26 Results for : perversely
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The Bottom: A Willie Black Mystery, Book 4 , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 373min
Richmond is in a panic. For the fourth time in 18 months, a young girl or woman has been brutalized and murdered. This time the body of a 14-year-old girl is found in Richmond's Shockoe Bottom train station. On her ankle is the same perversely cartoonish tattoo that has led the cops and newspapers to dub the perpetrator the Tweety Bird Killer. When Willie Black finds out that the night security guy at the station was lured away from his post by a phone call from Willie's daughter just before the body was dumped, the story gets weirder - and a lot more personal. At the same time, Willie's paper is facing a lawsuit from a developer who wants to make a killing of another kind by turning part of the Bottom into Top of the Bottom - a mix of big-box stores and apartments. It's an area where slaves were buried in unmarked graves, many of them still not discovered. The Bottom is emblematic of what Willie thinks of as the permanent stain Richmond can never wash away, but now he and the paper are under pressure to "lay off" Wat Chenault and his plans to turn the land into a real estate bonanza. When the police arrest Ronnie Sax, a photographer who used to work at Willie's paper, for the murders, the evidence seems overwhelming. But then Willie starts getting letters from someone who seems to know more about the killings than an innocent bystander should. Sax is eventually released, and the city goes on high alert once again. At the same time, Willie grows more and more suspicious about Chenault's motives. Willie is also trying to crawl back into the good graces of the lovely Cindy Peroni, seeking to convince her that he at last has a handle on his bourbon and two-packs-a-day habits. In The Bottom, the fourth Willie Black mystery, Richmond's nosiest newspaperman, true to form, chases the story like a bulldog going after a pork chop. But once he's caught it, he'll wish he hadn't. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Kevin Kenerly. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/blak/007798/bk_blak_007798_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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British Legends: The Life and Legacy of Guy Fawkes , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 65min
In 1605, Guy Fawkes was one of over a dozen conspirators in the famous Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to assassinate England's King James I. When the plot was discovered on the 5th of November, Fawkes and other conspirators were quickly convicted and executed, and the King asked his subjects to remember the 5th November as "the joyful day of deliverance". Fawkes was but one of a countless number of failed assassins, but in a perversely ironic way, the King's declaration ultimately turned the 5th November into Guy Fawkes Day, a celebratory day that usually had children creating an effigy that would then be burned in a bonfire. While the effigy was usually Fawkes, others made it a custom to burn an effigy of the pope, a tradition that came to the Thirteen Colonies in America as well. Though he was only one of the plotters, Fawkes became the one most associated with the act, and he was viewed as a symbol of treason. A strange thing happened, however, in the 19th century, as Fawkes began to undergo a sort of character rehabilitation, beginning with William Harrison Ainsworth's 1841 historical fiction Guy Fawkes; or, The Gunpowder Treason. Suddenly, Fawkes became an anti-hero who had the best interest of the public and was taking action to effect change. Other British literature of the century depicted Fawkes as a kind of action hero. In 2005's Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day, writer J.A. Sharpe noted Fawkes is sometimes remembered tongue-in-cheek as "the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions." With that new perception of Fawkes taking hold, Fawkes managed to become a symbol of defiance against government. The popular movie V for Vendetta reintroduced Fawkes to American audiences, and Fawkes and the Guy Fawkes Mask have taken on a new life as a rally cry and symbol for groups protesting the government. The major hacking network Anonymous uses the Guy Fawkes Mask as its hallmark, a ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Jannie Meisberger. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/034963/bk_acx0_034963_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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Belfast Noir , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 472min
Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Reflecting a city still divided, Belfast Noir serves as a record of a city transitioning to normalcy, or perhaps as a warning that underneath the fragile peace darker forces still lurk. Featuring brand-new stories by: Glenn Patterson, Eoin McNamee, Garbhan Downey, Lee Child, Alex Barclay, Brian McGilloway, Ian McDonald, Arlene Hunt, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Claire McGowan, Steve Cavanagh, Lucy Caldwell, Sam Millar, and Gerard Brennan. From the introduction by Adrian McKinty & Stuart Neville: "Few European cities have had as disturbed and violent a history as Belfast over the last half-century. For much of that time the Troubles (1968–1998) dominated life in Ireland's second-biggest population centre, and during the darkest days of the conflict - in the 1970s and 1980s - riots, bombings, and indiscriminate shootings were tragically commonplace. The British army patrolled the streets in armoured vehicles and civilians were searched for guns and explosives before they were allowed entry into the shopping district of the city centre... Belfast is still a city divided... You can see Belfast's bloodstains up close and personal. This is the city that gave the world its worst ever maritime disaster, and turned it into a tourist attraction; similarly, we are perversely proud of our thousands of murders, our wounds constantly on display. You want noir? How about a painting the size of a house, a portrait of a man known to have murdered at least a dozen human beings in cold blood? Or a similar house-sized gable painting of a zombie marching across a post-apocalyptic wasteland with an AK-47 over the legend UVF: Prepared for Peace - Ready for War. As Lee Child has said, Belfast i ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Stephen Bel Davies, Gerard Doyle, John Keating, Terry Donnelly. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/adbl/019203/bk_adbl_019203_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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Randy: The Full and Complete Unedited Biography and Memoir of the Amazing Life and Times of Randy S.!
"This book is fucking awesome. It's my life's story. I'm thirty-four but look twenty-one. Maybe twenty-two at the most. I live in Maryland. Please read it. I'm a writer, a songwriter, an artist. I do it all. I'm an artist of life. I'm an adventurer, I'm the president of my development. Read the memoir. You won't be disappointed." A self-published memoir of a Maryland thirty-something found by author Mike Sacks at a garage sale in 2019 and re-published here for the first time. The memoir is written by the struggling poet and novelist Noah B., who is embedded in the mind and lifestyle of a perversely unexceptional American asshole named Randy. Like Pale Fire if it were about a Danny McBride-style fuckup, the story is both unmoored from time and eerily prescient of our own-one so stupid and unbelievable that it requires a writer like Sacks to bring it to light. "If you don't know who Mike Sacks is, well, you should. His writing is funnier than just about anyone's and now he has a podcast that is excellent. I say Hooray for Mike Sacks and everything he stands for." -David Sedaris "He's the best kind of comedy writer; a bona fide weirdo with virtually no interest in satisfying anything other than his own personal obsessions." -Andy Richter "Randy is a hilariously, unexpectedly poignant and eminently worthy addition to Sacks' sociological/anthropological exploration of the American Jackass and his curious ways. Audacious and inspired." -Nathan Rabin "The year's best memoir is about a man who shot a porno in a Baskin-Robbins." -Vice "Randy does more to explain certain unexpected turns in this nation's political fate over the last couple of years than a bazillion think-pieces in the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, MSNBC." -John Colapinto (The New Yorker) "As the book's description alludes, Randy is an experiment in memoir, biography, and, well, sheer insanity." -Robobutt- Shop: buecher
- Price: 16.99 EUR excl. shipping
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Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live--And How Their Wealth Harms Us All
A senior editor at Mother Jones dives into the lives of the extremely rich, showing the fascinating, otherworldly realm they inhabit—and the insidious ways this realm harms us all. Have you ever fantasized about being ridiculously wealthy? Probably. Striking it rich is among the most resilient of American fantasies, surviving war and peace, expansions and recessions, economic meltdowns and global pandemics. We dream of the jackpot, the big exit, the life-altering payday, in whatever form that takes. (Americans spent $81 billion on lottery tickets in 2019, more than the GDPs of most nations.) We would escape "essential" day jobs and cramped living spaces, bury our debts, buy that sweet spread, and bail out struggling friends and relations. But rarely do we follow the fantasy to its conclusion—to ponder the social, psychological, and societal downsides of great affluence and the fact that so few possess it. What is it actually like to be blessed with riches in an era of plagues, political rancor, and near-Dickensian economic differences? How mind-boggling are the opportunities and access, how problematic the downsides? Does the experience differ depending on whether the money is earned or unearned, where it comes from, and whether you are male or female, white or black? Finally, how does our collective lust for affluence, and our stubborn belief in social mobility, explain how we got to the point where forty percent of Americans have literally no wealth at all? These are all questions that Jackpot sets out to explore. The result of deep reporting and dozens of interviews with fortunate citizens—company founders and executives, superstar coders, investors, inheritors, lottery winners, lobbyists, lawmakers, academics, sports agents, wealth and philanthropy professionals, concierges, luxury realtors, Bentley dealers, and even a woman who trains billionaires' nannies in physical combat, Jackpot is a compassionate, character-rich, perversely humorous, and ultimately troubling journey into the American wealth fantasy and where it has taken us.- Shop: buecher
- Price: 18.99 EUR excl. shipping
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Chopin
During my time as a student with Byron Janis in New York, we studied many of Chopin's works together, encompassing all genres, both large and small. Byron Janis was a genius of expression and characterisation in all the music of Chopin. He gave the small works the respect that tends to be reserved only for the large works by many and he influenced me greatly in my interpretation. In gratitude for music and much else, I dedicate this recording to Byron Janis. Small forms... I was delighted to be asked to record a Chopin Recital devoted to his smaller works. The emerging musical Romantics undoubtedly owed some of their ideals to their literary aunts and uncles. One legacy of this was the status of the fragment as a work of art, stemming from Novalis and Jean Paul and finding musical form through Schumann and some of the Preludes by Chopin. However, the musical revolution was not unopposed. Even in our postmodernist age, there is an uneasiness, among members of the artistic profession especially, about the eminence of these Waltzes, Nocturnes, Mazurkas and other small works. How typically ironic was Chopin's pen when in a letter from Vienna he wrote, 'Here, waltzes are called works!' An article from 1835 in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik by August Kahlert, typical of the day, represents a three-pronged attack on small forms in general, calling dance music the lowest form, implying that dramatic music is incompatible with small genres and explaining the custom of adding literary titles to musical works as being a mask to cover up empty works that have no meaning of their own. Even Schumann himself, who later attempted opera and symphony, said that Chopin's exclusive concentration on piano composition prevented him from achieving even greater heights. It is the aesthetic of the fragment - so many half-glimpsed and half-wrought visions, 'individual eagle pinions' as Schumann styled Chopin's Preludes - that is valuable to an appreciation of all Chopin's small forms. Although not strictly fragments, the Waltzes, Mazurkas and Nocturnes all share a dispersive quality with the true fragments among the Preludes. Each short work is a microcosm of expression, voice, form and technique. The epic, dramatic and lyric voices of a Chopin ballade or sonata can all find their individual articulation in the passage of a single Mazurka or Nocturne, just as the Waltz is a component of most of the large-scale works. The song... The nocturnes have a superficial affinity with the growing tradition of small-scale works popular with publishers and amateurs from the start of the nineteenth century. This association is responsible for the notion of Chopin the salon composer. However, Chopin's first published nocturne, Opus 9, No. 1, stands manifesto-like at the gateway forbidding such an interpretation with it's remote and dark opening tones. The full drama is unleashed in the middle section of the last nocturne of that same set of three. Publishers of the day followed the custom of attaching poetic titles to works to promote sales. The London edition of the Opus 9 Nocturnes went under the title Murmurs of the Seine and few works by Chopin escaped such treatment. Inevitably these titles, combined with the narrative hallmarks and intensity of many of his lyrical compositions, brought about another powerful conception of Chopin as a Romantic composer. His music became a 'fragment of autobiography', in Dahlhaus' words, and Chopin's liaison with Georges Sand, the trip to Majorca, his suffering and consumptive end took on new significance for the reception of his music. Chopin himself was too classicist to support this. He did not approve of descriptive titles and in his extant correspondence hardly more than once gives a poetic description of one of his own works. The dance... The Waltzes and Mazurkas mostly abandon the solid practicality of danceable music and instead elevate the spirit of dance, aspiring to the Baroque tradition of Bach. Chopin's Mazurkas tend to draw from more than one type of Polish regional dance, including the oberek and the kujawiak in addition to the characteristic holubiecs and other accents of the mazur. This elaborate mixing of genre, often perceptibly within one work, is an indication of the richness of the musical thought. Chopin's Mazurkas are also misinterpretations - in Harold Bloom's sense - of their folk models. One example is the treatment of the drones of Polish folk dance, such as the dudy or gajdy (bagpipes) or basetla or basy (unstopped string bass), which form a stable basis in the folk models. In Chopin, they sometimes function perversely to destabilise the tonic key, such as in the middle section of Opus 7, No.l. The Mazurkas partly fuel the myth of Chopin as the exiled Polish nationalist composer. As a result of the Polish folk origin and unusual modal elements of these dances, groups of listeners perceive his entire oeuvre, by association, as politically and culturally programmatic. Rubato... Eigeldinger identifies three distinct forms of rubato in Chopin - and the evidence suggests that Chopin used them all when he himself played his works. The most characteristic kind of rubato is that derived from the Italian Baroque bel canto tradition, and continued by Mozart, where the left hand maintains the pulse and the cantilena has an independent rhythmic freedom. The second kind is the more generally practised agogic fluctuation of tempo in response to phrasing, texture and dynamics. The third kind is a rhythmic signature specific to the Mazurkas, whose tradition must now sadly be regarded as lost to us. Chopin abandoned the use of the term rubato in his compositions at an early stage, no doubt because of the scope for misunderstanding and the recognition that the nature of rubato could only be communicated by demonstration. CD notes © 2001 Tamami Honma About TAMAMI HONMA, piano Tamami Honma began her career at the age of five as a prize-winner in a national competition in Tokyo, going on to make her US concerto debut at the age of seven with Mozart's Concerto in A Major, K414. After this auspicious start, she won grand and first prizes in several international competitions and has made many solo and orchestral appearances across most of the continental USA, in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Japan, Israel, Lithuania and Russia. In Moscow's Great Hall, she performed Rachmaninov's Concerto No. 7 with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra. Tamami Honma studied piano over a four-year period with legendary pianist of the Romantic generation Byron Janis - himself a student of Horowitz and the Lhevinnes - in New York and thereafter with Christopher Elton at the Royal Academy of Music, London. She now lectures on and co-ordinates the Piano Literature Course at the Royal Academy of Music, a course which she founded in 1998. An article by Tamami Honma on Beethoven performance was recently published in Arietta, Volume II (Autumn 2000 edition) and she was appointed as editor of the Liszt Society Journal in 2001. Commercial CD recordings of Tamami Honma's playing demonstrate an eclectic approach and a refreshingly diverse focus, including a disc of Mozart sonatas with violinist Howard Davis (leader of the Alberni Quartet), also for DK Music Ltd, and discs of contemporary British chamber works by McCabe, Rawsthorne and Nigel Clarke on Metier. Both Metier recordings received five stars in BBC Music Magazine and the Clarke CD also received high acclaim in Gramophone magazine. Tamami Honma's concert appearances around the world have included radio and television broadcasts with distinguished chamber partners. She has recently been featured on Lithuanian radio and television with the Vilnius String Quartet as part of the Gaida 2000 Festival in Vilnius, and on Polish Radio during the Autumn Festival 1999 in Warsaw with the acclaimed Kreutzer Quartet. Tamami Honma has also played with violinist Peter Sheppard-Skaerved, leader of the Kreutzer Quartet, cellist- Shop: odax
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