Tag Archives: books

Mark Prendergrast’s The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance – The Evolution of Sound In the Electronic Age is an enthusiastic and exhaustive tour through a century’s worth of biography of the music’s creators and disseminators. Included are early-twentieth century fathers Mahler, Satie, Debussy, Ravel; mid-century pioneering electronic composers Varese, …

Eric Nuzum is the author of the fascinating Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America: What we commonly refer to as “music censorship” (and what will be examined in this book) is actually implicit censorship: community, institutional, and corporate attempts to regulate society according to their personal standards of decency and …

Nicholas Kristof decried the publication of information of possible aid to terrorists in a NY Times column this week.

Neal Pollack talks about himself - what else?

The WSJ says Rowling “polishing”: Don’t worry — the next Harry Potter is just around the corner. Author J.K. Rowling said in an interview that she has completed the bones of her long-awaited fifth book, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” and is in the process of tweaking …

J.K. Rowling owns “muggles” and whatnot: A federal court on Wednesday threw out author Nancy Stouffer’s claims that Rowling, the author of the blockbuster Harry Potter ( news – web sites) books, stole words and characters from Stouffer’s books. The claims were made against Rowling and her U.S. publisher and …

Review of the ongoing Love/Payne show by Stephen Holden in the NY Times: Darlene Love and Freda Payne are prime examples of rhythm-and-blues singers who are considerably more complex than the sound of the vintage hit singles that typecast them vocally on the nostalgia hit parade. And in their exciting …

Oakland GM Billy Beane is first GM to build a team around sabermetrics.

I still can’t believe classic rock writer and Billboard editor Timothy White died of a heart attack at the age of 50 in June: it’s a real tragedy and 50 sure sounds young. I met White on a few occasions and he was very gracious and encouraging of our work …

David Kelly looks at Sopranos lit in the NY Times: Literary critics and historians, neo-Marxists and theoretical feminists, postmodernists and pre-post-post-structuralists are scrambling to stake their claims to David Chase’s series. The name-dropping in these books borders on the felonious — why stop at Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese …