Boston Red Sox 2005 Calendar

Book Description

12" x 12" wall calendar

Customer Reviews:

Nomah is Mr. January.......2005-01-22

My son has this calendar. And I thought it was odd that there is Nomar as Mr. January and no Pedro...

Anyway, Nomar is indeed on this one, as January.

Nomah???.......2004-12-02

I haven't seen this calendar, and I was one click away from buying it, when I noticed....Nomah on the cover???!!! Will it take them until 2006 to remove him from team photos???

Average customer rating:

Boston Red Sox 2005 Team Calendar

Manufacturer: J.F. Turner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Calendar
ASIN: 1403809046

Product Description

Each page in this fully licensed desk calendar contains either a Red Sox trivia question or fact, as well as the team logo and name in Red Sox colors.

Customer Reviews:

a wonderful book.......2003-03-20

Gilpin et al. aptly depict and identify what has made Yale's workers and the movement they have created so vibrant and strong. This book is all the more pertinent given last month's strike of all four unions.

A COMMUNITY COMES TOGETHER.......1999-11-21

I had to read this book for a US Labor History course at the University of Colorado. It was absolutely incredible. The authors trace the events leading up to the strike but, more importantly, they describe how the community of New Haven came together in order to defeat "Corporate Yale." I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in labor history and the struggles faced by American workers.

On Strike for Respect: The Clerical and Technical Workers' Strike at Yale University/1984-85

Average customer rating:

On Strike for Respect: The Clerical and Technical Workers' Strike at Yale University/1984-85
Toni Gilpin , Gary Isaac , and Dan Letwin
Manufacturer: Charles H Kerr Pub Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0882861611

Amazon.com

Do unions have a place in the Information Age? Is it even possible to create new and effective unions?

This is a lively and thoughtful account of the creation of such a union by white collar workers at Yale University. Having been there during that time, I can vouch for the accuracy of the described effects upon the university community, and was fascinated to read behind-the-scenes accounts of one of the few recent successes in unionization. Highly Recommended to anyone interested in labor issues and women's rights.

Average customer rating:
On Strike for Respect: The Clerical and Technical Workers' Strike at Yale University, 1984-85
Toni Gilpin
Manufacturer: University of Illinois Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OQ2KX0

Book Description

This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind.
The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant examples, among them musical modernism's idealizing or ambivalent relations with popular, ethnic, and non-Western music; exoticism and orientalism in the experimental music tradition; the representation of others in Hollywood film music; music's role in the formation and contestation of collective identities, with reference to Jewish and Turkish popular music; and issues of representation and difference in jazz, world music, hip hop, and electronic dance music.
Written by leading scholars from disciplines including historical musicology, sociology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and film studies, the essays provide unprecedented insights into how cultural identities and differences are constructed in music.

Customer Reviews:

Impressive, but Frustrating as well........2004-10-14

Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh have edited an impressive volume, "Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music." Distinguished by its multipart and very dense Introduction, the work seeks to serve as a literature review and signpost for those interested in sources and hidden centers in both western art and popular music.

The volume's essays, including many by long-standing cultural music scholars such as Richard Middleton, Simon Frith, and Philip Bohlman, seek several main goals. First, to apply portions of Orientatlist and Postcolonial theory to art and popular musics, seeking to identify in the traditions the twin poles of how Western ideology has traditionally sought the "Other"---as Same (assimilation), or as absolute Difference (projection). To this end a historical approach is used by several contributors. Second, to examine points of rupture, such as between subaltern musics, Western Modernist Art Music (like Schoenberg) and Experimental music (such as John Cage) for ways in which autonomy and difference from each other's traditions was demonstrated and non-Western music's role to that end. Third, this volumes seeks to at least temporarily collapse the distinction between Art and Popular music, so that questions about representation can be asked with regard to how both these music treat each other and other Others with regard to issues such as essentialisms, nationalisms, and race, within a global capitalist context.

While essays on the art music tradition were helpful, I found that Middleton, Frith, and John Corbett's essays to be of the most important, so I'll spend most of my time there. Middleton is concerned with combining postcolonial critiques of assimilating and projecting the Other with a psychoanalytic cultural role for the Imaginary (the realm of repressed forbidden denied desires). At the same time, he identifies two strategies of resistance -- subaltern musics showing mastery of form by signifying of projections, and also deformation of mastery by constructing alien spaces against assimilation.

Bartok, Mozart, musical blackface in Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," and others undergo this treatment. Even projections like Duke Ellington's 1929 "Japanese Dream," "Arabian Lover," and his "jungle-band" tongue-in -cheek work "Diga-Diga-Doo" at Harlem's Cotton Club are analyzed. Middleton then brings in African-American literary theory to point out how black artists such as Ellington and Ladysmith Black Mambazo take these representations of the Other and Signify on them for their own uses and agendas. Moreover, he notes Abraham Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) 's work which uses South African popular styles and European musical cliches to construct a space of multivalent open-endedness out of European closure. In this way. Middleton contends that while music can never authentically belong to us (it resists a final interpretation) we can make ourselves at home in it through these sorts of processes.

John Corbett's contribution misses not a beat, recognizing that Orientalist forms have long since been reappropriated and redeployed again and again. Seeking some underdetermined sense of how this has operated in the Experimental Music tradition, Corbett focuses on John Cage, who in his mind began with an inventive, scientific, and indeterminate approach, seeking to free sounds from socio-political concerns. Not sure I buy this interpretation, especially when the "irrationalist" Cage, by Corbett's own admission, and widely held knowledge, read freely among Buddhist and Indian philosophies, the contemporary Esotericism of Aldous Huxley's "The Perennial Philosophy," the nature writings of Thoreau and the anti-modernist works of Duchamp. When Corbett morphs this experimentation into a explorationist, conquering colonialist trope, he may be right--but it is more due to the study of Zen koans rather than any methodological scientific functionalism. While notable for its scope. Corbett is sometimes caught in the authenticity game he accuses others of playing--as when he approves of using "world musics" as inspiration for an artist to make "his own music."

Thankfully he sees that Cage used Other musics to disrupt Western musical preoccupations, more than for their "exotic" appeal, as did Steve Reich and others who sought inspiration rather than imitation. When Corbett tackles Brian Eno and Jon Hassell, he is more successful in framing the power politics of Jon Hassell's utopian Fourth World, an imaginary space where musics can freely intermix and national boundaries dissolve. For Corbett Hassell and Eno are merely imitators. His attempt to deconstruct Eno and Byrne's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", however is a failure, as the record's direct quotation of recorded sources approaches Signification rather then Orientalist exoticism. Corbett is reductive, attempting to place the "exotic... echoey" someplace. Except that isn't particularly sounding like anyplace else or any combination thereof, certainly not an "Oriental" space in the Edward Said sense.

If you can't trace where the Orientalism is from, then you should start to at least suspect that it actually might not be there. Otherwise, your interpretive analysis sounds like little more than an article of faith. And that really is the key here. Corbett, as an article of faith, is unmovably pessimistic about the possibility of any cross-cultural inquiry under any circumstances, as opposed to say works of 'surreal anthropology,' as well as Victor Turner, James Clifford, George Marcus, and David Toop. By the time he gets to John Zorn, who actively supports and finances the release of indigenous musics, he's lost his steam. By taking liner notes out of context and holding Zorn and New Albion Records to a standard of unrealistic verbal expression in order to avoid the charge of Orientalism--well, its just not credible any longer.

David Hesmondhalgh's essay explores the politics of appropriating sections of indigenous sounds as backing vocals and possible unity chants for foregrounded Western vocals, along with dance pulses, tabla-playing, and other elements of transglobal dance hall music. Hesmondhalgh correctly recognizes that the "world music" wave of the 80's was derided in the music press for its concern with "authenticity," but suggests that the same politics are at work in music that deliberately cultivates playful pastiche in the 90's as well. Hesmondhalgh is not the first to take sampling by artists such as Peter Gabriel to task for musical "borrowings" (Timothy Taylor, in particular, devotes extensive time to it). Nor is he the only one to point out the ethical problems that arise when artists sampled are not or cannot be paid. But he is notable for ethically accepting the role of live musicians to be used in recordings, rather than samples. Some have argued that any representation of "ethnic" music, even when credited and paid for, is still something of a postcolonial crime--the prime example being Paul Simon and his albums Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints. Yet at the same time Hesmondhalgh questions the notion of racial ownership, even via the shared experience of hegemony. So its unclear that any use or ground would be legitimate. D.H. just isn't consistent on this issue of whether musical hybridity is morally justifiable or not.

Frith's contribution (along with Middleton's) is the most satisfying one--as he unpacks the myth of "World Music" marketing in the late 1980's and 1990's-which was inextricably wound with concerns over marketing, commericial appeal, and perhaps most of all, authenticity. In fact, the recruitment of ethnomusicologists as field researchers and respondants for World music field guides placed the question of agency, gatekeeping, and cultural imperialism at the very center of the category. But the question runs both ways, as indigenous musicians appropriated Western musics for their own agency and power as well. This hybridity, for Frith, is the sound of the "Global Postmodern," with internal contradictions, power struggles, and politics in every direction, from accomodation to resistance to appropriation. Even as the boundaries of West and not-West are reproduced and maintained though, the question of authenticity remains. Are "world musicians" the only ones capable of playing these musics authentically (as Timothy Taylor maintains), or does that too simply reproduce the Other as absolute difference between "authentic" and "inauthentic"?

Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representations, and Appropriations in Music. (Cultural Topics).: An article from: Notes

Average customer rating:

Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representations, and Appropriations in Music. (Cultural Topics).: An article from: Notes
Jonathan Bellman
Manufacturer: Music Library Association, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Online Books | Books & Reading | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Science | Subjects | Books

Science & Technology | Subjects | e-Docs | Formats | Books

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on March 1, 2002. The length of the article is 1416 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representations, and Appropriations in Music. (Cultural Topics).
Author: Jonathan Bellman
Publication: Notes (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2002
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: 58 Issue: 3 Page: 567(3)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Product Description

This volume contains a selection of essays presented at the international conference on Cultural Crises in Art and Literature, held in Groningen in November 2002, in a special session on the question of the autonomy of the arts. Do we witness, in western culture, the end of the autonomy of the arts as it has been conceptualized and institutionalized since the eighteenth century? Indeed, developments of quite a different nature seem to have contributed to a blurring of boundaries between art and non-art, art and the market, art and politics or ethics, as well as between the arts themselves, and between 'high' and 'low' art. Although this volume does not pretend to map this complex process in its entirety - partly because it is impossible to step out of one's own history - it is meant as a contribution to the elucidation of the process itself, offering some challenging explanations as to the heat of the current debate.

Customer Reviews:

Sloppy history, but uniquely fun.......2006-05-27

Michael Ritchie was a good director (The Candidate, Fletch, Bad News Bears, et al.) but a pretty sloppy writer and historian. Nevertheless the fun and adventure of pre-mass media television shine through in a book that's full of errors (and probably wasn't even copyedited). You'll get a vivid idea of what it might have been like tuning into NBC's or General Electric's pioneering stations in the late '30s and early '40s, working with trailblazers like Dennis James and Anthony Mann, and of course, goof-up after amusing goof-up as a new technology finds its feet and defines what makes a good program in ways that we can still appreciate today.

Ritchie makes one point that I've never seen anyone else comment on. He believed that TV's delayed 1948 "debut" as mass entertainment was due mostly to the American Federation of Musicians, who had banned all live music from TV for several years previous. It's an intriguing thesis - no variety shows, musicals, concerts, etc. certainly limited TV's programming and appeal. But I've never seen it discussed since. Of course, that may be because most of the events related in this book officially "never happened"...

You'll be shocked with so much curious info about early TV!.......2001-11-03

This book is just incredible. The author (who also directed the Chevy Chase Fletch movie series), goes waaaaay back into an era of surprising TV struggle! Please, order it, buy it, get it used, new, hardcover, paperback or whatever. BUT GET IT. Almost every paragraph is and eyebrow raiser, every paragraph reveals some incredible detail! (For instance, Steve Allen was NOT the first talk show host in TV history!). It's perfectly written. It covers almost every area (Sports TV, Drama TV, Contest TV, etc.). It tells everything on the subject, and makes you gain hopes regarding the starting difficulties of any new project you may be trying to implement! Hold on to your idea! Hold on to your dream! These old time dreamers kept going, and made TV possible for everyone today!. It's the best book I've read this year (2001). Please. DON'T stand by and rush to get Please Stand By! You'll be really glad to know how many amazing things happened between 1928, when TV really began, and 1948, twenty years later, when they have made us BELIEVE everything started.

Carlos Sicilia, Caracas, Venezuela.

Fascinating history of a forgotten era in broadcasting.......2001-06-01

What do Milton Berle, Eddie Albert, and Dinah Shore have in common? They've all appeared on television. OK, you knew that--what you may NOT know, however, is that they all made their first TV appearance far sooner than you may think. Try 1929, 1936 and 1938 respectively.

Wait a minute, you say, television didn't exist yet. Well, actually, it did, if only experimentally. According to Michael Ritchie, those who think the television era began when Uncle Miltie donned his first ball gown are in for quite a shock.

Ritchie takes us into the hitherto unexplored "prehistory" of television, an era that in some ways typified Murphy's Law. Everything that could go wrong usually did--from Dinah Shore's disastrous singing debut (her mascara melted under the blistering hot lights) to the "nude" chorus girls in one early 30's production number (early cameras were insensitive to the girls' red costumes).

The book takes us through the pioneering days of what are now industry staples--television sports, news, drama, and quiz shows. The numerous anecdotes from such personalities as Hugh Downs never fail to amaze--and amuse. (Be sure to read his account of his role in the earliest TV news broadcasts).

Not to be missed also are the long-overdue tributes to individual pioneers, such as Charles Francis Jenkins, who began the first television "network" of sorts in the late 1920's; John Logie Baird, whose "mechanical" method of transmission (using a spinning disk) was doomed to failure; and of course Philo Taylor Farnsworth, the young Mormon genius who, at age 14, conceived the idea of electronic television while plowing his parents' field. The rise and fall of Allen B. DuMont, who at one time ran a fourth network (only to fall victim to the backstabbing maneuvers of NBC head David Sarnoff) is told in painstaking detail.

If you love television (and perhaps, even if you don't) you'll love this book.

Fascinating and enjoyable.......2001-05-11

An editorial review calls this book "dull." Dullness, like beauty, is in the beholder's eye. This beholder is fascinated with the pioneering days of broadcasting; unsurprisingly, I found this book tremendously interesting and even entertaining. By focusing on the people and the anecdotes of television's experimental days, Ritchie vividly transmits the new medium's uncertainty and excitement.

Wonderful book, focusing on the people and programs.......1999-11-20

Much ink has been spilled describing the early battles, both political and technological, to get television off the ground. But the story of what actually went before the camera during the thirties is almost lost. It is truly amazing just how much broadcasting was going on in these days when a well off amateurs could start their own low fidelity television stations. You'll learn many fun facts too. Such as-- Who was the first person to write, direct, and star in a television drama? Eddie Alpert!

Please Stand By A Prehistory of Television

Average customer rating:

Please Stand By A Prehistory of Television
Michael Ritchie
Manufacturer: Overlook Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000JX5J18

Book Description

A guide to the new XDoclet development tool that eliminates programming busy work by automatically generating code and other deployment artifacts, this book enables developers who place metadata in a single source code file to use XDoclet to generate additional source code and other files that are required in a project. Both smaller code examples and a full-scale J2EE example illustrate everything needed to employ XDoclet code generation into a development cycle. In addition to the typical uses of XDoclet in J2EE development, the uses of XDoclet with non-J2EE technologies such as JDO, Hibernate, JMX, SOAP, and MockObjects are also detailed. Information on how to extend XDoclet to generate practically any code a programmer is furnished.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent Book.......2004-12-17

I got this book and within the first week had all of my ejbs, struts framework, web descriptors created thru xdoclet. Now I just need to convince the client that the rest of the developers need to jump on board for their other projects and use this excellent tool. A must have for any web/j2ee java developers.

Excellent.......2004-08-30

This book starts with an overview of code generation and how and why XDoclet fits into your development projects. Xdoclet can generate code, deployment descriptors and configuration files. The authors fully explain how XDoclet integrates with Ant. If you understand Ant, you can easily follow the examples.

The authors then go through tutorials on how to use XDoclet with different aspects of Java development, EJB, web layer, JMX, Struts, etc. The example code and xml files are well documented and easy to follow. One of the best parts is the summary sections that how you how you benefited from using XDoclet and the number of files (code and deployment descriptors) that XDoclet generated for you. The last part of the book is a reference section, so this book is all you need to start using XDoclet.

Reading this book will also give you guidelines on the proper way to code a J2EE application using design patterns and source code organization. The authors cannot explain every topic covered in great detail, so you must understand the underlying framework (Struts, Hibernate, etc.) to use XDoclet, which is summed up by their admonition, "Don't generate what you don't understand." This book shows you how to solve real-world problems with XDoclet solutions. I would recommend this book (and XDoclet) to every Java developer.

All cool stuff, serious book to serious Java developer.......2004-08-23

When reading one of the reviews about this book before buying, I hisitated a little due to someone made it "down". But where is the other option. I got this book and started reading it...I cannot put it down. This book is really good one if you are serious J2EE developer and if you've been following up with most of cool Java technologies. The writing style and techical part of this book should be a model for most of those books about J2EE. This book helps me brush up J2EE from frontend to backend, with a lot of little trick and details I cannot get from XDoclet's website.

If you are J2EE developer, a serious one, you must get this book! It not only helps you create code, but it creates thoughts!

XDoclet in Action is an in-depth start at learning XDoclet.......2004-04-04

Are there plenty of code examples? Yes
Is the book easy to understand? Yes
Does it trivialize complex topics? No
Does the reference section add value? Yes
Is this book useful? An unqualified yes!

My needs in technology books are straightforward: give me a quick introduction and lots of examples. Walls and Richards have done a great job of explaining the nuts-and-bolts of XDoclet in a very lucid way. In working with an Eclipse plug-in that uses XDoclet as its code generation engine I was able to solve an XDoclet problem within a few minutes because I was able to look through the book's reference section and compare the information to a code sample earlier in the book.

I found the book covered so many areas that I hope the author's are working on a follow-on book where they discuss some of the thornier issues in J2EE development and how XDoclet can be brought to bear to solve them. Based on the depth of this book, they still have a lot to say about J2EE development using code generation tools.

A superbly accessible and useful primer.......2004-03-07

The collaboration of XDoclet seasoned experts and enthusiasts Craig Walls and Norman Richards, XDoclet In Action is a truly user-friendly introduction and guide to the metadata-driven, code generation engine for Java called XDoclet, and its many uses. A wealth of instructions, examples, and sample code lay out how XDoclet can be used with EJBs, Servlets, JMX, and other technologies, as well as customized or out-of-the-box uses to which XDoclet can be put for one's specific needs. A superbly accessible and useful primer, reference, and self-teaching tool, XDoclet In Action is a welcome addition to the computer reference shelf.

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books