The 10 Best Books of 2007
Fiction
MAN GONE DOWN
By Michael Thomas. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14. This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer's life.
OUT STEALING HORSES
By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. Graywolf Press, $22. In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.
THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27. A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.
THEN WE CAME TO THE END
By Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown & Company, $23.99. Layoff notices fly in Ferris's acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.
TREE OF SMOKE
By Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27. The author of "Jesus' Son" offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.
Nonfiction
IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq's Green Zone.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95; Vintage, paper, $14.95. The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America's governance of Iraq.
LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.
By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Bantam Books, $22. Kalish's soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.
THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.
By Jeffrey Toobin. Doubleday, $27.95. An erudite outsider's account of the cloistered court's inner workings.
THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History.
By Linda Colley. Pantheon Books, $27.50. Colley tracks the "compulsively itinerant" Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.
THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
By Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30. In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker's music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/books/review/10-best-2007.html?sq=Best%20Books%20of%202007&st=cse&scp=1-spot&pagewanted=print
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December 2, 2007
Holiday Books
100 Notable Books of 2007
Correction Appended
The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 3, 2006.
Fiction & Poetry
THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin’s, $24.95.) In this new novel by the author of “Little Children,” a sex-ed teacher faces off against a church bent on ridding her town of “moral decay.”
AFTER DARK. By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. (Knopf, $22.95.) A tale of two sisters, one awake all night, one asleep for months.
THE BAD GIRL. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This suspenseful novel transforms “Madame Bovary” into a vibrant exploration of the urban mores of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
BEARING THE BODY. By Ehud Havazelet. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) In this daring first novel, a man travels to California after his brother is killed in what may have been a drug transaction.
THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS. By Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead, $22.95.) A first novel about an Ethiopian exile in Washington, D.C., evokes loss, hope, memory and the solace of friendship.
BRIDGE OF SIGHS. By Richard Russo. (Knopf, $26.95.) In his first novel since “Empire Falls,” Russo writes of a small town in New York riven by class differences and racial hatred.
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love.
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. By André Aciman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Aciman’s novel of love, desire, time and memory describes a passionate affair between two young men in Italy.
CHEATING AT CANASTA. By William Trevor. (Viking, $24.95.) Trevor’s dark, worldly short stories linger in the mind long after they’re finished.
THE COLLECTED POEMS, 1956-1998. By Zbigniew Herbert. Translated by Alissa Valles. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $34.95.) Herbert’s poetry echoes the quiet insubordination of his public life.
DANCING TO “ALMENDRA.” By Mayra Montero. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Fact and fiction rub together in this rhythmic story of a reporter on the trail of the Mafia, set mainly in 1950s Cuba.
EXIT GHOST. By Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) In his latest novel Roth brings back Nathan Zuckerman, a protagonist whom we have known since his potent youth and who now must face his inevitable decline.
FALLING MAN. By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $26.) Through the story of a lawyer and his estranged wife, DeLillo resurrects the world as it was on 9/11, in all its mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion.
FELLOW TRAVELERS. By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $25.) In Mallon’s seventh novel, a State Department official navigates the anti-gay purges of the McCarthy era.
A FREE LIFE. By Ha Jin. (Pantheon, $26.) The Chinese-born author spins a tale of bravery and nobility in an American system built on risk and mutual exploitation.
THE GATHERING. By Anne Enright. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) An Irishwoman searches for clues to what set her brother on the path to suicide.
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS. By J. K. Rowling. (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, $34.99.) Rowling ties up all the loose ends in this conclusion to her grand wizarding saga.
HOUSE LIGHTS. By Leah Hager Cohen. (Norton, $24.95.) The heroine of Cohen’s third novel abandons her tarnished parents for the seductions of her grand-mother’s life in theater.
HOUSE OF MEETINGS. By Martin Amis. (Knopf, $23.) A Russian World War II veteran posthumously acquaints his stepdaughter with his grim past of rape and violence.
IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN. By Hisham Matar. (Dial, $22.) The boy narrator of this novel, set in Libya in 1979, learns about the convoluted roots of betrayal in a totalitarian society.
THE INDIAN CLERK. By David Leavitt. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) Leavitt explores the intricate relationship between the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy and a poor, self-taught genius from Madras, stranded in England during World War I.
KNOTS. By Nuruddin Farah. (Riverhead, $25.95.) After 20 years, a Somali woman returns home to Mogadishu from Canada, intent on reclaiming a family house from a warlord.
LATER, AT THE BAR: A Novel in Stories. By Rebecca Barry. (Simon & Schuster, $22.) The small-town regulars at Lucy’s Tavern carry their loneliness in “rough and beautiful” ways.
LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME. By Vendela Vida. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $23.95.) A young woman searches for the truth about her parentage amid the snow and ice of Lapland in this bleakly comic yet sad tale of a child’s futile struggle to be loved.
LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY: Stories. By Jim Shepard. (Knopf, $23.) Shepard’s surprising tales feature such diverse characters as a Parisian executioner, a woman in space and two Nazi scientists searching for the yeti.
MAN GONE DOWN. By Michael Thomas. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.
MATRIMONY. By Joshua Henkin. (Pantheon, $23.95.) Henkin follows a couple from college to their mid-30s, through crises of love and mortality.
THE MAYTREES. By Annie Dillard. (HarperCollins, $24.95.) A married couple find their way back to each other under unusual circumstances.
THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES. By Nathan Englander. (Knopf, $25.) A Jewish family is caught up in Argentina’s “Dirty War.”
MOTHERS AND SONS: Stories. By Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $24.) In this collection by the author of “The Master,” families are not so much reassuring and warm as they are settings for secrets, suspicion and missed connections.
NEXT LIFE. By Rae Armantrout. (Wesleyan University, $22.95.) Poetry that conveys the invention, the wit and the force of mind that contests all assumptions.
ON CHESIL BEACH. By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.) Consisting largely of a single sex scene played out on a couple’s wedding night, this seeming novel of manners is as much a horror story as any McEwan has written.
OUT STEALING HORSES. By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. (Graywolf Press, $22.) In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.
THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST. By Mohsin Hamid. (Harcourt, $22.) Hamid’s chilling second novel is narrated by a Pakistani who tells his life story to an unnamed American after the attacks of 9/11.
REMAINDER. By Tom McCarthy. (Vintage, paper, $13.95.) In this debut, a Londoner emerges from a coma and seeks to reassure himself of the genuineness of his existence.
THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.
SELECTED POEMS. By Derek Walcott. Edited by Edward Baugh. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) The Nobel Prize winner Walcott, who was born on St. Lucia, is a long-serving poet of exile, caught between two races and two worlds.
THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ. By Dalia Sofer. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $24.95.) In this powerful first novel, the father of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran is arrested shortly after the Iranian revolution.
SHORTCOMINGS. By Adrian Tomine. (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95.) The Asian-American characters in this meticulously observed comic-book novella explicitly address the way in which they handle being in a minority.
SUNSTROKE: And Other Stories. By Tessa Hadley. (Picador, paper, $13.) These resonant tales encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived.
THEN WE CAME TO THE END. By Joshua Ferris. (Little, Brown, $23.99.) Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.
THROW LIKE A GIRL: Stories. By Jean Thompson. (Simon & Schuster, paper, $13.) The women here are smart and strong but drawn to losers.
TIME AND MATERIALS: Poems, 1997-2005. By Robert Hass. (Ecco/Harper-Collins, $22.95.) What Hass, a former poet laureate, has lost in Californian ease he has gained in stern self-restraint.
TREE OF SMOKE. By Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) The author of “Jesus’ Son” offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.
TWENTY GRAND: And Other Tales of Love and Money. By Rebecca Curtis. (Harper Perennial, paper, $13.95.) In this debut collection, a crisp, blunt tone propels stories both surreal and realistic.
VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE: Stories. By Lydia Davis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $13.) Dispensing with straight narrative, Davis microscopically examines language and thought.
THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: Stories. By Alice Munro. (Knopf, $25.95.) This collection offers unusually explicit reflections of Munro’s life.
WHAT IS THE WHAT. The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel. By Dave Eggers. (McSweeney’s, $26.) The horrors, injustices and follies in this novel are based on the experiences of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.
WINTERTON BLUE. By Trezza Azzopardi. (Grove, $24.) An unhappy young woman meets an even unhappier drifter.
THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION. By Michael Chabon. (HarperCollins, $26.95.) Cops, thugs, schemers, rabbis, chess fanatics and obsessives of every stripe populate this screwball, hard-boiled murder mystery set in an imagined Jewish settlement in Alaska.
Nonfiction
AGENT ZIGZAG: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. By Ben Macintyre. (Harmony, $25.95.) The exploits of Eddie Chapman, a British criminal who became a double agent in World War II.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: A Life. By Hugh Brogan. (Yale University, $35.) Brogan’s combative biography takes issue with Tocqueville’s misgivings about democracy.
ALICE: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power Broker. By Stacy A. Cordery. (Viking, $32.95.) A biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s shrewd, tart-tongued older daughter.
AMERICAN CREATION: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. By Joseph J. Ellis. (Knopf, $26.95.) This history explores an underappreciated point: that this country was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them.
THE ARGUMENT: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. By Matt Bai. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) An exhaustive account of the Democrats’ transformative efforts, by a political reporter for The New York Times Magazine.
ARSENALS OF FOLLY: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. By Richard Rhodes. (Knopf, $28.95.) This artful history focuses on the events leading up to the pivotal 1986 Reykjavik summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev.
THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER: Who Killed the Bishop? By Francisco Goldman. (Grove, $25.) The novelist returns to Guatemala, a major inspiration for his fiction, to try to solve the real-life killing of a Roman Catholic bishop.
BROTHER, I’M DYING. By Edwidge Danticat. (Knopf, $23.95.) Danticat’s cleareyed prose and unflinching adherence to the facts conceal an undercurrent of melancholy in this memoir of her Haitian family.
CIRCLING MY MOTHER. By Mary Gordon. (Pantheon, $24.) Gordon’s deeply personal memoir focuses on the engaged and lively Catholicism of her mother, a glamorous career woman who was also an alcoholic with a body afflicted by polio.
CLEOPATRA’S NOSE: 39 Varieties of Desire. By Judith Thurman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.95.) These surgically analytic essays of cultural criticism showcase themes of loss, hunger and motherhood.
CULTURAL AMNESIA: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts. By Clive James. (Norton, $35.) Essays on 20th-century luminaries by one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals.
THE DAY OF BATTLE: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy. By Rick Atkinson. (Holt, $35.) A celebration of the American experience in these campaigns.
THE DIANA CHRONICLES. By Tina Brown. (Doubleday, $27.50.) The former New Yorker editor details the sordid domestic drama that pitted the Princess of Wales against Britain’s royal family.
THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War. By Graham Robb. (Norton, $27.95.) Robb presents France as a group of diverse regions, each with its own long history, intricate belief systems and singular customs.
DOWN THE NILE: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff. By Rosemary Mahoney. (Little, Brown, $23.99.) Mahoney juxtaposes her solo rowing journey with encounters with the Egyptians she met.
DRIVEN OUT: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. By Jean Pfaelzer. (Random House, $27.95.) How the Chinese were brutalized and demonized in the 19th-century American West — and how they fought back.
DUE CONSIDERATIONS: Essays and Criticism. By John Updike. (Knopf, $40.) Updike’s first nonfiction collection in eight years displays breathtaking scope as well as the author’s seeming inability to write badly.
EASTER EVERYWHERE: A Memoir. By Darcey Steinke. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) A minister’s daughter confronts her own spiritual rootlessness.
EDITH WHARTON. By Hermione Lee. (Knopf, $35.) This meticulous biography shows Wharton’s significance as a designer, decorator, gardener and traveler, as well as a writer.
THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam. By Tom Bissell. (Pantheon, $25.) Bissell mixes rigorous narrative accounts of the war and emotionally powerful scenes of the distress it brought his own family.
THE FLORIST’S DAUGHTER. By Patricia Hampl. (Harcourt, $24.) In her fifth and most powerful memoir, Hampl looks hard at her relationship to her Midwestern roots as her mother lies dying in the hospital.
FORESKIN’S LAMENT: A Memoir. By Shalom Auslander. (Riverhead, $24.95.) With scathing humor and bitter irony, Auslander wrestles with his Jewish Orthodox roots.
GOMORRAH: A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System. By Roberto Saviano. Translated by Virginia Jewiss. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This powerful work of reportage started a national conversation in Italy when it was published there last year.
THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty. By Wilfrid Sheed. (Random House, $29.95.) A rich homage to Gershwin, Berlin and other masters of the swinging jazz song.
HOW DOCTORS THINK. By Jerome Groopman. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) Groopman takes a tough-minded look at the ways in which doctors and patients interact, and at the profound problems facing modern medicine.
HOW TO READ THE BIBLE: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. By James L. Kugel. (Free Press, $35.) In this tour through the Jewish scriptures (i.e., the Old Testament, more or less), a former professor of Hebrew seeks to reclaim the Bible from the literalists and the skeptics.
HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ. By Pierre Bayard. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. (Bloomsbury, $19.95.) A French literature professor wants to assuage our guilt over the ways we actually read and discuss books.
IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. (Knopf, $25.95.) The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America’s governance of Iraq.
THE INVISIBLE CURE: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS. By Helen Epstein. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Rigorous reporting unearths new findings among the old issues.
LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA. By Tim Weiner. (Doubleday, $27.95.) A comprehensive chronicle of the American intelligence agency, from the days of the Iron Curtain to Iraq, by a reporter for The New York Times.
LENI: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. By Steven Bach. (Knopf, $30.) How Hitler’s favorite director made “Triumph of the Will” and convinced posterity that she didn’t know what the Nazis were up to.
LEONARD WOOLF: A Biography. By Victoria Glendinning. (Free Press, $30.) Glendinning shows Virginia Woolf’s accomplished husband as passionate, reserved and, above all, stoical.
A LIFE OF PICASSO: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. By John Richardson. (Knopf, $40.) The third, penultimate installment in Richardson’s biography spans a dauntingly complicated time in Picasso’s life and in European history.
LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. (Bantam, $22.) Kalish’s soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.
LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. By Ishmael Beah. (Sarah Crichton/-Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A former child warrior gives literary voice to the violence and killings he both witnessed and perpetrated during the Sierra Leone civil war.
THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. By Jeffrey Toobin. (Doubleday, $27.95.) An erudite outsider’s account of the cloistered court’s inner workings.
THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History. By Linda Colley. (Pantheon, $27.50.) Colley tracks the “compulsively itinerant” Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.
PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. By Joan Breton Connelly. (Princeton University, $39.50.) A scholar finds that religion meant power for Greek women.
RALPH ELLISON: A Biography. By Arnold Rampersad. (Knopf, $35.) Ellison was seemingly cursed by his failure to follow up “Invisible Man.”
THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century. By Alex Ross. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker’s music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.
SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A Biography. By David Michaelis. (Harper/ Harper-Collins, $34.95.) Actual “Peanuts” cartoons movingly illustrate this portrait of the strip’s creator, presented here as a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.
SERVICE INCLUDED: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter. By Phoebe Damrosch. (Morrow, $24.95.) A memoir about waiting tables at the acclaimed Manhattan restaurant Per Se.
SOLDIER’S HEART: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. By Elizabeth D. Samet. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) A civilian teacher at the Military Academy offers a significant perspective on a crucial social and political force: honor.
STANLEY: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. By Tim Jeal. (Yale University, $38.) Of the many biographies of Henry Morton Stanley, Jeal’s, which profits from his access to an immense new trove of material, is the most complete and readable.
THE STILLBORN GOD: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. By Mark Lilla. (Knopf, $26.) With nuance and complexity, Lilla examines how we managed to separate, in a fashion, church and state.
THOMAS HARDY. By Claire Tomalin. (Penguin Press, $35.) Tomalin presents Hardy as a fascinating case study in mid-Victorian literary sociology.
TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton. By Sara Wheeler. (Random House, $27.95.) The story of the man immortalized in “Out of Africa.”
TWO LIVES: Gertrude and Alice. By Janet Malcolm. (Yale University, $25.) Sharp criticism meets playful, absorbing biography in this study of Stein and Toklas.
THE WHISPERERS: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. By Orlando Figes. (Metropolitan, $35.) An extraordinary look at the gulag’s impact on desperate individuals and families struggling to survive.
THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. By Saul Friedländer. (HarperCollins, $39.95.) Individual testimony and broader events are skillfully interwoven.
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Correction: December 2, 2007
The list of 100 Notable Books of 2007 in the Book Review today misspells the surname of the author of the novel “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.” She is Vendela Vida, not Veda. (The same error appeared in the Editors’ Choice column on Jan. 7.)
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Soup Up Your Cellphone By KEVIN C. TOFEL
November 29, 2007
Basics
Soup Up Your Cellphone By KEVIN C. TOFEL
It is all too easy to get caught up in the hype that comes with the latest and greatest cellphones. And right now, the latest and greatest are the iPhone and the iPhone clones that, with a touch of the finger, open up maps, restaurant listings and the weather.
If those phones are too pricey for your budget or you've got more months on your contract with your carrier, there might be another way to get some of those handy services on your phone: widgets. (For a touch screen, you'll just have to wait.)
Widgets are small applications, most often free, that appear on your phone's menu pages. They deliver news or information to most handsets. You can use them to track down a cab company or follow stock prices. Other widgets deliver maps or headlines from media sources like the BBC, Bloomberg and this newspaper. For anyone with a smartphone that has the ability to connect to the Internet, it might make sense to simply use the included Web browser to visit Google Maps, YouTube and such, but if you're looking to extend the life of an older handset, widgets are a good option.
Widgets will not turn your vintage Motorola StarTAC into an iPhone, but they will add features and functions that you didn't think your phone could ever possess. There are several Web sites that offer widgets like GetMobio.com, Plusmo.com, Openwave.com and WidSets.com.
WidSets is one of the most popular such places because it has a large library of more than 2,650 widgets that work on more than 300 devices from all the leading manufacturers, even though the site is affiliated with Nokia, the world's largest maker of handsets. Most phones made in the last three years are supported by WidSets, including golden oldies like the Motorola RAZR V3.
GetMobio has fewer widgets and supports about 90 phones, but among its widgets are a cheap-gas finder, a store locator and something called the Panic Kit, which locates locksmiths, cab companies and pharmacies at the spur of the moment. Plusmo's roster is not as extensive, but among its widgets are applications to bring in news from CNN and a daily Peanuts cartoon.
Why would you use widgets when your carrier might offer similar applications? To save money. Cellular providers do not make much money selling handsets to consumers; in fact, they typically subsidize your handset purchase. By paying for a portion of your device, they're investing in you for the next two years. Over the contract's life, the real money is made in monthly service plan fees, overage charges and the extra services they can offer you.
That's where free widgets come in. You can avoid paying for extra services like news headlines and sports information that carriers typically bundle in packages for $5, $10, $20 or more. Often, you do not need the whole bundle, just one small feature like a stock price ticker or a weather update. Single-purpose widgets might serve your purpose (and your budget) better since you're installing only what you need.
While widgets are usually free, you can still end up paying your carrier for data transfer or airtime. The widgets need to piggyback on your cellular connection for data. Verify with your carrier that you either have some data allowance included in your plan or that it will charge only a nominal fee for small amounts of data. (Afterward, you can use the Traffic Feature in WidSets widgets to track how much data airtime you use.) Occasional updates of text data may seem small, but they add up quickly, so prepare accordingly with your service provider and monthly plan.
It does not matter whether your phone is on the CDMA network that Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Alltel use or the GSM network that AT&T and T-Mobile use. The determining factor for widget compatibility is whether your phone supports Java software, or more specifically what is known as Java MIDP 2.0. With a few notable exceptions, like the Apple iPhone, Java is fairly commonplace in handsets because it gives the wireless carriers a flexible and easy way to add services. Smartphones that run on Windows Mobile, Palm and even BlackBerry operating systems also support Java, though on some phones you may have to download it first.
It is easy to install widgets. Go to WidSets.com to verify whether your phone can accept widgets. Widgets that you select are sent directly to your handset along with a WidSets application to run them. The process should take less than five minutes.
Here are some popular and most recommended widgets to get you started:
¶AccuWeather. One of the most useful widgets is also one of the most popular; at last check, more than 125,000 people were running this widget. And why not when you can get the weather forecast, including local current weather, extended forecasts and even radar maps?
¶Google Calendar. The Web-based calendar is with you everywhere with this widget. The best part? Update your calendar in one place on the Internet and the changes are viewable on other devices.
¶Wikipedia. There's an option to turn off images in this encyclopedia and provide just text to speed up the information download as well as reduce the amount of data transferred.
¶YouTube. This widget might be a little more limited than the iPhone's YouTube application, but you can still catch recently added videos and more.
¶Flickr. One of the most popular photo-sharing services on the Internet is right in the palm of your hand. You can view your photos and those that your friends and family have uploaded or search by a keyword to see what's out there.
¶Private Chat. Those instant-message fees add up quickly. Get your closest friends to install this widget and pay for just the airtime in real-time chat sessions. With over 350,000 users, you'll never be lonely again, but you might want to invest in an unlimited data plan for this one.
¶Twitter. If you want a wider audience than just one chat participant, Twitter is the answer. This short-messaging service allows you to "micro-blog" your life in 140 character bursts.
¶Sudoku. You've got a number pad on that phone, so why not use it to exercise your brain?
¶EBay. Searching for that special item? Now you can do it all the time and everywhere.
¶Newsvine. A combination of mainstream news and user-generated opinions that offers up wide viewpoints on current topics. Start with headlines in the widget and read any story with a single click. You can also choose to have news that focuses on a keyword of your choice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/technology/personaltech/29basics.htm?sq=&st=cse%22Soup%20Up%20Your%20Cellphone=%22=&scp=1&pagewanted=print
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Basics
Soup Up Your Cellphone By KEVIN C. TOFEL
It is all too easy to get caught up in the hype that comes with the latest and greatest cellphones. And right now, the latest and greatest are the iPhone and the iPhone clones that, with a touch of the finger, open up maps, restaurant listings and the weather.
If those phones are too pricey for your budget or you've got more months on your contract with your carrier, there might be another way to get some of those handy services on your phone: widgets. (For a touch screen, you'll just have to wait.)
Widgets are small applications, most often free, that appear on your phone's menu pages. They deliver news or information to most handsets. You can use them to track down a cab company or follow stock prices. Other widgets deliver maps or headlines from media sources like the BBC, Bloomberg and this newspaper. For anyone with a smartphone that has the ability to connect to the Internet, it might make sense to simply use the included Web browser to visit Google Maps, YouTube and such, but if you're looking to extend the life of an older handset, widgets are a good option.
Widgets will not turn your vintage Motorola StarTAC into an iPhone, but they will add features and functions that you didn't think your phone could ever possess. There are several Web sites that offer widgets like GetMobio.com, Plusmo.com, Openwave.com and WidSets.com.
WidSets is one of the most popular such places because it has a large library of more than 2,650 widgets that work on more than 300 devices from all the leading manufacturers, even though the site is affiliated with Nokia, the world's largest maker of handsets. Most phones made in the last three years are supported by WidSets, including golden oldies like the Motorola RAZR V3.
GetMobio has fewer widgets and supports about 90 phones, but among its widgets are a cheap-gas finder, a store locator and something called the Panic Kit, which locates locksmiths, cab companies and pharmacies at the spur of the moment. Plusmo's roster is not as extensive, but among its widgets are applications to bring in news from CNN and a daily Peanuts cartoon.
Why would you use widgets when your carrier might offer similar applications? To save money. Cellular providers do not make much money selling handsets to consumers; in fact, they typically subsidize your handset purchase. By paying for a portion of your device, they're investing in you for the next two years. Over the contract's life, the real money is made in monthly service plan fees, overage charges and the extra services they can offer you.
That's where free widgets come in. You can avoid paying for extra services like news headlines and sports information that carriers typically bundle in packages for $5, $10, $20 or more. Often, you do not need the whole bundle, just one small feature like a stock price ticker or a weather update. Single-purpose widgets might serve your purpose (and your budget) better since you're installing only what you need.
While widgets are usually free, you can still end up paying your carrier for data transfer or airtime. The widgets need to piggyback on your cellular connection for data. Verify with your carrier that you either have some data allowance included in your plan or that it will charge only a nominal fee for small amounts of data. (Afterward, you can use the Traffic Feature in WidSets widgets to track how much data airtime you use.) Occasional updates of text data may seem small, but they add up quickly, so prepare accordingly with your service provider and monthly plan.
It does not matter whether your phone is on the CDMA network that Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Alltel use or the GSM network that AT&T and T-Mobile use. The determining factor for widget compatibility is whether your phone supports Java software, or more specifically what is known as Java MIDP 2.0. With a few notable exceptions, like the Apple iPhone, Java is fairly commonplace in handsets because it gives the wireless carriers a flexible and easy way to add services. Smartphones that run on Windows Mobile, Palm and even BlackBerry operating systems also support Java, though on some phones you may have to download it first.
It is easy to install widgets. Go to WidSets.com to verify whether your phone can accept widgets. Widgets that you select are sent directly to your handset along with a WidSets application to run them. The process should take less than five minutes.
Here are some popular and most recommended widgets to get you started:
¶AccuWeather. One of the most useful widgets is also one of the most popular; at last check, more than 125,000 people were running this widget. And why not when you can get the weather forecast, including local current weather, extended forecasts and even radar maps?
¶Google Calendar. The Web-based calendar is with you everywhere with this widget. The best part? Update your calendar in one place on the Internet and the changes are viewable on other devices.
¶Wikipedia. There's an option to turn off images in this encyclopedia and provide just text to speed up the information download as well as reduce the amount of data transferred.
¶YouTube. This widget might be a little more limited than the iPhone's YouTube application, but you can still catch recently added videos and more.
¶Flickr. One of the most popular photo-sharing services on the Internet is right in the palm of your hand. You can view your photos and those that your friends and family have uploaded or search by a keyword to see what's out there.
¶Private Chat. Those instant-message fees add up quickly. Get your closest friends to install this widget and pay for just the airtime in real-time chat sessions. With over 350,000 users, you'll never be lonely again, but you might want to invest in an unlimited data plan for this one.
¶Twitter. If you want a wider audience than just one chat participant, Twitter is the answer. This short-messaging service allows you to "micro-blog" your life in 140 character bursts.
¶Sudoku. You've got a number pad on that phone, so why not use it to exercise your brain?
¶EBay. Searching for that special item? Now you can do it all the time and everywhere.
¶Newsvine. A combination of mainstream news and user-generated opinions that offers up wide viewpoints on current topics. Start with headlines in the widget and read any story with a single click. You can also choose to have news that focuses on a keyword of your choice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/technology/personaltech/29basics.htm?sq=&st=cse%22Soup%20Up%20Your%20Cellphone=%22=&scp=1&pagewanted=print
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Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Rewritten, in a Language of Its Own By FRANK BRUNI
November 28, 2007
Rewritten, in a Language of Its Own By FRANK BRUNI
MORE than a few chefs have spent more than a little time trying to turn carpaccio into an intricate production that reflects and trumpets their ingenuity.
At the restyled Fiamma in SoHo, Fabio Trabocchi joins the challenge in an original fashion. He wraps thinly sliced Australian wagyu beef around columns of tofu, which support a crunchy Parmesan tuile and, over that, a teetering quail egg. On a long, thin rectangular plate he lines up three of these delicate towers, interspersed with ovals of wagyu tartare that wear caps of chopped mushrooms and Parmesan.
Is it carpaccio? Sort of. But not really. And so what? It’s crazily enjoyable, and that’s what counts.
Mr. Trabocchi relishes the finer fowls and isn’t inclined to let them be, so both roasted poussin and roasted wild Scottish pheasant come with fatty lobes of foie gras. The dark sauces pooling beneath the meat have an almost staggering richness.
Would you find these entrees in Italy, even up north? Maybe, in a very fussy restaurant. In most others, no. And who cares? They’re prepared with finesse and they’re the definition of luxury, no matter the geography, no matter the language.
Since Mr. Trabocchi took over the kitchen at Fiamma in September, much of the response to his cooking has been perplexed, centering on questions of nomenclature and ethnic fidelity.
Can a lasagna with as little sunshine and as much stormy intensity as Mr. Trabocchi’s justly call itself lasagna? And can a restaurant with food as ornate, saucy and creamy as Fiamma’s rightly call itself Italian?
That’s a chewy topic for debate, and I cast my vote this way: Fiamma is about as Italian as a poodle in a Prada scarf.
It owes its accessories — the olive oil, the balsamic vinegar, many of the cheeses (fontina, burrata, ricotta salata) — to Italy. It owes its classically indulgent soul to France.
It owes apologies and explanations to no one. When a restaurant turns out this many dishes that make you stop mid-chew, nudge a companion and nod your head vigorously — because you’re excited; because you need to start working off the calories any way you can — it needn’t worry about fitting into a tidy box.
Fiamma has been around since 2002, when William Grimes gave it three stars in The Times, solidifying its reputation as the lone thoroughbred among the many New York workhorses that belong to the restaurateur Stephen Hanson. He also owns multiple branches of Ruby Foo’s and Dos Caminos.
But in a shakeup this year that has turned out well for the city’s gastronomes, Fiamma’s chef, Michael White, decamped to the restaurants Alto and L’Impero, both of which are turning out distinguished food. And Mr. Hanson lured Mr. Trabocchi from Maestro, a restaurant near Washington, D.C., where he had established himself as one of the most dazzling chefs around the nation’s capital.
Mr. Hanson also spruced up the SoHo town house the restaurant inhabits, giving it not so much a new look as a fresh glow. The main, second-floor dining room, with its warm colors of orange and red, nimbly splits the difference between elegance and unceremonious comfort.
Elegance is getting extra attention these days. Previously called Fiamma Osteria, the restaurant has lost the second word, which evoked informality. (The remaining word is Italian for flame.) And there’s a fanciful array of new plates and cutlery, meant to cast the food they showcase in an artistic light.
That food is indeed artistic but seldom precious, the key to its success. Mr. Trabocchi delivers bold, resonant flavors; if anything he goes overboard with them, making you wish there were a more varied rhythm to his meals.
He comes out swinging and goes constantly for the knockout punch. An appetizer of various cuts of rabbit includes leg meat stuffed with prosciutto. The Romanesco broccoli around it is sautéed with guanciale. And the broccoli purée beneath everything includes a generous dose of rabbit jus.
Take a deep breath. You’ve got at least two courses —and maybe more — to go.
Although Mr. Trabocchi produces terrific gnocchi in way that uses less flour, he offsets their lightness with a goat ragù that, like so many of his sauces, has the kind of haunting intensity a laboriously made reduction does.
He takes flour, too, out of what might otherwise be a béchamel for the lasagna. What does he leave in? Well, a reduction of chicken stock and cream, which is layered with noodles and with a ragù of veal sweetbreads, chicken livers, chicken gizzards, prosciutto and more. Around the lasagna goes veal jus. And chanterelle mushrooms, for some additional dark magic.
For Mr. Trabocchi, more is more. He puts poached bone marrow on a saffron-flavored risotto. He puts fried bread crumbs on a whole lot, including monkfish liver and, separately, thick-cut, gorgeous Dover sole. He puts crushed Alba hazelnuts, sautéed in butter, on top of braised veal cheeks, which accompany a hunk of roasted veal rib-eye.
There’s nuance in the mix, the tofu in the newfangled carpaccio providing one example. It lends volume, shape and a chewy element to the silky beef without muffling its flavor.
And what you find on impeccably roasted rack of lamb isn’t rosemary but nepitella, an Italian herb that does the work of mint in a less assertive manner.
Mr. Trabocchi scatters such surprises throughout a meal, and he scatters luxuries, too: black and white truffles; porcini mushrooms; sea urchin (in a dish of spaghetti); langoustine (as an amuse-bouche).
In the context of that, and of Fiamma’s lofty prices, it’s a happy shock to find a wine list with dozens of bottles under $50 and scores under $75. And they’re interesting wines, from more countries than Fiamma’s list previously represented.
The desserts by Thomas Wellings, the pastry chef, tend to be fastidiously composed. My favorite was a so-called salad of roasted pears and pine nuts, accompanied by ice cream flavored with Corbezzolo honey, from the nectar of a shrub found in northern Italy.
The shrub’s provenance, I suppose, makes the dessert Italian. I’ll certainly go along with that, provided I get a second serving.
Fiamma
***
206 Spring Street (Sullivan Street), SoHo; (212) 653-0100.
ATMOSPHERE Equal measures of warmth and elegance enliven dining rooms on the ground floor and upstairs of a SoHo town house.
SOUND LEVEL Moderate.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Carpaccio; tuna crudo; mussels and cuttlefish with polenta; lasagna; gnocchi; squash agnolotti; Dover sole; veal cheeks and rib-eye; poussin; pheasant; lamb; pear salad; chocolate ganache with pistachio; chocolate torta Caprese.
WINE LIST Interesting, sophisticated and nicely varied in geography and price.
PRICE RANGE Three-course prix fixe, $75; five-course prix fixe, $100; six-course tasting, $110; à la carte dessert, $12.
HOURS Dinner from 6 to 10 p.m. Monday, to 11 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, to midnight Friday, and from 5:30 p.m. to midnight Saturday. Dec. 3 through Jan. 31, lunch from noon to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Closed Sunday.
RESERVATIONS Call at least two weeks ahead for prime dinner times.
CREDIT CARDS All major cards.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Entrance at street level, with elevator service between floors and accessible restrooms.
WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.
Rewritten, in a Language of Its Own By FRANK BRUNI
MORE than a few chefs have spent more than a little time trying to turn carpaccio into an intricate production that reflects and trumpets their ingenuity.
At the restyled Fiamma in SoHo, Fabio Trabocchi joins the challenge in an original fashion. He wraps thinly sliced Australian wagyu beef around columns of tofu, which support a crunchy Parmesan tuile and, over that, a teetering quail egg. On a long, thin rectangular plate he lines up three of these delicate towers, interspersed with ovals of wagyu tartare that wear caps of chopped mushrooms and Parmesan.
Is it carpaccio? Sort of. But not really. And so what? It’s crazily enjoyable, and that’s what counts.
Mr. Trabocchi relishes the finer fowls and isn’t inclined to let them be, so both roasted poussin and roasted wild Scottish pheasant come with fatty lobes of foie gras. The dark sauces pooling beneath the meat have an almost staggering richness.
Would you find these entrees in Italy, even up north? Maybe, in a very fussy restaurant. In most others, no. And who cares? They’re prepared with finesse and they’re the definition of luxury, no matter the geography, no matter the language.
Since Mr. Trabocchi took over the kitchen at Fiamma in September, much of the response to his cooking has been perplexed, centering on questions of nomenclature and ethnic fidelity.
Can a lasagna with as little sunshine and as much stormy intensity as Mr. Trabocchi’s justly call itself lasagna? And can a restaurant with food as ornate, saucy and creamy as Fiamma’s rightly call itself Italian?
That’s a chewy topic for debate, and I cast my vote this way: Fiamma is about as Italian as a poodle in a Prada scarf.
It owes its accessories — the olive oil, the balsamic vinegar, many of the cheeses (fontina, burrata, ricotta salata) — to Italy. It owes its classically indulgent soul to France.
It owes apologies and explanations to no one. When a restaurant turns out this many dishes that make you stop mid-chew, nudge a companion and nod your head vigorously — because you’re excited; because you need to start working off the calories any way you can — it needn’t worry about fitting into a tidy box.
Fiamma has been around since 2002, when William Grimes gave it three stars in The Times, solidifying its reputation as the lone thoroughbred among the many New York workhorses that belong to the restaurateur Stephen Hanson. He also owns multiple branches of Ruby Foo’s and Dos Caminos.
But in a shakeup this year that has turned out well for the city’s gastronomes, Fiamma’s chef, Michael White, decamped to the restaurants Alto and L’Impero, both of which are turning out distinguished food. And Mr. Hanson lured Mr. Trabocchi from Maestro, a restaurant near Washington, D.C., where he had established himself as one of the most dazzling chefs around the nation’s capital.
Mr. Hanson also spruced up the SoHo town house the restaurant inhabits, giving it not so much a new look as a fresh glow. The main, second-floor dining room, with its warm colors of orange and red, nimbly splits the difference between elegance and unceremonious comfort.
Elegance is getting extra attention these days. Previously called Fiamma Osteria, the restaurant has lost the second word, which evoked informality. (The remaining word is Italian for flame.) And there’s a fanciful array of new plates and cutlery, meant to cast the food they showcase in an artistic light.
That food is indeed artistic but seldom precious, the key to its success. Mr. Trabocchi delivers bold, resonant flavors; if anything he goes overboard with them, making you wish there were a more varied rhythm to his meals.
He comes out swinging and goes constantly for the knockout punch. An appetizer of various cuts of rabbit includes leg meat stuffed with prosciutto. The Romanesco broccoli around it is sautéed with guanciale. And the broccoli purée beneath everything includes a generous dose of rabbit jus.
Take a deep breath. You’ve got at least two courses —and maybe more — to go.
Although Mr. Trabocchi produces terrific gnocchi in way that uses less flour, he offsets their lightness with a goat ragù that, like so many of his sauces, has the kind of haunting intensity a laboriously made reduction does.
He takes flour, too, out of what might otherwise be a béchamel for the lasagna. What does he leave in? Well, a reduction of chicken stock and cream, which is layered with noodles and with a ragù of veal sweetbreads, chicken livers, chicken gizzards, prosciutto and more. Around the lasagna goes veal jus. And chanterelle mushrooms, for some additional dark magic.
For Mr. Trabocchi, more is more. He puts poached bone marrow on a saffron-flavored risotto. He puts fried bread crumbs on a whole lot, including monkfish liver and, separately, thick-cut, gorgeous Dover sole. He puts crushed Alba hazelnuts, sautéed in butter, on top of braised veal cheeks, which accompany a hunk of roasted veal rib-eye.
There’s nuance in the mix, the tofu in the newfangled carpaccio providing one example. It lends volume, shape and a chewy element to the silky beef without muffling its flavor.
And what you find on impeccably roasted rack of lamb isn’t rosemary but nepitella, an Italian herb that does the work of mint in a less assertive manner.
Mr. Trabocchi scatters such surprises throughout a meal, and he scatters luxuries, too: black and white truffles; porcini mushrooms; sea urchin (in a dish of spaghetti); langoustine (as an amuse-bouche).
In the context of that, and of Fiamma’s lofty prices, it’s a happy shock to find a wine list with dozens of bottles under $50 and scores under $75. And they’re interesting wines, from more countries than Fiamma’s list previously represented.
The desserts by Thomas Wellings, the pastry chef, tend to be fastidiously composed. My favorite was a so-called salad of roasted pears and pine nuts, accompanied by ice cream flavored with Corbezzolo honey, from the nectar of a shrub found in northern Italy.
The shrub’s provenance, I suppose, makes the dessert Italian. I’ll certainly go along with that, provided I get a second serving.
Fiamma
***
206 Spring Street (Sullivan Street), SoHo; (212) 653-0100.
ATMOSPHERE Equal measures of warmth and elegance enliven dining rooms on the ground floor and upstairs of a SoHo town house.
SOUND LEVEL Moderate.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Carpaccio; tuna crudo; mussels and cuttlefish with polenta; lasagna; gnocchi; squash agnolotti; Dover sole; veal cheeks and rib-eye; poussin; pheasant; lamb; pear salad; chocolate ganache with pistachio; chocolate torta Caprese.
WINE LIST Interesting, sophisticated and nicely varied in geography and price.
PRICE RANGE Three-course prix fixe, $75; five-course prix fixe, $100; six-course tasting, $110; à la carte dessert, $12.
HOURS Dinner from 6 to 10 p.m. Monday, to 11 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, to midnight Friday, and from 5:30 p.m. to midnight Saturday. Dec. 3 through Jan. 31, lunch from noon to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Closed Sunday.
RESERVATIONS Call at least two weeks ahead for prime dinner times.
CREDIT CARDS All major cards.
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Entrance at street level, with elevator service between floors and accessible restrooms.
WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Out of This World: Great Sci-Fi and Fantasy by Nancy Pearl
*
Fiction
Out of This World: Great Sci-Fi and Fantasy by Nancy Pearl
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Book covers
Nancy Pearl's Picks
* 'Cryptonomicon' by Neal Stephenson
* 'Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians' by Brandon Sanderson
* 'The Name of the Wind' by Patrick Rothfuss
* 'The Last Light' of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay
* 'The Thief' by Megan Whalen Turner
* 'The Forever War' by Joe Haldeman
* 'Gateway' by Frederik Pohl
Morning Edition, November 12, 2007 · I am not overly fond of the word genre. Sometimes, of course, it is simply used to describe a type of book that makes use of certain conventions. However, for many people, the word has a pejorative taint — they see genre fiction as being somehow "less" than non-genre writing.
When these people find that they really like a particular work of genre fiction, they're inclined to use phrases like "transcends the genre." Though I am not a particularly violent person, hearing this always makes me want to throttle the speaker. Genre labeling not only ghettoizes particular books, but it narrows the world of literature for readers, rather than expanding it.
And speaking of genre, although I don't consider myself at all a science fiction/fantasy fanatic, I must say that selecting the books for this topic was harder than any of the others that I've done. There is simply so much excellent stuff out there — both new and old — that I know people would enjoy, that the list could have been at least four times as long. As it is, I know I've omitted some wonderful novels, like Ursula Le Guin's The Wizard of Earthsea, Dahlgren by Samuel Delany, George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, Robert Heinlein's novels for young teens, like Between Planets and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Clifford Simak's Way Station, Dan Simmons' Hyperion and sequels, and on and on and on.
'Cryptonomicon'
* Read an Excerpt
'Cryptonomicon'
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, paperback, 1,168 pages
Because Neal Stephenson is probably best known for his classic science fiction cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (first published in 1992 and generally thought to be a major inspiration for the online virtual world, Second Life), he's thought of as a science fiction author, but that's a rather limiting (not to mention wrong) way of looking at his writing. Cryptonomicon is my favorite of his novels (and one of my top 10 favorite books of all time). I press it on friends and strangers alike who are looking for a book that's not only a page-turning adventure, but will offer them food for thought as well (randomness and cryptanalysis, among other nuggets, in this case).
This wildly ambitious, brilliant novel is difficult to describe briefly because of its complexity and its large cast of characters. It's set in various times and places, including the Pacific Theater during World War II, Bletchley Park in England (where men and women worked around the clock to decipher Nazi codes), and a fictitious country called Kinakuta, where a group of computer geeks are attempting to set up a data haven. Stephenson's main protagonists are invented, but they mix and mingle with historical characters like Admiral Isokuro Yamamoto, Douglas MacArthur, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Turing, among others. Stephenson deftly moves the action back and forth among time periods, locations, and into and out of the lives of his sundry characters, many of whom the reader develops a huge fondness for. Perhaps Stephenson's closest literary compatriot is David Foster Wallace, with whom he shares a wicked high intelligence, a well-developed sense of humor and a prodigious imagination. Don't miss this book.
'Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians'
* Read an Excerpt
'Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians'
Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson, Hardcover, 320 pages
Perhaps there are some people (even librarians) who could resist reading a book with the enticing title of Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson, but not me. Written for 10- to 13-year-olds, it's the story of Alcatraz Smedry. He has spent his short life in foster homes, moving from one to another as each set of foster parents gets fed up with his clumsiness, despite his protestations that he doesn't break things on purpose. On his 13th birthday, Alcatraz receives a strange sort of present — a bag of sand! — from his real parents. However, the gift is soon stolen by a group of evil librarians bent on world domination. Only Alcatraz, assisted by his grandfather Leavenworth (who always shows up late for everything) and assorted other characters, can prevent the librarians from fulfilling their dastardly plan. First, of course, the good guys have to infiltrate the local library….
This is an excellent choice to read aloud to the whole family. It's funny, exciting, and briskly paced. Best of all, the message it gives young readers is that a person's flaws — being late, breaking things, etc. — can sometimes turn into useful talents. (Alert science fiction and fantasy fans will recognize the authors memorialized in Grandpa Smedry's exclamations, like "Blistering Brooks" and "Rumbling Rawns.")
'The Name of the Wind'
* Read an Excerpt
'The Name of the Wind'
The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicles: Day One by Patrick Rothfuss, hardcover, 662 pages
Fans of the epic high fantasies of George R.R. Martin or J.R.R. Tolkien will definitely want to check out Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicles: Day One. When a traveling historian/writer, known as Chronicler, stumbles into the Waystone Inn, he sees through the proprietor's disguise and recognizes him as Kvothe (pronounced more or less like Quothe), the most talented, and infamous, magician of his day. At Chronicler's behest, Kvothe begins to relate the story of how he came to be at the Waystone Inn, which turns out to be a rags-to-riches-to-rags story of murder and a desperate search for truth and knowledge through study of the arcane arts. I don't want to give away too many details of the plot, since one of the great pleasures of this remarkable first novel is the meticulously detailed unfolding tale of Kvothe's life. This is a true page-turner, with an engrossingly complex hero (or is he an antihero?) and set in a particularly well-imagined world; it's set a high standard as fans will eagerly await the next two installments, Day Two and Day Three, due out, respectively, in 2008 and 2009.
'The Last Light of the Sun'
* Read an Excerpt
'The Last Light of the Sun'
The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay, paperback, 400 pages
Guy Gavriel Kay has made a name for himself among readers who love historical fantasy (another term might be alternative histories), but even those who don't consider themselves fantasy readers should take a look at Kay's novels. To write these books (two of my other favorites are The Lions of Al-Rassan and Sailing to Sarantium), Kay first immerses himself in the study of an historical era. He then invents characters, throws in a bit of magic, and, voila! — a novel that is totally fictional but always true to the essence of the period. (And who knows, perhaps his version, magic and all, is the true one.)
The Last Light of the Sun describes three groups of people living through a period of great upheaval. History buffs will recognize the action as taking place in the ninth century, when the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, and Celts fight (and die — often gruesomely: this is not always pleasant reading) for primacy in the land that would be later called England. The characters are all three-dimensional, and their choices and their fates will come to matter deeply to readers. For those who enjoy well-written, well-researched historical fiction, there are few who equal Kay's inspired recreations of the past.
'The Thief'
* Read an Excerpt
'The Thief'
The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner, paperback, 304 pages
Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief is a supremely satisfying book for kids 10 and up (and a good choice for adult readers as well). It's the first in a trilogy, followed by Queen of Attolia and King of Attolia. The eponymous protagonist, Gen, who's been caught with the King of Sounis' gold ring, is imprisoned deep in the king's dungeon. His chance of freedom comes when the king's magus sets off on a dangerous journey that requires a thief's talents to succeed. Gen is being brought along to steal Hamiathes' Gift (a precious stone that gives its owner the right to rule over a country). If Gen succeeds, he'll be rewarded; if he fails, he'll die; and there's to be no escape from the magus, who promises to track him down wherever he might try to hide.
There are many adventures and not a few surprises in store for both Gen and the reader, before the last page is turned. Gen is a terrific hero — a mixture of bravado and cunning. The well-evoked settings — three warring kingdoms, Eddis, Sounis, and Attolia — loosely resemble the city-states of ancient Greece, and some of the most interesting parts of the books are the myths and legends of the region's gods and goddesses.
'The Forever War'
* Read an Excerpt
'The Forever War'
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, paperback, 288 pages
When I think about terrific anti-war novels, there are three that come to mind: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Of the three, Haldeman's is the only one that's labeled science fiction, which means that a lot of people have probably missed it. Published in 1974, it won both of the major science fiction awards — the Nebula and the Hugo — one of the few books to achieve this honor. It's hard not to believe that Haldeman, who fought in the Vietnam War, drew on his own experiences of combat in this story of William Mandella. Mandella and other men and women with genius IQs are conscripted into an elite United Nations strike force whose mission is to track down and wipe out a group of aliens known as the Taurans from their presumed home planet as punishment for attacking ships carrying Earth's colonists in space.
The action ranges from the 20th to the 34th century, as William and his fellow soldiers engage in a series of battles to the death with the enemy, about whom they know very little. Haldeman also makes good use of the time distortion that presumably occurs when you travel at near the speed of light. So that while subjectively Mandella feels only a few months have gone by, decades have actually passed on Earth, with all the attendant changes that time can bring to governments, customs, and beliefs. Haldeman makes clear that soldiers returning home from any war, after however long or short a time, inevitably find the world they come back to far different from the one they left.
'Gateway'
* Read an Excerpt
'Gateway'
Gateway by Frederik Pohl, paperback, 288 pages
Gateway by Frederik Pohl is also part of the short list of books that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. It's been one of my favorites since I first read it in 1978, the year of its publication. Robinette Broadhead relates the story of his life on (and off) the asteroid Gateway to his psychiatrist, a robot whom he's nicknamed Sigfrid von Shrink. (I must say that I've often thought that the AI Sigfrid sets the gold standard for psychotherapists.) When Broadhead wins a lottery in his native Wyoming, he takes the first spaceship available and heads for Gateway to make his fortune prospecting. Gateway, now run by a huge multinational corporation, appears to have once been the home of aliens known to humans as Heechees. (What they called themselves is anyone's guess; Heechees is what we call them.) These aliens quite clearly left Gateway millennium before, but they left behind a large number of spacecraft, as well as other artifacts that continue to puzzle scientists as to their original function and/or use. Any prospector who comes to Gateway can choose to take out any of the available spacecraft.
The only catch is that these ships are preprogrammed, and no one can figure out where they're supposed to go, how long the trip is going to be, or how to change destinations once you're underway. When you're in a Heechee craft, you're forced to put your faith in Heechee know-how. Which can infrequently lead to fame and fortune for these risk-taking prospectors, but more often can lead to tragedy. And nobody has ever been able to figure out a foolproof way to know whether the outcome will be either tragedy or triumph. What happens to Robinette turns out to be a mix of fame, fortune and tragedy, all of which involve Klara, his fellow prospector and the great love of Broadhead's life. (Hence the necessity for his visits to Sigfrid, many years after the events he's describing.) The novel also includes excerpts from Sigfrid's notes, classified ads from the local Gateway newspaper, and even sections of lectures on what's known about Heechee life and culture, all of which deepen our understanding of the situation Broadhead finds himself in. Interestingly, it's never been the characters in and of themselves that keeps me re-reading Gateway, though they're well-drawn and interesting, but rather wondering, down through all the years since I first discovered this novel, if I would ever have the nerve to take one of those Heechee spacecraft out into unknown, uncharted, and oh-so-dangerous territory. Probably not.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16159971
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Fiction
Out of This World: Great Sci-Fi and Fantasy by Nancy Pearl
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Book covers
Nancy Pearl's Picks
* 'Cryptonomicon' by Neal Stephenson
* 'Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians' by Brandon Sanderson
* 'The Name of the Wind' by Patrick Rothfuss
* 'The Last Light' of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay
* 'The Thief' by Megan Whalen Turner
* 'The Forever War' by Joe Haldeman
* 'Gateway' by Frederik Pohl
Morning Edition, November 12, 2007 · I am not overly fond of the word genre. Sometimes, of course, it is simply used to describe a type of book that makes use of certain conventions. However, for many people, the word has a pejorative taint — they see genre fiction as being somehow "less" than non-genre writing.
When these people find that they really like a particular work of genre fiction, they're inclined to use phrases like "transcends the genre." Though I am not a particularly violent person, hearing this always makes me want to throttle the speaker. Genre labeling not only ghettoizes particular books, but it narrows the world of literature for readers, rather than expanding it.
And speaking of genre, although I don't consider myself at all a science fiction/fantasy fanatic, I must say that selecting the books for this topic was harder than any of the others that I've done. There is simply so much excellent stuff out there — both new and old — that I know people would enjoy, that the list could have been at least four times as long. As it is, I know I've omitted some wonderful novels, like Ursula Le Guin's The Wizard of Earthsea, Dahlgren by Samuel Delany, George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, Robert Heinlein's novels for young teens, like Between Planets and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Clifford Simak's Way Station, Dan Simmons' Hyperion and sequels, and on and on and on.
'Cryptonomicon'
* Read an Excerpt
'Cryptonomicon'
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, paperback, 1,168 pages
Because Neal Stephenson is probably best known for his classic science fiction cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (first published in 1992 and generally thought to be a major inspiration for the online virtual world, Second Life), he's thought of as a science fiction author, but that's a rather limiting (not to mention wrong) way of looking at his writing. Cryptonomicon is my favorite of his novels (and one of my top 10 favorite books of all time). I press it on friends and strangers alike who are looking for a book that's not only a page-turning adventure, but will offer them food for thought as well (randomness and cryptanalysis, among other nuggets, in this case).
This wildly ambitious, brilliant novel is difficult to describe briefly because of its complexity and its large cast of characters. It's set in various times and places, including the Pacific Theater during World War II, Bletchley Park in England (where men and women worked around the clock to decipher Nazi codes), and a fictitious country called Kinakuta, where a group of computer geeks are attempting to set up a data haven. Stephenson's main protagonists are invented, but they mix and mingle with historical characters like Admiral Isokuro Yamamoto, Douglas MacArthur, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Turing, among others. Stephenson deftly moves the action back and forth among time periods, locations, and into and out of the lives of his sundry characters, many of whom the reader develops a huge fondness for. Perhaps Stephenson's closest literary compatriot is David Foster Wallace, with whom he shares a wicked high intelligence, a well-developed sense of humor and a prodigious imagination. Don't miss this book.
'Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians'
* Read an Excerpt
'Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians'
Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson, Hardcover, 320 pages
Perhaps there are some people (even librarians) who could resist reading a book with the enticing title of Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson, but not me. Written for 10- to 13-year-olds, it's the story of Alcatraz Smedry. He has spent his short life in foster homes, moving from one to another as each set of foster parents gets fed up with his clumsiness, despite his protestations that he doesn't break things on purpose. On his 13th birthday, Alcatraz receives a strange sort of present — a bag of sand! — from his real parents. However, the gift is soon stolen by a group of evil librarians bent on world domination. Only Alcatraz, assisted by his grandfather Leavenworth (who always shows up late for everything) and assorted other characters, can prevent the librarians from fulfilling their dastardly plan. First, of course, the good guys have to infiltrate the local library….
This is an excellent choice to read aloud to the whole family. It's funny, exciting, and briskly paced. Best of all, the message it gives young readers is that a person's flaws — being late, breaking things, etc. — can sometimes turn into useful talents. (Alert science fiction and fantasy fans will recognize the authors memorialized in Grandpa Smedry's exclamations, like "Blistering Brooks" and "Rumbling Rawns.")
'The Name of the Wind'
* Read an Excerpt
'The Name of the Wind'
The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicles: Day One by Patrick Rothfuss, hardcover, 662 pages
Fans of the epic high fantasies of George R.R. Martin or J.R.R. Tolkien will definitely want to check out Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicles: Day One. When a traveling historian/writer, known as Chronicler, stumbles into the Waystone Inn, he sees through the proprietor's disguise and recognizes him as Kvothe (pronounced more or less like Quothe), the most talented, and infamous, magician of his day. At Chronicler's behest, Kvothe begins to relate the story of how he came to be at the Waystone Inn, which turns out to be a rags-to-riches-to-rags story of murder and a desperate search for truth and knowledge through study of the arcane arts. I don't want to give away too many details of the plot, since one of the great pleasures of this remarkable first novel is the meticulously detailed unfolding tale of Kvothe's life. This is a true page-turner, with an engrossingly complex hero (or is he an antihero?) and set in a particularly well-imagined world; it's set a high standard as fans will eagerly await the next two installments, Day Two and Day Three, due out, respectively, in 2008 and 2009.
'The Last Light of the Sun'
* Read an Excerpt
'The Last Light of the Sun'
The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay, paperback, 400 pages
Guy Gavriel Kay has made a name for himself among readers who love historical fantasy (another term might be alternative histories), but even those who don't consider themselves fantasy readers should take a look at Kay's novels. To write these books (two of my other favorites are The Lions of Al-Rassan and Sailing to Sarantium), Kay first immerses himself in the study of an historical era. He then invents characters, throws in a bit of magic, and, voila! — a novel that is totally fictional but always true to the essence of the period. (And who knows, perhaps his version, magic and all, is the true one.)
The Last Light of the Sun describes three groups of people living through a period of great upheaval. History buffs will recognize the action as taking place in the ninth century, when the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, and Celts fight (and die — often gruesomely: this is not always pleasant reading) for primacy in the land that would be later called England. The characters are all three-dimensional, and their choices and their fates will come to matter deeply to readers. For those who enjoy well-written, well-researched historical fiction, there are few who equal Kay's inspired recreations of the past.
'The Thief'
* Read an Excerpt
'The Thief'
The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner, paperback, 304 pages
Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief is a supremely satisfying book for kids 10 and up (and a good choice for adult readers as well). It's the first in a trilogy, followed by Queen of Attolia and King of Attolia. The eponymous protagonist, Gen, who's been caught with the King of Sounis' gold ring, is imprisoned deep in the king's dungeon. His chance of freedom comes when the king's magus sets off on a dangerous journey that requires a thief's talents to succeed. Gen is being brought along to steal Hamiathes' Gift (a precious stone that gives its owner the right to rule over a country). If Gen succeeds, he'll be rewarded; if he fails, he'll die; and there's to be no escape from the magus, who promises to track him down wherever he might try to hide.
There are many adventures and not a few surprises in store for both Gen and the reader, before the last page is turned. Gen is a terrific hero — a mixture of bravado and cunning. The well-evoked settings — three warring kingdoms, Eddis, Sounis, and Attolia — loosely resemble the city-states of ancient Greece, and some of the most interesting parts of the books are the myths and legends of the region's gods and goddesses.
'The Forever War'
* Read an Excerpt
'The Forever War'
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, paperback, 288 pages
When I think about terrific anti-war novels, there are three that come to mind: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Of the three, Haldeman's is the only one that's labeled science fiction, which means that a lot of people have probably missed it. Published in 1974, it won both of the major science fiction awards — the Nebula and the Hugo — one of the few books to achieve this honor. It's hard not to believe that Haldeman, who fought in the Vietnam War, drew on his own experiences of combat in this story of William Mandella. Mandella and other men and women with genius IQs are conscripted into an elite United Nations strike force whose mission is to track down and wipe out a group of aliens known as the Taurans from their presumed home planet as punishment for attacking ships carrying Earth's colonists in space.
The action ranges from the 20th to the 34th century, as William and his fellow soldiers engage in a series of battles to the death with the enemy, about whom they know very little. Haldeman also makes good use of the time distortion that presumably occurs when you travel at near the speed of light. So that while subjectively Mandella feels only a few months have gone by, decades have actually passed on Earth, with all the attendant changes that time can bring to governments, customs, and beliefs. Haldeman makes clear that soldiers returning home from any war, after however long or short a time, inevitably find the world they come back to far different from the one they left.
'Gateway'
* Read an Excerpt
'Gateway'
Gateway by Frederik Pohl, paperback, 288 pages
Gateway by Frederik Pohl is also part of the short list of books that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. It's been one of my favorites since I first read it in 1978, the year of its publication. Robinette Broadhead relates the story of his life on (and off) the asteroid Gateway to his psychiatrist, a robot whom he's nicknamed Sigfrid von Shrink. (I must say that I've often thought that the AI Sigfrid sets the gold standard for psychotherapists.) When Broadhead wins a lottery in his native Wyoming, he takes the first spaceship available and heads for Gateway to make his fortune prospecting. Gateway, now run by a huge multinational corporation, appears to have once been the home of aliens known to humans as Heechees. (What they called themselves is anyone's guess; Heechees is what we call them.) These aliens quite clearly left Gateway millennium before, but they left behind a large number of spacecraft, as well as other artifacts that continue to puzzle scientists as to their original function and/or use. Any prospector who comes to Gateway can choose to take out any of the available spacecraft.
The only catch is that these ships are preprogrammed, and no one can figure out where they're supposed to go, how long the trip is going to be, or how to change destinations once you're underway. When you're in a Heechee craft, you're forced to put your faith in Heechee know-how. Which can infrequently lead to fame and fortune for these risk-taking prospectors, but more often can lead to tragedy. And nobody has ever been able to figure out a foolproof way to know whether the outcome will be either tragedy or triumph. What happens to Robinette turns out to be a mix of fame, fortune and tragedy, all of which involve Klara, his fellow prospector and the great love of Broadhead's life. (Hence the necessity for his visits to Sigfrid, many years after the events he's describing.) The novel also includes excerpts from Sigfrid's notes, classified ads from the local Gateway newspaper, and even sections of lectures on what's known about Heechee life and culture, all of which deepen our understanding of the situation Broadhead finds himself in. Interestingly, it's never been the characters in and of themselves that keeps me re-reading Gateway, though they're well-drawn and interesting, but rather wondering, down through all the years since I first discovered this novel, if I would ever have the nerve to take one of those Heechee spacecraft out into unknown, uncharted, and oh-so-dangerous territory. Probably not.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16159971
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Sunday, September 30, 2007
Practical Traveler | Foreign Web Sites When the Best Deals Don’t End in .Com By MICHELLE HIGGINS
September 30, 2007
Practical Traveler | Foreign Web Sites When the Best Deals Don’t End in .Com By MICHELLE HIGGINS
FOR a trip to Barcelona, Jorge Cuadros, a lawyer from Alexandria, Va., turned to the Internet to book a rental car. On Hertz.com, Mr. Cuadros was quoted a price of 626.12 euros for an automatic Mercedes for five days in October. At $1.42 to the euro, that amounted to about $890.
Out of curiosity, Mr. Cuadros switched to his native Spanish tongue and checked Hertz’s Spanish Web site, www.hertz.es, where the same car was offered for 263.92 euros — about 58 percent less. He had stumbled upon a little-known trick that many online travel companies would rather keep quiet.
“It seems that the car rental companies are in some cases even charging twice the price to residents of the U.S. than to Europeans,” said Mr. Cuadros, who compares the practice to how some pharmaceutical companies charge more in the United States than they do overseas. “This is abusive behavior.”
Some of the best travel deals on the Web these days don’t end in .com but can be found on a travel company’s foreign offshoot, which usually ends with the country’s domain name, like .fr (France), and .de (Germany). Though the travel companies don’t advertise it, they often charge different prices based on the country of origin.
In an effort to expand their global reach, online travel agencies based in the United States like Expedia and Travelocity, as well as individual airlines and car rental agencies, are creating Web sites geared to foreign counties. Travelocity, for example, just started Travelocity.com.mx for customers in Mexico. It also has Travelocity.co.uk for Britain; www.Travelocity.de for Germany; and Travelocity.ca for Canada. Expedia has 13 foreign sites including Expedia.dk (Denmark), Expedia.it (Italy) and Expedia.fr (France).
The savings can be considerable. An Expedia.com search for a round-trip flight from Melbourne to Sydney in August yielded a $350 airfare on Qantas as the lowest available, including taxes and fees. The same flight was listed on Expedia’s Australian Web site, Expedia.com.au, for 224.34 Australian dollars, or about $187 at 1.20 Australian dollars to the U.S. dollar. Expedia.com.au also listed a lower fare (about 200 Australian dollars) on Virgin Blue, an Australian low-cost carrier; the United States site did not search that airline.
On Budget.com, a recent search for a six-day rental in Dublin pulled up a two-door, economy car for 109 euros a day. The same search on Budget.ie, the company’s Irish offshoot, offered the same category of car for 82 euros.
Travel companies defend the multitiered pricing structure, saying that they set prices according to what each market will bear. “For decades, the market where goods and services are purchased has been a pricing factor in the travel industry, car rental included,” Paula R. Rivera, a public affairs manager at Hertz, wrote in an e-mail message. “Costs and competitive conditions in individual markets are among the considerations that affect pricing.”
Expedia said its travel suppliers dictate prices, but added that it negotiated different agreements in each country. “Our Australian point-of-sale accesses domestic fares within Australia through a consolidator, giving the Australia site access to Virgin Blue, which we do not sell on Expedia.com in the U.S.,” Katie Deines, a spokeswoman for Expedia, said in an e-mail message. But customers in the United States, she added, can’t complete purchases on Expedia’s Australian Web site unless their credit card billing address is based in that country. (Budget and Hertz do not have that restriction.)
“The requirement is among the measures we take to ensure the validity and security of bookings made on our points-of-sale,” Ms. Deines said.
Some airlines do the same thing, and restrict purchases on their foreign Web sites to customers in those countries, said Keith Melnick, executive vice president of corporate development at Kayak.com and a former revenue manager at American Airlines. “In airline speak,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “the airlines differentiate their pricing based on the point-of-sale (P.O.S.). However, it is generally not a good idea to start searching the site in these other countries since the ones that do differentiate pricing by P.O.S. don’t want you to do this and will prevent you from purchasing by requiring a local credit card.”
When this is the case, there are few work-arounds. If you are visiting friends in a foreign country, see if they can make a reservation for you. Likewise if you’re traveling on business abroad, perhaps your company’s foreign office can arrange your travel. You also might try contacting a travel agent in the area you’re planning to visit and ask them to make the purchase for you. The savings may outweigh any fees charged by the agent for processing the transaction.
While country-domain hopping may uncover deals for rental cars and domestic flights in those countries, it doesn’t seem to work as well for hotel chains. “The large chains like Marriott have implemented a single image inventory to ensure rate parity across all channels,” said Ram Badrinathan, a Mumbai-based senior analyst at PhoCusWright, a travel consulting and research company.
Bargain hunters should also watch out for hidden fees. Car rental agencies may charge foreign customers more for liability coverage. Web sites often assume that you are a resident of that country when you book online, so the additional cost may not appear until you pick up the car.
Also, the foreign spinoffs of airline travel sites may require that the trip originate from that country, making round-trip searches of little use to American travelers. Still, those sites may be useful if you’re planning to travel within that country. A recent search on Kayak.com for the lowest airfare between Paris and Nice found a $171 fare on Air France. The same search on Kayak.fr turned up a 100-euro ticket on easyJet.
Those sites might also come in handy for finding a cheap side trip. A recent glance at Travelocity.co.uk highlighted four-star hotel offers in Rome starting at 48 euros a night and vacation packages in Krakow, Poland. Meanwhile, Travelocity.com was advertising deals in Florida, New York and Mexico.
So while searching the foreign version of a travel Web site might not always lead to the lowest price, it might just lead you to a destination you never would have thought to visit.
Practical Traveler | Foreign Web Sites When the Best Deals Don’t End in .Com By MICHELLE HIGGINS
FOR a trip to Barcelona, Jorge Cuadros, a lawyer from Alexandria, Va., turned to the Internet to book a rental car. On Hertz.com, Mr. Cuadros was quoted a price of 626.12 euros for an automatic Mercedes for five days in October. At $1.42 to the euro, that amounted to about $890.
Out of curiosity, Mr. Cuadros switched to his native Spanish tongue and checked Hertz’s Spanish Web site, www.hertz.es, where the same car was offered for 263.92 euros — about 58 percent less. He had stumbled upon a little-known trick that many online travel companies would rather keep quiet.
“It seems that the car rental companies are in some cases even charging twice the price to residents of the U.S. than to Europeans,” said Mr. Cuadros, who compares the practice to how some pharmaceutical companies charge more in the United States than they do overseas. “This is abusive behavior.”
Some of the best travel deals on the Web these days don’t end in .com but can be found on a travel company’s foreign offshoot, which usually ends with the country’s domain name, like .fr (France), and .de (Germany). Though the travel companies don’t advertise it, they often charge different prices based on the country of origin.
In an effort to expand their global reach, online travel agencies based in the United States like Expedia and Travelocity, as well as individual airlines and car rental agencies, are creating Web sites geared to foreign counties. Travelocity, for example, just started Travelocity.com.mx for customers in Mexico. It also has Travelocity.co.uk for Britain; www.Travelocity.de for Germany; and Travelocity.ca for Canada. Expedia has 13 foreign sites including Expedia.dk (Denmark), Expedia.it (Italy) and Expedia.fr (France).
The savings can be considerable. An Expedia.com search for a round-trip flight from Melbourne to Sydney in August yielded a $350 airfare on Qantas as the lowest available, including taxes and fees. The same flight was listed on Expedia’s Australian Web site, Expedia.com.au, for 224.34 Australian dollars, or about $187 at 1.20 Australian dollars to the U.S. dollar. Expedia.com.au also listed a lower fare (about 200 Australian dollars) on Virgin Blue, an Australian low-cost carrier; the United States site did not search that airline.
On Budget.com, a recent search for a six-day rental in Dublin pulled up a two-door, economy car for 109 euros a day. The same search on Budget.ie, the company’s Irish offshoot, offered the same category of car for 82 euros.
Travel companies defend the multitiered pricing structure, saying that they set prices according to what each market will bear. “For decades, the market where goods and services are purchased has been a pricing factor in the travel industry, car rental included,” Paula R. Rivera, a public affairs manager at Hertz, wrote in an e-mail message. “Costs and competitive conditions in individual markets are among the considerations that affect pricing.”
Expedia said its travel suppliers dictate prices, but added that it negotiated different agreements in each country. “Our Australian point-of-sale accesses domestic fares within Australia through a consolidator, giving the Australia site access to Virgin Blue, which we do not sell on Expedia.com in the U.S.,” Katie Deines, a spokeswoman for Expedia, said in an e-mail message. But customers in the United States, she added, can’t complete purchases on Expedia’s Australian Web site unless their credit card billing address is based in that country. (Budget and Hertz do not have that restriction.)
“The requirement is among the measures we take to ensure the validity and security of bookings made on our points-of-sale,” Ms. Deines said.
Some airlines do the same thing, and restrict purchases on their foreign Web sites to customers in those countries, said Keith Melnick, executive vice president of corporate development at Kayak.com and a former revenue manager at American Airlines. “In airline speak,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “the airlines differentiate their pricing based on the point-of-sale (P.O.S.). However, it is generally not a good idea to start searching the site in these other countries since the ones that do differentiate pricing by P.O.S. don’t want you to do this and will prevent you from purchasing by requiring a local credit card.”
When this is the case, there are few work-arounds. If you are visiting friends in a foreign country, see if they can make a reservation for you. Likewise if you’re traveling on business abroad, perhaps your company’s foreign office can arrange your travel. You also might try contacting a travel agent in the area you’re planning to visit and ask them to make the purchase for you. The savings may outweigh any fees charged by the agent for processing the transaction.
While country-domain hopping may uncover deals for rental cars and domestic flights in those countries, it doesn’t seem to work as well for hotel chains. “The large chains like Marriott have implemented a single image inventory to ensure rate parity across all channels,” said Ram Badrinathan, a Mumbai-based senior analyst at PhoCusWright, a travel consulting and research company.
Bargain hunters should also watch out for hidden fees. Car rental agencies may charge foreign customers more for liability coverage. Web sites often assume that you are a resident of that country when you book online, so the additional cost may not appear until you pick up the car.
Also, the foreign spinoffs of airline travel sites may require that the trip originate from that country, making round-trip searches of little use to American travelers. Still, those sites may be useful if you’re planning to travel within that country. A recent search on Kayak.com for the lowest airfare between Paris and Nice found a $171 fare on Air France. The same search on Kayak.fr turned up a 100-euro ticket on easyJet.
Those sites might also come in handy for finding a cheap side trip. A recent glance at Travelocity.co.uk highlighted four-star hotel offers in Rome starting at 48 euros a night and vacation packages in Krakow, Poland. Meanwhile, Travelocity.com was advertising deals in Florida, New York and Mexico.
So while searching the foreign version of a travel Web site might not always lead to the lowest price, it might just lead you to a destination you never would have thought to visit.
Friday, August 17, 2007
A Musical Pioneer Who Never Stopped Searching By BEN RATLIFF
An Appraisal
A Musical Pioneer Who Never Stopped Searching By BEN RATLIFF
It happens all the time. Friends hear jazz that veers toward the traditional, or toward the refinement of a basic form, and they say something like this: "It's good, but isn't jazz supposed to be looking for something new?"
Whether they know it or not, they're thinking within a system of expectation that Max Roach helped create. Mr. Roach, who died yesterday at 83, was in on the ground floor of aesthetic change for much of his working life. He just kept on being involved in whatever mattered most, zeroing in on particular regions of his drum kit and reshuffling rhythms, inventing percussive patterns that helped move jazz away from typical swing.
Some of these were tiny details of accent or phrasing that enjoined choruses or displaced a rhythm, and they worked like secret coding for the hungry musicians of the time. (The great drummer Roy Haynes, who is slightly younger than his friend Mr. Roach, said that when he heard him playing on Coleman Hawkins's 1944 recording "Woody'n You," it was like someone talking to him.) But some of the gestures were much bigger. Eventually Mr. Roach started a label, Debut, with Charles Mingus. He connected jazz to American social concerns, he set the standards for solo and duo improvisations, and he accomplished much else.
Again, some of these things might now seem like what jazz musicians do, often with some grant money and a clearly articulated press release. But Max Roach got there had already made it seem natural. He was in Hawkins's band at the age of 20 in 1944, recording proto-bebop. He was part of Charlie Parker's quintet from 1947 to 1949, a band that changed jazz through its recordings on Savoy and its performances at the Three Deuces and the Onyx Club in New York. He was probably the greatest percussive foil for Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. (That alone ...) He played on Miles Davis's "Birth of the Cool" sessions in 1949 and 1950, the manifestolike recordings of a new, chastened, chamberlike jazz. The group he led with the trumpeter Clifford Brown — which for a time included Mr. Rollins — was one of the greatest things about jazz in the 1950s, making beautifully constructed studio records and fascinatingly intense, though still little-heard, live recordings.
He played compositionally, complementing the work of jazz improvisers who also were master writers; this made his work with Booker Little, Herbie Nichols and Hasaan Ibn Ali special. (It's also why, when he played an aggressive Cuban rhythm with Powell in "Un Poco Loco," or in 4/4 against the waltz time of "Carolina Moon" with Monk, or in 5/4 on "As Long As You're Living" with his own group Max Roach Plus Four, he made it work within the piece, made it all sound natural.)
In his collaborations with Abbey Lincoln, Mr. Roach made civil rights issues ringingly explicit. He worked with percussion ensembles and strings and gospel choirs, always as original aesthetic choices rather than following the dimensions of established formats. With the pianist Cecil Taylor, among others, he played some highly rhythmic duo concerts — the last in 2000, at Columbia University — that were among the most memorable performances I have ever seen and heard. He had no second thoughts about working with the putative jazz avant-garde, or with hip-hop; he dived right in. And finally that may be his legacy to jazz: He seemed to have no fear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/arts/music/17roac.html?sq=&st=nyt%22musical%20Pioneer=%22=&scp=1&pagewanted=print
Hits From a Drummer Who Reveled in Change
By BEN RATLIFF
A selected discography of recordings featuring Max Roach, in chronological order:
'THE COMPLETE SAVOY AND DIAL MASTER TAKES' Charlie Parker (Savoy Jazz, three discs). Bebop from the 1940s and early '50s, landing like an asteroid on the jazz scene. Tracks with Mr. Roach include "Now's the Time," "Koko" and others.
'THE AMAZING BUD POWELL, VOL. 1' (Blue Note/EMI, 1951). An album split between a 1949 quintet including Sonny Rollins and Fats Navarro, and a 1951 trio session with Powell, Mr. Roach and the bassist Curly Russell; it includes "Wail," "Dance of the Infidels" and "Un Poco Loco."
'CLIFFORD BROWN AND MAX ROACH' Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet (Emarcy/Universal, 1954). Mr. Roach's great working band of the 1950s; basic parts of the jazz repertory, like Brown's "Daahoud" and "Joy Spring" come from this recording.
'FREEDOM SUITE' Sonny Rollins (Riverside/Concord, 1958). A beautifully conceived album from Mr. Rollins's short, exciting trio period.
'BRILLIANT CORNERS' Thelonious Monk (Riverside/Concord, 1956). Monk fully rising to his heights as a composer, with Mr. Roach articulating the rhythmic details.
'WE INSIST!: MAX ROACH'S FREEDOM NOW SUITE' (Candid, 1960). Highly political and aesthetically bold, with a group including the singer Abbey Lincoln, the trumpeter Booker Little and Coleman Hawkins.
'MONEY JUNGLE' Duke Ellington (Blue Note/EMI, 1962). With Charles Mingus on bass and Mr. Roach on drums, Ellington made an odd record of aggression and calm.
'PARIS 1989' Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie (A&M, 1989). Mr. Roach had played aggressive duo improvisations with Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp and others; here he does it with a colleague from the '40s, and makes all phases of modernity in jazz sound relative. BEN RATLIFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/arts/17broac.html?ref=music&pagewanted=print
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A Musical Pioneer Who Never Stopped Searching By BEN RATLIFF
It happens all the time. Friends hear jazz that veers toward the traditional, or toward the refinement of a basic form, and they say something like this: "It's good, but isn't jazz supposed to be looking for something new?"
Whether they know it or not, they're thinking within a system of expectation that Max Roach helped create. Mr. Roach, who died yesterday at 83, was in on the ground floor of aesthetic change for much of his working life. He just kept on being involved in whatever mattered most, zeroing in on particular regions of his drum kit and reshuffling rhythms, inventing percussive patterns that helped move jazz away from typical swing.
Some of these were tiny details of accent or phrasing that enjoined choruses or displaced a rhythm, and they worked like secret coding for the hungry musicians of the time. (The great drummer Roy Haynes, who is slightly younger than his friend Mr. Roach, said that when he heard him playing on Coleman Hawkins's 1944 recording "Woody'n You," it was like someone talking to him.) But some of the gestures were much bigger. Eventually Mr. Roach started a label, Debut, with Charles Mingus. He connected jazz to American social concerns, he set the standards for solo and duo improvisations, and he accomplished much else.
Again, some of these things might now seem like what jazz musicians do, often with some grant money and a clearly articulated press release. But Max Roach got there had already made it seem natural. He was in Hawkins's band at the age of 20 in 1944, recording proto-bebop. He was part of Charlie Parker's quintet from 1947 to 1949, a band that changed jazz through its recordings on Savoy and its performances at the Three Deuces and the Onyx Club in New York. He was probably the greatest percussive foil for Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. (That alone ...) He played on Miles Davis's "Birth of the Cool" sessions in 1949 and 1950, the manifestolike recordings of a new, chastened, chamberlike jazz. The group he led with the trumpeter Clifford Brown — which for a time included Mr. Rollins — was one of the greatest things about jazz in the 1950s, making beautifully constructed studio records and fascinatingly intense, though still little-heard, live recordings.
He played compositionally, complementing the work of jazz improvisers who also were master writers; this made his work with Booker Little, Herbie Nichols and Hasaan Ibn Ali special. (It's also why, when he played an aggressive Cuban rhythm with Powell in "Un Poco Loco," or in 4/4 against the waltz time of "Carolina Moon" with Monk, or in 5/4 on "As Long As You're Living" with his own group Max Roach Plus Four, he made it work within the piece, made it all sound natural.)
In his collaborations with Abbey Lincoln, Mr. Roach made civil rights issues ringingly explicit. He worked with percussion ensembles and strings and gospel choirs, always as original aesthetic choices rather than following the dimensions of established formats. With the pianist Cecil Taylor, among others, he played some highly rhythmic duo concerts — the last in 2000, at Columbia University — that were among the most memorable performances I have ever seen and heard. He had no second thoughts about working with the putative jazz avant-garde, or with hip-hop; he dived right in. And finally that may be his legacy to jazz: He seemed to have no fear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/arts/music/17roac.html?sq=&st=nyt%22musical%20Pioneer=%22=&scp=1&pagewanted=print
Hits From a Drummer Who Reveled in Change
By BEN RATLIFF
A selected discography of recordings featuring Max Roach, in chronological order:
'THE COMPLETE SAVOY AND DIAL MASTER TAKES' Charlie Parker (Savoy Jazz, three discs). Bebop from the 1940s and early '50s, landing like an asteroid on the jazz scene. Tracks with Mr. Roach include "Now's the Time," "Koko" and others.
'THE AMAZING BUD POWELL, VOL. 1' (Blue Note/EMI, 1951). An album split between a 1949 quintet including Sonny Rollins and Fats Navarro, and a 1951 trio session with Powell, Mr. Roach and the bassist Curly Russell; it includes "Wail," "Dance of the Infidels" and "Un Poco Loco."
'CLIFFORD BROWN AND MAX ROACH' Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet (Emarcy/Universal, 1954). Mr. Roach's great working band of the 1950s; basic parts of the jazz repertory, like Brown's "Daahoud" and "Joy Spring" come from this recording.
'FREEDOM SUITE' Sonny Rollins (Riverside/Concord, 1958). A beautifully conceived album from Mr. Rollins's short, exciting trio period.
'BRILLIANT CORNERS' Thelonious Monk (Riverside/Concord, 1956). Monk fully rising to his heights as a composer, with Mr. Roach articulating the rhythmic details.
'WE INSIST!: MAX ROACH'S FREEDOM NOW SUITE' (Candid, 1960). Highly political and aesthetically bold, with a group including the singer Abbey Lincoln, the trumpeter Booker Little and Coleman Hawkins.
'MONEY JUNGLE' Duke Ellington (Blue Note/EMI, 1962). With Charles Mingus on bass and Mr. Roach on drums, Ellington made an odd record of aggression and calm.
'PARIS 1989' Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie (A&M, 1989). Mr. Roach had played aggressive duo improvisations with Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp and others; here he does it with a colleague from the '40s, and makes all phases of modernity in jazz sound relative. BEN RATLIFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/arts/17broac.html?ref=music&pagewanted=print
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Thursday, August 16, 2007
The Record of Your Life as a Digital Archive By ERIC A. TAUB
August 16, 2007
Basics
The Record of Your Life as a Digital Archive By ERIC A. TAUB
WHEN Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Karen Duncan was ordered to leave her uptown neighborhood.
Among the possessions that Ms. Duncan, a lawyer, and her family took on their evacuation to Mississippi and later to Baton Rouge were two large trunks, filled not with clothes, but with the stacks of paper that recorded their life: photographs, birth certificates and their dog's immunization records.
"This is not going to happen again," Ms. Duncan said. "The next time, I'm carrying a digital flash drive — not trunks — loaded with my pictures."
Ms. Duncan, like millions of other Americans, has her feet firmly straddled across two technologies: embracing the new digital era but still hanging on to the paper records of the fast-disappearing analog age.
There are many reasons to digitize one's precious records and store them on a PC: to preserve them from aging, to make multiple copies that can be kept in separate places, and to create multimedia slide shows, perhaps to show future generations.
Digitizing records, whether documents, old photographs, or favorite LPs, "preserves history and lets people tell their stories," said Mark Cook, marketing director for Kodak Gallery, a Web site that stores consumer photographs.
"People want to use their content with today's tools, like iPhoto and YouTube," to create new forms of entertainment, Mr. Cook said.
Today, virtually any traditional document, movie or musical recording can be inexpensively and rapidly digitized and stored on a hard drive. And for those who do not want to spend the time, low-cost commercial services will do the job for you.
DOCUMENTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS So-called all-in-one printers have become the norm, with machines that print, scan and handle faxes available for under $100.
Optical character recognition software, included with such devices, will recognize printed text and convert it into a form that can be edited by a word processing program.
Photographs can be scanned and saved in the JPEG format at resolutions of at least 1,200 dots per inch. Once in a PC, software like Adobe Photoshop Elements ($80 for the Mac version; $100 for the PC version) can enhance faded colors, remove scratches and crop the image, just as with pictures shot with a digital camera.
Hewlett-Packard's all-in-one printers can scan in one pass as many photographs as will fit on the scanning tray, then save them as separate images.
Epson's Perfection 4490 ($350) includes a 30-page document feeder and scans up to three black-and-white pages a minute; it also scans 35 millimeter slides, negatives and photographs.
H.P.'s Scanjet G4050 ($200) scans up to 16 slides or 30 negatives simultaneously, and saves them as separate files. It does not, however, include an automatic sheet feeder for documents.
A number of services will do the conversions for you, either at storefronts or by mail, like Scanmyphotos.com. For those who are concerned about letting their precious memories out of sight, Kodak offers batch digitizing of photographs and other documents through its ScanVan, a vehicle that is currently on tour in the Eastern United States.
HOME MOVIES The simplest way to digitize those shoeboxes full of Super 8 movies is to use the technique perfected by movie pirates: project the image on a white wall, set up a digital camcorder on a tripod, and then shoot the film.
This is one case where you won't get the best results if you make it a do-it-yourself project. The different frame rates of movie film and a camcorder could cause annoying flickering of the final image. Send your movies to a commercial transfer service like Audio Video Memories (audiovideomemories.com), Digital Transfer Systems (digitaltransfersystems.net), and Just8mm.com that uses a telecine machine, a much more sophisticated version of the same home technique.
Movies arrive back on DVDs, ready to be imported into the PC for editing with a program like Apple's iMovie ($79, part of iLife '08) for Macs, or for PCs, Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 ($100).
VHS TAPES To transfer VHS footage, which is analog, into a computer, the PC needs to receive the data digitally. One way to check if your PC is so equipped to do that is to look at the computer's ports. If it has the familiar RCA inputs — the yellow, white, and red connectors — then it most likely is analog ready.
If not, analog images must first be converted to the digital format. To do so, combination VHS/DVD player/recorders are one of the simplest ways to get your home movies off your aging video tapes and onto more permanent DVDs. Available from Panasonic, Sony and others, prices start at under $200.
Alternatively, connect a stand-alone VHS player to a DVD recorder to make a digital copy.
VHS tapes can also be recorded onto a computer's hard drive by plugging the VCR's output cable into a digital camcorder that offers a "pass through" mode (most do). The signal is digitized within the camcorder, and then passed on to the PC's hard drive.
Sony's $229 VRD-MC5 is specifically made to record DVD copies of VHS tapes, or recordings from any camcorder or digital video recorder, without using a PC. VCRs and camcorders are plugged into the device, which resembles a portable DVD deck.
If you do not own a camcorder or DVD recorder, but you have loads of valuable tapes, consider an intermediary conversion product, such as the DAC-200 ($184; synchrotech.com); Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge ($300; omegamultimedia.com), and VHS to DVD 3.0 ($80; honestech.com). Each product includes hardware and software that converts analog signals to digital,.
LPS, EIGHT-TRACKS, AND CASSETTES Getting your old Country Joe and the Fish albums into your PC is one of the easiest conversions to do, according to Tom Merritt, executive editor of CNetTV.com.
Assuming you still have a phonograph turntable (or eight-track or cassette deck) and it is not the console type from the 1950s or earlier, plug the audio output from the turntable's amplifier/receiver into the minimike port found on virtually all home computers.
While commercial audio editing software is available, Mr. Merritt recommends installing Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net), a free program available for Macs, PCs and Linux/Unix machines that will manage the files, convert them into a specific format (for example, WAV or MP3), and remove clicks and crackles.
For those who value their time more than the fun of connecting cables and reading manuals, there are plenty of commercial companies happy to do the converting for you. Cassettes2CDs.com will convert audio and video tapes, LPs and 45s to digital format, storing the data on a CD, DVD or MP3 format for iPod use. The company does not handle 78 r.p.m. records, reel-to-reel or eight-track tapes.
If the thought of gathering up boxes full of photographs or phonograph records to digitize is daunting, here is one other compelling thought: your treasured memories will be in a digital format that can still be easily converted to the next video and audio formats that will invariably show up in the coming years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/technology/circuits/16basics.html?pagewanted=print
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http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/technology/16Basics_AudioLink.mp3
Basics
The Record of Your Life as a Digital Archive By ERIC A. TAUB
WHEN Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Karen Duncan was ordered to leave her uptown neighborhood.
Among the possessions that Ms. Duncan, a lawyer, and her family took on their evacuation to Mississippi and later to Baton Rouge were two large trunks, filled not with clothes, but with the stacks of paper that recorded their life: photographs, birth certificates and their dog's immunization records.
"This is not going to happen again," Ms. Duncan said. "The next time, I'm carrying a digital flash drive — not trunks — loaded with my pictures."
Ms. Duncan, like millions of other Americans, has her feet firmly straddled across two technologies: embracing the new digital era but still hanging on to the paper records of the fast-disappearing analog age.
There are many reasons to digitize one's precious records and store them on a PC: to preserve them from aging, to make multiple copies that can be kept in separate places, and to create multimedia slide shows, perhaps to show future generations.
Digitizing records, whether documents, old photographs, or favorite LPs, "preserves history and lets people tell their stories," said Mark Cook, marketing director for Kodak Gallery, a Web site that stores consumer photographs.
"People want to use their content with today's tools, like iPhoto and YouTube," to create new forms of entertainment, Mr. Cook said.
Today, virtually any traditional document, movie or musical recording can be inexpensively and rapidly digitized and stored on a hard drive. And for those who do not want to spend the time, low-cost commercial services will do the job for you.
DOCUMENTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS So-called all-in-one printers have become the norm, with machines that print, scan and handle faxes available for under $100.
Optical character recognition software, included with such devices, will recognize printed text and convert it into a form that can be edited by a word processing program.
Photographs can be scanned and saved in the JPEG format at resolutions of at least 1,200 dots per inch. Once in a PC, software like Adobe Photoshop Elements ($80 for the Mac version; $100 for the PC version) can enhance faded colors, remove scratches and crop the image, just as with pictures shot with a digital camera.
Hewlett-Packard's all-in-one printers can scan in one pass as many photographs as will fit on the scanning tray, then save them as separate images.
Epson's Perfection 4490 ($350) includes a 30-page document feeder and scans up to three black-and-white pages a minute; it also scans 35 millimeter slides, negatives and photographs.
H.P.'s Scanjet G4050 ($200) scans up to 16 slides or 30 negatives simultaneously, and saves them as separate files. It does not, however, include an automatic sheet feeder for documents.
A number of services will do the conversions for you, either at storefronts or by mail, like Scanmyphotos.com. For those who are concerned about letting their precious memories out of sight, Kodak offers batch digitizing of photographs and other documents through its ScanVan, a vehicle that is currently on tour in the Eastern United States.
HOME MOVIES The simplest way to digitize those shoeboxes full of Super 8 movies is to use the technique perfected by movie pirates: project the image on a white wall, set up a digital camcorder on a tripod, and then shoot the film.
This is one case where you won't get the best results if you make it a do-it-yourself project. The different frame rates of movie film and a camcorder could cause annoying flickering of the final image. Send your movies to a commercial transfer service like Audio Video Memories (audiovideomemories.com), Digital Transfer Systems (digitaltransfersystems.net), and Just8mm.com that uses a telecine machine, a much more sophisticated version of the same home technique.
Movies arrive back on DVDs, ready to be imported into the PC for editing with a program like Apple's iMovie ($79, part of iLife '08) for Macs, or for PCs, Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 ($100).
VHS TAPES To transfer VHS footage, which is analog, into a computer, the PC needs to receive the data digitally. One way to check if your PC is so equipped to do that is to look at the computer's ports. If it has the familiar RCA inputs — the yellow, white, and red connectors — then it most likely is analog ready.
If not, analog images must first be converted to the digital format. To do so, combination VHS/DVD player/recorders are one of the simplest ways to get your home movies off your aging video tapes and onto more permanent DVDs. Available from Panasonic, Sony and others, prices start at under $200.
Alternatively, connect a stand-alone VHS player to a DVD recorder to make a digital copy.
VHS tapes can also be recorded onto a computer's hard drive by plugging the VCR's output cable into a digital camcorder that offers a "pass through" mode (most do). The signal is digitized within the camcorder, and then passed on to the PC's hard drive.
Sony's $229 VRD-MC5 is specifically made to record DVD copies of VHS tapes, or recordings from any camcorder or digital video recorder, without using a PC. VCRs and camcorders are plugged into the device, which resembles a portable DVD deck.
If you do not own a camcorder or DVD recorder, but you have loads of valuable tapes, consider an intermediary conversion product, such as the DAC-200 ($184; synchrotech.com); Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge ($300; omegamultimedia.com), and VHS to DVD 3.0 ($80; honestech.com). Each product includes hardware and software that converts analog signals to digital,.
LPS, EIGHT-TRACKS, AND CASSETTES Getting your old Country Joe and the Fish albums into your PC is one of the easiest conversions to do, according to Tom Merritt, executive editor of CNetTV.com.
Assuming you still have a phonograph turntable (or eight-track or cassette deck) and it is not the console type from the 1950s or earlier, plug the audio output from the turntable's amplifier/receiver into the minimike port found on virtually all home computers.
While commercial audio editing software is available, Mr. Merritt recommends installing Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net), a free program available for Macs, PCs and Linux/Unix machines that will manage the files, convert them into a specific format (for example, WAV or MP3), and remove clicks and crackles.
For those who value their time more than the fun of connecting cables and reading manuals, there are plenty of commercial companies happy to do the converting for you. Cassettes2CDs.com will convert audio and video tapes, LPs and 45s to digital format, storing the data on a CD, DVD or MP3 format for iPod use. The company does not handle 78 r.p.m. records, reel-to-reel or eight-track tapes.
If the thought of gathering up boxes full of photographs or phonograph records to digitize is daunting, here is one other compelling thought: your treasured memories will be in a digital format that can still be easily converted to the next video and audio formats that will invariably show up in the coming years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/technology/circuits/16basics.html?pagewanted=print
null
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/technology/16Basics_AudioLink.mp3
Friday, August 10, 2007
Just Don't Call It Minimalism By JAMES R. OESTREICH
August 10, 2007
Just Don't Call It Minimalism By JAMES R. OESTREICH
BY and large musical Minimalists don't carry cards. But they do know something about guilt by association.
Most composers commonly called Minimalists have disavowed the label at one point or another, suggesting that it mischaracterizes their music, which can be mind-bogglingly intricate -- and huge. And they certainly don't consider themselves part of a school. The designation arose mainly from the friendships of composers with Minimalist artists: Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for example, with the sculptor Richard Serra.
But there certainly was something new and big (however minimal the means) stirring in the second half of the 20th century. With roots in the styles of Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, John Cage and others, music characterized by great rhythmic drive, simplified harmonies and hypnotic repetition blossomed in signal works by Terry Riley, John Adams, Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich. The pollen carried far and wide, even to Eastern Europe with the ''mystical Minimalism'' of Arvo Pärt and others as a spiritualized offshoot.
The 70th-birthday year of Philip Glass, which is being widely observed, seems as good a time as any to take stock of the Minimalist achievement by way of recordings. So the classical music critics of The New York Times have singled out favorite recordings of music by various forerunners (including the jazz great Count Basie), the early giants and those who later fell under the influence (including the Dane Poul Ruders).
None of this is likely to settle disputes about what, if anything, the various composers have in common, for the music is wildly varied. But it should at least lay out some of the terms of the argument, in addition to providing good listening. JAMES R. OESTREICH
August 10, 2007
Just Don't Call It Minimalism
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
BY and large musical Minimalists don't carry cards. But they do know something about guilt by association.
Most composers commonly called Minimalists have disavowed the label at one point or another, suggesting that it mischaracterizes their music, which can be mind-bogglingly intricate — and huge. And they certainly don't consider themselves part of a school. The designation arose mainly from the friendships of composers with Minimalist artists: Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for example, with the sculptor Richard Serra.
But there certainly was something new and big (however minimal the means) stirring in the second half of the 20th century. With roots in the styles of Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, John Cage and others, music characterized by great rhythmic drive, simplified harmonies and hypnotic repetition blossomed in signal works by Terry Riley, John Adams, Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich. The pollen carried far and wide, even to Eastern Europe with the "mystical Minimalism" of Arvo Pärt and others as a spiritualized offshoot.
The 70th-birthday year of Philip Glass, which is being widely observed, seems as good a time as any to take stock of the Minimalist achievement by way of recordings. So the classical music critics of The New York Times have singled out favorite recordings of music by various forerunners (including the jazz great Count Basie), the early giants and those who later fell under the influence (including the Dane Poul Ruders).
None of this is likely to settle disputes about what, if anything, the various composers have in common, for the music is wildly varied. But it should at least lay out some of the terms of the argument, in addition to providing good listening. JAMES R. OESTREICH
ANTHONY TOMMASINI
REICH "Different Trains," "Electric Counterpoint." Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79176; CD).
ADAMS Piano works. Ralph van Raat, pianist (Naxos 8.559285; CD).
ADAMS "The Death of Klinghoffer." Vocalists; Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon, conducted by Kent Nagano (Nonesuch 79281; two CDs).
RUDERS Violin Concerto No. 1; other works. Rolf Schulte, violinist; Riverside Symphony, conducted by George Rothman (Bridge BCD 9057; CD).
Well before the spring of 1989, when I first heard the Kronos Quartet perform Steve Reich's "Different Trains," Mr. Reich's music had grown far beyond the confines of the stylistic label Minimalism.
The concept for this ingeniously complex 1988 work came from Mr. Reich's memories of childhood travels on transcontinental trains in the late 1930s and early '40s to visit his divorced parents: his mother in Los Angeles, his father in New York. The constant clacking of the train on the tracks imprinted itself on his musical imagination. While contemplating this piece, Mr. Reich realized that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe during his youth he would probably have been traveling on quite different trains.
The piece's repetitive rhythms, cyclic riffs and persistent whistles convey the nervous, hypnotic sounds and feelings of train travel. Weaved into the textures are the recorded voices of the governess who accompanied Mr. Reich on his journeys and an old Pullman car worker, as well three Jewish refugees. The speeches, as transcribed with uncanny accuracy into pitches and rhythms, become another element in the music. The work is at once exhilarating, haunting and ominous, qualities arrestingly conveyed in the Kronos Quartet's recording.
John Adams was initially associated with Minimalism. A beguiling recent recording of his complete piano music, performed by Ralph van Raat, includes scintillating performances of "Phrygian Gates" and "China Gates," early scores that show the composer at his most openly and sonorously Minimalistic.
But Mr. Adams had bigger musical things in mind, like his landmark opera "Nixon in China." Though I greatly admire this work, I am especially affected by "The Death of Klinghoffer" (1991), written with the same librettist, Alice Goodman, and director, Peter Sellars. The opera has been attacked for what is perceived as its sympathetic depiction of the Palestinian terrorists who murdered Leon Klinghoffer aboard an Italian cruise ship in 1985. But the creators think of the opera as a reflective work in the spirit of the Bach Passions, which mix storytelling and commentary. The score flows in undulant waves of luminous yet piercing harmonies, with elegiac, melodic writing and violent, searing outbursts.
The Danish composer Poul Ruders acknowledges that he has been influenced by Minimalism. The repetitive figurations, jittery thematic lines and obsessive rhythms that abound in his invigorating Violin Concerto No. 1 (1981) would seem to prove the point, though I'd be careful about labeling it a work of Minimalism, at least in the presence of its formidable composer.
BERNARD HOLLAND
REICH "Drumming." So Percussion (Cantaloupe CA21026; CD).
ADAMS "Nixon in China." Vocalists; Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Edo de Waart (Nonesuch 79177; three CDs).
CAGE "Two2"; works for two pianos. Double Edge (Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles; CRI 732; CD).
BASIE "Complete Clef/Verve" (Mosaic Records limited edition; eight CDs).
Minimalism is a musical art that says very few things over long periods of time. This is in opposition to music that takes a long time to say many things (Mahler), music that says very little in normal amounts of time (Saint-Saëns) or music that says a great deal in practically no time at all (Webern).
Minimalism can be employed by several percussionists ("Drumming" by Steve Reich with So Percussion) or an entire opera company (John Adams's "Nixon in China"). It is also comfortable on two pianos ("Two2" by John Cage, played by Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles). Minimalism, in other words, is user-friendly.
"Drumming" is in four parts and goes on for quite a while (73 minutes 8 seconds, to be exact). It starts unpromisingly, but once the mind attaches itself, the music gathers an adhesive strength. As color and complexity of movement gradually evolve, the paradox of Minimalism sets in: Listeners enter a trancelike involvement but can answer the phone or go to the refrigerator and not miss much at all.
"Nixon in China" translates repetition into a kind of theatrical energy. Diplomatic ritual is made to dance; political and personal anxieties take on a machinelike tic. Minimalism becomes a dramatic tool, proving its further usefulness.
I like the Cage piece precisely because so little happens. It is a slow, calm appropriation of musical space. "Two2" is from 1989 and at quite a distance from the two other Cage pieces from the mid-1940s on this recording, "Experiences" and "Three Dances." Both are quite busy.
It is hard to leave the subject of Minimalism without mention of Count Basie, master of the art of leaving out. Basie's piano solos framed unspoken musical phrases with dabs of music: chords doing the work of a jazz-music continuo and fragments of melody that point at things present but unsaid. The richness of the silences — the tantalizing promises therein — were at odds with the art of Basie's colleague Art Tatum, who seemed determined to fill musical space with as many notes as possible. Minimalism, here as elsewhere, fills time with a minimum of means.
ALLAN KOZINN
ADAMS "Shaker Loops," "Light Over Water." The Ridge Quartet; other performers (New Albion NA014; CD).
GLASS "Satyagraha." Vocalists; New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Christopher Keene (Sony-BMG Masterworks M3K 39672; three CDs).
GLASS "Koyaanisqatsi." Western Wind Vocal Ensemble; Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79506, CD; MGM 1003766, DVD).
REICH "Tehillim," "The Desert Music." Ossia; Alarm Will Sound, conducted by Alan Pierson (Cantaloupe CA21009; CD).
It sounds oddly conservative and spare now, but "Shaker Loops" (1978) was a bombshell in its time, and it introduced John Adams as an important voice in the still fresh Minimalist rebellion against modernist complexity. Mr. Adams offered all the repetitive energy that propelled Philip Glass's and Steve Reich's most popular scores, but his quicker harmonic development, sudden dynamic changes and other startling touches pointed toward the next step — emotional and dramatic — that this style needed to take.
Mr. Adams's later orchestration gave the work a graceful sheen, but the original chamber recording has an endearingly homespun quality. The companion piece, "Light Over Water" (1983), is a pleasantly spacey oddity for brass and synthesizers.
"Satyagraha" (1980) was Mr. Glass's move toward Romanticism, a leap from his wheezy, rhythmically intricate writing for amplified chamber band to full-fledged scoring for orchestra, chorus and operatic voices. Its stage action shows the development of Gandhi's nonviolent resistance techniques to combat racism during his early years in South Africa. But with the text drawn directly from the Bhagavad-Gita, the story of an epic clan battle, and sung in Sanskrit, the work is also a magnificent oratorio version of this classic Hindu text. Nearly three decades on, it remains Mr. Glass's most wrenching opera. Though a new recording is long overdue, this 1985 performance captures much of the work's spirit.
"Koyaanisqatsi" (1983) extended the neo-Romanticism of "Satyagraha" with picturesque scoring and a refreshed harmonic vocabulary. It also works brilliantly as the soundtrack of the first and best installment of Godfrey Reggio's film trilogy about humanity's mostly malignant influence on the earth, its alternately lyrical and vigorous movements accompanying visions of everything from the grandeur of Southwestern deserts and cloud formations to urban crowds in slow motion and sped-up film of highway traffic. The 1998 remake on Nonesuch is superb, but the way to experience this work is on the DVD.
Except for a few early works in which recorded speech was mined for its rhythmic qualities, Steve Reich devoted himself to instrumental works until 1981, largely because he didn't want his musical line dictated by the text. Biblical Psalms and a William Carlos Williams poem about the nuclear age helped him solve that problem. In "Tehillim" (1981) the Hebrew texts lend themselves to Mr. Reich's sharp-edged rhythmic style, which in turn yields a timeless, almost ritualistic quality. And in "The Desert Music" (1984; heard here in a texturally transparent 2001 chamber version), the haunting setting of the Williams text is magnified by percussion that evokes a ticking clock, and an eerie instrumental shimmer that suggests the desert after a nuclear test.
ANNE MIDGETTE
RILEY "In C." Bang on a Can (Cantaloupe Records CA21004).
GLASS "Einstein on the Beach." Vocalists; Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79323; three CDs).
REICH Music for 18 Musicians. Amadinda Percussion Ensemble (Hungaroton 32208; CD).
ADAMS "Harmonium"; "The Death of Klinghoffer" Choruses. San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by John Adams; Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon, London Opera Chorus, conducted by Kent Nagano (Nonesuch 79549; CD).
Anton Bruckner was a proto-Minimalist, the composer Ingram Marshall suggests: "He writes music like he's writing great paragraphs."
That comment helps define a musical term that has been overused, misunderstood and often rejected by the very composers to whom it is usually applied. Minimalism can be understood as a form of musical dramaturgy in which the music grows not out of the contrast between linear phrases but from the juxtaposition of building blocks of sound.
But the term Minimalism fails to connote the aural richness that can arise even in the early, most repetitive pieces, a richness that is being increasingly mined by the current generation of performers. Minimalism, in its fifth decade, is encountering the same issues of original versus modern instruments that arise with any bygone music.
The early recordings have a scrappiness, a defiance and, in some cases (like the original 1979 recording of "Einstein on the Beach"), the limitations of old synthesizers. But today the music is in musicians' fingers and ears. Just as it took a generation for pianists to conquer Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata, the most intricate patterns of a Steve Reich are no longer in themselves a challenge.
I like the toughness and aura of what you might call the period instruments of the 1970s, but when it comes to choosing recordings I seem to come down on the side of opulence. Terry Riley's 1964 "In C," the defining work of Minimalism, belongs in every music library, and Bang on a Can's performance has a fluidity that brings out the depth of the repeated, interlocking patterns and the pleasure of listening to them.
"Einstein on the Beach" is another — if not the other — seminal Minimalist work. The Nonesuch recording, made 17 years after this opera's 1976 premiere, approaches it with the reverence due a masterpiece, smoothing down the rough edges and stressing the seriousness. It also restores 30 minutes of music that was cut from the original cast recording. On grounds of completeness alone, not to mention aural beauty, this 1993 recording is the one to get; here, the subtly changing kaleidoscope patterns of sound that grow out of the repeated syllables and notes only gain in color and depth.
Steve Reich himself waxes eloquent about Amadinda, a Hungarian percussion ensemble, and its performance of his seminal Music for 18 Musicians, which becomes a feast for the ears in this reading. Having expressed my enthusiasm for Mr. Reich's music sufficiently elsewhere, I have refrained from filling this list with his works alone.
"Harmonium," the first John Adams piece I heard, remains a personal favorite. Mr. Adams, unlike Mr. Glass, shows a specific awareness of vocal timbre; these settings of three Emily Dickinson poems play deliberately with the qualities of vocal sound. There is also a sense of the Americanness of this music: at once straightforward and with a kind of baroque fullness. This quality is increasingly evident in the later work of Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich as well as the work of Mr. Adams, for whom the term Minimalism is today decidedly a misnomer.
STEVE SMITH
GLASS Music in 12 Parts. Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79324; three CDs).
GLASS "Glassworks." Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Sony Classical SK 90394; CD).
ADAMS "The Chairman Dances"; other works. San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Edo de Waart (Nonesuch 79144; CD).
GLASS "Akhnaten." Vocalists; Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies (Sony Classical Germany 91141; two CDs).
Among admirers of Philip Glass's work, Music in 12 Parts has long been considered his rough equivalent of Bach's "Art of Fugue." Written from 1971 to 1974, the extensive cycle is a four-hour compendium of Mr. Glass's early compositional concerns. Fragmentary melodies and pulsating rhythms repeated at length evoke something of a trance state, so that tiny shifts in pitch or meter feel like major events. Yet the work also pointed toward future possibilities; the vocal writing in particular seems to predict "Einstein on the Beach."
In 1981 Mr. Glass was signed to an exclusive recording contract with CBS Masterworks, the first composer afforded such a berth since Aaron Copland. "Glassworks," Mr. Glass's first CBS release (now available on its successor label, Sony), acknowledged and even partly enabled his potential for crossover success. Whereas earlier recordings had documented music from his ensemble's active repertory, the six pieces on "Glassworks" were specifically conceived as an album accessible to new listeners. Concise, evocative works like "Floe" and "Rubric" anticipated Mr. Glass's lucrative sideline as a film composer; the melancholy "Facades" remains a staple of his concerts.
The music on "The Chairman Dances," a 1987 CD of works by John Adams, might not originally have been conceived as an introduction to his work, but the disc serves that purpose nonetheless. Mr. Adams reconciled techniques pioneered by Mr. Glass and Steve Reich with the resources of the Romantic orchestra in the 1985 title work, an uninhibited explosion of succulent melody and swooping French horns inspired by the scenario of Mr. Adams's first opera, "Nixon in China." Casting his net wider still, he evoked traditional hymnody in "Christian Zeal and Activity" and summoned the spirit of Charles Ives with the lonely trumpet lines of "Tromba Lontana."
Also in 1987 CBS issued a recording of Mr. Glass's third opera, "Akhnaten," a portrait of the iconoclastic pharaoh who briefly imposed a monotheistic religion in Egypt. Compared with "Einstein" and its successor, "Satyagraha," the opera seems almost conventional in its procession of narrative tableaus. But Mr. Glass's lean, percussive score includes some of his most viscerally exciting music, and assigning the lead role to a countertenor was a bold stroke.
"Hymn to the Aten," the pharaoh's second-act paean to his deity, is one of the composer's most communicative and ineffably beautiful creations; Mr. Glass, who must have had a sense of his achievement, instructed that the aria always be performed in the native language of the country where it is being performed.
VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
ADAMS "Shaker Loops," "The Wound-Dresser," "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." Bournemouth Symphony, conducted by Marin Alsop (Naxos 8.559031; CD).
GLASS Violin Concerto; other works. Adele Anthony, violinist; Ulster Orchestra, conducted by Takuo Yuasa (Naxos 8.554568; CD).
REICH Music for 18 Musicians. Steve Reich and Musicians (Nonesuch 79448; CD).
REICH "City Life," "New York Counterpoint," "Eight Lines," "Violin Phase." Ensemble Modern (BMG/RCA Victor 74321 66459 2; CD).
The diverse moods of John Adams are alluringly conveyed by Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra on a Naxos disc that opens with a sparkling performance of the wildly exuberant "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." In "Shaking and Trembling," the first movement of "Shaker Loops," the Bournemouth strings play as if possessed, hurling colorful arrows of sound into the kaleidoscopic dartboard of orchestral textures. The frenzied rapture builds to a dizzying fervor before melting into the eerie glissandos of the next movement. Also included is a performance of Mr. Adams's gloomy "Wound-Dresser," sung by the fine baritone Nathan Gunn.
Philip Glass's Violin Concerto is his first major orchestral work. It adheres to a traditional three-movement, fast-slow-fast structure for conventionally scored orchestra, but with its insistent opening chords, chromatically undulating harmonies and the soloist's mournful arpeggios, this theatrical work is signature Glass. On the fine Naxos disc Takuo Yuasa leads the Ulster Orchestra and the violinist Adele Anthony in a vibrant, throbbing performance. Ms. Anthony's sweet-toned, romantic playing soars over the waves of pulsating orchestral rhythms, played here with enough tension to create a taut web of sound. The disc also includes enjoyable renditions of "Company" and excerpts from "Akhnaten."
Like all masterpieces, when played with integrity and passion Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians — the seminal 1976 chamber work in which he used his broadest palette of harmonic language to date — never loses its fascination. In this 1996 recording Mr. Reich and his band of musicians build on the layers of blinding colors and hypnotic rhythms in a performance with moods veering from rhythmically energetic and vital to seductively (and deceptively) languid. This performance highlights the work's beautiful surface veneer, underlying levels of complexity and intoxicatingly therapeutic power.
Other notable works from various periods of Mr. Reich's life receive vigorous, intelligent performances by the Ensemble Modern on an RCA recording, which includes "City Life." This aural snapshot of New York streets transforms normally irritating sounds, like sirens and honking horns, into a compelling musical fabric. The turmoil of city life is also aptly conveyed in a taut, jaunty rendition of "New York Counterpoint," performed by Roland Diry, a stellar clarinetist. The disc also includes bristling performances of "Eight Lines" and, with Jagdish Mistry as the excellent soloist, "Violin Phase."
The recordings mentioned range in price from $9 to $20 for one CD, $24 to $34 for two CDs and $34 to $44 for a three-CD set; the eight-CD set is $136; the DVD is $22.44.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/arts/music/10mini.html?pagewanted=print
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Just Don't Call It Minimalism By JAMES R. OESTREICH
BY and large musical Minimalists don't carry cards. But they do know something about guilt by association.
Most composers commonly called Minimalists have disavowed the label at one point or another, suggesting that it mischaracterizes their music, which can be mind-bogglingly intricate -- and huge. And they certainly don't consider themselves part of a school. The designation arose mainly from the friendships of composers with Minimalist artists: Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for example, with the sculptor Richard Serra.
But there certainly was something new and big (however minimal the means) stirring in the second half of the 20th century. With roots in the styles of Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, John Cage and others, music characterized by great rhythmic drive, simplified harmonies and hypnotic repetition blossomed in signal works by Terry Riley, John Adams, Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich. The pollen carried far and wide, even to Eastern Europe with the ''mystical Minimalism'' of Arvo Pärt and others as a spiritualized offshoot.
The 70th-birthday year of Philip Glass, which is being widely observed, seems as good a time as any to take stock of the Minimalist achievement by way of recordings. So the classical music critics of The New York Times have singled out favorite recordings of music by various forerunners (including the jazz great Count Basie), the early giants and those who later fell under the influence (including the Dane Poul Ruders).
None of this is likely to settle disputes about what, if anything, the various composers have in common, for the music is wildly varied. But it should at least lay out some of the terms of the argument, in addition to providing good listening. JAMES R. OESTREICH
August 10, 2007
Just Don't Call It Minimalism
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
BY and large musical Minimalists don't carry cards. But they do know something about guilt by association.
Most composers commonly called Minimalists have disavowed the label at one point or another, suggesting that it mischaracterizes their music, which can be mind-bogglingly intricate — and huge. And they certainly don't consider themselves part of a school. The designation arose mainly from the friendships of composers with Minimalist artists: Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for example, with the sculptor Richard Serra.
But there certainly was something new and big (however minimal the means) stirring in the second half of the 20th century. With roots in the styles of Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, John Cage and others, music characterized by great rhythmic drive, simplified harmonies and hypnotic repetition blossomed in signal works by Terry Riley, John Adams, Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich. The pollen carried far and wide, even to Eastern Europe with the "mystical Minimalism" of Arvo Pärt and others as a spiritualized offshoot.
The 70th-birthday year of Philip Glass, which is being widely observed, seems as good a time as any to take stock of the Minimalist achievement by way of recordings. So the classical music critics of The New York Times have singled out favorite recordings of music by various forerunners (including the jazz great Count Basie), the early giants and those who later fell under the influence (including the Dane Poul Ruders).
None of this is likely to settle disputes about what, if anything, the various composers have in common, for the music is wildly varied. But it should at least lay out some of the terms of the argument, in addition to providing good listening. JAMES R. OESTREICH
ANTHONY TOMMASINI
REICH "Different Trains," "Electric Counterpoint." Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79176; CD).
ADAMS Piano works. Ralph van Raat, pianist (Naxos 8.559285; CD).
ADAMS "The Death of Klinghoffer." Vocalists; Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon, conducted by Kent Nagano (Nonesuch 79281; two CDs).
RUDERS Violin Concerto No. 1; other works. Rolf Schulte, violinist; Riverside Symphony, conducted by George Rothman (Bridge BCD 9057; CD).
Well before the spring of 1989, when I first heard the Kronos Quartet perform Steve Reich's "Different Trains," Mr. Reich's music had grown far beyond the confines of the stylistic label Minimalism.
The concept for this ingeniously complex 1988 work came from Mr. Reich's memories of childhood travels on transcontinental trains in the late 1930s and early '40s to visit his divorced parents: his mother in Los Angeles, his father in New York. The constant clacking of the train on the tracks imprinted itself on his musical imagination. While contemplating this piece, Mr. Reich realized that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe during his youth he would probably have been traveling on quite different trains.
The piece's repetitive rhythms, cyclic riffs and persistent whistles convey the nervous, hypnotic sounds and feelings of train travel. Weaved into the textures are the recorded voices of the governess who accompanied Mr. Reich on his journeys and an old Pullman car worker, as well three Jewish refugees. The speeches, as transcribed with uncanny accuracy into pitches and rhythms, become another element in the music. The work is at once exhilarating, haunting and ominous, qualities arrestingly conveyed in the Kronos Quartet's recording.
John Adams was initially associated with Minimalism. A beguiling recent recording of his complete piano music, performed by Ralph van Raat, includes scintillating performances of "Phrygian Gates" and "China Gates," early scores that show the composer at his most openly and sonorously Minimalistic.
But Mr. Adams had bigger musical things in mind, like his landmark opera "Nixon in China." Though I greatly admire this work, I am especially affected by "The Death of Klinghoffer" (1991), written with the same librettist, Alice Goodman, and director, Peter Sellars. The opera has been attacked for what is perceived as its sympathetic depiction of the Palestinian terrorists who murdered Leon Klinghoffer aboard an Italian cruise ship in 1985. But the creators think of the opera as a reflective work in the spirit of the Bach Passions, which mix storytelling and commentary. The score flows in undulant waves of luminous yet piercing harmonies, with elegiac, melodic writing and violent, searing outbursts.
The Danish composer Poul Ruders acknowledges that he has been influenced by Minimalism. The repetitive figurations, jittery thematic lines and obsessive rhythms that abound in his invigorating Violin Concerto No. 1 (1981) would seem to prove the point, though I'd be careful about labeling it a work of Minimalism, at least in the presence of its formidable composer.
BERNARD HOLLAND
REICH "Drumming." So Percussion (Cantaloupe CA21026; CD).
ADAMS "Nixon in China." Vocalists; Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Edo de Waart (Nonesuch 79177; three CDs).
CAGE "Two2"; works for two pianos. Double Edge (Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles; CRI 732; CD).
BASIE "Complete Clef/Verve" (Mosaic Records limited edition; eight CDs).
Minimalism is a musical art that says very few things over long periods of time. This is in opposition to music that takes a long time to say many things (Mahler), music that says very little in normal amounts of time (Saint-Saëns) or music that says a great deal in practically no time at all (Webern).
Minimalism can be employed by several percussionists ("Drumming" by Steve Reich with So Percussion) or an entire opera company (John Adams's "Nixon in China"). It is also comfortable on two pianos ("Two2" by John Cage, played by Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles). Minimalism, in other words, is user-friendly.
"Drumming" is in four parts and goes on for quite a while (73 minutes 8 seconds, to be exact). It starts unpromisingly, but once the mind attaches itself, the music gathers an adhesive strength. As color and complexity of movement gradually evolve, the paradox of Minimalism sets in: Listeners enter a trancelike involvement but can answer the phone or go to the refrigerator and not miss much at all.
"Nixon in China" translates repetition into a kind of theatrical energy. Diplomatic ritual is made to dance; political and personal anxieties take on a machinelike tic. Minimalism becomes a dramatic tool, proving its further usefulness.
I like the Cage piece precisely because so little happens. It is a slow, calm appropriation of musical space. "Two2" is from 1989 and at quite a distance from the two other Cage pieces from the mid-1940s on this recording, "Experiences" and "Three Dances." Both are quite busy.
It is hard to leave the subject of Minimalism without mention of Count Basie, master of the art of leaving out. Basie's piano solos framed unspoken musical phrases with dabs of music: chords doing the work of a jazz-music continuo and fragments of melody that point at things present but unsaid. The richness of the silences — the tantalizing promises therein — were at odds with the art of Basie's colleague Art Tatum, who seemed determined to fill musical space with as many notes as possible. Minimalism, here as elsewhere, fills time with a minimum of means.
ALLAN KOZINN
ADAMS "Shaker Loops," "Light Over Water." The Ridge Quartet; other performers (New Albion NA014; CD).
GLASS "Satyagraha." Vocalists; New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Christopher Keene (Sony-BMG Masterworks M3K 39672; three CDs).
GLASS "Koyaanisqatsi." Western Wind Vocal Ensemble; Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79506, CD; MGM 1003766, DVD).
REICH "Tehillim," "The Desert Music." Ossia; Alarm Will Sound, conducted by Alan Pierson (Cantaloupe CA21009; CD).
It sounds oddly conservative and spare now, but "Shaker Loops" (1978) was a bombshell in its time, and it introduced John Adams as an important voice in the still fresh Minimalist rebellion against modernist complexity. Mr. Adams offered all the repetitive energy that propelled Philip Glass's and Steve Reich's most popular scores, but his quicker harmonic development, sudden dynamic changes and other startling touches pointed toward the next step — emotional and dramatic — that this style needed to take.
Mr. Adams's later orchestration gave the work a graceful sheen, but the original chamber recording has an endearingly homespun quality. The companion piece, "Light Over Water" (1983), is a pleasantly spacey oddity for brass and synthesizers.
"Satyagraha" (1980) was Mr. Glass's move toward Romanticism, a leap from his wheezy, rhythmically intricate writing for amplified chamber band to full-fledged scoring for orchestra, chorus and operatic voices. Its stage action shows the development of Gandhi's nonviolent resistance techniques to combat racism during his early years in South Africa. But with the text drawn directly from the Bhagavad-Gita, the story of an epic clan battle, and sung in Sanskrit, the work is also a magnificent oratorio version of this classic Hindu text. Nearly three decades on, it remains Mr. Glass's most wrenching opera. Though a new recording is long overdue, this 1985 performance captures much of the work's spirit.
"Koyaanisqatsi" (1983) extended the neo-Romanticism of "Satyagraha" with picturesque scoring and a refreshed harmonic vocabulary. It also works brilliantly as the soundtrack of the first and best installment of Godfrey Reggio's film trilogy about humanity's mostly malignant influence on the earth, its alternately lyrical and vigorous movements accompanying visions of everything from the grandeur of Southwestern deserts and cloud formations to urban crowds in slow motion and sped-up film of highway traffic. The 1998 remake on Nonesuch is superb, but the way to experience this work is on the DVD.
Except for a few early works in which recorded speech was mined for its rhythmic qualities, Steve Reich devoted himself to instrumental works until 1981, largely because he didn't want his musical line dictated by the text. Biblical Psalms and a William Carlos Williams poem about the nuclear age helped him solve that problem. In "Tehillim" (1981) the Hebrew texts lend themselves to Mr. Reich's sharp-edged rhythmic style, which in turn yields a timeless, almost ritualistic quality. And in "The Desert Music" (1984; heard here in a texturally transparent 2001 chamber version), the haunting setting of the Williams text is magnified by percussion that evokes a ticking clock, and an eerie instrumental shimmer that suggests the desert after a nuclear test.
ANNE MIDGETTE
RILEY "In C." Bang on a Can (Cantaloupe Records CA21004).
GLASS "Einstein on the Beach." Vocalists; Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79323; three CDs).
REICH Music for 18 Musicians. Amadinda Percussion Ensemble (Hungaroton 32208; CD).
ADAMS "Harmonium"; "The Death of Klinghoffer" Choruses. San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by John Adams; Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon, London Opera Chorus, conducted by Kent Nagano (Nonesuch 79549; CD).
Anton Bruckner was a proto-Minimalist, the composer Ingram Marshall suggests: "He writes music like he's writing great paragraphs."
That comment helps define a musical term that has been overused, misunderstood and often rejected by the very composers to whom it is usually applied. Minimalism can be understood as a form of musical dramaturgy in which the music grows not out of the contrast between linear phrases but from the juxtaposition of building blocks of sound.
But the term Minimalism fails to connote the aural richness that can arise even in the early, most repetitive pieces, a richness that is being increasingly mined by the current generation of performers. Minimalism, in its fifth decade, is encountering the same issues of original versus modern instruments that arise with any bygone music.
The early recordings have a scrappiness, a defiance and, in some cases (like the original 1979 recording of "Einstein on the Beach"), the limitations of old synthesizers. But today the music is in musicians' fingers and ears. Just as it took a generation for pianists to conquer Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata, the most intricate patterns of a Steve Reich are no longer in themselves a challenge.
I like the toughness and aura of what you might call the period instruments of the 1970s, but when it comes to choosing recordings I seem to come down on the side of opulence. Terry Riley's 1964 "In C," the defining work of Minimalism, belongs in every music library, and Bang on a Can's performance has a fluidity that brings out the depth of the repeated, interlocking patterns and the pleasure of listening to them.
"Einstein on the Beach" is another — if not the other — seminal Minimalist work. The Nonesuch recording, made 17 years after this opera's 1976 premiere, approaches it with the reverence due a masterpiece, smoothing down the rough edges and stressing the seriousness. It also restores 30 minutes of music that was cut from the original cast recording. On grounds of completeness alone, not to mention aural beauty, this 1993 recording is the one to get; here, the subtly changing kaleidoscope patterns of sound that grow out of the repeated syllables and notes only gain in color and depth.
Steve Reich himself waxes eloquent about Amadinda, a Hungarian percussion ensemble, and its performance of his seminal Music for 18 Musicians, which becomes a feast for the ears in this reading. Having expressed my enthusiasm for Mr. Reich's music sufficiently elsewhere, I have refrained from filling this list with his works alone.
"Harmonium," the first John Adams piece I heard, remains a personal favorite. Mr. Adams, unlike Mr. Glass, shows a specific awareness of vocal timbre; these settings of three Emily Dickinson poems play deliberately with the qualities of vocal sound. There is also a sense of the Americanness of this music: at once straightforward and with a kind of baroque fullness. This quality is increasingly evident in the later work of Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich as well as the work of Mr. Adams, for whom the term Minimalism is today decidedly a misnomer.
STEVE SMITH
GLASS Music in 12 Parts. Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79324; three CDs).
GLASS "Glassworks." Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Sony Classical SK 90394; CD).
ADAMS "The Chairman Dances"; other works. San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Edo de Waart (Nonesuch 79144; CD).
GLASS "Akhnaten." Vocalists; Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies (Sony Classical Germany 91141; two CDs).
Among admirers of Philip Glass's work, Music in 12 Parts has long been considered his rough equivalent of Bach's "Art of Fugue." Written from 1971 to 1974, the extensive cycle is a four-hour compendium of Mr. Glass's early compositional concerns. Fragmentary melodies and pulsating rhythms repeated at length evoke something of a trance state, so that tiny shifts in pitch or meter feel like major events. Yet the work also pointed toward future possibilities; the vocal writing in particular seems to predict "Einstein on the Beach."
In 1981 Mr. Glass was signed to an exclusive recording contract with CBS Masterworks, the first composer afforded such a berth since Aaron Copland. "Glassworks," Mr. Glass's first CBS release (now available on its successor label, Sony), acknowledged and even partly enabled his potential for crossover success. Whereas earlier recordings had documented music from his ensemble's active repertory, the six pieces on "Glassworks" were specifically conceived as an album accessible to new listeners. Concise, evocative works like "Floe" and "Rubric" anticipated Mr. Glass's lucrative sideline as a film composer; the melancholy "Facades" remains a staple of his concerts.
The music on "The Chairman Dances," a 1987 CD of works by John Adams, might not originally have been conceived as an introduction to his work, but the disc serves that purpose nonetheless. Mr. Adams reconciled techniques pioneered by Mr. Glass and Steve Reich with the resources of the Romantic orchestra in the 1985 title work, an uninhibited explosion of succulent melody and swooping French horns inspired by the scenario of Mr. Adams's first opera, "Nixon in China." Casting his net wider still, he evoked traditional hymnody in "Christian Zeal and Activity" and summoned the spirit of Charles Ives with the lonely trumpet lines of "Tromba Lontana."
Also in 1987 CBS issued a recording of Mr. Glass's third opera, "Akhnaten," a portrait of the iconoclastic pharaoh who briefly imposed a monotheistic religion in Egypt. Compared with "Einstein" and its successor, "Satyagraha," the opera seems almost conventional in its procession of narrative tableaus. But Mr. Glass's lean, percussive score includes some of his most viscerally exciting music, and assigning the lead role to a countertenor was a bold stroke.
"Hymn to the Aten," the pharaoh's second-act paean to his deity, is one of the composer's most communicative and ineffably beautiful creations; Mr. Glass, who must have had a sense of his achievement, instructed that the aria always be performed in the native language of the country where it is being performed.
VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
ADAMS "Shaker Loops," "The Wound-Dresser," "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." Bournemouth Symphony, conducted by Marin Alsop (Naxos 8.559031; CD).
GLASS Violin Concerto; other works. Adele Anthony, violinist; Ulster Orchestra, conducted by Takuo Yuasa (Naxos 8.554568; CD).
REICH Music for 18 Musicians. Steve Reich and Musicians (Nonesuch 79448; CD).
REICH "City Life," "New York Counterpoint," "Eight Lines," "Violin Phase." Ensemble Modern (BMG/RCA Victor 74321 66459 2; CD).
The diverse moods of John Adams are alluringly conveyed by Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra on a Naxos disc that opens with a sparkling performance of the wildly exuberant "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." In "Shaking and Trembling," the first movement of "Shaker Loops," the Bournemouth strings play as if possessed, hurling colorful arrows of sound into the kaleidoscopic dartboard of orchestral textures. The frenzied rapture builds to a dizzying fervor before melting into the eerie glissandos of the next movement. Also included is a performance of Mr. Adams's gloomy "Wound-Dresser," sung by the fine baritone Nathan Gunn.
Philip Glass's Violin Concerto is his first major orchestral work. It adheres to a traditional three-movement, fast-slow-fast structure for conventionally scored orchestra, but with its insistent opening chords, chromatically undulating harmonies and the soloist's mournful arpeggios, this theatrical work is signature Glass. On the fine Naxos disc Takuo Yuasa leads the Ulster Orchestra and the violinist Adele Anthony in a vibrant, throbbing performance. Ms. Anthony's sweet-toned, romantic playing soars over the waves of pulsating orchestral rhythms, played here with enough tension to create a taut web of sound. The disc also includes enjoyable renditions of "Company" and excerpts from "Akhnaten."
Like all masterpieces, when played with integrity and passion Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians — the seminal 1976 chamber work in which he used his broadest palette of harmonic language to date — never loses its fascination. In this 1996 recording Mr. Reich and his band of musicians build on the layers of blinding colors and hypnotic rhythms in a performance with moods veering from rhythmically energetic and vital to seductively (and deceptively) languid. This performance highlights the work's beautiful surface veneer, underlying levels of complexity and intoxicatingly therapeutic power.
Other notable works from various periods of Mr. Reich's life receive vigorous, intelligent performances by the Ensemble Modern on an RCA recording, which includes "City Life." This aural snapshot of New York streets transforms normally irritating sounds, like sirens and honking horns, into a compelling musical fabric. The turmoil of city life is also aptly conveyed in a taut, jaunty rendition of "New York Counterpoint," performed by Roland Diry, a stellar clarinetist. The disc also includes bristling performances of "Eight Lines" and, with Jagdish Mistry as the excellent soloist, "Violin Phase."
The recordings mentioned range in price from $9 to $20 for one CD, $24 to $34 for two CDs and $34 to $44 for a three-CD set; the eight-CD set is $136; the DVD is $22.44.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/arts/music/10mini.html?pagewanted=print
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Sunday, August 05, 2007
Elgar, Beyond Pomp and Circumstance By DIANA McVEAGH
August 5, 2007
Music
Elgar, Beyond Pomp and Circumstance By DIANA McVEAGH
LONDON
EDWARD ELGAR’S eminence in British music, 150 years after his birth, is assured.
During this anniversary year his music is being played up and down the land, from January to December: rare as well as familiar works, as a glance at the Elgar Society Web site (www.elgar.org) shows. There are many broadcasts, celebrations, major publications. But exactly what Elgar stood for and what is unique about his music are more than ever being questioned.
Recently in Britain there have been several scholarly Elgar conferences, with Americans as well as his countrymen taking part. Old assumptions are being challenged, clichés rejected. And in a welcome development, the major festival is in America, which Elgar visited several times to conduct his music. Over the next two weekends the Bard Music Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., will devote its annual Rediscoveries series to Elgar and his world.
Critical opinion about Elgar is far less settled than it was at his centenary in 1957. Fifty years ago he seemed a grand phenomenon. At a greater distance he is more of a historical figure, less of a living presence.
To the many Americans now writing about him, he may seem no more familiar than Brahms. Young British academics are applying rigorous analytical techniques to his music as if he were Debussy or Schoenberg, unencumbered by images of the Malvern Hills or the British empire. His sayings are being taken less at face value and scrutinized as defensive coverups. Scholars who have studied other composers before Elgar — Julian Rushton, after Mozart and Berlioz; James Hepokoski, after Verdi and Sibelius — come to him freshly.
It was never true that Elgar was universally regarded simply as a Colonel Blimp, epitomizing England, Empire and Establishment, his music confident and grandiloquent. Certainly, “Land of Hope and Glory” (better known to Americans from the “Pomp and Circumstance” March of countless graduations), the once-in-a-lifetime tune that entered the national consciousness and brought him popular fame, also acted partly as a barrier.
Some people, though always a minority, saw little beyond it, beyond the bristling mustache and the cultivated military appearance. Perceptive listeners, right from the start, heard the nervousness beneath the swagger. The pendulum may indeed have swung too far the other way. Emphasizing the melancholy, tormented undertow to Elgar’s music has brought a danger that his life-affirming, exuberant, glowing side is now underestimated. He may have wished to “curse the power that gave me gifts,” as he once said, but he also knew the “Spirit of Delight” invoked in the epigraph to his Second Symphony.
His range is great. At one extreme are his charming light pieces, like “Salut d’Amour.” They are not negligible, for their melodic appeal and the finish of their workmanship are enduring.
During the decade in which Delius composed his agnostic “Mass of Life” to Nietzsche’s text, Elgar turned to Cardinal Newman for his searing oratorio “The Dream of Gerontius” and offered glimpses of eternity. (The critic Michael Steinberg rates “Gerontius” as the greatest religious work between Verdi’s Requiem and Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”)
The exhilarating but elusive Introduction and Allegro for strings is a bridge between the 18th-century concerto grosso and Vaughan Williams’s “Tallis Fantasia” and Tippett’s Double Concerto. Then there are the enchanting Edwardian-style stage works, “The Starlight Express” and “The Sanguine Fan”; great part songs, still underperformed; and strange miniatures like the song “Submarines.”
Elgar’s two symphonies are psychologically complex, and they explore the harmonic hinterland behind their ostensible keys. Elgar can use limpid scales to express innocence, but at anguished climaxes — in the opening movement of the First Symphony or the Rondo of the Second — the distortion approaches Expressionism.
Commentators argue whether this “typical” Englishman was overemotional or repressed. But it is exactly this tension between passion and inhibition that makes him so compelling.
Elgar was uneasily poised between cultures. Born and rooted in Worcestershire, in verdant central England, he has been seen as primarily a pastoral composer. The American-born Elgar scholar Jerrold Northrop Moore most persuasively argues for this. But as soon as Elgar could afford it, he made a bid for London, and he was at his most carefree vacationing in Bavaria and Italy. He was a Roman Catholic who never composed a mature Mass, and he spent much of his life among the three great Protestant cathedrals of the Three Choirs Festival, accepting an invitation for an Anglican Te Deum and Benedictus. He was born into trade, married into a county family, then leapfrogged over that rank to mingle with the aristocracy.
A tougher man might have drawn strength from such diversity. Elgar was by no means the only creative artist of his time to rise socially. James Barrie and Thomas Hardy, like Elgar, all started life with few material advantages. All three rose to fame in the first half of the last century; all three were loaded with honors; all three were awarded the Order of Merit. Class-conscious though England may have been, people with outstanding ability and perseverance could rise to the top.
But for the thin-skinned Elgar, such balancing acts meant insecurity, and he made it worse by his determination to live, once established, only by his composing. Unlike his English contemporaries, he proudly refused to seek a salaried professional post. He never achieved a stable personality but was subject to violent despondencies, and he made some shockingly bitter remarks that need to be set in a sympathetic context. In later life he could adopt irritating poses, like rating horse racing above composition.
For all that, he had devoted, tenacious friends. He was also one of the great letter writers of all time, pouring out ridiculous puns next to heart-rending confessions and thoroughly practical instructions for the printing of his music.
He saw himself as disadvantaged by having been self-taught. Yet without undue early influence he developed his noble tunes, aspirational sequences and vigorous rhythms into an instantly recognizable style. He worked in the provinces as organist, accompanist, arranger, violinist (solo and orchestral), conductor, bassoonist and teacher, to say nothing of composer. He could hardly have acquired a finer practical training anywhere.
His contrapuntal technique is essential to the integration of his symphonic movements and is the very web and woof of his “Falstaff.” Yet he wore his hard-won learning lightly. His “Enigma” Variations, which catapulted him to fame in 1899, sound absolutely spontaneous but can bear strict analysis. The eighth variation (‘‘W. N.”), a portrait of a delicate country household, is a tissue of extensions, chromatic inflections and rhythmic and melodic reversals, all ingeniously derived from the theme. Into the bluff, emphatic fourth variation (“W. M. B.”), he nonchalantly tossed a couple of bars of close canon.
His Violin Concerto, given its premiere in London in 1910 by Fritz Kreisler with Elgar conducting, marked the peak of his career. His Second Symphony, of 1911, brought a more puzzled response. Change was in the air. Edward VII was dead; Stravinsky was composing “The Rite of Spring”; the Great War was coming nearer.
That war destroyed Elgar’s world. As it ended, he withdrew inward, composing chamber music and his poignant, haunted Cello Concerto. Was that a requiem for the war dead, for the cultural world he knew, for his own increasing age, even for a lost early love? It could be none or all of these.
Elgar was never parochial. His technique owes much to Wagner, his orchestration to French composers. It was Hans Richter, who had given premieres of works by Brahms, Wagner and Dvorak, who introduced the “Enigma” Variations to London. The first truly successful performance of “Gerontius” was in Düsseldorf under Julius Buths. In Elgar’s heyday he was taken up by Artur Nikisch, Fritz Steinbach, Bruno Walter and Felix Weingartner; and by Theodore Thomas in Chicago and Frank and Walter Damrosch in New York. Mahler conducted the “Enigma” Variations in New York in 1911.
Unlike the generation of British composers that followed him, Elgar did not find inspiration in folk song. The only charge England might lay against him is that his genius overpowered his lesser but still fine near-contemporaries, until the advent of Vaughan Williams and Britten. The great merit of the Bard festival which begins on Friday, is to place Elgar in that wider context.
In 1899 Horatio Parker’s oratorio “Hora Novissima” was given in Elgar’s hometown, Worcester, the first American work to be performed at a Three Choirs Festival. In 1905 Professor Parker, initiating a tradition, performed the “Pomp and Circumstance” March No. 1 at Yale when an honorary doctorate was conferred on Elgar.
Elgar was introduced as a composer “honored for his genius” in an art that “voices the profoundest spirited emotions and the deepest longings of the heart.”
“Commanding the homage of the musicians of Germany, of France and of America,” the commendation went on, “he is heartily welcomed among us.”
Diana McVeagh is the author of “Elgar the Music Maker” (Boydell Press).
Music
Elgar, Beyond Pomp and Circumstance By DIANA McVEAGH
LONDON
EDWARD ELGAR’S eminence in British music, 150 years after his birth, is assured.
During this anniversary year his music is being played up and down the land, from January to December: rare as well as familiar works, as a glance at the Elgar Society Web site (www.elgar.org) shows. There are many broadcasts, celebrations, major publications. But exactly what Elgar stood for and what is unique about his music are more than ever being questioned.
Recently in Britain there have been several scholarly Elgar conferences, with Americans as well as his countrymen taking part. Old assumptions are being challenged, clichés rejected. And in a welcome development, the major festival is in America, which Elgar visited several times to conduct his music. Over the next two weekends the Bard Music Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., will devote its annual Rediscoveries series to Elgar and his world.
Critical opinion about Elgar is far less settled than it was at his centenary in 1957. Fifty years ago he seemed a grand phenomenon. At a greater distance he is more of a historical figure, less of a living presence.
To the many Americans now writing about him, he may seem no more familiar than Brahms. Young British academics are applying rigorous analytical techniques to his music as if he were Debussy or Schoenberg, unencumbered by images of the Malvern Hills or the British empire. His sayings are being taken less at face value and scrutinized as defensive coverups. Scholars who have studied other composers before Elgar — Julian Rushton, after Mozart and Berlioz; James Hepokoski, after Verdi and Sibelius — come to him freshly.
It was never true that Elgar was universally regarded simply as a Colonel Blimp, epitomizing England, Empire and Establishment, his music confident and grandiloquent. Certainly, “Land of Hope and Glory” (better known to Americans from the “Pomp and Circumstance” March of countless graduations), the once-in-a-lifetime tune that entered the national consciousness and brought him popular fame, also acted partly as a barrier.
Some people, though always a minority, saw little beyond it, beyond the bristling mustache and the cultivated military appearance. Perceptive listeners, right from the start, heard the nervousness beneath the swagger. The pendulum may indeed have swung too far the other way. Emphasizing the melancholy, tormented undertow to Elgar’s music has brought a danger that his life-affirming, exuberant, glowing side is now underestimated. He may have wished to “curse the power that gave me gifts,” as he once said, but he also knew the “Spirit of Delight” invoked in the epigraph to his Second Symphony.
His range is great. At one extreme are his charming light pieces, like “Salut d’Amour.” They are not negligible, for their melodic appeal and the finish of their workmanship are enduring.
During the decade in which Delius composed his agnostic “Mass of Life” to Nietzsche’s text, Elgar turned to Cardinal Newman for his searing oratorio “The Dream of Gerontius” and offered glimpses of eternity. (The critic Michael Steinberg rates “Gerontius” as the greatest religious work between Verdi’s Requiem and Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”)
The exhilarating but elusive Introduction and Allegro for strings is a bridge between the 18th-century concerto grosso and Vaughan Williams’s “Tallis Fantasia” and Tippett’s Double Concerto. Then there are the enchanting Edwardian-style stage works, “The Starlight Express” and “The Sanguine Fan”; great part songs, still underperformed; and strange miniatures like the song “Submarines.”
Elgar’s two symphonies are psychologically complex, and they explore the harmonic hinterland behind their ostensible keys. Elgar can use limpid scales to express innocence, but at anguished climaxes — in the opening movement of the First Symphony or the Rondo of the Second — the distortion approaches Expressionism.
Commentators argue whether this “typical” Englishman was overemotional or repressed. But it is exactly this tension between passion and inhibition that makes him so compelling.
Elgar was uneasily poised between cultures. Born and rooted in Worcestershire, in verdant central England, he has been seen as primarily a pastoral composer. The American-born Elgar scholar Jerrold Northrop Moore most persuasively argues for this. But as soon as Elgar could afford it, he made a bid for London, and he was at his most carefree vacationing in Bavaria and Italy. He was a Roman Catholic who never composed a mature Mass, and he spent much of his life among the three great Protestant cathedrals of the Three Choirs Festival, accepting an invitation for an Anglican Te Deum and Benedictus. He was born into trade, married into a county family, then leapfrogged over that rank to mingle with the aristocracy.
A tougher man might have drawn strength from such diversity. Elgar was by no means the only creative artist of his time to rise socially. James Barrie and Thomas Hardy, like Elgar, all started life with few material advantages. All three rose to fame in the first half of the last century; all three were loaded with honors; all three were awarded the Order of Merit. Class-conscious though England may have been, people with outstanding ability and perseverance could rise to the top.
But for the thin-skinned Elgar, such balancing acts meant insecurity, and he made it worse by his determination to live, once established, only by his composing. Unlike his English contemporaries, he proudly refused to seek a salaried professional post. He never achieved a stable personality but was subject to violent despondencies, and he made some shockingly bitter remarks that need to be set in a sympathetic context. In later life he could adopt irritating poses, like rating horse racing above composition.
For all that, he had devoted, tenacious friends. He was also one of the great letter writers of all time, pouring out ridiculous puns next to heart-rending confessions and thoroughly practical instructions for the printing of his music.
He saw himself as disadvantaged by having been self-taught. Yet without undue early influence he developed his noble tunes, aspirational sequences and vigorous rhythms into an instantly recognizable style. He worked in the provinces as organist, accompanist, arranger, violinist (solo and orchestral), conductor, bassoonist and teacher, to say nothing of composer. He could hardly have acquired a finer practical training anywhere.
His contrapuntal technique is essential to the integration of his symphonic movements and is the very web and woof of his “Falstaff.” Yet he wore his hard-won learning lightly. His “Enigma” Variations, which catapulted him to fame in 1899, sound absolutely spontaneous but can bear strict analysis. The eighth variation (‘‘W. N.”), a portrait of a delicate country household, is a tissue of extensions, chromatic inflections and rhythmic and melodic reversals, all ingeniously derived from the theme. Into the bluff, emphatic fourth variation (“W. M. B.”), he nonchalantly tossed a couple of bars of close canon.
His Violin Concerto, given its premiere in London in 1910 by Fritz Kreisler with Elgar conducting, marked the peak of his career. His Second Symphony, of 1911, brought a more puzzled response. Change was in the air. Edward VII was dead; Stravinsky was composing “The Rite of Spring”; the Great War was coming nearer.
That war destroyed Elgar’s world. As it ended, he withdrew inward, composing chamber music and his poignant, haunted Cello Concerto. Was that a requiem for the war dead, for the cultural world he knew, for his own increasing age, even for a lost early love? It could be none or all of these.
Elgar was never parochial. His technique owes much to Wagner, his orchestration to French composers. It was Hans Richter, who had given premieres of works by Brahms, Wagner and Dvorak, who introduced the “Enigma” Variations to London. The first truly successful performance of “Gerontius” was in Düsseldorf under Julius Buths. In Elgar’s heyday he was taken up by Artur Nikisch, Fritz Steinbach, Bruno Walter and Felix Weingartner; and by Theodore Thomas in Chicago and Frank and Walter Damrosch in New York. Mahler conducted the “Enigma” Variations in New York in 1911.
Unlike the generation of British composers that followed him, Elgar did not find inspiration in folk song. The only charge England might lay against him is that his genius overpowered his lesser but still fine near-contemporaries, until the advent of Vaughan Williams and Britten. The great merit of the Bard festival which begins on Friday, is to place Elgar in that wider context.
In 1899 Horatio Parker’s oratorio “Hora Novissima” was given in Elgar’s hometown, Worcester, the first American work to be performed at a Three Choirs Festival. In 1905 Professor Parker, initiating a tradition, performed the “Pomp and Circumstance” March No. 1 at Yale when an honorary doctorate was conferred on Elgar.
Elgar was introduced as a composer “honored for his genius” in an art that “voices the profoundest spirited emotions and the deepest longings of the heart.”
“Commanding the homage of the musicians of Germany, of France and of America,” the commendation went on, “he is heartily welcomed among us.”
Diana McVeagh is the author of “Elgar the Music Maker” (Boydell Press).
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