A bath of musical memory and association, drenched with emotion, time, and space.
Rumbling thoughts, sonorous and percussive as a truck driving over a plank bridge, on how the author makes sense of the music he hears and connects it to his life.
For O’Brien (Castaways of the Image Planet, 2002, etc.), music is a sweeping environment, a closet of memories, a looking glass, a visitation, a map of individualized reality, essential and immense. The songs he has appropriated have “a climate, a history, a state of being.” Sometimes they express a certain bitterness, remind you of “a scene already over by the time any public ever caught its afterglimmer . . . a succession of parties that one hadn’t attended.” They may have fallen into a memory hole, “that limbo where unrecorded dance bands play without interruption for the ghosts of the unremembered” (though O'Brien remembers well). Or they may achieve pure transcendence and “stop moments from passing. The song is the place where perfection stays.” O’Brien offers chewy ruminations on Brian Wilson and the Beatles, on minor-key melodies like “Greensleeves” and “Oranges and Lemons”: “universal folk music that dares to propose unhappy endings not only for individual lives but for life itself.” Music becomes a landscape in which “to lose yourself, or more properly to empty yourself of yourself,” to erase history as you keep on building more of it. Your record collection is more revealing than any resume, the very “substance of what pleased you,” with songs as loyal as dogs. Despite all the fiddlings and knockdowns, the self-criticism and the moments of overthinking (“it is a definition intended to undermine the notion of definition as such”), O'Brien, as much as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, is saved by music. Everyone is, he asserts: “People sing when they no longer know who they are. They sing not to remember what was but to be in its presence.”
A bath of musical memory and association, drenched with emotion, time, and space.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58243-192-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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