Magic City Nights

This exploration of rock ’n’ roll music and culture in Birmingham, Alabama, is based on the oral histories of musicians, their fans and professionals in the popular music industry. Collected over a twenty-year period, their stories describe the coming of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, the rise of the garage bands in the 1960s, of southern rock in the 1970s, and of alternative music in the 1980s and 1990s. Told in the words of the musicians themselves, Magic City Nights provides an insider’s view of the dramatic changes in the business and status of popular music from the era of the vacuum tube to twenty-first-century digital technology. These collective memories offer a unique perspective on the impact of a subversive and racially integrated music culture in one of the most conservative and racially divided cities in the country.

Birmingham's rock music scene has thrived on camaraderie and collaboration for decades. With no competitiveness, it has maintained a punk rock ethos while also appealing to a mainstream audience, thanks to DIY clubs and alternative radio support. Once one of the country's most successful AAA radio stations, 107.7 The X and the A&R power of station head Scott Register provided the early radio success that helped break Train, Matchbox Twenty and John Mayer. The same scene produced Jim Bob & the Leisure Suits, the Primitons, the Sugar La Las and Verbena. From local legends like Hotel and Telluride to national sensation St. Paul and the Broken Bones, writer Blake Ells tells the story of the Magic City's indelible stamp on the history of modern rock.

Magic City is the story of one of American music's essential unsung places: Birmingham, Alabama, birthplace of a distinctive and influential jazz heritage. In a telling replete with colorful characters, iconic artists, and unheralded masters, Burgin Mathews reveals how Birmingham was the cradle and training ground for such luminaries as big band leader Erskine Hawkins, cosmic outsider Sun Ra, and a long list of sidemen, soloists, and arrangers. He also celebrates the contributions of local educators, club owners, and civic leaders who nurtured a vital culture of Black expression in one of the country's most notoriously segregated cities. In Birmingham, jazz was more than entertainment: long before the city emerged as a focal point in the national civil rights movement, its homegrown jazz heroes helped set the stage, crafting a unique tradition of independence, innovation, achievement, and empowerment. Blending deep archival research and original interviews with living elders of the Birmingham scene, Mathews elevates the stories of figures like John T. "Fess" Whatley, the pioneering teacher-bandleader who emphasized instrumental training as a means of upward mobility and community pride. Along the way, he takes readers into the high school band rooms, fraternal ballrooms, vaudeville houses, and circus tent shows that shaped a musical movement, revealing a community of players whose influence spread throughout the world.

This carefully crafted ebook: "The Magic City (Illustrated)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. After Philip's older sister and sole family member Helen marries, he goes off to live with his new step sister Lucy. He has trouble adjusting at first, thrown into a world different from his previous life and abandoned by his sister while she is on her honeymoon. To entertain himself he builds a giant model city from things around the house: game pieces, books, blocks, bowls, etc. Then through some magic he finds himself inside the city, and it is alive with the people he has populated it with. Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) was the author of world famous books for children - the tales of fantastical adventures, journeys back in time and travel to magical worlds.

Finding Platinum: A Magic City Memoir, is the highly anticipated novel from Sonya Taylor, who spent several years as an adult entertainer at one of the most legendary gentlemen's clubs in the world - the infamous Magic City in Atlanta, GA. Amongst the glitter and glamour of the high-priced lifestyle of exotic dancing, sex, and drugs is the poignant tale of a streetwise, coquettish young woman born and raised on the tough streets of Detroit, who migrated to the heart of the south in the late 80s and early 90s, and grew up under the dazzle of the strobe lights and the salacious eyes of men with power, money, and prestige. This book, the first in a trilogy, is a powerful love story. It revolves around the love of money, fame, and fast living. It shows how they all collided at a deadly intersection in the life of this bright, young woman. At times, her life seemed so glamorous and exciting on the outside, but it was marred by heartbreak, tragedy, and senseless murders. This book explains how life's lessons that sometimes cost so much, often show that their value is worth every dime. For more information or to order the book, please visit: www.FindingPlatinum.com, or email Sonya at: [email protected]. Born on June 2, 1968 in Mount Clemens, Michigan, raised into poverty and welfare in the city of Detroit, Sonya Taylor knew what it was like to be underprivileged, and she knew the endurance of the struggle. Taylor decided at a young age to overcome her situations, and not forget the circumstances that brought her and her family to a place of serenity, or at least a few minutes of temporary relief. As a child, Taylor had little interest in literature, but she discovered the joy of reading and writing at the age of 12. Her preference of poetry and creative-thought writing, is what Taylor has been focusing on these past years leading up to her first book, "Finding Platinum, A Magic City Memoir."

“A thug is someone who stands on his own. He lives by the decisions he makes and accepts the consequences. A thug is comfortable in his own skin. I wear mine like a glove.” Trick Daddy was born a thug—just a stone’s throw from downtown Miami, yet a world away from its dazzling beauty and sparkling wealth. Where grinding poverty, deadly crime, and devastating racial tension taught kids to live by the ’hood rules. Remarkably, Trick came from nothing and made it big just when his chances had run out. Magic City is the extraordinary tale of a boy whose father was a pimp, who learned to hustle to survive, and whose only role model was his brother, the drug dealer he watched plying his trade on the block. It’s the untold truth behind the cult movie Scarface, of the drug money that transformed the city into a shining mecca for the rich and famous while turf wars between smalltime pushers claimed countless lives. It’s also the incredible story of how that potent mixture of extremes—the electric pulse and glittering abundance of South Beach and the crime, corruption, and despair in its shadows—gave rise to the most dominant sound in hip-hop today. Magic City is an ode to Miami, a riveting tale of a paradise lost and a native son determined to infuse it with new life.

"Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?" The question that guides this volume stems from Walter Benjamin's studies of nineteenth-century Parisian culture as the apex of capitalist aesthetics. Thirteen scholars test Benjamin's ideas about the centrality of Paris, formulated in the 1930s, from a variety of methodological perspectives. Many investigate the underpinnings of the French capital's reputation and mythic force, which was based largely upon the city's capacity to put itself on display. Some of the authors reassess the famed centrality of Paris from the vantage point of our globalized twenty-first century by acknowledging its entanglements with South Africa, Turkey, Japan, and the United States. The volume equally studies a broader range of media than Benjamin did himself: from modernist painting and printmaking, photography, and illustration to urban planning. The essays conclude that Paris did in many ways function as the epicenter of modernity's international reach, especially in the years from 1850 to 1900, but did so only as a consequence of the idiosyncratic force of its mythic image. Above all, the essays affirm that the study of late nineteenth-century Paris still requires nimble and innovative approaches commensurate with its legend and global aura.

There are areas which can be described as gay space because there are many gays and lesbians in the population. Queer Sites offers a history of gay space in the major cities from early modern time to the present.