Posted in reseña, tagged 24, film, reseña on February 6, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Let’s face it, you’ve heard the phrase ‘a new kind of television’ enough times to make you go numb in the buttocks. Every two-bit wanna’be Seinfeld pilot gets styled that way, too often to cover up a lack of talent with the siren song of novelty.
But you’d be mistaken to be dubious about 24. This show in its first season was about as new as television can get. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Ann Chamberlain, fauna, reseña, Rhodesian Ridgebacks on February 4, 2008| 1 Comment »
‘Funny thing about Rhodesian Ridgeback books. It’s hard to tell the reader something he doesn’t already know.
That’s because this beguiling breed elicits such passion and understanding from its owners that most of us end up so attached to our dogs that we know their behaviors and temperament inside and out. As a result, we read about the breed while nodding our heads and commenting ‘Yup ….’, ‘Uh-huh …’ and the like. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Fyodor Dostoyevsky, reseña on February 4, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Some literary works are so sweeping in their vision, so penetrating in their understanding of the human condition and its psychology, so inexhaustible with respect to their spiritual insight that a reviewer feels quite small as he turns the last page and takes up his pen to comment.
Such is Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Three Karamazov siblings, products of the unrestrained loins of the hapless Fyodor Karamazov, spend most of the pages alloted to them walking their ever diverging paths and become more and more unlike each other. Then, in a hundred or so pages, Dostoevsky all but forces us to see how alike they are. How alike we are, whether under the Russian sun or some other. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Lifehouse, music, reseña on February 2, 2008| Leave a Comment »
It may well be that Lifehouse fired their three working bullets on the first tracks of this eponymous and excellent album.
Then again, maybe not. The rest of these tunes are pretty good work. It’s just a little tough keeping up with the right-left-another-right emotional impact of ‘Come Back Down’, ‘You and Me’, and ‘Blind’. Lifehouse could pull a Simon & Garfunkel and disappear after this album and we’d still warm to these first three exquisite and pathos-filled songs twenty years hence. We’d remember who we were when we first heard them.
That’s good music-making. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged music, reseña, Simon and Garfunkel on January 22, 2008| Leave a Comment »
This masterful album can only be called succulent. And that’s just to start with. The adjectives need to wax ever stronger in order adequately to describe the movement from one classic piece to the next in this eleven-track celebration of some of the 1970s finest music.
Like Seinfeld for the ears, Simon and Garfunkel’s music generates many of the lyrics and observations that are engraved upon the brains of us who grew up in that era and which spring almost unconsciously to the lips when circumstances beckon. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Antoni Wit, music, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, reseña, Tchaikovsky on January 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Russian romantic music performed like this in a 1992 recording by Antoni Wit and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra is the reason the Naxos label came out of nowhere to the kind of well-deserved prominence that makes ‘budget music’ seem an irrelevant misnomer.
Tchaikovsky’s great Symphony Number 5 is played with exceptional verve. The stirring Andante tempo that predominates in three of the four movements comes off majestically. If Tchaikovsky teetered on the edge of madness, he managed to transpose whatever chaos gusted in his soul into memorable late romantic lines that occasionally make one almost shudder. This fifth symphony set him up for the unforgettable sixth (‘Pathetique’), in which emotion burst whatever dam was still standing as he wrote this, its precursor. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged music, reseña, Yasmín Levy on January 20, 2008| 1 Comment »
Yasmín Levy’s music is a revelation. Blending and sorting influences from Ladino (Jewish-Spanish) culture, Gypsy, and Flamenco music with other Middle Eastern aural aromas, the result is stunning. Levy is the kind of interpreter who could sing about a floor mop in an exotic language and leave you paralyzed by the emotion of it.
Her style is richly sensuous. Accompanied by some splendid Spanish guitar, the Mediterranean sabor of it all splashed a bit of sun on even a winter’s morning in Indianapolis. Yet this is not music for the casual vacationer hoping for a bit of melodic bronzing before lunch.
Levy’s theme is often abandonment. Whether the Gypsy with no country or the lover with no choice but to leave because ‘quiero olvidar el aroma de tu cuerpo, quiero olvidar el sabor de tus labios’, Levy’s song is as often as not a lament.
From an aesthetic point of view, that is just as well. The deep sadness that comes through in this genre accounts for its well-echoing beauty. Even to sing of amor is to weep over love lost or to cringe in the face of its anticipated departure or to cut off a beautiful thing because one knows it will turn bad.
The flamenco touches are gorgeously done, the genre’s staccato clap punctuating a vocal line laid down with superb maturity by the singer. It is not difficult to believe Levy’s reviewers who say that she presents an exquisite live concert.
No one will ever say that Yasmín Levy’s music lacks feeling. Yet there is so very much more here than just passion.
La Judería is indeed a revelation.
Posted in reseña, tagged Kelly Liebengood, music, reseña on January 6, 2008| 1 Comment »
My good friend Kelly Liebengood ran off to Costa Rica shortly after recording this 2003 album. Then, when he had done all the damage he could in that Central American nation, he fled to Scotland, where he is presently jousting at becoming a biblical scholar, to the general consternation of an otherwise splendid old University that lies next to the world’s most famous golf courses.
It is difficult to say with certainty how the world might have been different had Mr. Liebengood continued to devote himself to recording music rather than, say, missionary pursuits in Latin America or a high-fallutin’ academic career across the pond. There are moments in these thirteen tracks that are so raw one is reminded of a train running off the rails and burying an unsuspecting village in its load of cabbage or, say, malt. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Gregorian Chant, music, reseña, Sunday Times Music Collection on January 6, 2008| 3 Comments »
At first or early encounter, Gregorian Chant is a bit like a large, quality cigar.
It goes on rather longer than one anticipated, it provides moments for wondering how-did-I-get-myself-into-this, it opens the shutters to glimpses of true beauty, and in the end leaves one longing for the next one. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Irene Nemirovsky, reseña on January 1, 2008| Leave a Comment »
This is a book of which the appendices are capable of making their reader weep.
And weep, one should.
Irene Nemirovsky’s stories and the almost incredible story of how this lost manuscript only recently came to light after the author was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 (her husband died a similar death at the hands of the same villains a bit later) thrust one into the deepest, most senseless excesses of Europe’s twentieth-century self-mutilations. (more…)
Canter Bridge 