Warren Zevon was one of the most original songwriters to emerge from the prolific 1970s Los Angeles music scene. Beyond his most familiar song - the rollicking 1978 hit "Werewolves of London" - Zevon's smart, often satirical songbook is rich with cinematic, literary, and comic qualities; dark narratives; complex characters; popular culture references; and tender, romantic ballads of parting and longing.Warren Zevon: Desperado of Los Angeles is the first book-length, critical exploration of one of popular music's most talented and tormented antiheroes. George Plasketes provides a comprehensive chronicle of Zevon's 40-year, 20-record career and his enduring cultural significance. Beginning with Zevon's classical training and encounters as a youth with composers Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Plasketes surveys Zevon's initiation into the 1960s through the Everly Brothers, the Turtles, and the film Midnight Cowboy. Plasketes then follows Zevon from his debut album with Asylum Records in 1976, produced by mentor Jackson Browne, through his successes and struggles from a Top Ten album to record label limbo during the 1980s, through a variety of music projects in the 1990s, including soundtracks and scores, culminating with a striking trio of albums in the early 2000s. Despite his reckless lifestyle and personal demons, Zevon made friends and alliances with talk show host David Letterman and such literary figures as Hunter S. Thompson and Carl Hiaasen. It was only after his death in 2003 that Zevon received Grammy recognition for his work. Throughout this book, Plasketes explores the musical, cinematic, and literary influences that shaped Zevon's distinctive style and songwriting themes and continue to make Zevon's work a telling portrait of Los Angeles and American culture.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
|
9781442234567
|
Hardcover
The Wild Bunch
By Stratton, W. K.
For the fiftieth anniversary of the film, W.K. Stratton's definitive history of the making of The Wild Bunch, named one of the greatest Westerns of all time by the American Film Institute.Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch is the story of a gang of outlaws who are one big steal from retirement. When their attempted train robbery goes awry, the gang flees to Mexico and falls in with a brutal general of the Mexican Revolution, who offers them the job of a lifetime. Conceived by a stuntman, directed by a blacklisted director, and shot in the sand and heat of the Mexican desert, the movie seemed doomed. Instead, it became an instant classic with a dark, violent take on the Western movie tradition. In The Wild Bunch, W.K. Stratton tells the fascinating history of the making of the movie and documents for the first time the extraordinary contribution of Mexican and Mexican-American actors and crew members to the movie's success. Shaped by infamous director Sam Peckinpah, and starring such visionary actors as William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien, and Robert Ryan, the movie was also the product of an industry and a nation in transition. By 1968, when the movie was filmed, the studio system that had perpetuated the myth of the valiant cowboy in movies like The Searchers had collapsed, and America was riled by Vietnam, race riots, and assassinations. The Wild Bunch spoke to America in its moment, when war and senseless violence seemed to define both domestic and international life. The Wild Bunch is an authoritative history of the making of a movie and the era behind it.
Bloomsbury Publishing
|
9781632862129
|
Hardcover
The China Collectors
By Meyer, Karl E.
Thanks to Salem sea captains, Gilded Age millionaires, curators on horseback and missionaries gone native, North American museums now possess the greatest collections of Chinese art outside of East Asia itself. How did it happen? The China Collectors is the first full account of a century-long treasure hunt in China from the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion to Mao Zedong's 1949 ascent.The principal gatherers are mostly little known and defy invention. They included "foreign devils" who braved desert sandstorms, bandits and local warlords in acquiring significant works. Adventurous curators like Langdon Warner, a forebear of Indiana Jones, argued that the caves of Dunhuang were already threatened by vandals, thereby justifying the removal of frescoes and sculptures.
St. Martin's Press
|
9781137279767
|
Hardcover
Kelly Hoppen
By Hoppen, Kelly
Kelly Hoppen offers a wealth of experience and advice on achieving your signature style, making this a definitive master class in home design. This book is a must for any home decorator wanting to give their home a touch of Kelly Hoppen's distinctive style, the perfect combination of luxury with simplicity. Here, she reveals her trade secrets and shares her expert knowledge to ensure that your decorating project, however big or small in scale, runs smoothly, stays within budget, and achieves the look you want. In The Groundwork, part one of the book, she advises on basics, setting out the design process and weighing the choices, analyzing space, and working out what to do to improve the ergonomics of a home. She also identifies personal requirements and personal style.
Rizzoli International Publications
|
9780847842476
|
Hardcover
Drawing Cute Animals in Colored Pencil
By Akikusa, Ai
Drawing Cute Animals in Colored Pencil offers simple step-by-step drawing instructions that help you to learn how to draw your favorite animals. Adorable animals like rabbits, squirrels, deer, and pigs come alive with vibrant color and beautiful detail. Using colored pencils learn tips and techniques to easily draw an elephant, polar bear, lion, alpaca, hippopotamus, and more adorable creatures.The instructions are simple to follow, but detailed enough so anyone can easily achieve great success in replicating each figure. Author Ai Akikusa loves animals and she shares interesting details about each animal in each section. Enjoy Drawing Cute Animals in Colored Pencil as a guidebook to animals and drawing in color!
Ever since crossing over with his 2005 soft rock hit "Home, " Michael Bubl has attempted to balance his love of traditional jazz standards with his knack for sincerely delivered contemporary pop material. It's something his similarly inclined crossover contemporaries, from Harry Connick, Jr. and Jamie Cullum to Josh Groban and Diana Krall, have all attempted with greater and lesser degrees of success. Even before them, legends like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole regularly strayed beyond the pages of the Great American Songbook, hoping to wrangle the odd country & western, polka, or latest British Invasion hit into submission. That said, Bubl is arguably the best at doing the crossover dance. Blessed with a warm, inviting voice and attractively louche stage presence, Bubl is a 21st century Bobby Darin; a mutable lounge act who knows when to swing, when to play it straight, and when to pepper a lyric with just enough tongue-in-cheek to let the hipsters know that you smell the cheese too. It's a multi-layered skill set that's helped him achieve a level of mainstream success on par with that of his more pop-oriented peers. Not surprisingly, he keeps the dance going with his slick, superbly executed ninth studio album, 2016's Nobody But Me. Co-produced by Bubl along with a cadre of big-name pop producers including Johan Carlsson, Alan Chang, Jason "Spicy G" Goldman, and the Monsters & Strangerz, the album is not dissimilar from the Canadian artist's past works. Here, we get a handful of well-curated standards, from a jaunty reading of the Matt Monro classic "My Kind of Girl" to a lush, orchestral take on "The Very Thought of You" to a brightly swinging, Sinatra-esque version of "My Baby Just Cares for Me. " And while it's Bubl's finely honed talent for delivering these urbane, time-tested songs that remains the foundation of his appeal, he continues to defy easy categorization with his various forays into newly penned, modern radio-ready pop. Cuts like the crisp, '50s rock-meets-2000s-hip-hop title track, the twangy and soulful "Today Is Yesterday's Tomorrow, " and the ukulele-accented duet with Meghan Trainor "Someday, " are peppy anthems that make the most of Bubl's charm. Ultimately, that Bubl can successfully transition on Nobody But Me from the uber-earnest acoustic guitar boy band romance of "I Believe in You" to the giddy, mandolin-soaked, Dean Martin-pastiche of "On an Evening in Roma (Sotter Celo de Roma) " and make both work is at the least an enviable skill and at best, a kind of pop magic. Very few of his contemporaries can do that and nobody but Bubl can own it like he does here.
Reprise
|
93624917663
|
Audio CD
Switched On Pop
By Sloan, Nate
Pop music surrounds us - in our cars, over supermarket speakers, even when we are laid out at the dentist - but how often do we really hear what's playing Switched on Pop is the book based on the eponymous podcast that has been hailed by NPR, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Entertainment Weekly for its witty and accessible analysis of Top 40 hits. Through close studies of sixteen modern classics, musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding shift pop from the background to the foreground, illuminating the essential musical concepts behind two decades of chart-topping songs. In 1939, Aaron Copland published What to Listen for in Music, the bestseller that made classical music approachable for generations of listeners. Eighty years later, Nate and Charlie update Copland's idea for a new audience and repertoire: 21st century pop, from Britney to Beyonc, Outkast to Kendrick Lamar. Despite the importance of pop music in contemporary culture, most discourse only revolves around lyrics and celebrity. Switched on Pop gives readers the tools they need to interpret our modern soundtrack. Each chapter investigates a different song and artist, revealing musical insights such as how a single melodic motif follows Taylor Swift through every genre that she samples, Andr 3000 uses metric manipulation to get listeners to "shake it like a Polaroid picture," or Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee create harmonic ambiguity in "Despacito" that mirrors the patterns of global migration.Replete with engaging discussions and eye-catching illustrations, Switched on Pop brings to life the musical qualities that catapult songs into the pop pantheon. Readers will find themselves listening to familiar tracks in new waysand not just those from the Top 40. The timeless concepts that Nate and Charlie define can be applied to any musical style. From fanatics to skeptics, teenagers to octogenarians, non-musicians to professional composers, every music lover will discover something ear-opening in Switched on Pop.
Oxford University Press
|
9780190056650
|
Hardcover
The Life and Love of Dogs
By Blackwell, Lewis
Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one is a life diminished. Dogs live with us in a way that no other creature does. Their contribution to our history has enabled us to be where we are today. It’s a connection that can even have depths beyond those we have with our own species.For all dog lovers, The Life and Love of Dogs offers hundreds of incredible images by acclaimed photographers from around the world. A textual exploration of our unique relationship with dogs—including a surprising analysis of the qualities that make a dog attractive in our eyes, a detailed look at how the breeds we see today are a product of our own needs and desires, and more—it sheds original light on this great love affair.
Harry N. Abrams
|
9781419713934
|
Hardcover
Lost in Translation
By Sanders, Ella Frances
An artistic collection of more than 50 drawings featuring unique, funny, and poignant foreign words that have no direct translation into English. Did you know that the Japanese language has a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there's a Finnish word for the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to rest? Lost in Translation brings to life more than fifty words that don't have direct English translations with charming illustrations of their tender, poignant, and humorous definitions. Often these words provide insight into the cultures they come from, such as the Brazilian Portuguese word for running your fingers through a lover's hair, the Italian word for being moved to tears by a story, or the Swedish word for a third cup of coffee. In this clever and beautifully rendered exploration of the subtleties of communication, you'll find new ways to express yourself while getting lost in the artistry of imperfect translation.
Ten Speed Press
|
9781607747109
|
Book
How to Read Art
By Rideal, Liz
This charmingly illustrated, highly informative field guide to understanding art history is small enough to fit in a pocket yet serious enough to provide real answers. This seventh entry in the hugely popular How to Read series is a one-stop guide to understanding the world's great artworks. The book explains the aesthetics of schools of painting from the Renaissance masters and Impressionists to the Cubists and Modernists. It enables readers to develop swiftly an understanding of the vocabulary of painting and to discover how to look at diverse paintings in detail.In the first part of the book, the author reveals how to read paintings by considering five key areas: shape and support, style and medium, compositional devices, genre, and the meaning of recurring motifs and symbols.
Warren Zevon
By Plasketes, George
Warren Zevon was one of the most original songwriters to emerge from the prolific 1970s Los Angeles music scene. Beyond his most familiar song - the rollicking 1978 hit "Werewolves of London" - Zevon's smart, often satirical songbook is rich with cinematic, literary, and comic qualities; dark narratives; complex characters; popular culture references; and tender, romantic ballads of parting and longing.Warren Zevon: Desperado of Los Angeles is the first book-length, critical exploration of one of popular music's most talented and tormented antiheroes. George Plasketes provides a comprehensive chronicle of Zevon's 40-year, 20-record career and his enduring cultural significance. Beginning with Zevon's classical training and encounters as a youth with composers Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Plasketes surveys Zevon's initiation into the 1960s through the Everly Brothers, the Turtles, and the film Midnight Cowboy. Plasketes then follows Zevon from his debut album with Asylum Records in 1976, produced by mentor Jackson Browne, through his successes and struggles from a Top Ten album to record label limbo during the 1980s, through a variety of music projects in the 1990s, including soundtracks and scores, culminating with a striking trio of albums in the early 2000s. Despite his reckless lifestyle and personal demons, Zevon made friends and alliances with talk show host David Letterman and such literary figures as Hunter S. Thompson and Carl Hiaasen. It was only after his death in 2003 that Zevon received Grammy recognition for his work. Throughout this book, Plasketes explores the musical, cinematic, and literary influences that shaped Zevon's distinctive style and songwriting themes and continue to make Zevon's work a telling portrait of Los Angeles and American culture.
The Wild Bunch
By Stratton, W. K.
For the fiftieth anniversary of the film, W.K. Stratton's definitive history of the making of The Wild Bunch, named one of the greatest Westerns of all time by the American Film Institute.Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch is the story of a gang of outlaws who are one big steal from retirement. When their attempted train robbery goes awry, the gang flees to Mexico and falls in with a brutal general of the Mexican Revolution, who offers them the job of a lifetime. Conceived by a stuntman, directed by a blacklisted director, and shot in the sand and heat of the Mexican desert, the movie seemed doomed. Instead, it became an instant classic with a dark, violent take on the Western movie tradition. In The Wild Bunch, W.K. Stratton tells the fascinating history of the making of the movie and documents for the first time the extraordinary contribution of Mexican and Mexican-American actors and crew members to the movie's success. Shaped by infamous director Sam Peckinpah, and starring such visionary actors as William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien, and Robert Ryan, the movie was also the product of an industry and a nation in transition. By 1968, when the movie was filmed, the studio system that had perpetuated the myth of the valiant cowboy in movies like The Searchers had collapsed, and America was riled by Vietnam, race riots, and assassinations. The Wild Bunch spoke to America in its moment, when war and senseless violence seemed to define both domestic and international life. The Wild Bunch is an authoritative history of the making of a movie and the era behind it.
The China Collectors
By Meyer, Karl E.
Thanks to Salem sea captains, Gilded Age millionaires, curators on horseback and missionaries gone native, North American museums now possess the greatest collections of Chinese art outside of East Asia itself. How did it happen? The China Collectors is the first full account of a century-long treasure hunt in China from the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion to Mao Zedong's 1949 ascent.The principal gatherers are mostly little known and defy invention. They included "foreign devils" who braved desert sandstorms, bandits and local warlords in acquiring significant works. Adventurous curators like Langdon Warner, a forebear of Indiana Jones, argued that the caves of Dunhuang were already threatened by vandals, thereby justifying the removal of frescoes and sculptures.
Kelly Hoppen
By Hoppen, Kelly
Kelly Hoppen offers a wealth of experience and advice on achieving your signature style, making this a definitive master class in home design. This book is a must for any home decorator wanting to give their home a touch of Kelly Hoppen's distinctive style, the perfect combination of luxury with simplicity. Here, she reveals her trade secrets and shares her expert knowledge to ensure that your decorating project, however big or small in scale, runs smoothly, stays within budget, and achieves the look you want. In The Groundwork, part one of the book, she advises on basics, setting out the design process and weighing the choices, analyzing space, and working out what to do to improve the ergonomics of a home. She also identifies personal requirements and personal style.
Drawing Cute Animals in Colored Pencil
By Akikusa, Ai
Drawing Cute Animals in Colored Pencil offers simple step-by-step drawing instructions that help you to learn how to draw your favorite animals. Adorable animals like rabbits, squirrels, deer, and pigs come alive with vibrant color and beautiful detail. Using colored pencils learn tips and techniques to easily draw an elephant, polar bear, lion, alpaca, hippopotamus, and more adorable creatures.The instructions are simple to follow, but detailed enough so anyone can easily achieve great success in replicating each figure. Author Ai Akikusa loves animals and she shares interesting details about each animal in each section. Enjoy Drawing Cute Animals in Colored Pencil as a guidebook to animals and drawing in color!
Nobody But Me
By Bublé, Michael
Ever since crossing over with his 2005 soft rock hit "Home, " Michael Bubl has attempted to balance his love of traditional jazz standards with his knack for sincerely delivered contemporary pop material. It's something his similarly inclined crossover contemporaries, from Harry Connick, Jr. and Jamie Cullum to Josh Groban and Diana Krall, have all attempted with greater and lesser degrees of success. Even before them, legends like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole regularly strayed beyond the pages of the Great American Songbook, hoping to wrangle the odd country & western, polka, or latest British Invasion hit into submission. That said, Bubl is arguably the best at doing the crossover dance. Blessed with a warm, inviting voice and attractively louche stage presence, Bubl is a 21st century Bobby Darin; a mutable lounge act who knows when to swing, when to play it straight, and when to pepper a lyric with just enough tongue-in-cheek to let the hipsters know that you smell the cheese too. It's a multi-layered skill set that's helped him achieve a level of mainstream success on par with that of his more pop-oriented peers. Not surprisingly, he keeps the dance going with his slick, superbly executed ninth studio album, 2016's Nobody But Me. Co-produced by Bubl along with a cadre of big-name pop producers including Johan Carlsson, Alan Chang, Jason "Spicy G" Goldman, and the Monsters & Strangerz, the album is not dissimilar from the Canadian artist's past works. Here, we get a handful of well-curated standards, from a jaunty reading of the Matt Monro classic "My Kind of Girl" to a lush, orchestral take on "The Very Thought of You" to a brightly swinging, Sinatra-esque version of "My Baby Just Cares for Me. " And while it's Bubl's finely honed talent for delivering these urbane, time-tested songs that remains the foundation of his appeal, he continues to defy easy categorization with his various forays into newly penned, modern radio-ready pop. Cuts like the crisp, '50s rock-meets-2000s-hip-hop title track, the twangy and soulful "Today Is Yesterday's Tomorrow, " and the ukulele-accented duet with Meghan Trainor "Someday, " are peppy anthems that make the most of Bubl's charm. Ultimately, that Bubl can successfully transition on Nobody But Me from the uber-earnest acoustic guitar boy band romance of "I Believe in You" to the giddy, mandolin-soaked, Dean Martin-pastiche of "On an Evening in Roma (Sotter Celo de Roma) " and make both work is at the least an enviable skill and at best, a kind of pop magic. Very few of his contemporaries can do that and nobody but Bubl can own it like he does here.
Switched On Pop
By Sloan, Nate
Pop music surrounds us - in our cars, over supermarket speakers, even when we are laid out at the dentist - but how often do we really hear what's playing Switched on Pop is the book based on the eponymous podcast that has been hailed by NPR, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Entertainment Weekly for its witty and accessible analysis of Top 40 hits. Through close studies of sixteen modern classics, musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding shift pop from the background to the foreground, illuminating the essential musical concepts behind two decades of chart-topping songs. In 1939, Aaron Copland published What to Listen for in Music, the bestseller that made classical music approachable for generations of listeners. Eighty years later, Nate and Charlie update Copland's idea for a new audience and repertoire: 21st century pop, from Britney to Beyonc, Outkast to Kendrick Lamar. Despite the importance of pop music in contemporary culture, most discourse only revolves around lyrics and celebrity. Switched on Pop gives readers the tools they need to interpret our modern soundtrack. Each chapter investigates a different song and artist, revealing musical insights such as how a single melodic motif follows Taylor Swift through every genre that she samples, Andr 3000 uses metric manipulation to get listeners to "shake it like a Polaroid picture," or Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee create harmonic ambiguity in "Despacito" that mirrors the patterns of global migration.Replete with engaging discussions and eye-catching illustrations, Switched on Pop brings to life the musical qualities that catapult songs into the pop pantheon. Readers will find themselves listening to familiar tracks in new waysand not just those from the Top 40. The timeless concepts that Nate and Charlie define can be applied to any musical style. From fanatics to skeptics, teenagers to octogenarians, non-musicians to professional composers, every music lover will discover something ear-opening in Switched on Pop.
The Life and Love of Dogs
By Blackwell, Lewis
Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one is a life diminished. Dogs live with us in a way that no other creature does. Their contribution to our history has enabled us to be where we are today. It’s a connection that can even have depths beyond those we have with our own species.For all dog lovers, The Life and Love of Dogs offers hundreds of incredible images by acclaimed photographers from around the world. A textual exploration of our unique relationship with dogs—including a surprising analysis of the qualities that make a dog attractive in our eyes, a detailed look at how the breeds we see today are a product of our own needs and desires, and more—it sheds original light on this great love affair.
Lost in Translation
By Sanders, Ella Frances
An artistic collection of more than 50 drawings featuring unique, funny, and poignant foreign words that have no direct translation into English. Did you know that the Japanese language has a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there's a Finnish word for the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to rest? Lost in Translation brings to life more than fifty words that don't have direct English translations with charming illustrations of their tender, poignant, and humorous definitions. Often these words provide insight into the cultures they come from, such as the Brazilian Portuguese word for running your fingers through a lover's hair, the Italian word for being moved to tears by a story, or the Swedish word for a third cup of coffee. In this clever and beautifully rendered exploration of the subtleties of communication, you'll find new ways to express yourself while getting lost in the artistry of imperfect translation.
How to Read Art
By Rideal, Liz
This charmingly illustrated, highly informative field guide to understanding art history is small enough to fit in a pocket yet serious enough to provide real answers. This seventh entry in the hugely popular How to Read series is a one-stop guide to understanding the world's great artworks. The book explains the aesthetics of schools of painting from the Renaissance masters and Impressionists to the Cubists and Modernists. It enables readers to develop swiftly an understanding of the vocabulary of painting and to discover how to look at diverse paintings in detail.In the first part of the book, the author reveals how to read paintings by considering five key areas: shape and support, style and medium, compositional devices, genre, and the meaning of recurring motifs and symbols.