Download or read book That Summertime Sound written by Matthew Specktor and published by MTV Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkable debut novel, reminiscent of the gimlet eye of Jim Thompson and the sense of wonder created by Kazuo Ishiguro and full of adoration for music, youth and adventure. It's the summer of 1986 and an American freshman, in love with the world's most obscure band, lives under a doctrine of blind faith with such a ferocity that it might as well be the one true religion. Enthralled by dead philosophers and mad prophets, he embarks on a group pilgrimage to Anywhere, Everywhere and Nowhere, USA.

Download or read book American Dream Machine written by Matthew Specktor and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of two talent agents and their three troubled boys, heirs to Hollywood royalty; a sweeping narrative about fathers and sons, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood and, by extension, American life. American Dream Machine is the story of an iconic striver, a classic self-made man in the vein of Jay Gatsby or Augie March. It's the story of a talent agent and his troubled sons, two generations of Hollywood royalty. It's a sweeping narrative about parents and children, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood, and by extension, American life. Beau Rosenwald—overweight, not particularly handsome, and improbably charismatic—arrives in Los Angeles in 1962 with nothing but an ill-fitting suit and a pair of expensive brogues. By the late 1970s he has helped found the most successful agency in Hollywood. Through the eyes of his son, we watch Beau and his partner go to war, waging a seismic battle that redraws the lines of an entire industry. We watch Beau rise and fall and rise again, in accordance with the cultural transformations that dictate the fickle world of movies. We watch Beau's partner, the enigmatic and cerebral Williams Farquarsen, struggle to contain himself, to control his impulses and consolidate his power. And we watch two generations of men fumble and thrive across the LA landscape, learning for themselves the shadows and costs exacted by success and failure. Mammalian, funny, and filled with characters both vital and profound, American Dream Machine is a piercing interrogation of the role—nourishing, as well as destructive—that illusion plays in all our lives.

Download or read book Always Crashing in the Same Car On Art Crisis and Los Angeles California written by Matthew Specktor and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Best Book of the Year at The Atlantic Los Angeles Times Bestseller "[An] absorbing and revealing book. . . . nestling in the fruitful terrain between memoir and criticism." —Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage Blending memoir and cultural criticism, Matthew Specktor explores family legacy, the lives of artists, and a city that embodies both dreams and disillusionment. In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor’s first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother’s cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or “cracking up,” he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of “success” and “failure” that haunt the artist’s life and the American imagination. Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It’s a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists—Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others—and the author’s own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives. At once deeply personal and broadly erudite, it is a story of an art form (the movies), a city (Los Angeles), and one person’s attempt to create meaning out of both. Above all, Specktor creates a moving search for optimism alongside the inevitability of failure and reveals the still-resonant power of art to help us navigate the beautiful ruins that await us all.

Download or read book The Summertime Girls written by Laura Hankin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When two lifelong friends reunite for one more summer in small-town Maine, they must bridge the gap caused by the dreams and secrets that tore them apart… Ally Morris and Beth Abbott were beyond inseparable. From the very first time they met, the girls knew they’d found a once-in-a-lifetime friendship. But sometimes, life can’t help but get in the way. As time goes by, disappointments and petty resentments begin to alter what they once thought was forever. Ally’s boho lifestyle leaves her drowning in confusion and cheap whisky, while a terrible secret threatens to shatter Beth’s carefully controlled world. By the time they need each other most, Ally and Beth are nearly strangers to each other. When a family crisis prompts Beth to contact Ally for help out of the blue, the girls reunite in Maine. But the distance between them is overwhelming. To save their friendship, Ally and Beth will have to confront painful moments in their past and redefine who they are—before their incredible connection fades away for good…

Download or read book The Sting written by Matthew Specktor and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Melville to Madoff, the Confidence Man is an essential American archetype. George Roy Hill’s 1973 film The Sting treats this theme with a characteristic dexterity. The movie was warmly received in its time, winning seven Academy Awards, but there were some who thought the movie was nothing more than a slight throwback. Pauline Kael, among others, felt Hill’s film was mechanical and contrived: a callow and manipulative attempt to recapture the box-office success of Robert Redford and Paul Newman’s prior pairing, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. Matthew Specktor’s passionate, lyric meditation turns The Sting on its head, on its side, and right-side-up in an effort to unpack the film’s giddy complexity and secret, melancholic heart. Working off interviews with screenwriter David S. Ward and producer Tony Bill, and tacking from nuanced interpretation of its arching moods and themes to gimlet-eyed observation of its dizzying sleights-of-hand, Specktor opens The Sting up to disclose the subtle and stunning dimensions—sexual, political, and aesthetic—of Hill’s best film. Through Specktor’s lens, The Sting reveals itself as both an enduring human drama and a meditation on art-making itself, an ode to the necessary pleasure of being fooled at the movies.

Download or read book Natsumi s Song of Summer written by Robert Paul Weston and published by Tundra Books. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweet and gentle picture book celebrates summer in Japan, as one little girl shares her love for bugs with her cousin who is visiting from America. Two young cousins who are separated by language, continent and culture meet for the first time when Jill's family travels from America to Japan to stay with Natsumi's family during the summer holidays. Natsumi's nervousness about meeting her cousin from across the sea quickly disappears when she discovers that her cousin is a lot like her: they both love summertime's hot sandy beaches, cool refreshing watermelon, festivals and fireworks. Then Jill asks Natsumi about the strange buzzing sound that comes from the nearby trees, and Natsumi is nervous once again. What if Jill is frightened of Natsumi's cherished cicadas, the insects that sing the music of summertime? This is a tender, evocative story that celebrates the special pleasures of summertime and of reunions with faraway family and friends.

Download or read book Summer Beat written by Betsy Franco and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-04-24 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clackity-clack, clackity-clack. A skateboard flies over sidewalk squares. Whoosh pumf, whoosh pumf. Water balloons tossed through the air. Bizzle-bzzz, bizzle-bzzz. A bumblebee comes zipping by. Tzooooooooooo bang. Tzooooooooooo bang. Fireworks start for the Fourth of July! The sounds of summer sizzle and pop in this bouncing, swinging tribute to the best beats of every child's favorite season.

Download or read book Lizzie and the Last Day of School written by Trinka Hakes Noble and published by Sleeping Bear Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lizzie loves school almost more than anything. First she loved Nursery school. She loved Kindergarten even more. When the time comes for Lizzie to start First Grade, she can't wait. Everyone tells her it will be a whole year of school. And Miss Giggliano, the first-grade teacher, tells her class to make this the best year of school ever. Yippee! thinks Lizzie--a whole year of school! And what a year it is. Miss G.'s class wins the Centipede Reading Award. And they even win the Nature Study Award for their bee and butterfly garden. It's a great year! But all great things must come to an end. When the last day of school arrives, Lizzie is dismayed. How can this be? It was supposed to be a whole year! But good news soon arrives and Lizzie, along with Miss G., finds herself in a different classroom and eager to learn!

Download or read book Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media written by Graeme Harper and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-10-27 with total page 1257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: A Critical Overview is a comprehensive work defining and encapsulating concepts, issues and applications in and around the use of sound in film and the cinema, media/broadcast and new media. Over thirty definitive full-length essays, which are linked by highlighted text and reference material, bring together original research by many of the world's top scholars in this emerging field. Complete with an extensive bibliography, Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media provides the most comprehensive and wide-ranging consideration of this subject yet produced.

Download or read book Summertime Blues written by Julien Neel and published by Graphic Universe ™. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summertime is here! But there's no sun, surf, or sand for Lou. Instead, it's Brussels sprouts, mud, and mosquitoes. Lou and her mom are off to spend the summer with Memaw in the most boring town on earth. Lou's mom keeps busy by exchanging love letters with her new sweetheart, Richard, but Lou's crush, Tristan, only sends her a lousy postcard. Will meeting a new boy chase Lou's blues away? Paul's not exactly a heartthrob, but he's sweet and . . . unusual. He's nothing like Tristan, but could he be just as crush-worthy?

Download or read book Musical Digest written by and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Last Supper written by Rachel Cusk and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cusk escapes dreary England for Tuscany, to relish the landscape, the weather, the food and , most of all, the art.

Download or read book The Sound of Innovation written by Andrew J. Nelson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-03-06 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a team of musicians, engineers, computer scientists, and psychologists developed computer music as an academic field and ushered in the era of digital music. In the 1960s, a team of Stanford musicians, engineers, computer scientists, and psychologists used computing in an entirely novel way: to produce and manipulate sound and create the sonic basis of new musical compositions. This group of interdisciplinary researchers at the nascent Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, pronounced “karma”) helped to develop computer music as an academic field, invent the technologies that underlie it, and usher in the age of digital music. In The Sound of Innovation, Andrew Nelson chronicles the history of CCRMA, tracing its origins in Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory through its present-day influence on Silicon Valley and digital music groups worldwide. Nelson emphasizes CCRMA's interdisciplinarity, which stimulates creativity at the intersections of fields; its commitment to open sharing and users; and its pioneering commercial engagement. He shows that Stanford's outsized influence on the emergence of digital music came from the intertwining of these three modes, which brought together diverse supporters with different aims around a field of shared interest. Nelson thus challenges long-standing assumptions about the divisions between art and science, between the humanities and technology, and between academic research and commercial applications, showing how the story of a small group of musicians reveals substantial insights about innovation. Nelson draws on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with digital music pioneers; the book's website provides access to original historic documents and other material.

Download or read book Billboard written by and published by . This book was released on 1994-07-23 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Enchantment in the Fine Arts written by M. Kronegger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Let us revive the true sense of fine arts: enchantment! In the conceptualised, commercialised, artificial approach to fine arts, we forgot its authentic experiential sense. It lies at the imaginative heart of all arts there to be retrieved by the creative recipient as the very 'truth of it all'.

Download or read book Billboard written by and published by . This book was released on 2000-07-29 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

Download or read book When I First Held You written by Brian Gresko and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From some of today’s most critically acclaimed writers—including Dennis Lehane, Justin Cronin, Andre Dubus III, and Benjamin Percy—comes a rich collection of essays on what it means to be a dad. Becoming a father can be one of the most profoundly terrifying, exhilarating, life-changing occasions in a man’s life. Now 22 of today’s masterful writers get straight to the heart of modern fatherhood in this incomparable collection of thought-provoking essays. From making that ultimate decision to have a kid to making it through the birth to tangling with a toddler mid-tantrum, and eventually letting a teen loose in the world, these fathers explore every facet of fatherhood and show how being a father changed the way they saw the world—and themselves. “One of the first things I learned about fatherhood was that my father was right: it was hard and it kicked the shit out of your life plan.”—Lev Grossman “I wanted to hold him. I wanted to hold him close and never let go. But we have to let go, don’t we?”—Andre Dubus III “Bridges are engineered. Children are worked toward, clumsily, imperfectly, with a deep and almost religious faith in trial and error.”—Ben Greenman “If you counted up the nights I’ve spent dancing to ‘Strangers in the Night,’ those hours would stretch three times around the equator.”—Garth Stein “The most surprising aspect of parenting has been how much my pre-parenting life looks like a cloud in the rearview.”—Dennis Lehane Contributors include André Aciman, Chris Bachelder, David Bezmozgis, Justin Cronin, Peter Ho Davies, Anthony Doerr, Andre Dubus III, Steve Edwards, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Ben Greenman, Lev Grossman, Dennis Lehane, Bruce Machart, Rick Moody, Stephen O’Connor, Benjamin Percy, Bob Smith, Frederick Reiken, Marco Roth, Matthew Specktor, Garth Stein, and Alexi Zentner