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Notes on Chopin by André Gide
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The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
Étienne de La Boétie
This classic work of the sixteenth century political philosopher, in reply to Machiavelli's The Prince, seeks to answer the question of why people submit to the tyranny of government, and as such, has exerted an important influence on the traditions of dissidence from Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to Tolstoy, to Gandhi.
Now, Now, Louison
Jean Frémon - 2016
The art world’s grande dame and its shameless old lady, spinning personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks with her characteristic insolence and wit, through a most discreet, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and adult life in America, to her death, this phosphorescent novella describes Bourgeois’s inner life as only one artist regarding another can. Included as an afterword is Frémon’s essay about his own “portrait writing” and how he came to know and work with Louise Bourgeois.
Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty - 1945
What makes this work so important is that it returned the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.
Discoveries: Henri Cartier-Bresson
Clément Chéroux - 2008
Early on he adopted the versatile 35mm format and helped develop the popular “street photography” style, influencing generations of photographers that followed. In his own words, he expressed that “the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. . . . It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.” In 1947 Cartier-Bresson founded Magnum Photos with four other photographers. August 22 will be the 100th anniversary of his birth.
The Sick Bag Song
Nick Cave - 2015
It began life scribbled on airline sick bags during Cave’s 22-city tour of North America in 2014. It soon grew into a restless full-length contemporary epic. Spurred by encounters with modern day North America, and racked by romantic longing and exhaustion, Cave teases out the significant moments, the people, the books and the music that have influenced and inspired him, and drops them into his Sick Bag.The Sick Bag Song blends poetry, lyrics, memories, musings, flights of fancy and journal entries. Both mythic and contemporary, it lies somewhere between The Wasteland and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and explores and develops the imaginative universe of Nick Cave.The sumptuous physical edition reproduces in full colour twenty-two sick bags, each hand-customised by Nick, that are integrated throughout the text.
Paris Reborn: Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City
Stephane Kirkland - 2013
The Louvre Palace was expanded, Notre-Dame Cathedral was restored and the French masterpiece of the Second Empire, the Opéra Garnier, was built. A very large part of what we see when we visit Paris today originates from this short span of twenty-two years.The vision for the new Nineteenth Century Paris belonged to Napoleon III, who had led a long and difficult climb to absolute power. But his plans faltered until he brought in a civil servant, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, to take charge of the implementation. Heedless of controversy, at tremendous cost, Haussmann pressed ahead with the giant undertaking until, in 1870, his political enemies brought him down, just months before the collapse of the whole regime brought about the end of an era.Paris Reborn is a must-read for anyone who ever wondered how Paris, the city universally admired as a standard of urban beauty, became what it is.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things
Maynard James Keenan - 2016
Co-author Sarah Jensen's 30-year friendship with Keenan gives her unique insight into his history and career trajectory. The book traces Keenan's journey from his Midwest childhood to his years in the Army to his time in art school, from his stint at a Boston pet shop to his place in the international spotlight and his influence on contemporary music and regional winemaking. A comprehensive portrayal of a versatile and dedicated artist, A Perfect Union of Contrary Things pays homage to the people and places that shaped the man and his art. Until now, Maynard's fans have had access to only an abridged version of his story. A Perfect Union of Contrary Things presents the outtakes, the scenes of disappointment and triumph, and the events that led him to take one step after the next, to change direction, to explore sometimes surprising opportunities. Included are sidebars in his own words, often humorous anecdotes that illuminate the narrative, as well as commentary by his family members, friends, instructors, and industry colleagues. The book also features a foreword by Alex Grey, an American visionary artist and longtime friend of Keenan. Accompanying the text are photos of Keenan from childhood to the present. Maynard's story is a metaphor for the reader's own evolution and an encouragement to follow one's dreams, hold fast to individual integrity, and work ceaselessly to fulfill our creative potential.
What to Listen for in Music
Aaron Copland - 1939
Whether you listen to Mozart or Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland's provocative suggestions for listening to music from his point of view will bring you a deeper appreciation of the most rewarding of all art forms.
Dave Matthews Band: Step Into the Light
Morgan Delancey - 1998
This revised edition includes 75 exclusive photos and two new chapters that chart the band’s activities from 1998 to 2001, right up to the release of Everyday and the mysterious discovery of the Lillywhite sessions. Included is fascinating commentary on Before These Crowded Streets, Live at Luther College, and Listener Supported. The personal lives of each band member are expanded upon, and new coverage of DMB tours, the creation of Dave’s own record label, and the worldwide growth of DMB fans is provided.
Robert Doisneau
Jean-Claude Gautrand - 1992
Fresh, unstaged, and full of poetry and humor, his photographs portray everyday people (in everyday places, doing everyday things) frozen in time, unwittingly revealing fleeting personal emotions in a public context. Doisneau's gift was the ability to seek out and capture, with humanity and grace, those little epiphanies of everyday Parisian life. This book traces Doisneau's life and career, providing a wonderful introduction to the work of this seminal photographer.
Memoirs of Montparnasse
John Glassco - 1973
It is also the best and liveliest of the many chronicles of 1920s Paris and the exploits of the lost generation. In 1928, nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped Montreal and his overbearing father for the wilder shores of Montparnasse. He remained there until his money ran out and his health collapsed, and he enjoyed every minute of his stay. Remarkable for their candor and humor, Glassco’s memoirs have the daft logic of a wild but utterly absorbing adventure, a tale of desire set free that is only faintly shadowed by sadness at the inevitable passage of time.
Reinventing Bach
Paul Elie - 2012
Two centuries later, pioneering musicians began to take advantage of breakthroughs in audio recording to make Bach’s music the sound of modern transcendence. The sainted organist Albert Schweitzer used wax-cylinder recordings to broadcast Bach’s organ works beyond the churches. Pablo Casals, cutting 78s at Abbey Road Studios, made Bach’s cello suites existentialism for the living room; Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney, with Fantasia, made Bach the sound of children’s playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike. Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations opened and closed the LP era and made Bach the byword for postwar cool; and Yo-Yo Ma has brought Bach into the digital present, where computers and smartphones put the sound of Bach all around us. In this book we see these musicians and dozens of others searching, experimenting, and collaborating with one another in the service of Bach, who emerges as the very image of the spiritualized, technically savvy artist. Reinventing Bach is a gorgeously written story of music, invention, and human passion—and a story with special relevance in our time, for it shows that great things can happen when high art meets new technology.
The Allure of the Archives
Arlette Farge - 1989
While combing through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, historian Farge was struck by the extraordinarily intimate portrayal they provided of the lives of the poor in pre-Revolutionary France, especially women. She was seduced by the sensuality of old manuscripts and by the revelatory power of voices otherwise lost. In The Allure of the Archives, she conveys the exhilaration of uncovering hidden secrets and the thrill of venturing into new dimensions of the past. Originally published in 1989, Farge’s classic work communicates the tactile, interpretive, and emotional experience of archival research while sharing astonishing details about life under the Old Regime in France. At once a practical guide to research methodology and an elegant literary reflection on the challenges of writing history, this uniquely rich volume demonstrates how surrendering to the archive’s allure can forever change how we understand the past.
Def Jam, Inc.: Russell Simmons, Rick Rubin, and the Extraordinary Story of the World's Most Influential Hip-Hop Label
Stacy Gueraseva - 2005
Few could or would have predicted that the improvised raps and raw beats busting out of New York City's urban underclass would one day become a multimillion-dollar business and one of music's most lucrative genres. Among those few were two visionaries: Russell Simmons, a young black man from Hollis, Queens, and Rick Rubin, a Jewish kid from Long Island. Though the two came from different backgrounds, their all-consuming passion for hip-hop brought them together. Soon they would revolutionize the music industry with their groundbreaking label, Def Jam Records. Def Jam, Inc. traces the company's incredible rise from the NYU dorm room of nineteen-year-old Rubin (where LL Cool J was discovered on a demo tape) to the powerhouse it is today; from financial struggles and scandals-including The Beastie Boys's departure from the label and Rubin's and Simmons's eventual parting-to revealing anecdotes about artists like Slick Rick, Public Enemy, Foxy Brown, Jay-Z, and DMX. Stacy Gueraseva, former editor in chief of Russell Simmons's magazine, Oneworld, had access to the biggest players on the scene, and brings you real conversations and a behind-the-scenes look from a decade-and a company-that turned the music world upside down. She takes you back to New York in the '80s, when late-night spots such as Danceteria and Nell's were burning with young, fresh rappers, and Simmons and Rubin had nothing but a hunch that they were on to something huge. Far more than just a biography of the two men who made it happen, Def Jam, Inc. is a journey into the world of rap itself. Both an intriguing business history as well as a gritty narrative, here is the definitive book on Def Jam-a must read for any fan of hip-hop as well as all popular-culture junkies.
Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society
Robert L. Herbert - 1988
In this classic of art history, both art and history are triumphantly reborn.”—Robert Rosenblum, New York UniversityThis remarkable book will transform the way we look at Impressionist art. The culmination of twenty years of research by a preeminent scholar in the field, it fundamentally revises the conventional view of the Impressionist movement and shows for the first time how it was fully integrated into the social and cultural life of the times. Robert L. Herbert explores the themes of leisure and entertainment that dominated the great years of Impressionist painting between 1865 and 1885. Cafes, opera houses, dance halls, theaters, racetracks, and vacations by the sea were the central subjects of the majority of these paintings, and Herbert relates these pursuits to the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire.Sumptuously illustrated with many of the most beautiful Impressionist images, both familiar and unfamiliar, this book presents provocative new interpretations of a wide range of famous masterpieces. Artists are seen to be active participants in, as well as objective witnesses to, contemporary life, and there are many profound insights into the social and cultural upheaval of the times.“A social history of Impressionist art that is truly about the art, informed by a penetrating analysis of the ways in which its pictorial structure and qualities communicate its social content. Herbert brings that society to life, but above all he makes some of the most familiar and frequently discussed works in the history of art come wonderfully and vividly to life again.”—Theodore Reff, Columbia UniversityRobert L. Herbert is Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on nineteenth-century French art.