4 extended essays on various aspects of pool culture, such as the use of empty swimming pools in California by skateboarders. Illustrated throughout with awe-inspiring colour photography, Extraordinary Pools is a mosaic of exceptional public and private pools, reasserting the protean quality of the swimming pool as a space of activity, pleasure and excess.Ver libro
Arthur Miller's deeply moving drama reunites two long estranged middle-aged brothers. Nostalgia and recrimination erupt as they sell off an attic full of furniture, their last link to a family and a world that no longer exist. This 1968 classic is a wrenching saga of plaintive gestures and missed opportunities. A BBC Co-production. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Richard Dreyfuss, Amy Irving and Harris Yulin.Ver libro
The ultimate introduction to every character, creature and location you will encounter in this epic adventure from the official Lord of the Rings saga, read by star of the film, Gaia Wise. Set 183 years before the events chronicled in the original trilogy of films, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim tells the fate of the House of Helm Hammerhand, the legendary King of Rohan. A sudden attack by Wulf, a clever and ruthless Dunlending lord seeking vengeance for the death of his father, forces Helm and his people to make a daring last stand in the ancient stronghold of the Hornburg—a mighty fortress that will later come to be known as Helm’s Deep. Finding herself in an increasingly desperate situation, Héra, the daughter of Helm, must summon the will to lead the resistance against a deadly enemy intent on their total destruction.With a cast of exciting and original characters, and a mix of locations both familiar and new, this dramatic new standalone story weaves another thread in the grand tapestry of Middle-earth. Read by the star of the film herself, The War of the Rohirrim Official Companion is the ultimate introduction to every character, creature and location you will encounter in this epic adventure from the official Lord of the Rings saga.Ver libro
