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  Mussorgsky in Words and Music

  Davinia Caddy

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  The Great Gate of Kiev resounds to the tumultuous bell rings that end Pictures an an Exhibition, one of the most magnificent and virtuosic of all piano pieces. However, to some of his contemporaries, Modest Mussorgsky was ‘insane’ and ‘a perfect idiot’. Born into a wealthy land-owning family, what drove this tormented man and why did he suffer psychological breakdowns and alcoholism? How did he achieve his command of the realist idiom in his stage works? Illustrated with some of Mussorgsky’s finest works, the biographical narrative includes excerpts from Songs and Dances of Death, Boris Godunov, A Night on the Bald Mountain and, of course, Pictures at an Exhibition.

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  Imagining the Method - Reception...

  Justin Owen Rawlins

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  Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: "Method acting." The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on "anti-Method" stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers.

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  Learning From My L-pt1 - The...

  Michael Bellicourt

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  Soulful romance/ erotica: I was a very sexually-charged young man. To say I was maturely developed in body, mind and spirit is no exaggeration. Elle was the elegant, yet ridiculously desirable embodiment of all that I craved. She was nine years my senior, but I somehow convinced her to become my sexual mentor. The experience was deeply intimate.

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  25x2

  Brian Posehn

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  In his latest special, Posehn laments the recent loss of his heroes. He also professes re-found love for a certain sci-fi franchise, and manages to rip on a few recent bands like the aging rocker he is. It's personal, silly, profane, dry and screwed up and sometimes all at once. It's Posehn: 25x2.

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  The Statue of Liberty - A...

  Edward Berenson

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  “If you think you know all there is to know about the Statue of Liberty, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”—The New York Times   When the crated monument first arrived in New York Harbor, few could have foreseen the central place the Statue of Liberty would come to occupy in the American imagination. In this book, cultural historian and scholar of French history Edward Berenson tells the little-known stories of the statue’s improbable beginnings, transatlantic connections, and the changing meanings it has held for each successive generation. He tells of the French intellectuals who decided for their own domestic political reasons to pay tribute to American liberty; the initial, less-than-enthusiastic American response; and the countless difficulties before the statue was at last unveiled to the public in 1886. The trials of its inception and construction, however, are only half of the story. Berenson also shows how the statue’s symbolically indistinct, neoclassical form has allowed Americans to interpret its meaning in diverse ways—as representing the emancipation of the slaves, Tocqueville’s idea of orderly liberty, opportunity for “huddled masses,” and, in the years since 9/11, the freedom and resilience of New York City and the United States in the face of terror.Includes photos and illustrations “Endlessly fascinating.”—Louisville Courier-Journal

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  Mae Murray - The Girl with the...

  Michael G. Ankerich

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  This story of a silent-film star’s rise and fall offers “a lesson about those heady days of early Hollywood and the transience of fame” (Library Journal).   Renowned for her classic beauty and charismatic presence, Mae Murray rocketed to stardom as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, moving across the country to star in her first film, To Have and to Hold, in 1916. An instant hit with audiences, Murray soon became one of the most famous names in Tinseltown.   But Murray’s moment in the spotlight was fleeting. The introduction of talkies, a string of failed marriages, a serious career blunder, and a number of bitter legal battles left the former star in a state of poverty and mental instability that she would never overcome.   In this intriguing biography, Michael G. Ankerich traces Murray’s career from the footlights of Broadway to the klieg lights of Hollywood, recounting her impressive body of work on the stage and screen and charting her rapid ascent to fame and decline into obscurity. Featuring exclusive interviews with Murray’s only son, Daniel, and with actor George Hamilton, whom the actress closely befriended at the end of her life, Ankerich restores this important figure in early film to the limelight.   “If Billy Wilder hasn’t made the definitive movie about the delusions of stardom in Sunset Boulevard, Murray’s story, a blend of absurdity and pathos, would make a terrific one.” —TheWashington Post  Includes photos

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