Memphis, Tennessee, will always stand out as a city important for popular American music. Here W.C. Handy was a work here, later music history was written by quite a few local musicians who excelled in blues, rock’n’roll, soul and funk. One of them was singer/songwriter and master entertainer Rufus Thomas (1917-2001) who now with this […]
American Film Noir Genres, Characters, and Settings by Harold Hellwig (2023)
Strongly influenced by domestic hard-boiled novels of the 1920s and 1930s, one of the most American film genres, film noir, had its boom time in the 1940s. Generally believed to have mostly vanished from studios and theaters by the late 1950s, the genre briefly resurfaces every few years in the so-called “neo noirs” of various […]
The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932 by Scott Blackwood (2023)
One of the greatest but least researched American record labels, Paramount from Grafton, Wisconsin, is the subject of Scott Blackwood’s title at hand, that introduces itself as a blend of solid historical research, good artist presentation and a bit of fiction. Maybe it has to do with Blackwoods’s first calling as a writer of novels, […]
The Transformative Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky by George Melnyk (2023)
Few other artists connected with auteur cinema have left such a record of often disturbing, mythical, surreal, and sometimes more or less incomprehensible movies as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean director extraordinaire, born in 1929. If the label “cult director” can be applied to just a few artists, he definitely is in that league. “Jodorowsky has invested […]
domus 1940-1949, 1950-1959, 1960-1969 by Charlotte & Peter Fiell (eds.) (2023)
Often reverently labeled the ultimate magazine or record of architecture and contemporary design, the Italian publication domus made history as the spectacular diary of modern and future ideas in design and architecture. Ever since 1928, when legendary Italian designer and Professor of architecture Giovanni (Gio) Ponti presented the first edition. For most of his life, […]
Perplexing Plots. Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David Bordwell (2023)
Generally, storytelling, narratives, modes of presentation and the story behind it, define most works of fiction and movie plots alike. As those techniques changed over the decades (as did audiences who step by step were introduced to this), new and exiting ways of shooting film and presenting characters entered popular forms of entertainment. The simple, […]
The Jordanaires: The Story of the World’s Greatest Backup Vocal Group by Gordon Stoker … (2022)
The list of famous singers with biographies is huge and gets longer almost every day. Even so, there are just a few books on those voices that built the solid, reliable and harmonic background for countless hits. It is hardly possible to imagine songs such as Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” “Don’t be Cruel,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” […]
Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad by Matthew Edwards and Fernando G. Pagn...
The gialli (“the yellow ones”), introduced in Italy in the mid-1960s, were a film genre that combined all sorts of sensations, such as crimes planned and committed, detectives and amateur sleuths looking for clues, great landscapes, exotic venues, usually connected to airports and train stations, beautiful women, Gothic horror and disturbing soundtracks. In the gialli, […]
David Lynch and the American West: Essays on Regionalism and Indigeneity in Twin Peaks and the Films...
Usually, whenever American director David Lynch introduces a new film, audiences can be almost certain that it will contain a couple of dreamlike, surreal, noir or neo-noir settings, characters or specific places. It may also feature different regional settings or the story could follow the travels or quests of the protagonist through several states. This […]