Sonata For Jukebox

Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien delves into twentieth-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private, personal yet popular. O'Brien's book is more than a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. And it reaches far beyond a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity, with pop music--his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. Ultimately, it is an exploration of what we as listeners hear, what we think we hear, and how we connect that experience with the rest of our lives. The dizzying array of musical references plays like a sound-track as O'Brien explores how our lives are lived in the presence--and in the memory of the presence--of music.

Dazzling and original, "Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien has delved into 20th-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private; personal yet popular. This is not a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. It is not a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity with pop music--his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. It is an exploration of what listeners hear, what they think they hear, and how they connect it with the rest of their lives. The dizzying array of musical references will play through the reader's mind like a soundtrack as O'Brien explores how lives are lived in the presence--and in the memory of the presence--of music.

"From one of our most original essayists and critics, Sonata for Jukebox, with its dizzying array of musical references, its heartrending personal stories, and its vivid evocation of half a century of pop music's evolution, is a remarkable exploration of how people use music to understand and give cadence to their lives."--BOOK JACKET.

"In The Poetics of Slumberland, Scott Bukatman celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman begins with Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland to explore how and why the emerging media of comics and cartoons brilliantly captured a playful, rebellious energy. Slumberland is more than a marvelous world for Nemo and its other citizens; it is an aesthetic space defined by the artist's innovations. The book broadens to consider similar 'animated' behaviors in seemingly disparate media--films about Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh; the musical My Fair Lady and the story of Frankenstein; the slapstick comedies of Jerry Lewis; and contemporary comic superheroes--drawing them all together as purveyors of embodied utopias of disorder."--Page 4 of cover.

Currently, there is very little academic literature dealing with the topic of record collecting, and, when the topic is broached, it appears to be done so with some level of suspicion towards the record collector. As such, the only depictions of record collectors in the public domain tend to be very stereotypical and demeaning. This work serves as a new starting point in how the record collector and the practices involved are viewed and understood by considering the roots of these stereotypes, which mainly stem from the work of the Frankfurt School theorists who lived during a time of great insecurity, both in regards to new methods of production for cultural artefacts and art, but also their physical lives. Once this has been achieved, a consideration of more realistic record collecting practices takes place through discussions with collectors themselves, an examination of a collectible record label (Vertigo Records), and a diachronic analysis of the theories that have contributed to a fallacious view of the record collector. The record collector consumes his/her records on an individual basis – both in terms of person to person, but also – and crucially – even record to record. Ultimately, it is argued that one cannot define consumption through (the artefact’s) production, which most considerations of the record collector have mistakenly done.

"In the tumultuous era of the late 1960s and early 70s, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that elevated and explored the immediacy of lived experience, whether as an aesthetic or political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms associated with temporal alienation or distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown) and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, however, "the past" is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, bridging conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, the representation of media technology, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past"--

Over the last several decades, comic book superheroes have multiplied and, in the process, become more complicated. In this cutting edge anthology an international roster of contributors offer original research and writing on the contemporary comic book superhero, with occasional journeys into the film and television variation. As superheroes and their stories have grown with the audiences that consume them, their formulas, conventions, and narrative worlds have altered to follow suit, injecting new, unpredictable and more challenging characterizations that engage ravenous readers who increasingly demand more.

A must-have volume for all Beatles fans-a career-spanning selection of writings about the Fab Four There are, of course, many books on the Beatles, but this is the only one available that is a comprehensive, career-spanning collection of journalism about the legendary band, before and after the breakup. Consisting of more than fifty articles, essays, interviews, record and movie reviews, poems, and book excerpts-many of them rare and hard to find-Read the Beatles is an unprecedented compilation that follows the arc of the Fab Four's iconic and idiosyncratic career, from their early days in Liverpool through their tragic and triumphant histories after the group's split. The book also includes original essays from noted musicians and journalists about the Beatles' lasting influence and why they still matter today.