Midnight Rambles

Download or read book Midnight Rambles written by David J. Goodwin and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A micro-biography of horror fiction’s most influential author and his love–hate relationship with New York City. By the end of his life and near financial ruin, pulp horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft resigned himself to the likelihood that his writing would be forgotten. Today, Lovecraft stands alongside J. R. R. Tolkien as the most influential genre writer of the twentieth century. His reputation as an unreformed racist and bigot, however, leaves readers to grapple with his legacy. Midnight Rambles explores Lovecraft’s time in New York City, a crucial yet often overlooked chapter in his life that shaped his literary career and the inextricable racism in his work. Initially, New York stood as a place of liberation for Lovecraft. During the brief period between 1924 and 1926 when he lived there, Lovecraft joined a creative community and experimented with bohemian living in the publishing and cultural capital of the United States. He also married fellow writer Sonia H. Greene, a Ukrainian-Jewish émigré in the fashion industry. However, cascading personal setbacks and his own professional ineptitude soured him on New York. As Lovecraft became more frustrated, his xenophobia and racism became more pronounced. New York’s large immigrant population and minority communities disgusted him, and this mindset soon became evident in his writing. Many of his stories from this era are infused with racial and ethnic stereotypes and nativist themes, most notably his overtly racist short story, “The Horror at Red Hook,” set in Red Hook, Brooklyn. His personal letters reveal an even darker bigotry. Author David J. Goodwin presents a chronological micro-biography of Lovecraft’s New York years, emphasizing Lovecraft’s exploration of the city environment, the greater metropolitan region, and other locales and how they molded him as a writer and as an individual. Drawing from primary sources (letters, memoirs, and published personal reflections) and secondary sources (biographies and scholarship), Midnight Rambles develops a portrait of a talented and troubled author and offers insights into his unsettling beliefs on race, ethnicity, and immigration.

Download or read book The Levon Helm Midnight Ramble written by Paul LaRaia and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Levon Helm's Rambles have quickly become the stuff of legend. Helm, of course, is the charismatic drummer, singer, and sometimes mandolin picker for The Band, a group whose songs and stature have made them a pillar of classic rock and rootsy Americana. Beyond their work with Bob Dylan, their own hits (“Up on Cripple Creek ” “The Weight ” “The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down ” to name just a few) have landed them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the consciousness of music fans everywhere. The Ramble is Levon's down-home jam session for friends and fans, held on Saturday nights in his studio “Barn” in Woodstock. Levon based his Ramble Sessions on the Southern medicine shows of his youth, and has invited some of the most notable blues entertainers and musicians of our time to perform with him including Robert Plant, Elvis Costello, Rickie Lee Jones, Clarence Clemons, Allison Krauss and others. This book is the official record of these incredibly intimate sessions: the next best thing to being there. Accompanying the spectacular photos are testimonials and remembrances from the superstars who have joined the Ramble.

Download or read book The Midnight Ramble: Or, The Adventures of Two Noble Females, Etc. [With Plates and Newspaper Cuttings Interleaved.] written by MIDNIGHT-RAMBLE. and published by . This book was released on 1754 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Band written by and published by PediaPress. This book was released on with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Jazz written by James Lincoln Collier and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-07-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praised by the Washington Post as a "tough, unblinkered critic," James Lincoln Collier is probably the most controversial writer on jazz today. His acclaimed biographies of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman continue to spark debate in jazz circles, and his iconoclastic articles on jazz over the past 30 years have attracted even more attention. With the publication of Jazz: The American Theme Song, Collier does nothing to soften his reputation for hard-hitting, incisive commentary. Questioning everything we think we know about jazz--its origins, its innovative geniuses, the importance of improvisation and spontaneous inspiration in a performance--and the jazz world, these ten provocative essays on the music and its place in American culture overturn tired assumptions and will alternately enrage, enlighten, and entertain. Jazz: The American Theme Song offers music lovers razor-sharp analysis of musical trends and styles, and fearless explorations of the most potentially explosive issues in jazz today. In "Black, White, and Blue," Collier traces African and European influences on the evolution of jazz in a free-ranging discussion that takes him from the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) to the orderly classrooms where most music students study jazz today. He argues that although jazz was originally devised by blacks from black folk music, jazz has long been a part of the cultural heritage of musicians and audiences of all races and classes, and is not black music per se. In another essay, Collier provides a penetrating analysis of the evolution of jazz criticism, and casts a skeptical eye on the credibility of the emerging "jazz canon" of critical writing and popular history. "The problem is that even the best jazz scholars keep reverting to the fan mentality, suddenly bursting out of the confines of rigorous analysis into sentimental encomiums in which Hot Lips Smithers is presented as some combination of Santa Claus and the Virgin Mary," he maintains. "It is a simple truth that there are thousands of high school music students around the country who know more music theory than our leading jazz critics." Other, less inflammatory but no less intriguing, essays include explorations of jazz as an intrinsic and fundamental source of inspiration for American dance music, rock, and pop; the influence of show business on jazz, and vice versa; and the link between the rise of the jazz soloist and the new emphasis on individuality in the 1920s. Impeccably researched and informed by Collier's wide-ranging intellect, Jazz: The American Theme Song is an important look at jazz's past, its present, and its uncertain future. It is a book everyone who cares about the music will want to read.

Download or read book The Band written by Craig Harris and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-06-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes previously unpublished interviews and photos: “His research is extensive, but the overall pace through these two hundred pages is breezy and entertaining.” —Vintage Rock At a time when acid rock and heavy metal dominated popular music, The Band rebelled against the rebellion with tight ensemble arrangements, masterful musicianship, highly literate lyrics, and a respect for the musical traditions of the American South. Comprised of Canadians Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson, and Arkansas-born Levon Helm, The Band sparked a new appreciation for America’s musical roots, fusing R&B, jump blues, country, folk, boogie-woogie, swing, Cajun, New Orleans-style jazz, and rock, and setting the foundations for the Americana that would take hold thirty years later. The Band: Pioneers of Americana Music explores the diverse influences on the quintet’s music, and the impact that their music had in turn on contemporary music and American society. Through previously unpublished interviews with Robbie Robertson, Eric Andersen, Pete Seeger, and the late Rick Danko, as well as numerous other sources, Craig Harris surveys The Band’s musical journey from sidemen for, among others, Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan to rock legends in their own right. Touching on the evolution of rock and roll, the electrifying of folk music, unionism, the Civil Rights Movement, changes in radio formatting, shifting perceptions of the American South, and the commercializing of the counterculture, as well as drug dependency, alcoholism, suicide, greed, and the struggle against cancer, Harris takes readers from The Band’s groundbreaking albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band, through their final releases and solo recordings, as well as their historic appearances at Woodstock, the Isle of Wight Festival (with Dylan), Watkins Glen (with the Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead), and the filmed final concert known as the Last Waltz (with an all-star cast). Sixteen previously unpublished photographs, by the author, are included.

Download or read book Struggles for Representation written by Phyllis Rauch Klotman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Struggles for Representation examines over 300 non-fiction films by more than 150 African American film/videomakers and includes an extensive filmography, bibliography, and excerpts from interviews with film/videomakers. In eleven original essays, contributors explore the extraordinary scope of these aesthetic and social documents and chart a previously undiscovered territory: documentaries that examine the aesthetic, economic, historical, political, and social forces that shape the lives of black Americans, as seen from their perspectives. Until now, scholars and critics have concentrated on black fiction film and on mainstream non-fiction films, neglecting the groundbreaking body of black non-fiction productions that offer privileged views of American life. Yet, these rich and varied works in film, video, and new electronic media, convey vast stores of knowledge and experience. Although most documentary cannot hope to match fiction film's mass appeal, it is unrivaled in its ability to portray searing, indelible impressions of black life, including concrete views of significant events and moving portraits of charismatic individuals. Documentary footage brings audiences the moments when civil rights protestors were attacked by state troopers; it provides the sights and sounds of Malcom X delivering an electrifying speech, Betty Carter performing a heart-wrenching song, and Langston Hughes strolling on a beach. Uniting all of this work is the "struggle for representation" that characterizes each film–an urgent desire to convey black life in ways that counter the uninformed and often distorted representations of mass media film and television productions. African American documentaries have long been associated with struggles for social and political empowerment; for many film/videomakers, documentary is a compelling mode with which to present an alternative, more authentic narrative of black experiences and an effective critique of mainstream discourse. Thus, many socially and politically committed film/videomakers view documentary as a tool with which to interrogate and reinvent history; their works fill gaps, correct errors, and expose distortions in order to provide counter-narratives of African American experience. Contributors include Paul Arthur, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Mark F. Baker, Pearl Bowser, Janet K. Cutler Manthia Diawara, Elizabeth Amelia Hadley, Phyllis R. Klotman, Tommy Lee Lott, Erika Muhammad, Valerie Smith, and Clyde Taylor.