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| February
2007 |
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BOOK |
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The
Story of French |
| (Jean-Benoit
Nadeau and Julie Barlow) |
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| The
first history of one of the most beautiful languages
in the world, this groundbreaking book charts the
origins of the French language and its progress
around the globe. |
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FILM |
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| Pan's
Labyrinth |
| (rated
'R' for graphic violence and some language)
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| In
the fascist Spain of 1944, the bookish young stepdaughter
of a sadistic army general escapes into an eerie
but captivating fantasy world. |
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MUSIC |
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Joanna
Newsom's  Ys |
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| Joanna
Newsom chose to carve herself a niche—folk-leaning
singer-songwriter armed with a harp—in which
she wouldn't have much competition. It would've
been easy for her to loll comfortably in that grotto;
but, instead, she pushes herself significantly on
her sophomore set, which displays the flowering
of both her songwriting and her arrangements, orchestrated
by the legendary Van Dyke Parks. While Ys (pronounced "ease") indicates that Newsom
has unabashedly embraced the "bigger is better"
philosophy, she never gets lost in the intriguingly
intricate mix. Parks doesn't consciously position
Newsom's instrument at the fore, but he does help
her bring out its nuances—from the stone-skipping
playfulness of "Monkey and Bear" to the
foreboding darkness of "Only Skin", a
song so redolent of drama that its 17 minutes pass
by in a heartbeat. Newsom's vocals, keening and
possessed with a birdlike chirp, are well suited
to impressionistic lyrics that occasionally veer
a bit too far into Renaissance Faire territory.
Even when they do, however, Newsom displays a charm
so guileless that it's impossible to suggest she's
intentionally creating a period piece. Her songs
and sound are distinctive and deliriously enchanting.
-David Sprague for Barnes
& Noble |
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TV
on the Radio's  Return
to Cookie Mountain |
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| TV
on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain,
their second full-length and their major-label début,
opens with a sparse trip-hop beat, some droning
horns, and a distant sitar—or maybe they are
all keyboard-generated sounds. It's hard to tell,
and that's one of the enticing qualities of this
impressive album. "I was a lover, before this
war," croons Tunde Adebimpe, amid blasts of
staticky white noise that build to a dense wall
of sound by song's end. One can trace the roots
of "I Was a Lover" to Massive Attack,
Public Enemy, and My Bloody Valentine; but, ultimately,
it sounds solely like TVOTR: confident, challenging,
and completely engrossing. Steeped in political
indignation, Return to Cookie Mountain is
musically adventurous, from the stuttering electronics
of "Playhouses" to the thumping synth-pop
base of "Wolf like Me" to the parade band
march of "Let the Devil In". But the vocals,
primarily Adebimpe with Kyp Malone on falsetto harmonies
(although David Bowie drops in to help out on "Province"),
make the Brooklyn quintet truly special: These guys
love doo-wop as much as hip-hop as much as indie
rock, and Adebimpe swoops, slurs, and chants like
an otherworldly gospel singer. Cookie Mountain
isn't an easy listen on the surface, but the depths
of its rewards seem bottomless. -Steve Klinge
for Barnes & Noble |
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TV |
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| (Monday-Thursday
11p/10c pm; Comedy Central) |
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| America's
top fake news show |
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| (Monday
- 10 pm; HBO) |
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| A
portrait of Lord Longford, a tireless British campaigner
whose controversial beliefs often resulted in furious
political debate and personal conflict. |
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WEB |
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McSweeney's
is a publishing house founded by editor Dave Eggers,
author of You
Shall Know Our Velocity, A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,
How
We Are Hungry and What
Is the What .
Apart from a growing stable of books, McSweeney's
is responsible for four regular publications:
the quarterly literary journal Timothy McSweeney's
Quarterly Concern, the daily-updated literature
and humor site McSweeney's Internet Tendency,
the monthly magazine The Believer, and
the new quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin.
The publishing house also runs two additional
imprints, Believer Books and the Collins Library.
On the name of the organization, Eggers says:
"(My family) would always get letters from
someone named Timothy McSweeney...He claimed to
be my mother's long-lost brother...(Letters) would
always include flight plans, like he was planning
on coming to visit. I don't know if he's real
or not. My relatives deny it, but who knows?"
McSweeney's has helped launch the careers of many
young writers, but it has also published the works
of well established authors such as Michael Chabon,
Stephen King, and Joyce Carol Oates. The band
One Ring Zero gained notoriety by becoming the
house band for the New York McSweeney's store.
As a result of this relationship, they gained
the trust of many prominent McSweeney writers
and solicited their lyric-writing help in the
ORZ album "As Smart As We Are".
McSweeney's was also the subject of the They Might
Be Giants song, "The Ballad of T. McSweeney".
-Wikipedia
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Masters
of Cinema is a line of classic and contemporary
films on DVD and a Web site dedicated to the most
well-regarded film directors in the world. The
Web site is a resource of news, articles, and
links about these directors and their works. The
DVD series is a side project that Masters of Cinema
started with Eureka Entertainment in 2004, capitalizing
on the scholarship of Masters of Cinema and the
influence and reputation it had acquired as a
Web site, along with the resources and experience
of Eureka. The model that the series follows was
set by The
Criterion Collection, which is to say that
it is a series of numbered releases serving as
definitive editions of the films, usually involving
a restoration of the work, a collection of available
scholarly material that can be conveniently packaged
with the film, and the commissioning of interviews,
essays, and/or commentary tracks. Filmmakers such
as Martin Scorsese, Alex Cox, and Paul Schrader;
scholars such as Tony Rayns and Scott Eyman; and
critics such as Kent Jones, Phillip Lopate, David
Ehrenstein, and Bill Krohn have all created exclusive
content for DVD released by Masters of Cinema.
The Masters of Cinema DVD series [as of August
2006] includes 27 titles.
Masters of Cinema was founded by a diverse international
group of like-minded film enthusiasts: Jan Bielawski,
a mathematician; Doug Cummings, a graphic artist
and freelance critic; Trond Trondsen, a Ph.D.
of Space Physics and president of Keo Scientific
Ltd.; and Nick Wrigley, a musician. The founders
of the group began to bring their individual Web
sites on the film directors Yasujiro Ozu, Andrei
Tarkovsky, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Robert Bresson
under the heading of Masters of Cinema in 2001
and officially combined them and created the primary
Masters of Cinema page in 2003. R. Dixon Smith,
a film historian and documentary filmmaker, joined
the group at that time. -Wikipedia
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