Archives for 2009

…you can always order a copy of the British edition, which went on sale last week.

The first movement of Peter Anastos’ “Go for Barocco,” a George Balanchine parody set to Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto and danced by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial–or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.”
Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

I’ve been keeping an amused eye on the books, CD, and DVDs purchased by people who order an advance copy of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong from Amazon. Some, like The Skeptic, Gary Giddins’ Satchmo, and Robin Kelley’s new biography of Thelonious Monk, seem reasonably plausible. Others are…well, less so.
Here are some of the items that have been paired with Pops on Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” module:
• Brian Kellow’s Ethel Merman: A Life
• Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart
• Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
• Douglas G. Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
• Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun
• The Joan Crawford Collection, Vol. 2
• William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories
• Michael Burleigh’s Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism
• Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
• The Letters of Noël Coward
And here’s the weirdest co-purchase of all:
• James Wood’s How Fiction Works

Amazon.com has chosen Pops as one of the ten best biographies of 2009.
To see the full list, go here.

“The canvas had that overly stunning, almost meretricious, quality of originals. The attention they call to themselves as such, to the oils laid on by a vanished hand, overcharge the aesthetic experience for the viewer, who oftener sees a fetish than a picture.”
Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

Publishers Weekly just picked Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong as one of the best books of 2009.
Says PW: “Teachout’s forceful reassertion of Louis Armstrong’s significance to 20th-century America is a model for writing serious biography about pop culture icons.”
To see the complete list, go here.