What Are You Reading?

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Dr Dave
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Dr Dave » August 27th, 2013, 11:48 am

steve(thelil) wrote:Image by Will Hermes.

Thorough, informative, well-written and fun account of musical developments in many genres (including loft jazz) during a period which is often considered dormant.

Bonus points to Will Hermes for responding to my email telling him how much I was enjoying it.


I want this just for the Mark Alan Stamaty cover art..
Dr Dave
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Dr Dave » August 27th, 2013, 11:57 am

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Several of my friends urged me to read this. When I got to the part where the 44 year old creep from LA gets a blowjob from a teenaged girl while standing just offstage at a club I began to wonder who were these people who were my friends who thought I'd be into this. But I calmed down after a while when I finally realized that the book wasn't about being a rock musician, it was about how circumstances press choices upon us, and have consequences of varying degrees as we move from childhood to adolescence to adulthood to decreptitude and death. The chapter done in Powerpoint by the autistic daughter was irritating at first, and then actually astonishing.
steve(thelil)
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby steve(thelil) » August 27th, 2013, 4:17 pm

Just finished Lieber and Stoller's joint autobiography (written with David Ritz) "Hound Dog". It's a light read, but very well done and the paths they've crossed and people they've worked with are stunning.
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uli
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby uli » August 28th, 2013, 4:23 am

Yesterday I read Maler Klecksel by Wilhelm Busch. I love this stuff. Here for illustration young Klecksel as a baby who learns early in life that making a lot of noise has it's rewards

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steve(thelil)
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby steve(thelil) » August 28th, 2013, 7:25 am

sozamora wrote:
steve(thelil) wrote:Thorough, informative, well-written and fun account of musical developments in many genres (including loft jazz) during a period which is often considered dormant.


Dormant? As in musically dormant? I'm not sure how you would get the idea that anyone anywhere in the world thinks that NYC in the 70s was musically dormant? I can think of fewer periods and places more musically fecund in the latter part of the 20th century.

I've been hoping that somebody would make a documentary covering precisely this subject matter with segments devoted to Punk, early Hip Hop, the loft jazz scene, Nuyorican music, and early grimy gay club Disco (more Paradise Garage than Studio 54).



I agree. That's the point the book (Love Comes to a Building on Fire) is making as well.
sozamora
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby sozamora » September 3rd, 2013, 6:33 pm

Flannery O'Connor - Wise Blood

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Robert Walser - The Walk

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uli
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby uli » September 5th, 2013, 7:01 am

Robert Walser - The Walk

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my man!
steve(thelil)
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby steve(thelil) » September 5th, 2013, 7:23 am

I've been reading a lot about music history recently. A couple of recent reads have been quite interesting.

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Here's a review that I think captures it, from the Amazon Web Site. The review's author isn't stated:

Rock & roll has transformed American culture more profoundly than any other art form. During the 1960s, it defined a generation of young people as political and social idealists, helped end the Vietnam War, and ushered in the sexual revolution. In Dixie Lullaby, veteran music journalist Mark Kemp shows that rock also renewed the identity of a generation of white southerners who came of age in the decade after segregation -- the heyday of disco, Jimmy Carter, and Saturday Night Live.
Growing up in North Carolina in the 1970s, Kemp experienced pain, confusion, and shame as a result of the South's residual civil rights battles. His elementary school was integrated in 1968, the year Kemp reached third grade; his aunts, uncles, and grandparents held outdated racist views that were typical of the time; his parents, however, believed blacks should be extended the same treatment as whites, but also counseled their children to respect their elder relatives. "I loved the land that surrounded me but hated the history that haunted that land," Kemp writes. When rock music, specifically southern rock, entered his life, he began to see a new way to identify himself, beyond the legacy of racism and stereotypes of southern small-mindedness that had marked his early childhood. Well into adulthood Kemp struggled with the self-loathing familiar to many white southerners. But the seeds of forgiveness were planted in adolescence when he first heard Duane Allman and Ronnie Van Zant pour their feelings into their songs.

In the tradition of music historians such as Nick Tosches and Peter Guralnick, Kemp masterfully blends into his narrative the stories of southern rock bands --from heavy hitters such as the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and R.E.M. to influential but less-known groups such as Drive-By Truckers -- as well as the personal experiences of their fans. In dozens of interviews, he charts the course of southern rock & roll. Before civil rights, the popular music of the South was a small, often racially integrated world, but after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, black musicians struck out on their own. Their white counterparts were left to their own devices, and thus southern rock was born: a mix of popular southern styles that arose when predominantly white rockers combined rural folk, country, and rockabilly with the blues and jazz of African-American culture. This down-home, flannel-wearing, ass-kicking brand of rock took the nation by storm in the 1970s. The music gave southern kids who emulated these musicians a newfound voice. Kemp and his peers now had something they could be proud of: southern rock united them and gave them a new identity that went beyond outside perceptions of the South as one big racist backwater.

Kemp offers a lyrical, thought-provoking, searingly intimate, and utterly original journey through the South of the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, viewed through the prism of rock & roll. With brilliant insight, he reveals the curative and unifying impact of rock on southerners who came of age under its influence in the chaotic years following desegregation. Dixie Lullaby fairly resonates with redemption.

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Here's the Amazon summary:A classic, finally back in print! British rock historian Barney Hoskyns (Hotel California, Across the Great Divide: The Band in America) examines the long and twisted rock 'n' roll history of Los Angeles in its glamorous and debauched glory. The Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, the Doors, Little Feat, the Eagles, Steely Dan, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, and others (from Charlie Parker right up to Black Flag, the Minutemen, Jane's Addiction, Ice Cube, and Guns N' Roses) populate the pages of this comprehensive and extensively illustrated book.
relyles
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby relyles » September 5th, 2013, 9:59 am

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Tom Storer
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Tom Storer » September 5th, 2013, 11:13 am

I'm reading old Elmore Leonard novels. Currently on "Maximum Bob."
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sozamora
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby sozamora » September 5th, 2013, 12:07 pm

uli wrote:my man!


I figured you were a fan.
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A. Kingstone
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby A. Kingstone » September 5th, 2013, 5:23 pm

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uli
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby uli » September 6th, 2013, 6:47 am

sozamora wrote:
uli wrote:my man!


I figured you were a fan.


Well he is one of our finest.
Dr Dave
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Dr Dave » September 6th, 2013, 3:23 pm

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You pick it up, open it, and pretty soon you're in the jungle up near the DMZ, five days without food or water. If ever I needed a justification for being a cowardly draft-dodger, which I was, this is it. If I'd gone, I'd be dead now.
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Jazzooo » September 6th, 2013, 5:13 pm

I just finished Swamplandia! which was ok, but it paled in comparison to the book it reminded me of, Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Poisonwood Bible has to be one of the best books I've read in a long time. I loved the characters, the story and the storytelling and writing techniques.

Now I'm reading Dan Brown's latest thriller. I'm not sure why so many seem to hate his books--he's not a great writer, but he's definitely not a bad one. I also think his plot lines are fairly interesting, though the further I get in this one the more I recognize the rhythms of the others.

Next up is probably Brains, recommended by my brother, and Peter Erskine's book about his time with Weather Report, which I heard is coming out on Kindle soon. I got a Kindle Paperweight recently and I'm digging it.
gonzo
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby gonzo » September 9th, 2013, 11:25 pm

new jonathon lethem,dissident gardens,coming out soon. new pynchon too. jazooo lacuna ,by kingsolver, was very good. :smug:
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Monte Smith
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Monte Smith » September 10th, 2013, 4:41 am

I want to thank my father who opened a new way of reading to me some years ago...the asshole way. He was seated there reading a book by Paul Theroux, so I said to him, "Paul Theroux, huh?" He says, "Yes. The guy is an asshole." For several months, Theroux was all he read.

Chris Hedges, asshole:

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I agree with the bulk of the explicit complaints made in Empire of Illusion. America is a nation with a shallow and abusive culture, check, a venal media, check, in thrall largely to pseudo-events, check, and unchallenged assumptions, check, piloted by unaccountable oligarchs, check, awash is an aspirational celebrity culture, check, the ends of which are an affront to reason and decency, check. The author is still an asshole, though. Why?

He's biased, of course, with the usual bien-pensant biases. He wants to be excoriating of both the right and the left, but he can't help wrongly aiding the left in his argument. For instance, we learn (from debatable evidence) that George W. Bush operates at a sixth grade reading level (value given = 6.7) and that Al Gore at a "high" seventh grade level (value given = 7.6). Anyone can see that the figure 6.7 deserves to be characterized as a high six sooner than 7.6 deserves to be characterized as a high seven, but bias doesn't see it that way. Barack Obama is assumed to have a higher value than either, but no figure is given. Common bias alone doesn't make Hedges an asshole, though. He's also a name-dropping snob. He doesn't say, "These values are illusory," he says, "These values, as Sigmund Freud understood, are illusory." "It was Sinclair Lewis," Hedges reminds the reader sagely, if wrongly, "who took us into the stockyards and shantytowns of Chicago in The Jungle." He's icky, too. The first name in his acknowledgements is of his wife, where he mentions that she watched and transcribed all the brutal and explicit scenes described in the chapter on pornography, and then he apostrophizes her with lines from John Donne. It's like shouting from a mountain top that their relationship is groovy and hang-up free. Cringe. I was in a college bookstore recently and noticed that there are several tomes on porn listed as required reading in the various disciplines, so this is good academic work--I don't quibble with that. Hedges' methodology is to go to Las Vegas and hang out at a porn convention which frankly sounds like a lot more fun than poring over data in the British Library a la Karl Marx. Another Hedges gets a shout out in the acknowledgements and this is his college age son, who is a "very talented young man whose integrity is matched by a superb intellect, as well as a sensitivity and maturity that extends well beyond his years." I get the feeling that Hedges regards a lot of Hedges as having integrity matched only by their intellect, sensitivity, and maturity. Hedges is self-regarding. But finally, the real reason that the author is an asshole is that he is a fucking communist. Empires of Illusion describes a culture that is steeped in materialism and unable to find any higher value than base appetite, but in the end his solution (expressed, to be fair, in unwritten assumptions) is to create a politics where sensitive, mature intellectuals with integrity guarantee the material welfare of the proletariat. He might in actuality be at a porn convention, but in his heart he is at the British Library with Marx.

Next up: Chris Hedges, I Don't Believe in Atheists.
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Tom Storer
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Tom Storer » September 10th, 2013, 6:16 am

But Monte, he won the Pulitzer Prize! He must be really smart.
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Monte Smith
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Monte Smith » September 10th, 2013, 6:50 am

Tom Storer wrote:But Monte, he won the Pulitzer Prize! He must be really smart.


Even that is not quite accurate. Hedges did not win the Pulitzer Prize, the prize was awarded to a team of NYT journalists for their reporting on global terrorism in 2002 and Hedges was on that team. Do I quibble? Hedges sure doesn't. But maybe that blurb was stuck on the front of the book not by the author but by an editor whose integrity doesn't match his, etc etc.
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Brian Olewnick
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Brian Olewnick » September 11th, 2013, 9:37 am

So, I've been reading a helluva a lot here (a by-product of the inexplicable and entirely unsupportable absence of Netflix on this continent), mostly things I can put on my trusty Kindle. In addition to the normal new stuff, I've been trying to make amends on classics I've never gotten around to. Currently, I'm more than halfway through Sons and Lovers, which is just incredible. Savoring each page there. I also get the occasional urge to read some good SF and, knowing how hard that is to come by, found this pretty decent (despite the omission of Lem's "Solaris") list by David Pringle (https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_pringle_sf.asp) which I've been working my way through chronologically (to the extent they're available on Kindle), currently into Bester's "The Stars My Destination"--some choice nuggets so far.

On the negative side, Douglas Hofstadter and Emanuel Sander's "Surface and Essences" was the worst, most absurdly padded thing I've read in ages. As a longtime fan of DH (GEB, Mind's Eye, Le Ton Beau de Marot are all excellent), this was seriously disappointing. It was very much as if they'd produced what was essentially a middling magazine article and gone through it, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, asking themselves, "How can we bloat this sucker to 400 pages?". Really, to a farcical degree. Why list two or three examples when you can list two or three pages worth? Stunningly bad.
sozamora
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby sozamora » September 11th, 2013, 10:41 am

Oh snap! Ollie's up in here!

Brian Olewnick wrote:currently into Bester's "The Stars My Destination"--some choice nuggets so far.


As I've mentioned elsewhere, one of my faves.
steve(thelil)
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby steve(thelil) » September 11th, 2013, 1:54 pm

Just read Richard Neer's "FM" about the rise and fall of free form radio and, later somewhat/slightly free form radio. I thought it was a nice mix of well researched material and personal memoir. Not surprisingly, I was much more interested in reading about the years I was really into WNEW (where Neer worked, mainly) than later years.

Just starting Stephen King's "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft."
I have a fascination with books about the development and lives of writers and musicians and people involved in publishing and the music business (and to a lesser extent visual artists and visual art). To the point that I often read, with great interest, about people whose work I'm not interested in. (I've never read a Stephen King book. I don't think I've ever read an adult mystery).

My current kindle app- on-my-phone-book for reading while on the cross trainer at the gym is Questlove's Mo Meta Blues, which is all about his musical influences.

My last kindly/gym book, just finished, was the excellent "Free Country: A Penniless Adventure the Length of Britain "by George Mahood. It's a memoir about two young British blokes who rode bikes from one end of Great Britain to the other. The catch was they did it all with NO MONEY and started out with nothing except underpants. In other words, they had to depend on the kindness of strangers for bikes, clothes, shelter, lodging and everything else. A lot of fun.
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Coda » September 11th, 2013, 2:53 pm

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and

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If you're into digital photography and making your own prints I can't think of anything better on the market than these two books. I am about finished reading the printing book and finished the image book a while ago. In the print book he dedicates a lot of text to color theory that really helped me understand how to use the raw developer in Lightroom and Photoshop. The printing book is all about maximizing your final print. This is do it yourself at home stuff from soup to nuts. They both get 5 Stars from me.
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Brian Olewnick
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby Brian Olewnick » September 17th, 2013, 12:03 am

Finished 'Sons and Lovers', can't praise it highly enough. 'Women in Love' is in the on-deck circle. Also finished the Bester, which was fine and prescient. Next up on the SF front is Arthur C Clarke's "The City and the Stars". A few weeks back, I began a mini-project to read through Pynchon--I'd never read "V.", since remedied, and thought it was wonderful. I've begun "The Crying of Lot 49", which I read back in college but have long since forgotten (I've read GR three times, but not for about 20 years, tried to read Vineland when it appeared, but gave up and never got to the subsequent ones.) Amused to see therein a rock group called Sick Dick and the Volkswagens, a name appropriated by Donald Miller (later of Borbetomagus infamy) for a no wave band in the late 70s..
sozamora
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Re: What are you reading?

Postby sozamora » September 24th, 2013, 8:36 am

Finished recently:

Eric Ries - The Lean Startup

This was for work, but it was quite good. Ries presents a very rational and practical approach, and he or his ghost writer writes clearly and eloquently.

Junot Diaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

That one just floored me. It's the first Diaz I've read, but he's pretty amazing. I'm not sure how well this reads for folks who are not bilingual, but Diaz' fluidity and skill weaving the two languages was something I did not think possible.

Jose Saramago - Cain

Not the best Saramago I've read, but it was good and quite funny at times.

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